Vincent van Gogh, 'Snowy Landscape with Arles in the Background', 1888

After almost two years of living with his brother Theo in the bustling bohemian district of Montmartre, Van Gogh decided to move to Arles in the south of France during the winter of 1887. Life in Paris had exhausted him, and he wished to escape the cold winter conditions of the city. Already in late October 1887 he wrote to his sister Willemien: ‘It’s my plan to go to the south for a while, as soon as I can, where there’s even more colour and even more sun’. It was Van Gogh’s dream to establish a new artist’s colony in southern France, where those he called his Parisian ‘pals’ could experience the unique landscape of Provence, together shaping the future of modern art. Van Gogh finally made the move to Arles in February 1888. However, to his surprise, he wasn’t greeted by warm sunshine but by thick layers of white snow. Shortly after his arrival he wrote to Theo of the vast snowfall: ‘[…] at least 60 centimetres all over, and it’s still snowing.’ Despite the freezing temperatures, Van Gogh was determined to go out and paint. In early March, when the snow had finally begun to thaw, the artist painted two landscapes which he described in his subsequent letters to Theo. The first, Landscape with Snow, is now in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, the latter is likely the present picture.

While working on his landscape, Van Gogh probably set up his easel several kilometres outside of Arles, overlooking the white fields south of the village. The artist followed traditional 17th-century Dutch landscape painting, by emphasizing the darker greens and browns of the vegetation in the foreground. The sky, however, he minimised to a small strip of blue at the top of his composition, which contrasts with the large expanses of blue sky often found in Dutch landscapes. The town of Arles is visible only as a strip of lilac silhouettes, with several taller buildings overlooking the houses of the village. The proportions of the spires seem exceptionally large; an almost impossible size given the distance of the artist to the village. Van Gogh would paint numerous landscapes with Arles in the background during his 15-month stay, continuing to familiarise himself with this new motif.

Besides the influence of 17th-century Dutch landscape painting, Van Gogh took much inspiration from his extensive collection of Japanese prints – especially when it came to the landscape paintings and drawings of his Arles period. Upon his arrival, the snowy countryside reminded him of the Japanese winters in his print collection, characterised by the white peak of mount Fuji: ‘And the landscape under the snow with the white peaks against a sky as bright as the snow was just like the winter landscapes the Japanese did’. The stark contrast of bright colours against the snowy white, is a technique he had copied from his Japanese prints, in which planes of achromatic whites contrast with bright shades of blues, greens and reds. The clear segmentation of his horizontal composition is another aspect he copied from his prints, as Japanese landscapes often feature clearly defined fore, middle and backgrounds. Van Gogh employed a similar compositional division in his Snowy Landscape with Arles in the Background, outlining the vegetation in the foreground, the snowy fields in the middle and the strip of lilac Arles in the background.