Willows at Sunset

Van Gogh painted pollarded willows at sunset during his Nuenen and Etten years as part of his sustained engagement with the low Dutch landscape he regarded as his native artistic territory. Willows, bent and pollarded by repeated human intervention, appealed to him as trees that bore the marks of labour, linking them thematically to the peasant figures he painted at the same period. The sunset palette — orange, gold, and violet — anticipates the later chromatic boldness of Arles but is here still filtered through a Barbizon sensibility, particularly the influence of Georges Michel and Jules Dupré.

A warm orange-yellow horizon is set against a violet-pink sky rendered in thin, horizontal strokes. The willow silhouettes are painted in dark sienna and umber with evident speed. The handling is looser than the figure paintings of the same period, suggesting a plein-air sketch executed rapidly.