How Did Van Gogh Come To Etten

At the end of April, 1881, Vincent comes to Etten to live with his parents. On the 18th of August he is registered as a resident of Etten. He fills in as his profession: a painter.

On this document you can see that Vincent fills in that he's a painter « enlarge »

Vincent is of good heart. In the months to come, he makes a lot of drawings. He likes to work on Ingres-paper, a grey colored kind of paper. In August Vincent visits for the first time his cousin by marriage Anton Mauve (1838-1888) at The Hague. Mauve is known as a painter of landscapes, and the sea at Scheveningen, near The Hague. Later he will be remembered as one of the leading figures of the School of The Hague, a Dutch variant of Impressionism. On the advice of Mauve, Vincent starts to draw, back at Etten, with crayons of Conte de Paris, and makes tones in his drawings with thinned black and sepia ink with brushes. When it is too dirty to work outside, Vincent practices drawing by copying paintings and engravings by Jean Millet, one of the first French painters, painting farmers and labourers. He also copies from a late-medieval German painter, Hans Holbein, like this one. He practiced on portraits too, drawing pictures of his sister Will and his father. However, we do not know for sure if they posed for him or if he used their photographs.