The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in the Snow 1885

Vincent van Gogh made this painting of ‘The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in the Snow’ with oil on canvas. This work dates to Van Gogh’s Dutch period, before he moved to France, and depicts the garden connected to his father’s church. Its subject matter is a church, an institution of social and religious authority. Look closely and you’ll see a lone figure rendered in dark browns and grays, symbolic of the working-class peasant. The painting is not a picturesque winter scene; it’s a statement about social class and the role of the church in the lives of the poor. To fully understand this work, we need to consider the economic hardships of the Netherlands in the 1880s, and the role of the church as a source of both comfort and oppression. Primary source documents and historical scholarship on Dutch society at this time can reveal the complex social dynamics that shaped Van Gogh's artistic vision. Art is always a product of its time.