Van Gogh Watercolours

Watercolour and opaque colour

The word watercolour does not describe every part of every sheet equally well. Transparent colour allows the paper to contribute strongly to a passage’s lightness; opaque colour can cover what lies below. Diluting an opaque paint can nevertheless produce a thin-looking wash. Van Heugten’s 1996 catalogue relates Van Gogh’s Dutch aquarelle gouachée to Cassagne and Eugène Isabey: thin opaque paint and successive layers. Whether he followed every instruction is unknown. ^[1]

Van Heugten uses opaque watercolour rather than applying gouache throughout: tested passages differed in water sensitivity, and binders remained unresolved. No universal gum-arabic binder is established. Getty specifically catalogues Bleachery at Scheveningen as watercolour heightened with white gouache. An object’s identified material should be distinguished from a formula imposed on the group. ^{[1] [7]}

Pencil, chalk, ink and wax crayon can share a sheet with watercolour. They need not disappear when a sheet becomes more finished. A visible contour may establish the edge of a form while a wash gives it weight or atmosphere. In the later Landscape with Houses, even watercolour and diluted oil occupy different parts of the same paper. The category becomes more useful when it directs attention to these differences. ^{[11] [13]}

Mauve and the first studies of models

In December 1881 Van Gogh reported practical lessons with Anton Mauve in The Hague: painting during the day and drawing in the evening. He had made five painted studies and two watercolours. His letter to Theo links their promise of sale with another reason for keeping them: they preserved what he had learned about execution. “How marvellous watercolour is,” he wrote, before describing its ability to give a figure surrounding atmosphere. ^[2]

The two worked-up sheets are Scheveningen Woman Sewing, F869/JH83, and Scheveningen Woman Knitting, F870/JH84. The smaller related Scheveningen Woman, F871/JH85, is a separate sketch. Mauve’s additions belong to the knitting watercolour, which later went to Molenaar; they must not be attributed automatically to all three versions. The critical letters edition distinguishes these objects, while its works concordance confirms the sewing sheet’s F869 number. ^{[2] [20]}

His enthusiasm concerned atmosphere around a figure, beyond colouring an outline. Dress and background meet through colour as well as contour. Kept studies could recall decisions learned beside an experienced painter; they were saleable pictures and records of learning. ^[2]

That excitement did not remove practical difficulties. In letter 203, written in January 1882, he describes the frustration of working a watercolour further only to find the paint becoming thick. Paper, brushes, paint, paid models and time all entered the cost of experiment. The editors explain his difficulty as a wish to strengthen colour that could compromise transparency. This is a specific early problem, rather than evidence that he always preferred either transparent or opaque handling. ^[21]

Paper and the cost of experiment

In July 1882 Van Gogh considered making a more serious watercolour on Harding paper. He told Theo that, compared with Whatman, it allowed a firm basis in black and white before washing while retaining the appearance he sought. Paper choice was therefore part of the image’s construction. A support could affect what he believed he could put beneath colour, and how confidently he could work over it. His account is a historical description of his own experiment, rather than a reliable instruction for recreating the result with modern materials. ^[22]

The pressure to produce saleable colour work coexisted with his investment in drawing. That relationship becomes particularly clear in letter 252, of 31 July 1882. He defended the time spent drawing before moving further into colour and analysed grey and other tones as combinations rather than isolated ready-made shades. Colour and drawing were connected problems of observation. His interest in greys helps explain why a subdued landscape could count as an advance instead of a preliminary stage to be valued only for its later replacement by brighter painting. ^[3]

Watercolour paper also crossed the boundary into predominantly black drawing. The early catalogue describes experiments involving pencil, milk as a fixative, lithographic crayon, brushwork and white bodycolour, followed in one account by soaking a drawing with water. Patrick Grant reads the dramatic pail-of-water episode in relation to the letters’ presentation of risk and delicate results. The story records both material experiment and an artist telling Theo about its precariousness. It supplies neither a repeatable recipe nor evidence that every watercolour was soaked. The wider range of graphic methods belongs with Van Gogh’s drawings. ^{[1] [19]}

