Description
Landscape near Arles – the first canvas of the Provence months
The middle of the picture is taken by a large haystack, shaped as a soft cone in ochre and golden brown. To its left stand low white buildings with grey roofs and dark openings; behind them rises a band of dark green, narrowly growing trees. In the foreground a pale sandy track winds from the bottom edge towards the stack and is lost beside it. Between the track and the buildings lie green and blue-grey fields, painted in broad bands. The sky is light and almost cloudless. The work is held by the Indianapolis Museum of Art under the inventory number 44.10, and the year is 1888.
The first canvas of those two months
The museum’s own gallery label beside the work states that this was the first canvas Gauguin painted during the two months of his stay in Provence in 1888. We report the detail as the museum gives it. For the viewer it changes the picture: what we see is not the summing-up of a period but its beginning, the first look at a place the painter did not yet know.
The haystack as the centre
The scene has neither person nor animal. Instead it has a haystack, set almost in the middle and painted larger than the houses behind it. Its warm ochre is the strongest colour on the canvas, and everything else arranges itself by it: the track leads towards it, the fields order themselves around it, the trees outline it. A mass of farm labour thus takes the place that would otherwise belong to a figure.
The measurement, which the museum gives in inches
The museum record gives the canvas measurement in inches only: 36 x 28 and a half inches, as height by width. Converted to centimetres that is 91.4 x 72.4 cm. Because a figure of exactly that kind has already been misread as centimetres on this shelf, we mark it expressly: the museum gives inches, and the centimetre value is a conversion.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every reproduction here is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke. In this motif the haystack is the hardest part: it is made of short slanting strokes that give it its shape, and if those line up the cone flattens into a patch. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished work for approval.
- Subject: a large haystack, white farm buildings and dark trees beside it, a sandy track in front.
- Technique: oil on canvas, a warm ochre centre and cool green fields.
- Sizes: portrait format, from 40 x 50 cm to 160 x 200 cm; 72 x 90 cm and 87 x 110 cm are often chosen.
- Of note: not one human figure appears in the picture.
If the same period interests you, see also A Farm in Brittany, Winter Landscape (Vinterlandskap) and Arlesiennes (Mistral).
