A Tile Factory

This drawing of a tile factory seen beyond ploughed fields was made from the road leading to the town of Tarascon, around half a mile outside Arles. Making drawings reduced the financial strain on Van Gogh’s brother Theo, who supported him. In a letter from the spring of 1888 the artist wrote, ‘if there comes a month or a fortnight where you feel pressed, let me know, from then on I’ll make drawings, and that will cost us less’. Here, using reed pens of various thicknesses, Van Gogh has rendered the scene with the diversity of mark-making found in his paintings. Long deliberate lines are used to describe the furrows of the field; quick successive strokes where the pen barely leaves the page suggest stubble; and fine lines denote the factory roof. Van Gogh’s careful attention to the factory extends to the fence that horizontally divides the composition, where each individual plank of wood has been meticulously demarcated. Meanwhile, elements in the foreground have been cursorily described and the upper third of the drawing remains relatively untouched. Beneath the graphite, which Van Gogh used first to situate the buildings and the cart and rider before applying the brown ink, is a visible grid that covers the entire sheet. Some of the lines are ruled, while others are hand drawn, but all were drawn with a hard pencil that left indentations on the sheet. This may be evidence of Van Gogh’s use of a perspective frame, a portable wooden frame crossed by wires in a grid formation that could be pinned to posts, aiding with the accurate representation of a scene. Having recently moved to Arles from Paris, Van Gogh was excited about working outdoors. Despite the picturesque surroundings, however, he chose to focus on the modern subject of a factory.