Encampment of Gypsies with Caravans

Van Gogh painted this in Arles in the summer of 1888, the extraordinary months when the southern light seemed to pour straight onto his canvases. He had recently travelled down to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a village on the Camargue coast that drew Roma pilgrims each year, and the horse-drawn caravans he saw there stayed with him. Here a small group of them is pulled up at the roadside, wheels and canvas tops catching the sun, figures and a tethered horse gathered alongside. These wooden wagons were a common sight on French roads at the end of the 19th century. The picture belongs to the same burst of work as his sunflowers and wheat fields, and now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.