Cottages and Cypresses: Memories of the North

Catalogue numbers: F 675, JH 1921.

Motifs such as wheatfields and times of the day had been part of the vocabulary of van Gogh's art in his formative Dutch years. The important feature of his programme in Saint-Rémy was his return to the preoccupations of that period and their justifications. He wrote to ask his family to send him drawings made in Nuenen so that he could rework them and work on similar themes.

He began a series of paintings of imaginary landscapes, based in part on sketches he had made in Drenthe and Nuenen and in part on his recollections of the rural architecture and the agricultural labourers of Brabant, which he called Memories of the North or Memories of Brabant. These drawings and paintings were not mere imitations of past work. Through them van Gogh was asserting his allegiance to the ideas and meanings that such subjects, painted by himself and an earlier generation of French and Dutch artists, had carried - expressions of an attitude to the modern world. So he revived that subject-matter but revised it in terms of colour, and in drawing used the more sinuous, flowing and decorative graphic style that he had been developing in Saint-Rémy.