Three White Cottages in Saintes-Maries

At the end of May 1888 van Gogh took the stagecoach from Arles down to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a small fishing village on the Mediterranean, and saw the southern sea for the first time. He stayed only about five days, from 30 May to 3 June, sketching the low whitewashed cottages of the fishermen and the boats drawn up on the beach. Back in Arles he worked two of those drawings into paintings, and this is one of them. The Kunsthaus in Zürich treats the small canvas as a turning point in his work, the first time he drives the complementary colours all the way to their extreme: blue against orange, red against green, white against black.