THE VIRTUAL WINE MUSEUM - LE MUSÉE VIRTUEL DU VIN

RED VINE AT ARLES (LA VIGNE ROUGE)

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)  

1888

Oil on canvas, 75 x 93 cm

Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia

Van Gogh painted two landscapes featuring vines in oils – The Green Vine and The Red Vine – during his period in Arles, where he lived from 20th February 1888, followed by Vines with View of Auvers when he was receiving treatment from Doctor Gachet from late May 1890. Van Gogh also painted a watercolour landscape entitled Old Vineyard and Peasant Woman. The Red Vine is one of the artist’s best-known paintings, and often said to be the only one sold in his lifetime – in February 1890, five months before his suicide. But let’s be more precise: it was “one of few paintings to be sold in his lifetime.” ((Ingo F. Walther).

The call of the South: Van Gogh went to the region in search of light and colour. He produced a harvest scene in late October, near Arles, depicting red vines. This is decidedly odd: although Arles is in a Mediterranean region, a late-October harvest is still terribly late. Usually, the grape harvest takes place before the vines turn red. There is a plethora of grape-pickers – twenty-one! Night has almost fallen. What to make of this harvest scene? Could it have really taken place as Van Gogh depicts it, so late in the year?

Let’s examine the evidence in Van Gogh’s Letters*. In a letter sent to his brother Théo, dated 3rd October, the artist reports having just finished The Green Vine: “Ah! My vine study, I sweated water and blood over it, but it’s done… The vines I’ve painted are green, purple and yellow with violet grapes and black and orange shoots. On the horizon, some blue-grey willows and the press much further away, its red roof and the lilac silhouette of the town in the distance. Amidst the vines, the figures of women with red parasols and other harvest workers with their cart.” The scene is described in great detail. The harvest seems to have got off to a good start, although the pace is slow. All is going to plan. 10th (or 11th) October: “If only you could see the vines! Bunches weighing a whole kilo – the grapes are magnificent this year.” If the start of the summer had been particularly rainy, from September the weather was glorious. The grapes were abundant, and ripe for the picking by early October.
 

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...”