The Stevedores in Arles

Van Gogh painted the Arles stevedores unloading coal from barges on the Rhône in August 1888, finding in their collective, rhythmic labour a contemporary equivalent of the agricultural workers he had documented in Nuenen. He wrote to Theo about watching 'twenty men unloading coal' with the same precise attention he had given to weavers and potato-diggers: the specific organisation of physical labour, the repeated motion, the way multiple individuals became a single functional unit. The subject was unusual in his Arles period for its concentration on collective industrial work rather than individual agricultural labour or solitary landscape, and the formal challenge of depicting a procession of figures in coordinated action was quite different from his usual compositions. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid holds this as part of a collection that spans European art from the medieval period to the twentieth century, assembled primarily by Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza and his predecessors.

The figures carrying coal sacks are rendered as dark, compressed silhouettes against the lighter background of the quay and sky. The repeating rhythm of the procession is the primary compositional device. The palette is unusually restrained for Arles — dominated by dark umber and grey — reflecting the industrial subject matter.