This work transports us from the centrality of the city and its rhythms to the suburbs, its outer edges and roads. In the foreground, three people are unloading coal on the bank of the Rhone. Their dark bodies fuse with the blackness of the ore and the shapes backlit by the setting sun. A choreography of harsh, strenuous labour in a silent atmosphere of solemn ordinariness framed by the last ripples of light on the river. In the distance, the impassive city has been reduced to stony blocks with no personality whatsoever. Here, as in our own cities, many production industries and essential jobs were carried out on the edge of town, in the suburbs.

The artist’s interest in depicting the working classes, renewed during his sojourn in Arles, recalls the early Dutch works where Van Gogh portrayed peasants, potato harvesters, weavers and miners. His Potato Eaters series, to which this lithograph belongs, aimed to dignify manual and physical labour, as he explained in a letter: “I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labor, and how they have honestly earned their food.”

At Arles, Van Gogh was drawn to existence on the periphery, in the transitional spaces between city and non-city. The artist turned his eye to the suburbs and away from the imposing city filled with Roman ruins or medieval monuments. He painted outdoors and hiked along the banks and canals of the Rhone, seeking paths and bridges where life unfolded far from the urban centre. His sketches and drawings captured those outskirts.

One of the places that fascinated the artist was the vicinity of the Langlois Bridge. This drawbridge over a navigable canal near the city was named after one of the men who had guarded it for years. In those days, it was a place of both transit and meeting. Van Gogh visited often and painted it frequently during the summer of 1888. In the mornings, washerwomen would gather on the banks of the canal to wash and dry their laundry, and in the afternoon people liked to stroll there. We can imagine the artist drawing with his reed pen and ink or painting with watercolours, trying various positions around the bridge at different times of day. In 1974, the writer Georges Perec also systematically observed the Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris for three days, with the aim of recording and portraying “what happens when nothing seems to happen”.

On his long walks in search of life outside the urban centre, Van Gogh painted the wetlands of the Camargue, the ghostly Montmajour Abbey rising above the plain of La Crau, and the vast fields around Arles, where he depicted wheat farmers and harvesters hard at work.