Willows at Sunset

Van Gogh painted this at Arles, in the south of France, in 1888, the year his colour opened up completely. It is small, done on cardboard rather than canvas, and clearly fast: a row of pollarded willows, their trunks cut back to stumps, throwing spiky bare branches up against an enormous orange sun, which they seem to bar like a grille. In these same weeks at Arles he was working toward a larger picture of a sower walking a field at sundown, and this study looks like him fixing that low, blazing light before he built the bigger scene.