VINCENT VAN GOGH paintings

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The town of Arles is on the Rhone, and that busy waterway appears in a number of Van Gogh's works. He painted the quayside with stevedores at work as well as more panoramic views of the river as it sweeps its way through the town. But in such works there is something stylized and remote about his treatment, as if it was difficult to come to terms with this aspect of Arles. There is a quality of ambivalence reminiscent of Monet's evasive treatment of signs of modern labour and industry on the banks of the Seine near Argenteuil. The painting is curious. The barges and their workmen are solidly and attentively painted; but the setting is minimal and unfinished. Nothing indicates exactly where this is all taking place. A small stretch of quayside suddenly gives way to a sketchy river bank, a beach even. Beside the barges a man in a rowing boat is fishing, but his relation in space and scale to the barges is not clear. Van Gogh sent the painting to his friend and fellow artist Emile Bernard.
A dedication was painted on the canvas which has since been erased. In the accompanying letter Van Gogh admitted that the painting was only an attempt at a picture. But he stressed that although it was painted directly from the motif it was not in the least 'impressionist'. Perhaps he was intending to take on the older Impressionists like Claude Monet on their own territory - using their subject-matter - and to transform it by a more solid handling and a greater solidity of form. But apart from the foreground this has hardly been accomplished.
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The Sea at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer

The Sea at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (F415) depicts three boats floating on a calm sea with special attention to light and color. A fisherman is visible guiding the boat in the painting’s foreground. The painting’s high horizon places emphasis on the vast sea, with varying shades of blue and green standing out against the boats. Compared to the other dramatic seascape Van Gogh painted at Saintes-Maries, this one is calm and quaint, with nonthreatening waves rendered in blue and green. Horizontal lines close to the horizon represent calm seas, while swirling lines and whitecaps in the foreground suggest turbulence and nod to one of Van Gogh's favorite Japanese works, The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
The different shades of color Van Gogh used to depict the sea capture light’s interactions with water. He wrote that the "Mediterranean Sea is a mackerel color: in other words, changeable – you do not always know whether it is green or purple, you do not always know if it is blue, as the next moment the ever-changing sheen has assumed a pink or a gray tint." To contrast with the color of the water, Van Gogh signed his name in large red letters.
The scene is painted with thick impasto, emphasizing the tumultuous waves and uneven sea. To achieve this effect, Van Gogh squeezed paint directly onto the canvas and created texture using his palette knife rather than a traditional brush. This is most visible in the crest of the waves crashing in the painting's foreground. Unlike Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, which was painted in a studio, this work was likely created on the beach en plein air, as is indicated by grains of sand that have been found embedded in the paint.
Weeks after completing the painting, Van Gogh referred to boats in the ocean as a metaphor in a letter to his brother, Theo. Van Gogh wrote that artists like himself were "sailing on the high seas in our small and wretched boats, isolated on the great waves of time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saintes-M ... _series%29
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