The Red Vineyard
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · November 1888
A huge yellow sun is sinking over a vineyard near Arles, and the vines below it have turned the colour of blood. Women in bonnets bend among the rows gathering the last grapes, a man drives a cart along the road, and a stream of light runs like molten metal through the foreground. Van Gogh saw this scene on a walk with Paul Gauguin at the beginning of November 1888, and painted it from memory in the studio of the Yellow House a few days later. It is one of the very few paintings he made entirely from imagination rather than in front of the subject.
The colour is pushed to its limits. Look at the sky, a solid wall of yellow and orange, and the way the red of the vines is set against the green blue of the women's clothes and the violet of the distant town. Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo that he had painted a red vineyard, all red like red wine, turning yellow in the distance, with a green sky after rain and a purple ground. The brushwork is in short thick strokes that follow the rows of vines, and the surface is as heavy as a ploughed field.
This is the painting usually described as the only one Van Gogh sold in his lifetime. It was bought in 1890 by the Belgian painter Anna Boch for four hundred francs at an exhibition in Brussels, a few months before his death. Ivan Morozov bought it from a Paris dealer in 1909, and it came to the Pushkin Museum after his collection was nationalised. Whether it was truly the only sale is debated, but its legend is part of why crowds stand in front of it.
Did You Know? Anna Boch, who bought the painting, was the sister of Eugène Boch, the poet friend whom Van Gogh painted against a starry sky.
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