Vincent van Gogh - The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in the Snow 1885
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The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in the Snow 1885
51x77cm oil/canvas
Pasadena, California, The Norton Simon Museum of Art
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From The Norton Simon Museum of Art:
Van Gogh’s father was a Protestant minister; the artist himself had studied theology and pursued missionary work briefly before settling with his parents in the vicarage of a remote Dutch town in 1883. In this view across the vicarage garden, a lone figure clears a path, though the leafless bushes—or perhaps markers at left give us pause: is this man shoveling snow, or digging a grave? From bare trees to dirty snow, to wintry, scumbled sky, the landscape is willfully, unremittingly bleak, a painted equivalent to Émile Zola’s grim Naturalist novels of the same period.