Avenue of Plane Trees near Arles Station

Van Gogh stepped off the train at Arles on the 20th of February 1888, hoping for the light of the south, and found the town under snow. This road of plane trees near the station belongs to those first cold weeks. The trees are still bare, and a few small figures are at work along the roadside. He had come to paint orchards in blossom and fields of sun, and here he is instead recording a grey, leafless avenue a short walk from where he had arrived. Within a year he would paint plane trees again, wilder ones, from the asylum at Saint-Rémy. The canvas hangs today in Paris, in the Musée Rodin, the former mansion of the sculptor Auguste Rodin.