A Road at Saint-Remy with Female Figure

Painted at Saint-Rémy in 1889, this road with a female figure is unusual in Van Gogh's asylum landscape work for its inclusion of a human presence — a woman on the road providing scale and narrative suggestion in what is otherwise a depopulated landscape. He was permitted to paint beyond the asylum garden with an attendant, and the roads around Saint-Rémy — lined with the olive trees and cypresses he painted obsessively — were among his accessible subjects. The female figure, perhaps a local peasant woman going about her daily work, is rendered simply, without the psychological intensity of his formal portraits; she functions as a measure of space and a reminder of the ordinary human world continuing beyond his confinement. The Kasama Nichidō Museum of Art in Japan holds this canvas — the Japanese connection to Van Gogh's art running full circle from his admiration for Japanese prints to Japanese institutions collecting his work.

Van Gogh builds the Provençal road in his characteristic Saint-Rémy technique — heavily worked impasto, swirling directional strokes in the sky and surrounding vegetation, the road itself rendered in warm ochres and yellows. The figure is more simply painted, providing a still point in the energized landscape.