Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Le pont de Trinquetaille’ to be sold at Christie’s

Van Gogh’s ‘Le pont de Trinquetaille’ at Christie’s Christie’s presents Vincent van Gogh’s spectacular landscape ‘Le pont de Trinquetaille’ as a highlight of the 20th Century Evening Sale at Christie’s New York on 13 May 2021 ($25,000,000-35,000,000)

April 24, 2021, source: Christie’s

Painted during Van Gogh’s pivotal fifteen-month stay in Arles, situated on the Rhône River in the Provence region of Southern France, “Le pont de Trinquetaille” with its electric color palette and expressive brushwork is emblematic of the artist’s mature period.

Inspired by the intense Provençal light while living amidst the rural French landscape, Van Gogh’s work underwent a radical transformation as he produced one modern masterpiece after another. Painted in the summer of 1888, Le pont de Trinquetaille dates from this extraordinary period of creativity. Depicting the Rhône from Arles, it encapsulates the experimentation of this seminal period. As with the greatest of Van Gogh’s Arles landscapes, color takes on a force of its own within this radically constructed composition.

This period marks not only a central turning point in the artist’s life, but in modern art as a whole. Van Gogh’s groundbreaking use of autonomous color in his subjective vision of nature and the landscape would come to alter the course of painting throughout the following century, influencing artists from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Pablo Picasso to Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon.