Langlois Bridge at Arles

Van Gogh had come south to Arles in February 1888, and among the first things that caught him was this little drawbridge over a canal outside town, worked by counterweights and known locally by its keeper's name, Langlois. It pleased him partly because it looked like home. The lifting bridges of Provence reminded him of the canals of his native Holland, and he painted the motif several times that spring. In this version, made in May, a woman holds an umbrella as she crosses behind a horse and cart, the water below catching a clean southern blue. To get the angles right he used a perspective frame he had built years earlier in The Hague, a wooden grid he sighted the scene through. The original bridge is long gone, bombed in the Second World War and later rebuilt, and the reconstruction downstream now carries his name.