Les Peiroulets Ravine

During his year at the asylum near Saint-Remy, Van Gogh was sometimes let out to paint in the hills of the Alpilles, and he was drawn to a rocky gorge the locals called Les Peiroulets, where a stream ran white and foaming between the boulders. Working there was a physical fight. The mistral, the hard dry wind of Provence, kept knocking his easel over, and he wrote to a friend that he had to wedge its legs down between the stones to keep painting at all. He built the rocks out of short twisting strokes of violet, green and rust. He made more than one view of the gorge in the autumn of 1889, and this one dates to December. Much later, scientists examining it found another abandoned picture, a study of wild plants, hidden under the surface.