Ponte de Langlois em Arles, França (Langlois Bridge at Arles) - Vincent van Gogh

Ponte de Langlois em Arles, França (Langlois Bridge at Arles) - Vincent van Gogh
Arles - França
Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Colônia, Alemanha
OST - 49x64 - 1888

The Langlois Bridge at Arles is the subject of four oil paintings, one watercolor and four drawings by Vincent van Gogh. The works, made in 1888 when Van Gogh lived in Arles, in southern France, represent a melding of formal and creative aspects. Van Gogh leverages a perspective frame that he built and used in The Hague to create precise lines and angles when portraying perspective.

Van Gogh was influenced by Japanese woodcut prints, as evidenced by his simplified use of color to create a harmonious and unified image. Contrasting colors, such as blue and yellow, were used to bring a vibrancy to the works. He painted with an impasto, or thickly applied paint, using color to depict the reflection of light. The subject matter, a drawbridge on a canal, reminded him of his homeland in the Netherlands. He asked his brother Theo to frame and send one of the paintings to an art dealer in the Netherlands. The reconstructed Langlois Bridge is now named Pont Van-Gogh.

Van Gogh was 35 when he made the Langlois Bridge paintings and drawings. Living in Arles, in southern France, he was at the height of his career, producing some of his best work: sunflowers, fields, farmhouses and people of the Arles, Nîmes and Avignon areas. It was a prolific time for Van Gogh: in less than 15 months he made about 100 drawings, produced more than 200 paintings and wrote more than 200 letters.

The canals, drawbridges, windmills, thatched cottages and expansive fields of the Arles countryside reminded Van Gogh of his life in the Netherlands. Arles brought him the solace and bright sun that he sought for himself and conditions to explore painting with more vivid colors, intense color contrasts and varied brushstrokes. He also returned to the roots of his artistic training from the Netherlands, most notably with the use of a reed pen for his drawings.

The Langlois Bridge was one of the crossings over the Arles to Bouc canal. It was built in the first half of the 19th century to expand the network of canals to the Mediterranean Sea. Locks and bridges were built, too, to manage water and road traffic. Just outside Arles, the first bridge was the officially titled "Pont de Réginel" but better known by the keeper's name as "Pont de Langlois". In 1930, the original drawbridge was replaced by a reinforced concrete structure which, in 1944, was blown up by the retreating Germans who destroyed all the other bridges along the canal except for the one at Fos-sur-Mer, a port on the Mediterranean Sea. The Fos Bridge was dismantled in 1959 with a view to relocating it on the site of the Langlois Bridge but as a result of structural difficulties, it was finally reassembled at Montcalde Lock several kilometers away from the original site.

According to letters to his brother Theo, Van Gogh began a study of women washing clothes near the Langlois Bridge about mid-March 1888 and was working on another painting of the bridge about April 2. This was the first of several versions he painted of the Langlois Bridge that crossed the Arles canal.

Reflecting on Van Gogh's works of the Langlois Bridge Debora Silverman, author of the book Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art comments, "Van Gogh's depictions of the bridge have been considered a quaint exercise in nostalgia mingled with Japonist allusions." Van Gogh approached the making of the paintings and drawings about the bridge in a "serious and sustained manner" with attention to "the structure, function, and component parts of this craft mechanism in the landscape."

In Arles Van Gogh began using again a perspective frame he had built in The Hague. The device was used for outdoor sightings to compare the proportion of items that were near to those that were in the distance. Some of the works of the Langlois Bridge were made with the aid of the frame. Its use "deepened his exploration of the drawbridge as a mechanism.”

The Langlois Bridge reminded Van Gogh of Hiroshige's print Sudden Shower on the Great Bridge. Inspired by the Japanese wood block prints, Van Gogh sought to integrate techniques from Japanese artwork into his own. In a letter to Émile Bernard about the Langlois Bridge, he wrote: "If the Japanese are not making any progress in their own country, still it cannot be doubted that their art is being continued in France." With a Japanese aesthetic, Van Gogh's Langlois Bridge paintings reflect a simplified use of color to create a harmonious and unified image. Outlines were used to suggest movement. He used fewer shades of colors, preferring multiple subtle color variations. The Langlois Bridge reminded Van Gogh of Hiroshige's Sudden Shower on the Great Bridge inspiring him to use blocks of colors, like patterns of yellow against a blue sky, colors chosen to create a sense of vitality of the Japanese prints and the vibrant quality of light in southern France. These approaches created a more powerful impact and depicted the simpler, primitive quality of the country lifestyle.