Flower Beds in Holland by Van Gogh: Colour Before the Sunflowers (c. 1883)
Strips of colour run toward a line of thatched roofs: white, pink, butter yellow, pale blue, laid side by side like lengths of cloth set out to dry. One man walks between them. Above, a cream-grey Dutch sky fills the upper half of the canvas. Vincent van Gogh’s Flower Beds in Holland (c. 1883) is not the Van Gogh most people picture — it is tidy, quiet, almost polite — and it was made years before Paris and Arles, while he was still teaching himself to paint in The Hague. Look closely and you can watch a beginner use a hard-won discipline, perspective, to hold down the thing he could not yet fully control: colour. Quick facts Artist: Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) Date: c. 1883 (his Hague years; often placed in spring 1883) Medium: Oil on canvas on wood (48.9 × 66 cm / 19 1/4 × 26 in.) Collection: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1983.1.21; Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon) Notable fact: First exhibited in Rotterdam in 1904 as Tu...