Rocks

Van Gogh's rock studies at Montmajour, painted during his first months in Arles in the summer of 1888, represent his engagement with the Provençal geology that struck him as entirely unlike the flat, damp Netherlands of his youth. The limestone outcrops of the Alpilles — bleached, fractured, baking in the sun — gave him a subject that was simultaneously abstract and deeply material. He was also reading Zola's 'Le Rêve' and Tartarin de Tarascon at the time, and the landscape of Provence was acquiring for him a literary as well as visual resonance. The rocks provided a challenge in representing form without the vegetation and figures that typically anchored his compositions.

The pale limestone surfaces are built from short, varied strokes of white, ochre, and cool grey, conveying the fractured, sun-bleached quality of the rock. Shadows fall in blue-violet. The almost abstract arrangement of planar surfaces anticipates Cézanne's treatment of rock formations at Bibémus.