Entrance to a Quarry

Van Gogh painted the entrance to a quarry at Montmajour near Arles in the summer of 1888, and returned to the quarry motif at Saint-Rémy where the asylum grounds included rocky excavations in the Alpilles limestone. The quarry entrance — a dark cavity in pale stone, a passage between exterior and interior — offered him an architectural subject of pure form, stripped of human presence. He was interested in rock faces as a form of abstraction, anticipating Cézanne's treatment of the Bibémus quarry, though Van Gogh's approach remains more painterly and energetic than Cézanne's structural analysis.

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.