Pollard Willow and the shape of a landscape

Pollard Willow, made in The Hague in July 1882, combines pencil, brown ink, watercolour and chalk on a sheet measuring 38 by 55.8 centimetres. The Van Gogh Museum identifies it as F947/JH164, accession d1172S2012. In letter 252 Van Gogh assessed the watercolour favourably and connected the setting with the railway area. The small sketch in the letter is a separate object, JH165, rather than another title for the large sheet. ^{[4] [3]}

The willow interrupts the view with a broad, dark, leaning trunk. Its cut branches spread across the sky, while the narrow green bank turns away from the foreground towards a small figure. The left-hand expanse of water and the right-hand track provide contrasting surfaces: the water opens sideways, while the path carries the eye into distance. The tree’s weight and the tapering bank hold these different directions together. A small figure becomes legible within a landscape dominated by a much nearer form. ^[4]

Colour does not operate through equal brightness across the sheet. The green strip beside the track stands out against greyer water and sky; small blue passages punctuate the subdued field. The effect invites attention to intervals and relationships. The trunk gains emphasis partly because the surrounding tones allow it to remain dark and solid. This is a useful place to understand Van Gogh’s interest in greys: they can organise a picture instead of merely filling the spaces between stronger colours. His letter’s discussion of colour and his judgement of this particular watercolour belong together. ^[3]

Looking at the tree and track together also reveals how much drawing survives within the coloured image. Branches remain sharply directional, and the bank gives the foreground a clearly articulated edge. Yet the sky is made from broader, irregular patches. The sheet can sustain both kinds of mark. Its varied surface is a reason to examine the whole composition before isolating an attractive detail.

The museum acquired Pollard Willow in 2012. This matters when comparing accounts of its watercolour holdings: a description published in 1996 cannot include that later purchase. The work’s present collection history should be distinguished from the date when Van Gogh made it, just as the full sheet should be distinguished from his letter sketch. ^[4]

Roots and wash on a larger sheet

Tree Roots in a Sandy Ground, at the Kröller-Müller Museum, belongs to April–May 1882. Its accession, KM117.091 RECTO, identifies a work on watercolour paper made with pencil, black chalk, brown and grey wash and opaque watercolour. This is the early Hague sheet, distinct from the Tree Roots oil painted in 1890. A repeated motif does not make the two objects interchangeable. ^[6]

Dark knotted roots and surrounding earth receive different handling. The museum relates the subject to Van Gogh’s language about life struggling to root itself while threatened with being torn away. This is an attributed association, rather than symbolism inferred from dark paint. Roots combine visible attachment with exposure and vulnerability. ^[6]

Beside Pollard Willow, the roots sheet changes scale: a tree organises an extensive view in one, while growth at ground level dominates the other. Wash and watercolour could give substance to either, without relying on comparison with later oils.

Bleachery at Scheveningen and the reused sheet

Getty’s Bleachery at Scheveningen, accession 98.GC.2, is a watercolour heightened with white gouache, dated 1882. It measures 31.8 by 54 centimetres. The landscape occupies the recto, or front, while a Woman from Scheveningen survives on the verso. Getty’s reconstruction of the paper’s history remains qualified: a larger figure study may have been washed, cut down and reused for the landscape. The fact that there is work on both sides is secure; every step proposed to explain it is not. ^{[7] [8]}

The catalogue links the broad sky, receding ground and white accents, and identifies the July letter’s torchon as coarse paper. An older translation’s linen is misleading: the support is paper, rather than fabric. ^[8]

It compares Roofs Seen from the Artist’s Attic Window, F943/JH156, and Carpenter’s Yard and Laundry, F939/JH150, as constructions of working space. The bleachery’s letter sketch has different proportions of sky and perspective from the full watercolour: correspondence need not reproduce a composition exactly. ^[8]

Reuse can preserve an earlier image behind a later one, even when the first sheet’s extent is uncertain. Front and back form one object but need separate subjects and execution histories; its landscape title alone conceals this. The broader account of work around The Hague places such experiments among Van Gogh’s studies of models, buildings and outdoor space.

