Important Notice

Lot 31

L'allée aux deux promeneurs (Lane with Two Figures) was painted in the southern Dutch village of Neunen in October 1885 - a year which was to prove pivotal in Van Gogh's artistic career. By then, he had renounced his desire to become a preacher and was fully committed to being an artist. Following art courses in Belgium and a period in The Hague, in 1883 the thirty-year old Van Gogh had returned to live with his parents at the vicarage in... L'allée aux deux promeneurs (Lane with Two Figures) was painted in the southern Dutch village of Neunen in October 1885 - a year which was to prove pivotal in Van Gogh's artistic career. By then, he had renounced his desire to become a preacher and was fully committed to being an artist. Following art courses in Belgium and a period in The Hague, in 1883 the thirty-year old Van Gogh had returned to live with his parents at the vicarage in Neunen. This decision must have been taken out of financial necessity, given the artist's age and difficult relationship with his father. Van Gogh had also formed a deep-seated desire - induced by a visit to an artists' community in northern France in 1879-80 and by a fervent passion for the novels of the French Naturalists - to become a painter of peasant and rural life.

Van Gogh stayed at the Neunen vicarage longer than at any other place in his entire life as an artist. He could now devote himself almost completely to oil painting, as previously he had been unable to afford the materials and canvas with which to work. His brother Theo, a successful art dealer in Paris, had also begun to support Vincent financially and from this time onwards the two siblings took up a lengthy written correspondence that remains a testament to the thought processes and obsessive drive behind Van Gogh's work.

At this time, Vincent occupied himself with the three common subjects in painting: Still life, genre and landscape painting. He was particularly fascinated with recording the daily life of local peasants in their surroundings, whether it was at work in the fields, going to church, or sitting down to a frugal meal in their homes. It was a few months before the present work was painted that Van Gogh created his first great masterpiece 'The Potato Eaters' in April 1885.

As with his earliest known paintings, nature and landscape held an important place in his work. In a letter to his brother Theo in 1882, Van Gogh stated "the duty of a painter is to study nature in depth and to use all his intelligence, to put his feelings into his work so that it becomes comprehensible to others" (letter 252 from Vincent to Theo van Gogh). Nature was always the basis of Van Gogh's art - he'd grown up in the Dutch countryside and fostered a deep love for it. His long walks in the forests and marshes as a boy had taught him to be a keen observer of the living world. His Protestant upbringing also taught that the beauty of nature was a manifestation of God and although his faith dwindled, he continued to believe that nature represented a deeper truth. He not only recorded the surroundings of Neunen, but imbued his paintings with a subtle sense of emotion. He could articulate feelings of loneliness or frenetic energy in a landscape: "Sometimes I long so much to do landscape, just as one would for a long walk to refresh oneself, and in all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul, as it were" (letter 292). Ingo F. Walther goes further in noting: "To a far greater extent than the enlightened artists of his time he withdrew into Nature, searching for its anthropomorphic side, the image of himself and of the gloomy frame of mind he was in... 'if I paint landscapes, there will always be something figural in them' (letter 182). Landscape was a model for Van Gogh. He tried to talk to it, as if it were there in a studio and he could provoke a response" (R. Metzger & I. F. Walther, Van Gogh, 1853-1890, Cologne, 2008, p. 28).

After his father passed away in the summer of 1885, Van Gogh moved out of the family home and rented rooms from a local man in Neunen. By this time he was viewed with great suspicion by the locals and suffered a serious lack of models after the local pastor forbade his parishioners to pose for the artist. Van Gogh therefore turned all his attention to still life and landscape painting. He particularly enjoyed recording the effects of autumn on his natural surroundings, as can be seen in the present painting. In fact, he liked it so much that he longed for a country "where it would always be autumn" (letter 277).

The present work is a brilliant example of Van Gogh's landscape painting from this important period. He has used the green and brown colors of the native earth to emphasise the power of the natural world and add emotional weight to the scene. The alley of trees is a deliberate exercise in perspective and yet appears to exaggerate the isolation of the two figures at the focal point. This use of perspective as another emotional tool is clearly a conscious effect on the artist's part, as can be seen again in several sketches and paintings of this time. The impact of the natural world on man, and this artist's extraordinary capacity to imbue landscape painting with human emotion was to gather momentum over the next few years. Soon after completing the present work, Van Gogh moved to Antwerp in November 1885 and a few months later left for Paris, where his art was to explore further most of the subjects and technique he had begun to explore during his time in Neunen.

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