Die Hafenarbeiter in Arles

At the start of August 1888 Van Gogh watched a big boat being unloaded on the Rhone at Arles and wrote to his brother Theo about the strange effect of it, men in dirty blue and white carrying coal ashore against pale, clouded water. He made three paintings from the sight. This one shows it at sunset, a huge disc of sun over the river and the workers as dark, hurrying shapes on the gangplanks. He painted it not on the quay but from memory, back in his studio in the Yellow House on the Place Lamartine, in long thick strokes and hard contrasts of orange and blue he took partly from the Japanese prints he collected. The reflection of the sun runs down the water in one broad band of yellow almost to the bottom edge.