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Lot Essay
Vincent van Gogh painted A Girl in a Wood at a crucial juncture in his early development as an artist, as he began to explore painting in oil for the very first time. The artist had moved to The Hague at the end of December 1881, following a heated argument with his parents that prompted him to abruptly leave his family home, and set out on his own. Despite the unhappy circumstances of this move, Van Gogh was excited at the prospect of life in the city: ‘I think it’s wonderful to be in The Hague, and I find no end of beautiful things, and I must try and depict some of them,’ he wrote to his brother Theo shortly after his arrival (Letter 194, 29 December 1881, in L. Jansen, H. Luijten and N. Bakker, eds., Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition, London, 2009, vol. 2, p. 13). The Hague was one of the most important intellectual and cultural centres in Holland at the time, known for its strong community of artists and writers. It was here that Van Gogh threw himself fully into his dream of becoming a painter, renting a small apartment on the eastern outskirts of the city, where he worked diligently, honing his skills as a draughtsman, then a watercolorist, before he finally felt able to begin translating his vision into oil paint.
Dating to August 1883, A Girl in a Wood is one of the earliest examples of Van Gogh’s work in oil on canvas, and belongs to a rare series of paintings from the artist’s pivotal twenty-month stay in The Hague. Few of the works from this period still exist – out of more than seventy compositions that the artist mentioned in his letters, only around two dozen are known of today. Van Gogh’s interest in the woods and nature took root early during his stay in The Hague. In a letter to Theo from August 1882, he wrote that he had been painting there among the trees, creating a study ‘of big green beech trunks on a ground with dead leaves, and the small figure of a girl in white,’ referring to Girl in a Wood, now held in the permanent collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (Letter 258, in ibid., p. 138).
A visit from Theo in the summer of 1882 had provided Vincent with some much-needed funds that allowed him to buy a range of new supplies, including brushes and oil paints. Yet financial pressures continued to shape his artistic decisions, and he worked largely on inexpensive paper through the ensuing months. About a year later, however, he wrote to Theo that he had not only ‘bought a field easel’ but also ‘painting canvas’ (Letter 369, in ibid., p. 396). This shift in material provides a notable change in composition. Whereas his 1882 woodland study positions the viewer close to the forest floor – resulting in a lower vantage point – the 1883 Girl in a Wood adopts a more elevated, open perspective. The increased height offers greater breathing room within the composition, allowing Van Gogh to articulate the receding planes of the forest and to situate the solitary figure within a deeper spatial framework.
Besides the shift in perspective, Van Gogh’s handling of oil paint also underwent an important evolution during this time. As Van Gogh explained to Theo in a letter dated to the last week of August 1883: ‘I’ve been rather busy painting in the last few days, again I have studies from the woods mainly’ (Letter 379, in ibid., p. 413). After a year of training in oil, he reflected that his earlier woodland paintings had been highly impastoed, yet the colors did not fuse well. By contrast, his more recent works from August 1883 were less thickly painted but ‘nonetheless becoming more assured in color, because the colors are more worked into each other and the brushstrokes are painted over each other, so that it fuses together more’ (Letter 371, in ibid., p. 400).
This period was also marked by Van Gogh’s determination to master figure painting. However, financial constraints made it difficult to hire professional models and instead he began to incorporate figures he observed during his daily activities and wanderings into his compositions, painting from nature such subjects as woodcutters, fisherfolk, and farm labourers in the surrounding villages and landscapes, whose actions and forms he had studied from afar. In A Girl in a Wood, Van Gogh depicts a young local girl in a white bonnet as she strays from the winding path through the woods. Her small form is dwarfed by the towering height of the surrounding trees, a contrast heightened even further by her proximity to the thick, heavy roots that spread outwards from the base of the trunk, into the reddish-hued soil. This expressionistic treatment of thick tree trunks and densely overgrown plants serves as an early manifestation of motifs that would continue to develop throughout his later practice, reflecting his habit of prolonged, immersive observation in nature and his tendency to regard these forms as untamed presences possessing a quiet, inherent power.
