Seascape at Saintes-Maries (Fishing Boats at Sea)

Vincent van Gogh

Contemporary-Art.org
Keywords: SeascapeSaintesMariesFishingBoatsSea

Work Overview

Seascape at Saintes-Maries (Fishing Boats at Sea)
1888
Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia


Saintes-Maries is the subject of a series of paintings that Vincent van Gogh made in 1888. When Van Gogh lived in Arles, he took a trip to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer on the Mediterranean sea, where he made several paintings of the seascape and town.


In June 1888 Van Gogh took a 30-mile stagecoach trip from Arles to the sea-side fishing village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer on the coast of the Mediterranean sea. Van Gogh's week-long trip was taken to recover from his health problems and make some seaside paintings and drawings. At that time Saintes-Maries was a small fishing village with under a hundred homes.


In just a few days he made two paintings of the sea, one of the village and nine drawings. One of the paintings was Van Gogh Museum's Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (F413), which he described to his brother, Theo: "I made the drawing of the boats when I left very early in the morning, and I am now working on a painting based on it, a size 30 canvas with more sea and sky on the right. It was before the boats hastened out; I had watched them every morning, but as they leave very early I didn't have time to paint them."[2] Some of the work on the painting was finished in the studio, such as capturing the light in the sand, sea and sky.