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Lot Essay
Following a bitter argument with his father in December of 1881, Vincent van Gogh abruptly left his parent's home in Etten and returned to The Hague. The painter Anton Mauve, a relative, helped him find a studio in Schenkweg on the outskirts of town and he lived there through March 1883. Mauve introduced van Gogh to a number of artists active in the area whose style of painting landscapes en plein aire was closely related to the work of the Barbizon artists Millet and Corot. During this period he worked hard at perfecting his figure painting and wrote to his brother, "Theo, I am decidedly not a landscape painter; when I make landscapes, there will always be something of the figure in them" (V. van Gogh, op. cit., p. 328, letter no. 182).
Financial constraints made it difficult for him to hire models and instead he used figures he observed in his daily activities, painting from nature such subjects as woodcutters, fisherfolk, and faggot gatherers. In June of 1882, van Gogh was hospitalized with an infection and he was not able to paint for several weeks. Upon his release in July he attended the exhibition of French art from Mesdag's collection where he saw paintings by Dupré, Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, Breton, Jacque and Rousseau that reaffirmed the direction he was pursuing in his own art. A visit from Theo in August provided him with badly needed money to buy supplies and in thanking him van Gogh wrote, "I limited myself to simple colors...ochre (red-yellow-brown), cobalt and Prussian blue, Naples yellow, sienna, black and white" (ibid., p. 429, letter no. 222). A Girl in a Wood was painted towards the end of August and van Gogh expressed his enthusiasm about it in a letter to Theo: "This week I have painted some rather large studies in the wood, which I tried to carry out more thoroughly and vigorously than the first ones" (ibid., p. 442, letter no. 227).
Many of van Gogh's oil paintings from this period have been lost and of the twenty-five oils that are identifiable, fourteen were painted during August (J. Hulsker, op. cit., 1977, p. 54). The model in A Girl in a Wood cannot be positively identified but it is possible that she might be Maria, the six year old daughter of Sein Hoornik, a woman with whom the artist had become romanticly involved.
Financial constraints made it difficult for him to hire models and instead he used figures he observed in his daily activities, painting from nature such subjects as woodcutters, fisherfolk, and faggot gatherers. In June of 1882, van Gogh was hospitalized with an infection and he was not able to paint for several weeks. Upon his release in July he attended the exhibition of French art from Mesdag's collection where he saw paintings by Dupré, Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, Breton, Jacque and Rousseau that reaffirmed the direction he was pursuing in his own art. A visit from Theo in August provided him with badly needed money to buy supplies and in thanking him van Gogh wrote, "I limited myself to simple colors...ochre (red-yellow-brown), cobalt and Prussian blue, Naples yellow, sienna, black and white" (ibid., p. 429, letter no. 222). A Girl in a Wood was painted towards the end of August and van Gogh expressed his enthusiasm about it in a letter to Theo: "This week I have painted some rather large studies in the wood, which I tried to carry out more thoroughly and vigorously than the first ones" (ibid., p. 442, letter no. 227).
Many of van Gogh's oil paintings from this period have been lost and of the twenty-five oils that are identifiable, fourteen were painted during August (J. Hulsker, op. cit., 1977, p. 54). The model in A Girl in a Wood cannot be positively identified but it is possible that she might be Maria, the six year old daughter of Sein Hoornik, a woman with whom the artist had become romanticly involved.