Most people think of Vincent van Gogh and immediately see yellow. They see the swirling, hallucinogenic blues of The Starry Night or the aggressive, vibrant golds of his Arles sunflowers. It’s a vibe. But honestly, if you only look at the end of the story, you’re missing the actual grit of how a failed preacher became the most famous painter on the planet. Van Gogh early work isn't pretty. It’s brown. It’s muddy. It’s heavy. It’s also where the real soul of his art was born, long before he ever touched a tube of chrome yellow in the South of France.
He started late. Like, really late. Vincent didn't decide to be an artist until he was 27, after failing spectacularly as a bookstore clerk, an art salesman, and a lay preacher in the coal-mining district of the Borinage. He was broke. He was awkward. He was essentially living off his brother Theo’s grace. When you look at his earliest sketches from around 1880, they aren't the works of a natural prodigy. They're stiff. They’re kind of clunky. But there’s a desperate honesty in them that explains everything he did later.
The Potato Eaters and the Cult of the Peasant
The masterpiece of the Van Gogh early work period is, without a doubt, The Potato Eaters (1885). If you haven’t seen it, don't expect a palette cleanser. It’s a dark, cramped scene of a peasant family sharing a meal of potatoes by the light of a single oil lamp. Vincent spent months practicing for this. He didn't want it to be "nice." He actually wrote to Theo saying he wanted the painting to smell of bacon fat and potato steam.
He was obsessed with the idea of "the peasant painter." He looked up to Jean-François Millet like a god. To Vincent, art wasn't about decoration; it was about manual labor. He wanted his brushstrokes to feel like the digging of a spade. This is a huge pivot from the Impressionists in Paris who were painting pretty picnics and sailboats. While Monet was chasing light, Vincent was in the dirt in Nuenen, trying to capture the "coarse" reality of people who worked the land with the same hands they used to eat.
It’s interesting because critics at the time—and even his friend Anthon van Rappard—absolutely hated it. They thought the anatomy was wrong. They thought the colors were muddy. Rappard basically told him the work was amateurish. Vincent was crushed, but he didn't change his style to please them. He leaned in. He knew that the "deformity" in his figures conveyed a deeper truth than a perfectly proportioned academic drawing ever could.
Why the Muddy Palette Was a Choice
A common misconception is that Vincent used dark colors because he was depressed or because he didn't have access to better paint. That's just not true. He chose those "earth tones"—sepia, umber, black, and deep greens—because he felt they represented the earth itself. He was reading a lot of Zola and Dickens at the time. He wanted his art to be "socially conscious" before that was even a buzzword.
He was basically trying to find the sacred in the mundane.
In his Nuenen period, which lasted from roughly 1883 to 1885, he produced hundreds of drawings and paintings. We’re talking about weavers hunched over looms, old women peeling potatoes, and the bleak landscapes of the Netherlands. He wasn't trying to be "Van Gogh" yet. He was trying to be a craftsman.
The Shift: Antwerp and the Discovery of Japanese Prints
By 1885, things were getting weird in Nuenen. There was a scandal involving a local woman, and the village priest essentially forbade people from posing for him. Vincent headed to Antwerp. This is a massive turning point for Van Gogh early work.
Antwerp gave him two things: Peter Paul Rubens and Ukiyo-e woodblock prints.
Rubens taught him that color could be used to create energy, not just to describe a scene. But the Japanese prints? Those changed his life. He started buying them for a few centimes. He loved the flat areas of color, the bold outlines, and the weird, cropped perspectives. You can see the influence immediately. His work starts to flatten out. The shadows start to disappear. He’s still using relatively dark colors, but the "graphic" quality of his work begins to emerge.
He also started studying anatomy at the Academy in Antwerp, but he hated it. He thought the teachers were stuck in the past. There’s a funny story about him being told his drawings were too "rough" and him basically telling the professors they didn't know what they were talking about. He was always a bit of a rebel.
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The Paris Explosion (1886-1888)
When Vincent moved to Paris to live with Theo, his art underwent a total molecular shift. This is the tail end of what we consider "early work," but it’s the bridge to his famous period. He meets Gauguin. He meets Toulouse-Lautrec. He sees what the Pointillists like Seurat are doing with tiny dots of color.
Suddenly, the "potato" palette is gone.
He starts experimenting with "broken" brushstrokes. If you look at his self-portraits from 1886 versus 1887, it’s like looking at two different humans. He’s learning the science of complementary colors—how putting a red next to a green makes both look brighter. This wasn't just "talent." It was intense, nerdy study. He was obsessed with color theory books by Charles Blanc and Delacroix’s ideas on color.
The Misunderstood Mastery of the "Ugly" Years
A lot of people skip the early Dutch years because the paintings don't look good on a coffee mug. But art historians like Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith (who wrote the definitive biography Van Gogh: The Life) argue that his early work is where his technical foundation was actually built.
Without the heavy, structural drawing he did in the Borinage and Nuenen, the swirling stars of his later years would have no weight. They would just be decorative patterns. The reason a Van Gogh painting feels so "solid" is because he spent years drawing peasants who were built like oak trees.
- Structure over Style: His early drawings of weavers show a complex understanding of 3D space, even if the proportions are "expressive."
- Empathy as a Tool: He didn't paint from a distance. He lived with his subjects. He wanted to feel their struggle.
- The Rejection of Beauty: He purposefully avoided "pretty" subjects, which was a radical act in the 19th-century art world.
Honestly, the Van Gogh early work phase is a lesson in persistence. He wasn't a "natural." He worked his way into being a genius. He failed at almost everything else in life, which gave him a "nothing to lose" attitude when he finally picked up a brush.
How to Look at Van Gogh's Early Art Today
If you want to actually "get" Vincent, you have to look past the ears and the sunflowers. You have to look at the hands. In his early work, he focuses obsessively on hands. Bony, overworked, dirty hands. To him, those hands told the entire story of a human life.
When you visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the first floor is usually packed with people taking selfies with the bright stuff. But if you go to the sections covering 1881-1885, it’s quieter. You can see the pencil marks where he erased and re-drew lines a dozen times. You can see the heavy impasto where he tried to make the paint look like dirt.
It's raw. It's human. It's the sound of a man trying to find his voice in a room that's telling him to be quiet.
Actionable Insights for Art Lovers and Collectors
If you're looking to deepen your appreciation or even collect prints/studies related to this era, keep these points in mind:
Study the Drawings First Vincent's drawings from the Etten and Hague periods (1881-1883) are masters-classes in texture. Look for his "Sien" drawings. They are heartbreaking but show his ability to capture raw emotion through simple graphite and carpenter's pencils.
Understand the "Working Class" Context To appreciate The Potato Eaters, read a bit about the Dutch coal mining and weaving industries of the 1880s. It places his "drab" colors in a social context that makes them feel revolutionary rather than just "dark."
Track the Transition Compare a landscape from Nuenen with a landscape from his early months in Paris. You can literally see the light "turning on" in his brain as he begins to understand how to use white and yellow to simulate sunlight.
Visit the Sources If you ever travel, skip the big galleries for a day and head to the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Hoge Veluwe National Park. They have one of the best collections of his early drawings and paintings, often in a much more intimate setting than the main Amsterdam museum.
Embrace the "Ugly" Stop looking for beauty in art and start looking for "characteristic" truth. That was Vincent’s goal. Ask yourself: "Does this feel real?" rather than "Does this look good?" That is the ultimate key to unlocking the power of Van Gogh’s formative years.