Description of the picture:
Arles Ladies (Remembering the Garden in Etten) – Vincent Van Gogh. 1888. Oil on canvas. 73×92
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) – representative of the direction of post-impressionism in painting. During his lifetime, he was not recognized, he was actually begging, and today his canvases are the pride of any museum and luck for the auction house.
The second name of the picture presented refers to the village of Etten in Holland, where Van Gogh’s parents lived. Thus, on the canvas appears a Dutch peasant woman caring for flowers, and a cabbage field in the background. The bright color and red shadow on the umbrella are connected with the dazzling light of Provence. The canvas is not written from nature, but by imagination. Everything in it is planar – both figures and landscape. The space does not unfold in depth, it runs parallel to the plane of the canvas in separate zones – this method Van Gogh borrowed from Japanese artists. Inside the “zone” is saturated with rapid tangible strokes that create an internal dynamism of forms.
Arles Ladies – the work is ambiguous, very complex. Despite the bright coloring, the picture causes the viewer an involuntary feeling of anxiety, exacerbated by the sad faces of the walking women. The work was written in the last eight years of the artist’s life, when the world around him brought him only suffering."
