Landscape with Wheelbarrow1883
In September 1883 Van Gogh left the bustling Dutch city of The Hague in search of open countryside in which to paint. More about this work
About this work
In September 1883 Van Gogh left the bustling Dutch city of The Hague in search of open countryside in which to paint. He moved to Drenthe, a village in northeastern Netherlands that was virtually untouched by the Industrial Revolution. He described the barren terrain as supremely beautiful and serene: "What tranquility, what expanse, what calmness in this nature." With a limited palette of steely greens and cool blues, Van Gogh masterfully portrayed one of the region’s expanses of heath—"a vast plane vanishing into infinity"—illuminated by the lilac hues of the evening sky.
Text from the Cleveland Museum of Art.
How it was made
- Opaque watercolour
- Watercolour made opaque with white or chalk and laid in flat, even layers. Persian and Indian painters ground their colours from minerals, applied them with the finest brushes and burnished the finished page.
- Chalk
- Natural black, red and white chalks. Used together on toned paper they could give the warmth of flesh with very little effort, and they were favourites for studies from life.
- Watercolour
- Pigment in gum arabic, thinned with water and laid in transparent washes. Nothing white is painted: the light is the paper showing through.
Vincent van Gogh
Dutch, 1853–1890 · Born in Zundert; died in Auvers-sur-Oise.
Van Gogh worked as an art dealer, teacher and lay preacher before he turned to art in 1880, at twenty-seven. His early pictures of Dutch peasants are dark and heavy; in Paris from 1886 he met the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, and his palette brightened. In Arles in 1888–89 he painted with intense colour and thick, directional strokes, and he worked on at the asylum in Saint-Rémy and finally at Auvers-sur-Oise. The Poet’s Garden belongs to a group made to decorate Gauguin’s room in the Yellow House.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Post-Impressionism
Artists who kept Impressionism's colour but pushed towards structure, symbol and feeling.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Cleveland Museum of Art has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1958.30
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art
- Type
- Drawing
- Department
- Drawings
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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