Van Gogh arrived in Arles on 20 February 1888 to find the city and the surrounding countryside covered with a thick blanket of snow. The unusually cold weather did not turn milder until 9 March. The eight canvases Van Gogh painted in those first few weeks were largely done indoors, since the icy mistral made it impossible to work outside. In his letters Van Gogh does not mention making any drawings in this first period. The earliest reference occurs in a letter of 9 April, in which he tells Theo that he has made two watercolours after paintings (see cat. 326). That he had begun to draw before this time is evidenced by Landscape with path and pollard willows, which bears an inscription: ‘Arles Mars 88’. This makes the sheet one of the first drawings from the Arles period and the only one that Van Gogh dated there, perhaps because it was in fact the first drawing he made in the South.

There is another sheet whose subject suggests a March date: Figures in a field (cat. 324). These two works probably originated some time between 9 March – when milder weather set in and the snow melted – and 24 March, after which time Van Gogh became completely absorbed in painting orchards in blossom. Nevertheless, the possibility that he made these drawings in the last week of March cannot be ruled out.

Van Gogh drew Landscape with path and pollard willows from a position to the east of Arles, looking south, where the view is obstructed by the higher-lying Crau plateau. The building to the left of the path is a cabanon, used to store tools and harvested crops. The upper storey contained a bedroom where the peasants, who often lived quite some distance from the land they tilled, could spend the night. Such structures were seen all over Provence, and were usually flanked by a cypress, as is the case in this drawing. Hidden behind the trees to the right of the path, which in the middle distance turns left to the cabanon, is a building with a pitched roof and exposed timbers in the façade. Behind the pollard willows and running alongside the path, which is partly overgrown with grass, Van Gogh used horizontal lines to draw a ditch lined by trees that are largely obscured from view. Towering above the pollard willows is a tall, thin elm, a tree found frequently beside ditches, just like the willows and ash trees seen here in the right background. To the left of the path is a vineyard, at the very back of which a woman works. Behind her, on the horizon, stand a few tall trees (probably poplars), three cypresses and a farmhouse.

Without the cypress and the cabanon the landscape would look very Dutch. Van Gogh himself pointed out the similarities (and differences) between the Dutch and southern French landscapes: ‘Many motifs here are – in character – absolutely the same as in Holland; the difference lies in the colour’. Pollarded trees, in particular, occur regularly in the work Van Gogh made in Holland. The composition of this drawing strongly recalls that of a watercolour he made in The Hague fig. 323a.

Landscape with path and pollard willows was drawn in pencil and pen and brown ink. Here Van Gogh used the pencil, as he did in his Dutch period, as a fully fledged material at every stage in the drawing. In addition to a preliminary sketch in pencil, heavy pencil lines run over the ink lines in the truncated trees, small strokes suggest the shady side of the cypress, and stumped graphite is clearly visible in the path. Van Gogh initially applied the ink with two pens, using a fine pen for the branches of the trees, the hatching on the horizon, the details of the cabanon and the posts alongside the path, and a somewhat thicker pen for the foreground and the trunks of the pollard willows. This much of the drawing had been completed and the inscription added when Van Gogh took up a reed pen and dark brown ink to apply dots, mainly to the right of the path. The dots may well have been an afterthought, for it was April before he began to explore in earnest the possibilities of the reed pen. However, because Van Gogh used a reed pen in the other drawing made in March, it is quite possible that he applied these dots in the same session.

The smooth wove paper on which the landscape is drawn comes from a sketchbook that Van Gogh brought with him from Paris. Three sides display original, straight, cut edges, whereas the right side – the one that was stitched into the sketchbook – is not completely straight. Van Gogh cut the paper out himself before starting to draw, since the ink lines extend to the right edge but are not cut off by it. The top of the sheet bears traces of brown pigments from the sketchbook’s coloured-edged pages. The drawings from Van Gogh’s first months in Arles include a group made on paper from the same sketchbook.

To lay in the composition and to ensure correct proportion, Van Gogh made use of a perspective frame. Laying it on the sheet, he traced the frame itself, as well as its vertical, horizontal and intersecting diagonal threads. In the present drawing, this working method is evidenced by the transition from horizontal to diagonal lines at the lower right, drawn in one flowing pencil line fig. 323b. If Van Gogh had reproduced the perspective frame without laying it on the paper, it would have been logical for him to draw the frame first and then the perspective guidelines. Notably, all the drawings made with this perspective frame display diagonal lines that end not exactly in but just next to the inside corners of the frame. This could be due to the fact that Van Gogh stuck the threads into the mitred joints at the outer edge of the frame. A thread joining diagonally the outer corners of a rectangular frame does not run precisely through the middle of the inner corners, but just next to them.

Traces of two horizontal and two vertical lines which together form the inside of the frame, as well as two diagonals and a vertical line (13.1 cm from the right inner edge of the frame) intersecting in the middle, are still vaguely visible fig. 323b. The vertical pencil line running along the right side of the paper, one centimetre from the edge, might have been traced along the outside of the frame, which would indicate that the right slat was 3.3 centimetres wide.