Through the gaps in the trees, Van Gogh shows a sliver of bright light on the horizon, deftly indicating the world beyond the quiet, enveloping atmosphere of the mysterious forest. In this way, Van Gogh introduces a sense of air and space to the composition, fulfilling his desire to capture the feeling of being there, in the very midst of the trees, so ‘that one can breathe and wander about in it – and smell the woods’ (Letter 258, in ibid., p. 138).
Dating to August 1883, A Girl in a Wood is one of the earliest examples of Van Gogh’s work in oil on canvas, and belongs to a rare series of paintings from the artist’s pivotal twenty-month stay in The Hague. Few of the works from this period still exist – out of more than seventy compositions that the artist mentioned in his letters, only around two dozen are known of today. Van Gogh’s interest in the woods and nature took root early during his stay in The Hague. In a letter to Theo from August 1882, he wrote that he had been painting there among the trees, creating a study ‘of big green beech trunks on a ground with dead leaves, and the small figure of a girl in white,’ referring to Girl in a Wood, now held in the permanent collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (Letter 258, in ibid., p. 138).
A visit from Theo in the summer of 1882 had provided Vincent with some much-needed funds that allowed him to buy a range of new supplies, including brushes and oil paints. Yet financial pressures continued to shape his artistic decisions, and he worked largely on inexpensive paper through the ensuing months. About a year later, however, he wrote to Theo that he had not only ‘bought a field easel’ but also ‘painting canvas’ (Letter 369, in ibid., p. 396). This shift in material provides a notable change in composition. Whereas his 1882 woodland study positions the viewer close to the forest floor – resulting in a lower vantage point – the 1883 Girl in a Wood adopts a more elevated, open perspective. The increased height offers greater breathing room within the composition, allowing Van Gogh to articulate the receding planes of the forest and to situate the solitary figure within a deeper spatial framework.
Besides the shift in perspective, Van Gogh’s handling of oil paint also underwent an important evolution during this time. As Van Gogh explained to Theo in a letter dated to the last week of August 1883: ‘I’ve been rather busy painting in the last few days, again I have studies from the woods mainly’ (Letter 379, in ibid., p. 413). After a year of training in oil, he reflected that his earlier woodland paintings had been highly impastoed, yet the colors did not fuse well. By contrast, his more recent works from August 1883 were less thickly painted but ‘nonetheless becoming more assured in color, because the colors are more worked into each other and the brushstrokes are painted over each other, so that it fuses together more’ (Letter 371, in ibid., p. 400).
This period was also marked by Van Gogh’s determination to master figure painting. However, financial constraints made it difficult to hire professional models and instead he began to incorporate figures he observed during his daily activities and wanderings into his compositions, painting from nature such subjects as woodcutters, fisherfolk, and farm labourers in the surrounding villages and landscapes, whose actions and forms he had studied from afar. In A Girl in a Wood, Van Gogh depicts a young local girl in a white bonnet as she strays from the winding path through the woods. Her small form is dwarfed by the towering height of the surrounding trees, a contrast heightened even further by her proximity to the thick, heavy roots that spread outwards from the base of the trunk, into the reddish-hued soil. This expressionistic treatment of thick tree trunks and densely overgrown plants serves as an early manifestation of motifs that would continue to develop throughout his later practice, reflecting his habit of prolonged, immersive observation in nature and his tendency to regard these forms as untamed presences possessing a quiet, inherent power.
Through the gaps in the trees, Van Gogh shows a sliver of bright light on the horizon, deftly indicating the world beyond the quiet, enveloping atmosphere of the mysterious forest. In this way, Van Gogh introduces a sense of air and space to the composition, fulfilling his desire to capture the feeling of being there, in the very midst of the trees, so ‘that one can breathe and wander about in it – and smell the woods’ (Letter 258, in ibid., p. 138).