The Langlois bridge

Van Gogh stepped off the train at Arles in February 1888, leaving behind two grinding years in Paris and hoping the south would give him stronger colour and cheaper living. Just outside the town he found this little wooden drawbridge over a canal, and it caught him partly because it looked so out of place. It was one of several such bridges along the waterway, built decades earlier to a Dutch design, and its plain hoisting frame would have looked like home to a man raised in the Netherlands. He worked the motif again and again that spring, in oil, in watercolour and in reed pen, timing his visits so a washerwoman or a passing cart might animate the bank. He set it all under the hard, clear light he had come south to find, the canal a flat band of blue beneath it.