蓟

Van Gogh painted this in Arles in August 1888, in the middle of his one great southern summer. He had come to the south of France that winter dreaming of a shared studio, and while he waited for the painter Gauguin to join him he worked at a furious pace in the fields around the town. The dry mistral wind blew so hard he sometimes had to peg his easel to the ground. Here he chose a clump of roadside thistles, a spiny, stubborn weed that thrives in exactly that baked, wind-scoured earth and that almost no one bothers to paint. Gauguin finally arrived that October, and by the end of the year the two men had fallen out badly.