Barques aux Saintes-Maries

Van Gogh travelled from Arles to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer on the Mediterranean coast in late May and early June 1888, producing a celebrated series of drawings and paintings of the fishing boats in the shallow waters. He was overwhelmed by the sea — he had grown up in landlocked Brabant and had never seen the Mediterranean — and wrote to Theo that the colours of the water surpassed anything he had imagined. The flat-bottomed boats, pulled up on the beach in characteristic Mediterranean fashion, gave him brightly coloured geometric forms to work against the horizontal sea. The drawings of the same trip were sent to the painter John Russell as gifts.

The boats are rendered with flat, unmodulated areas of intense colour — green, red, yellow — consistent with Japanese woodblock influence. The sea behind them is built from horizontal strokes of blue, turquoise, and green. The sand is kept thin and warm beneath the boats' bold forms.