The Langlois Bridge at Arles 2

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The Langlois Bridge at Arles 2: Vincent van Gogh

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Vincent van Gogh Oil Painting - The Langlois Bridge at Arles 2

Keywords: Langlois, Bridge, Arles

Work Overview: The Langlois Bridge at Arles
Vincent van Gogh
Date: 1888; Arles, Bouches-du-Rhône, France *
Style: Japonism
Genre: landscape
Media: oil, canvas
Location: Private Collection

Arles
Van Gogh was 35 when he made the Langlois Bridge paintings and drawings. Living in Arles, in southern France, he was at the height of his career, producing some of his best work:[1] sunflowers, fields, farmhouses and people of the Arles, Nîmes and Avignon areas.[2] It was a prolific time for Van Gogh: in less than 15 months[3] he made about 100 drawings, produced more than 200 paintings and wrote more than 200 letters.

The canals, drawbridges, windmills, thatched cottages and expansive fields of the Arles countryside reminded Van Gogh of his life in the Netherlands. Arles brought him the solace and bright sun that he sought for himself and conditions to explore painting with more vivid colors, intense color contrasts and varied brushstrokes. He also returned to the roots of his artistic training from the Netherlands, most notably with the use of a reed pen for his drawings.

Langlois Bridge
The original drawbridge, 1902. It was replaced by a reinforced-concrete bridge in 1930. At Van Gogh's time, it was called Pont de Langlois, Langlois' bridge, after its bridge keeper. The bridge has been relocated and renamed Pont Van-Gogh
The Langlois Bridge was one of the crossings over the Arles to Bouc canal.[6] It was built in the first half of the 19th century to expand the network of canals to the Mediterranean Sea. Locks and bridges were built, too, to manage water and road traffic. Just outside Arles, the first bridge was the officially titled "Pont de Réginel" but better known by the keeper's name as "Pont de Langlois".[7][8] In 1930, the original drawbridge was replaced by a reinforced concrete structure which, in 1944, was blown up by the retreating Germans who destroyed all the other bridges along the canal except for the one at Fos-sur-Mer, a port on the Mediterranean Sea. The Fos Bridge was dismantled in 1959 with a view to relocating it on the site of the Langlois Bridge but as a result of structural difficulties, it was finally reassembled at Montcalde Lock several kilometers away from the original site.[9][10]

According to letters to his brother Theo, Van Gogh began a study of women washing clothes near the Langlois Bridge about mid-March 1888[11] and was working on another painting of the bridge about April 2.[12] This was the first of several versions he painted of the Langlois Bridge that crossed the Arles canal.[8]

Reflecting on Van Gogh's works of the Langlois Bridge Debora Silverman, author of the book Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art comments, "Van Gogh's depictions of the bridge have been considered a quaint exercise in nostalgia mingled with Japonist allusions." Van Gogh approached the making of the paintings and drawings about the bridge in a "serious and sustained manner" with attention to "the structure, function, and component parts of this craft mechanism in the landscape."[13]

Perspective frame
In Arles Van Gogh began using again a perspective frame he had built in The Hague. The device was used for outdoor sightings to compare the proportion of items that were near to those that were in the distance. Some of the works of the Langlois Bridge were made with the aid of the frame. Its use "deepened his exploration of the drawbridge as a mechanism."[14]

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