The Poor and Money and a crowded street

In The Poor and Money, made in September–October 1882, chalk, watercolour, pen and ink organise a crowd outside a lottery office. The Van Gogh Museum’s sheet, d0376V1962, measures 37.9 by 56.6 centimetres and is catalogued as F970/JH222. The inscription on the building announces the lottery drawing. People have assembled for the event; reducing the scene to a queue buying tickets misses that specific activity. The museum connects the subject with Van Gogh’s concern for the disappointed hopes of poor people. ^[5]

The group is a substantial pictorial problem. Seen from behind or in profile, the figures overlap and turn towards different points. Light head coverings and faces punctuate the darker bodies, while the doorway becomes a dark concentration at the back. In the foreground, the paving remains visible between the feet. Its angled divisions supply a structure beneath a gathering whose individual members could otherwise merge into a continuous band. ^[5]

The coat on a nearer figure can read as a large shape before its wearer becomes an individual. A head, shoulder or small interval then separates that person from the next. The eye moves between the mass of the gathering and these local distinctions. Watercolour helps relate the figures through shared tones, while linear marks make different contours and positions legible. This is a different demand from setting a solitary model against a background, although the question of giving a body convincing surroundings remains.

The museum cites Van Gogh’s difficulty in getting figures into their right places while preserving life and movement. That challenge belongs to the making of the composition as much as its social subject does. A comparison with George Hendrik Breitner has been discussed in the scholarly catalogue, but direct influence remains uncertain. The scene needs no unproved borrowing to establish its ambition. Van Gogh’s peasants and workers similarly invite attention to how a human subject inhabits an organised pictorial space. ^{[5] [1]}

Drenthe landscapes in cool and warm colour

Van Gogh’s move to Drenthe in autumn 1883 brought him to a northeastern Dutch region of villages, open ground and peat working. Drenthe is a province, rather than the name of a single village. Hoogeveen, Nieuw-Amsterdam and Zweeloo belong to the geography of his stay. Colour sheets from the region complicate a simple contrast between a brown Dutch period and a bright French one: different local subjects and conditions called for different relationships of colour. ^[17]

Landscape with Wheelbarrow, 1883. Watercolour, opaque watercolour and black chalk. Cleveland Museum of Art.

Cleveland’s Landscape with Wheelbarrow, accession 1958.30, uses watercolour and opaque watercolour with black chalk on cream wove paper. It is dated 1883 and measures 24.9 by 35.7 centimetres. The museum draws attention to cool greens and blues under a lilac evening sky. The wheelbarrow places a modest sign of human work within a broad expanse. Such a palette can convey atmosphere without intense warm colour dominating the sheet. Subdued colour remains colour, with differences that would disappear if the Dutch work were treated as essentially monochrome. ^[9]

A warmer example entered Assen’s Drents Museum in 2024: Landscape with a Farm, P2024-0029, watercolour on paper, 1883. Its wet autumn view has a distant farm or hut and rust and lilac tones. Chief curator Annemiek Rens used the purchase to challenge Drenthe’s reputation as dark and insignificant. The colour provides a specific ground for reassessment, without judging it only against later French paintings. ^{[16] [17]}

In the announcement, last meant the only known privately held Drenthe work still available to the market, rather than his final painting there. After forty years with a Canadian family, it reappeared in the museum’s 2023 exhibition before purchase. ^[17]

The Drawbridge in Nieuw-Amsterdam, 1883. Groninger Museum. The bridge occupies the centre of this wide view.

The Groninger Museum adds another contrast with The Drawbridge in Nieuw-Amsterdam. Its account identifies the subject as the view from Van Gogh’s lodging and describes the large watercolour’s light, lyrical tone, with echoes of Mauve and Max Liebermann. An inhabited canal view belongs beside the open fields when considering his regional work. Mauve’s example also returns in a new setting: lessons associated with the early figure studies were part of a wider visual experience, rather than a method confined to one subject. ^[18]

These works make comparison more rewarding than a single verdict about a dark or colourful phase. One can ask how much a sky contributes to a landscape, how a small structure establishes distance and how signs of labour change an apparently empty expanse. Drenthe offers the fuller regional context. Within the watercolours, the immediate value lies in the range of effects achieved during one short period, with each sheet preserving its own materials and subject.

