The Road Menders

Van Gogh painted this street in the winter of 1889, while he was a patient at the asylum at Saint-Remy, in the south of France, where he had committed himself after the breakdown in Arles. On one of his supervised walks into the village he came on workmen tearing up the pavement of a road lined with enormous plane trees, their trunks mottled and bare in the cold. He described the scene to his brother Theo in a letter that December. He made two paintings of it. The first he did outdoors, quickly, on a scrap of cloth because he had run out of canvas. This second one he worked up indoors, the trees twisting up the picture in his heavy, ropey strokes.