Entrance to a Quarry

Entrance to a Quarry at the Van Gogh Museum (1889) belongs to the Saint-Rémy period subjects Van Gogh explored in the rocky Alpilles landscape around the asylum. The quarry entrance — a dark opening cut into pale limestone — offered an architectural subject of pure geological form, entirely stripped of human inhabitation, that anticipated something of Cézanne's analytical treatment of the Bibémus quarry near Aix-en-Provence during the same period. Van Gogh had seen Cézanne's work through Theo's gallery activities and was aware of the older artist's approach, though his own treatment remained more physically energetic and less structurally systematic than Cézanne's geometric analysis. The quarry as a subject also connected to his broader interest in industrial and extractive subjects — Belgian coal mines, Dutch peat bogs — where the earth was being actively opened and transformed by human labour or, in this case, where human excavation had left a permanent wound in the rock.

The dark opening of the quarry is rendered in deep umber and black, contrasting sharply with the pale limestone face treated in ochre and cool white. Vegetation at the mouth of the opening is indicated with rapid strokes of green. The composition is dominated by the strong diagonal of the rock face.