The loom and the small room in Nuenen

The Van Gogh Museum’s Weaver, d0423V1962, dates from December 1883–August 1884 in Nuenen. This is the sheet F1115/JH502, measuring 35.5 by 44.6 centimetres, in pencil, watercolour, pen and ink. Its broad format is important: the loom nearly fills the image, leaving the worker embedded in the equipment and room. The museum relates Van Gogh’s interest to weavers working hard for poor returns in their homes. It suggests that hopes of sale probably explain his signature. He also described the difficulty of drawing a loom when a small room prevented him from standing far enough back. ^[10]

Weaver, F1115/JH502. Van Gogh Museum, d0423V1962.

The loom’s dark outer frame encloses several smaller structures. The pale stretched fabric runs diagonally towards the foreground; rods, threads and hanging mechanisms interrupt the space above it. The figure sits within this arrangement, rather than commanding a clear central stage. Across the back wall, three windows establish a succession of light rectangles. They offer points of orientation in an interior whose machinery could otherwise be difficult to disentangle. ^[10]

The room’s colour works differently from the open skies of Drenthe. Dark greenish and brown passages bring the wall, floor and loom close together, while lighter areas distinguish fabric and windows. The result makes the relation between a person and an apparatus immediately perceptible even before every mechanical part is understood. A small figure can remain the human subject of an image dominated by things.

This is why the watercolours should include interiors and labour alongside landscapes. The medium could address an enclosed and obstructed view, with light entering through limited openings, as effectively as a horizon beneath a broad sky. The Nuenen work develops the question of labour at greater length; this particular sheet makes machinery, space and the figure inseparable. Other weaver compositions require their own identities rather than borrowing this sheet’s date range, dimensions or materials.

Arles and watercolours after paintings

The notes to letter 594 (9 April 1888) identify two after-oil watercolours: The Langlois Bridge with Washerwomen, F1480/JH1382, after F397/JH1368, for Tersteeg; and Pink Peach Trees, F1469/JH1384, after F394/JH1379, for Jet Mauve. These relationships concern those works, rather than every bridge or orchard with a similar title. ^[12]

A watercolour after an oil can communicate a composition already solved, rethinking colour and line on a different support and scale. The Langlois Bridge and orchards give the larger subject histories; these examples document the direction from oil to watercolour.

The choice of recipient adds another purpose. A work could convey an account of recent work while also carrying an association with a person. That makes repetition part of artistic communication. Susan Alyson Stein and Colta Ives emphasise this exchange in their account of Van Gogh’s drawings: paper works could precede oils, but he also made versions after paintings for his brother and fellow artists. Repetition was an opportunity to reconsider an image through another graphic language, rather than evidence that the later sheet was merely redundant. ^[15]

The Zouave and a disputed working sequence

The Met dates The Zouave, 62.151, to about 20 June 1888. Reed pen and brown ink, wax crayon and watercolour over graphite occupy wove paper, 31.5 by 23.6 centimetres. Its current label calls it a colour study for the bust-length oil; dedication and dispatch to Émile Bernard followed in July. Materials and destination remain distinct from its proposed working sequence. ^[11]

There is an object-specific disagreement. The Met’s 1982 acquisitions bulletin described this same sheet as a watercolour copy made for Bernard after the oil; the current label places it before the oil. The difference should remain visible when considering the versions. The museum’s present study interpretation is a curatorial position, and the earlier after-painting interpretation is another documented account of the same object. Their conflict does not undo the securely identified after-oil bridge and peach-tree watercolours in letter 594. ^{[23] [11] [12]}

A coloured sheet can thus raise two separate questions: how its marks work together and when it was made in relation to an oil. Its appearance alone cannot settle both. A dedication concerns the sheet’s social life, but need not establish its original working function. Keeping those questions apart permits a more precise comparison, without forcing every work on paper into the category of either preparation or copy.

