Description
Rows of low, dark green shrubs march across the foreground in tight, repeated strokes of ink and green wash, separated by pale sandy paths that curve gently back toward a cluster of buildings on the horizon. At the centre of that distant group stands a round stone tower without sails, its walls washed in soft ochre and left largely undefined by colour, sketched more than painted, sitting among houses with orange tile roofs and a scatter of tall, dark cypress trees.
Above the whole scene, a wide sky takes up almost half the sheet, built from loose washes of blue interrupted by soft white clouds, giving the drawing an open, breezy feel that contrasts with the dense, busy rows of vegetation below. Van Gogh made this sheet while working in the south of France, drawing the countryside in pen and watercolour as a fast, direct way of recording a motif before or instead of committing it to oil, letting the reed pen carry most of the descriptive work while colour fills in loosely behind it.
What sets the sheet apart from his oil landscapes of the same region is its speed and transparency: individual pen strokes for each shrub remain fully visible, colour washes sit unevenly within their pen outlines, and large areas of the paper, especially around the buildings, are left bare, letting the drawing breathe in a way a fully worked canvas does not. The old windmill tower, stripped of its sails and reduced to a simple cylindrical form, becomes almost incidental to the rhythm of the vine rows in front of it.
That openness and the visible hand of the reed pen give the sheet an immediacy well suited to a wall where a busier oil painting might feel heavy, its pale ground and light wash of colour keeping it airy rather than saturated, a quieter, more linear counterpart to his better known landscapes.
