#dusk

This comes out of the old Russian folk epics, where a rider reaches a stone that spells out which road kills him and which one ruins him. From what I can find the painter chewed on this subject for years, redoing it more than once before settling on this version, and he spent a lot of his career on folk tales and stage designs when most of his colleagues were painting contemporary life.

They say he knew Munch's work from early on, and was after a feeling more than an accurate view — this reads like a mood he wanted you to sit in, not a real place.

He painted this same striding figure more than once; the version that went to the Paris Salon and got people arguing about whether farm labourers belonged in serious painting is a different one, elsewhere. Van Gogh, apparently, copied the sower over and over for years — he treated it as something to learn from rather than something to hang.

They've stopped for the evening prayer — the bell would be ringing from that little church on the horizon. Dalí was supposedly obsessed with this picture, insisting the couple were actually mourning a dead child, and an X-ray later turned up a painted-over shape near the basket. No one seems to agree what it was.

He seems to be painting almost nothing but trees his whole life, and kept at it into his nineties — someone supposedly called him 'the Michelangelo of trees', which is a lot of title for a man who mostly did quiet evenings like this.