View of a Butcher's Shop

Van Gogh reached Arles on 20 February 1888 hoping for southern light and found the town under snow. He took a room at the Hotel Restaurant Carrel in the rue Amedee Pichot, and this is what was in front of him from inside it: the street, the snow with sun on it, and the shopfront opposite. The name on the facade reads Reboul, charcutier, a pork butcher, and sausages hang in the display window to the right. The frame of the window he was looking through is still there in the picture. He painted it on a piece of canvas laid down on cardboard, about 40 centimetres tall, and it is among the first things he made in Arles, weeks before the weather let him work outdoors.