This is one of four canvases in the Hermitage which date from the last two years of van Gogh's tragically short life. The work was created in November 1888, when van Gogh was living at Arles with Gauguin. Provence provoked memories of his home town in Holland. The bitterness of his unrealized dream to create a brotherhood of painters, the Southern Workshop, coloured his memories of the past in a range of anxious yellow, green and blue with flashes of red. The texture of the surface, made of paint laid thickly or squeezed directly onto the canvas, reveals the tension within the artist.