View to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer

Van Gogh's trip to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in June 1888 was his first encounter with the Mediterranean coast, and the views he painted of the small Camargue village from the sea and from the surrounding plain were among the most spatially expansive of his entire career. He had been working primarily in the town of Arles and its immediate agricultural plain; the coastal excursion opened a different spatial experience — the village visible from across the flat salt marshes, its church tower and white houses rising from the level landscape against a brilliant sky. He produced both drawings and paintings during the week-long visit, working at the distinctive quality of Camargue light — intense, diffuse, reflected from both sea and sky simultaneously — that was quite unlike either the Dutch atmospheric effects of his training or the concentrated Provençal noon light of the Arles plain. The Kröller-Müller Museum holds this panoramic view as a key document of this coastal excursion.

A wide, low composition with the village spread horizontally across the middle distance. The sky occupies more than half the picture, rendered in fluid strokes of cerulean and ultramarine. The flat foreground — sand or scrub — is built in short, warm strokes of ochre and green, contrasting with the luminous sky.