Landscape with Snow

Van Gogh painted snowy landscapes during his Nuenen and early Antwerp periods, treating the white ground and grey Dutch sky as a monochromatic challenge that forced him to work within severely restricted tonal contrast. His letters from this period reveal a deep interest in the way snow simplified the landscape to its essential forms — trees, walls, figures — against a uniform white ground, an effect he associated with Japanese woodblock prints. The snow paintings of Nuenen belong to his systematic documentation of the rural Dutch winter alongside the potato-eaters and cottage interiors of the same period.

The snow-covered ground is rendered in thin, cold whites with blue-grey shadows under trees and along walls. Bare tree forms provide stark dark verticals against the pale ground. The sky is kept in the same muted tonal register, merging sky and snow in a coherent grey-white scheme.