Seascape near Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer

In late May or early June 1888 Van Gogh, newly settled in Arles, made a short trip south to the coast, to a small fishing village called Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. It was his first real look at the Mediterranean, and the colour astonished him. In a letter he wrote that the sea kept changing, that you could not tell if it was green or violet or blue from one moment to the next. He painted this on the beach itself, working fast in the wind, laying the waves on thick with a palette knife as much as a brush. Conservators later found grains of sand dried into the paint, blown onto the wet surface as he worked. He signed it in red, low in the foreground, a small hot note against all that shifting sea-green.