The Blue Cart and the Harvest preparations

Harvard’s The Blue Cart, accession 1943.279, belongs to the 1888 harvest campaign. At 39.4 by 52.3 centimetres, it is a substantial coloured sheet. The museum records graphite, black chalk, brown ink, watercolour and gouache on tan laid paper, with a question mark attached to an additional identification of oil pastel. That uncertainty must remain attached to the material: an unqualified list of media would imply a conclusion the record does not give. ^[14]

The notes to letter 623 identify F1484/JH1438 among the coloured preparations for the large Harvest oil, F412/JH1440. This places the Harvard sheet in a different relationship from the documented after-oil watercolours. Its range of materials also makes a useful comparison with the Zouave: both resist the assumption that a coloured drawing consists simply of a pencil outline subsequently filled with transparent wash. The presence of several media does not, by itself, establish their exact order of application. ^{[24] [14]}

The sheet’s provenance includes Van Gogh’s sister Wilhelmina, while the later pen drawing of the harvest sent to John Peter Russell is another object with another role. The Harvest comparison follows those distinctions in detail. Taken with the bridge repetitions, the coloured preparation establishes a flexible practice: Van Gogh could return to a composition for a recipient, or use colour on paper while developing a painting. Neither role determines the value of the sheet as an image. ^{[14] [24]}

Watercolour sky and diluted oil at Auvers

Landscape with Houses, made at Auvers in May 1890, provides an unusually clear late example of materials sharing one surface. The Van Gogh Museum identifies the recto as d0332V1962r, F1640r/JH1986, measuring 44 by 54.4 centimetres. Pencil remains visible where Van Gogh departed from his underdrawing. The light-blue sky is watercolour; the rest of the scene uses sweeping strokes of thinned oil paint. The complete sheet cannot accurately be described as pure watercolour. ^[13]

The distinction changes how its apparent unity is understood. Dark blue lines describe roofs, trees and the rolling ground, while pale intervals keep the paper active within the view. The trees rise in loops and hooked strokes; the thatched roofs combine heavy outlines with repeated slanting marks. Near the bottom, long curving bands carry the ground across the sheet. The sky’s broader pale areas meet an animated network whose medium is different, although the eye can take them in as one landscape. ^[13]

The repeated marks also join subjects normally separated by name. A tree, a roof and a field each have their own shape, but curves and stripes move between them. The houses remain recognisable within a landscape whose rhythms are strongly asserted. Visible pencil makes the process less rigid than the final dark network might suggest: the first arrangement did not bind every subsequent stroke to its position.

The reverse bears a different subject, Blossoming Chestnut Trees by a House. As with Getty’s bleachery sheet, front and back belong to one physical object but need distinct titles and descriptions. The late Auvers landscape brings the medium history into sharp focus. A brush mark may look fluid without being watercolour, and a paper support can carry oil. What matters is the actual distribution of materials, together with what the artist made them do. ^[13]

Comparing sheets and their purposes

Three distinctions make these works easier to compare. The title identifies a subject, but a collection accession identifies the particular object. The medium names the materials, but does not necessarily establish their order or function. A relation to an oil painting can be preparation, repetition or a disputed sequence. Pollard Willow, the letter sketch of the bleachery and the different Harvest drawings show why these distinctions matter before any comparison of colour or composition begins.

The differences are also visually productive. The track in Pollard Willow opens a route into distance; the paving in The Poor and Money supports a compressed gathering; the loom makes the interior of Weaver seem densely occupied. In Landscape with Houses, repeated curves bind buildings and vegetation across an undulating surface. Colour does not merely decorate these structures. It helps establish separation, weight, light and continuity in different circumstances.

Van Gogh’s colour and brushwork and technique extend those questions across his painting. The watercolours give them a particular material setting: paper can retain pencil, carry opaque accents, preserve another image on its reverse or accommodate watercolour beside oil. Their variety rewards looking at the whole sheet and the exact object, with the small or unfamiliar works given the same attention as a celebrated canvas.