About this work
*Human Miseries (Grape Harvest in Arles)* is an 1888 oil on jute sackcloth, measuring 73.5 × 92 cm, now held at the Ordrupgaard collection in Copenhagen. The painting's most commanding presence is its foreground figure: a woman hunched over, silent and inward, her hands cupped beneath her chin in an attitude of total withdrawal. Gauguin described her to his friend Schuffenecker as "a poor disconsolate being... It is a woman. Her two hands under her chin she thinks of few things, but feels the consolation of the earth (nothing but the earth) which the sun spreads with its red triangle." Behind her, the vineyard fills the canvas in broad, flattened planes of russet, orange-red, and warm gold — the Arles harvest season condensed into something closer to symbol than scene. Gauguin painted women in costumes from Brittany — where he had just been staying — but set them in a vineyard in Arles, while the main figure in the foreground resembles a Peruvian mummy he had seen in Paris. The horizon is pressed high and the pictorial space refuses to open outward; the pictorial idiom is Symbolistic and introverted, closing off the horizon and moving down into the heaviness — both literal and spiritual — that is the characteristic of the woman in the foreground.
*Human Miseries* was executed in the first half of November 1888, while Gauguin was staying with Van Gogh in Arles.
Gauguin was in Arles from October 21 to December 26, 1888 — a fraught stay and failed attempt to establish an artists' collective.
The two painters looked for motifs in the surrounding area, and Gauguin was especially interested in combining the impressions this made on him with the remembered images within himself. That deliberate synthesis — observed landscape fused with recalled imagery from entirely different places — is exactly what makes this work so pivotal. The composite motifs are a step on his journey of exploration away from a naturalistically painted record of the surrounding world towards a Synthetist picture which combines several impressions. Van Gogh, watching Gauguin at work, noted in a letter that he was "painting women in the vineyard — entirely from memory," adding that if he did not spoil or leave the piece unfinished, "it will turn out beautiful and original."
As wall art, this print commands rooms where stillness is welcome — a study, a reading corner, a hallway where you slow down. Its warm, earthen palette of deep reds and amber reads richly in candlelight and holds
