All of Vincent van Gogh’s artworks are the product of an intensely visceral response to the natural world. His letters, paintings, and the accounts of the many contemporaries who knew him convey the intensity of his vision and force of will. In that sense, whether we consider a painting of The Hague, Paris, Arles, or Auvers-sur-Oise periods, that relentless Vincent is always behind its making. Incredibly productive and advanced in his ability to assimilate new potentialities, the intervals between breakthroughs or turning points in Van Gogh’s arduous journey were compressed into an unbelievably short timeline. Despite working from age 27 until his demise ten years later, he produced more than 900 paintings and many more drawings. That data and numbers equate to creating an artwork every 36 hours. Whatever his faults and attributes, painful and tragic, at every touchpoint of his career, he was running on creative cinders from a fully stoked, raging furnace forged by a transcendent will and independent spirit. The New Church and Old Houses in The Hague is one of his earliest oils and, in the spirit of that awareness, a necessary precursor, if not an essential waypoint along his arduous journey.

When Vincent van Gogh arrived unexpectedly at the home of his cousin-in-law, Anton Mauve, on November 27, 1881, it was as much a surprise to Mauve as it was to Van Gogh’s brother Theo. For his part, Mauve, a prominent realist painter associated with the Hague School, was more gracious than Vincent had any right to expect. He took the young Vincent under his wing and, with all due haste, “installed (Vincent) in front of a still life consisting of a couple of old clogs and other objects.” He then set the newcomer to gaining likenesses from a model, to which Vincent gushed, “How marvelous watercolor is for expressing space and airiness, allowing the figure to be part of the atmosphere and life to enter it!”

Courtesy of Mauve’s generous loan, by early January, Vincent had his studio. “Drawing is becoming more and more of a passion…Mauve has shown me a new way to make something, namely watercolors. Well, now I’m immersed in that. I’m daubing and washing out, in short, seeking and striving. One must make desperate attempts because there is something diabolical about executing a watercolor.” In addition to a couple of small watercolors, Vincent started a large one that “did not automatically go so well and easily straightaway.” But it seems the rest of January would be devoted entirely to working with watercolor only — mainly in the service of achieving a reasonable facsimile of any model he could afford to hire.