Kai mit Männern, die Sandkähne entladen

In August 1888 Van Gogh was in Arles, in the south of France, in the most productive stretch of his life. He described this one in a letter: boats seen from above from the quay, two of them a purplish pink, the water very green, no sky, a small tricolor flag on a mast, a workman unloading sand with a wheelbarrow. He looked down on the scene from a height and cropped it like a print, a way of composing he had picked up from the Japanese woodcuts he collected. That autumn he gave the study to his friend, the painter Emile Bernard, telling him to keep it or trade it back. Bernard kept it, and showed it in 1892 in a memorial exhibition, two years after Van Gogh's death.