Snowy Landscape with Arles in the Background

Vincent van Gogh left Paris in search of southern light and stepped off the train in Arles on 20 February 1888 into snow. The next day he told his brother Theo that at least 60 centimetres had fallen and it was still coming down, and that the white country under a bright sky looked just like the winter landscapes of the Japanese artists whose prints he collected. The cold hung on. Around 2 March he wrote that there was a hard frost, that snow still lay out in the fields, and that he had a study of a whitened landscape with the town in the background. The editors of his letters identify that study as this canvas. Arles is only a thin band of towers and roofs along the horizon, and the foreground belongs to dry reeds beside a board fence. In the same letter he mentioned two small studies of an almond branch, already in flower despite everything.