Paesaggio con neve

Van Gogh left Paris in mid-February 1888 chasing the sun, expecting the warm south. He stepped off the train at Arles into a record cold snap and found the fields under snow. This is one of the first things he painted there, made around the 24th of February as the snow was already melting. In a letter to his brother Theo he mentions finishing three pictures in as many days, one of them a landscape in the snow. So this is Provence caught before the color arrived, the flat plain running back to low hills, a man and his dog crossing toward a cluster of buildings. He had been collecting Japanese prints in Paris, with their spare snowy scenes, and you can feel that flatness and calm here. It is the quiet start of the most productive stretch of his life, the year that gave him the sunflowers and the yellow house.