The Red Vineyard

The Red Vineyard is an oil on canvas that Vincent van Gogh painted in Arles in early November 1888, during the months when he worked intensely in the south of France. The scene shows a vineyard in reddish and ochre tones beneath a sky of strong colours, with workers gathering grapes and a wheelbarrow and a carriage crossing the field. In the background a house and a river can be made out, and the sun seems barely suggested in the atmosphere.

The most striking feature of the work is its palette. Van Gogh sets strong contrasts between the red of the autumn foliage, the greens and yellows of the ground and the blues of the sky, applying colour in visible brushstrokes and rhythms that run across the surface. This way of building the landscape through the paint itself anticipates the expressive language he would develop in the following years. The human figures are integrated into the countryside, more as part of agricultural labour than as the protagonists.

The painting also has a particular historical interest. According to the sources consulted, it was one of the very few works Van Gogh managed to sell during his lifetime. It was shown in 1890 at the annual exhibition of the Belgian group Les XX in Brussels, and the painter and collector Anna Boch bought it for 400 francs. Her brother Eugène Boch, also a painter and a friend of Van Gogh, had been portrayed by him in Arles that same autumn. The work later passed to the Russian collector Ivan Morozov, and after the Russian Revolution it was nationalised and ended up in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

Its reception reflects the fate of many of Van Gogh's paintings, which found few buyers while he was alive. Today The Red Vineyard is regarded as a testimony to his Arles period and to his search for a colour capable of conveying emotion and energy.

Painter

Vincent van Gogh

Date

1888

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

75 × 93 cm

Museum

Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

Genre

landscape painting

Depicts

landscape, farmer, wheelbarrow, vineyard, carriage, house, river, human

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