Renowned throughout the world, the post-impressionist Vincent van Gogh liked to depict nature at the end of the day at sunset. In his work there are several such landscapes, one of which is the picture “Coal barges”. The yellow-green sky is permeated with diagonal pasthetic smears of red, lilac and orange colors.
On the horizon, you can see a city silhouetted against the backdrop of the setting sun. Only part of the buildings are painted in a glow of a lilac shade. Urban architecture is reflected on the surface of the river. Very colorful artist painted small river waves, which reflect in themselves all the beauty of heavenly color. In the foreground in front of the audience are coal barges on the river bank.
It’s late at night, but despite this people are still working on barges, they unload coal on shore on trolleys. And the barges and workers on them are depicted by a dark silhouette, only on the person standing on the shore is a greenish shirt. People are exhausted from hard work, someone is resting, tuning for hard work, someone is already busy with the job. Van Gogh often depicted ordinary people who are already at the late hour finish their work day. Most likely the artist went out to the riverbank in the evenings to enjoy the evening scenery and watched the activities of these people, which impressed him and inspired him to write this landscape.
Landscape “Coal barges” carries two contradictory moods. On the one hand, this is admiring the beauty of the evening nature, and on the other – sympathy for people engaged in such hard work.
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