Thistles

Van Gogh painted this in Arles in August 1888, in the middle of his one great southern summer. He had come to the south of France that winter dreaming of a shared studio, and while he waited for the painter Gauguin to join him he worked at a furious pace in the fields around the town. The dry mistral wind blew so hard he sometimes had to peg his easel to the ground. Here he chose a clump of roadside thistles, a spiny, stubborn weed that thrives in exactly that baked, wind-scoured earth and that almost no one bothers to paint. Gauguin finally arrived that October, and by the end of the year the two men had fallen out badly.