Path Through a Field with Willows

Vincent van Gogh had come south to Arles in February 1888, stepping off the train into unexpected snow, and then Provence did what he had crossed the country hoping it would do. The spring arrived in a rush of blossom and hard clear light, and he worked at a pace that frightened even him, orchards and fields, sometimes a whole canvas in a day. This little picture, made months before the sunflowers and the yellow house, belongs to that first Provençal spring. A path cuts through a field between rows of pollarded willows, those stumpy trees cut back for their branches that he had drawn over and over as a young man in Holland, now carried into the warm colour of the south. At the far end he set a small white house with a red roof, a single bright point to walk your eye toward down the length of the path.