Canal avec des femmes qui lavent

Van Gogh had come south to Arles early in 1888, chasing a light he could not find in grey Paris, and by that first summer he was painting almost faster than he could prepare canvases. This is a canal on the edge of town, the Roubine du Roi, where local women knelt at the water's edge to do their washing. He painted it in June, when the Provencal sun flattened the fields into strong, dry blocks of color. It was the season he began dreaming of a studio of the South, a house where painters would live and work together in that light. The washerwomen are small, bent figures, almost lost against the bright bank and the hot blue water.