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1. Turner traveled through Macon in Burgundy during the grape harvest in 1802. This impressive painting supposedly depicts the festival which accompanied the harvest, but is in fact a view of the Thames from Richmond Hill in Surrey.

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15.  Van Gogh painted two landscapes featuring vines in oils – The Green Vineyard and Red Vineyards – during his period in Arles, where he lived from February 1888. Van Gogh went South in search of light and colour. On 3rd October, in one of his many letters to him, he told his brother Theo that he had finished the painting: “I have an extraordinary fever for work these days, at present I’m grappling with a landscape with blue sky above an immense green, purple, yellow vine with black and orange shoots. Little figures of ladies with red sunshades, little figures of grape-pickers with their cart further liven it up.” The scene is described in minute detail. The harvest seems to have got off to a good start, although the pace is slow.

16-17. The other vineyard painting, Red Vineyards at Arles, Montmajour, is one of Van Gogh’s best-known works [click here to see the work in context and find out more >>]. Gauguin joined Van Gogh in the South at the end of October. In another letter to Theo, dated 3rd November, Van Gogh recounts a walk to Montmajour and Trébon, several kilometers from Arles and not far from the Fontevielle windmill, which he had taken with Gauguin the weekend before, the 28th October, at sunset: “We saw a red vineyard, completely red like red wine. In the distance it became yellow, and then a green sky with a sun, fields violet and sparkling yellow here and there after the rain in which the setting sun was reflected." The result of this colorful walk? In his letters, Van Gogh is Gauguin’s record-keeper. On the 3rd November, he relates: “At the moment he’s working on some women in a vineyard, entirely from memory, but if he doesn’t spoil it or leave it there unfinished it will be very fine and very strange”. On the 10th November, he announces that “Gauguin has finished his canvas of the women picking grapes”. If Gauguin’s memory of the vineyard’s colours was spot-on, other details are less exact: the women in his painting are wearing headdresses from Brittany! Sardonically, Van Gogh adds: “I haven’t seen the Breton things...” Gauguin describes the painting to Emile Bernard: “The red vines form a triangle. To the right, a Breton woman, from Pouldu, in black. Two women bending over, in blue dresses and black corsages. In the foreground, a little peasant girl with red hair and a green skirt. Thick lines full of colour, the knife laid very thick on the rough canvas. It’s an effect I took from the vines in Arles. I put Bretons in the picture. Not very accurate, but who cares?”

By comparing Van Gogh’s Red Vineyards to Gauguin’s Grape Harvest at Arles (Human Anguish), we can see significant differences in approach and attitude. Gauguin doesn’t give two hoots for reality, explaining that “it’s an effect I took from the vines in Arles… not accurate, but who cares?” His aim is to communicate a lived experience, something he achieves by rearranging the image to juxtapose the Breton figures and the southern vines, transfiguring the landscape. In reality, the harvest in Province had taken place long before the execution of the painting, on the 20th September. There would have been no one in the bare vineyard at the time of painting. The two artists worked from memory and if they were accurate in their representation of the bright reds and yellows of the autumnal vine leaves (typical of the vineyards in late October, after the harvest) they let their imaginations run wild for the rest. These compositions clearly show that some painters tell a story of wine - their own - rather than recounting its history.