Description
A narrow cobbled street runs from the lower edge of the sheet straight back to a gated entrance framed by two brick pillars, above which a large tree spreads a canopy of yellow-green foliage rendered in short, repeated strokes of coloured chalk and ink. From the crossbar between the pillars hangs a red, white and blue flag, and through the gate itself a pale strip of open water or sky is just visible, suggesting the entrance leads to a viewpoint over a harbour or coastline beyond.
On the left, a row of houses runs alongside the street, their fronts sketched in quick pen outline with touches of colour at doors and window boxes, one door picked out in red, flowers in a box beneath a window in orange and pink. Two small figures animate the empty street: a child in a pale dress and hat walks alone near the houses, while further along, close to the gate, a woman in a yellow skirt stands near a fence, her pose relaxed rather than posed for the drawing. Van Gogh worked in this combined technique of pen, chalk and watercolour early in his career, using it to record townscapes with more graphic clarity than his later oil brushwork would allow, letting the coloured washes fill in loosely between firmly drawn architectural lines.
What distinguishes this sheet from his later, more famous street scenes is exactly that hybrid method: the picture reads first as a drawing, with colour used sparingly to pick out a flag, a door, a patch of foliage, rather than as a fully painted surface, giving it a lighter, more immediate feel than an oil canvas of the same subject would have.
That graphic quality, strong pen lines carrying the composition with colour used almost like accents, makes the sheet read cleanly even at a distance, while the small human incident, a child and a woman going about an ordinary afternoon, gives it a warmth that a purely architectural drawing would lack.
