Street in Saintes-Maries

Van Gogh's Street in Saintes-Maries (1888) was painted during his brief June 1888 visit to the Mediterranean fishing village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer — one of the most productive short expeditions of his career. In three days he produced dozens of drawings and paintings of the fishing boats, sea, and village. The street scene shows the characteristic white houses of the Camargue village under the brilliant Provençal sky — an environment radically different from anything he had known in the Netherlands or Paris, whose light and color excited him enormously. Saintes-Maries confirmed his conviction that the south offered the light conditions he needed for his work.

The Mediterranean intensity of Saintes-Maries transforms Van Gogh's palette: the whitewashed houses under direct southern sun, the brilliant blue sky, the vivid colors of doors and shutters — all are rendered with the saturated complementary contrasts of his Arles period at its most chromatic. His brushwork is rapid and decisive, appropriate to plein air painting in intense heat. The street's spatial recession is handled with the confident perspective construction he had been practicing throughout the Arles period.