Van Gogh acquired an interest in painting while working for an art dealer, in the Netherlands and in England. He then dedicated himself to a religious career among the poor miners of Belgium, until being sent away for supporting the struggles of the workers. There, he began to paint and produced his first notable work, The Potato Eaters (1885). The following year, in Paris, he began to study impressionist technique and Japanese prints. He then moved to Arles, in the south of France, where he began a series of works with splendid lighting and vibrant colors. In that period, he suffered psychic disturbances and compulsory confinements in asylums, culminating in his suicide in 1890. MASP possesses four works by the artist, painted during his last years in Arles. In A Walk at Twilight, the brushstrokes suggest agitation, excitation, a strange atmosphere in which sky, plants and characters seem to move. The rhythm of the brushstrokes gains power from the strong and saturated colors, which vibrate and grow in luminosity. The sky, which Van Gogh saw from the window of the asylum in Saint-Remy, was described by him, in a letter to his brother, Theo van Gogh (1857–1891), as “a nocturnal sky with a stupefying moon.” For some interpreters of the work, the red-haired man in this romantic walk is the artist himself.
— MASP Curatorial Team, 2015
By Luciano Migliaccio
De la Faille (1938, p. 496) believes the picture A Walk at Twilight was painted in Saint-Rémy, between October and November 1889. Zurcher, Walther, and Metzger have dated it May 1890. Camesasca (1989, p. 198) suggests that Van Gogh may have started it in October 1889, breaking off during one of his crises, only to resume work later, in 1890. The painting is featured in the various editions of De la Faille’s catalogue and in all scientific indexes of Van Gogh’s work. It once belonged to Johanna Gesina Van Gogh Bonger, the widow of the painter’s brother, Theo. Van Gogh adopted cypresses as a subject in June 1889 at the asylum in Saint-Rémy. In July, he suffered another series of attacks that forced him to stop working. By the end of that summer, however, the artist resumed his painting with renewed vigor. At first, he painted mostly the landscape he observed from the window of his improvised studio; later, he depicted the surrounding region. At the same time, Van Gogh started copying works by Millet, Daumier, Delacroix, and Rembrandt, continuing to do so until May 1890. In October 1889, he produced various studies of olive trees that preceded the painting in the Masp Collection. Camesasca (1989, p. 198) suggested that the figures resemble the print series The Four Parts of the Day by J. A. Lavielle – particularly Morning, which Van Gogh copied in January 1890 (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) – and that the male figure might represent the painter himself. Zurcher (1985, n. 258) interpreted A Walk at Twilight as an allegory of happiness and joy of living. In this romantic stroll in the tranquil sunset, feverish excitement is rendered by brushwork in pure colors that seem to set fire to the canvas surface. These brush strokes represent in a concrete manner the clayish earth, the contorted olive trees, the cypresses, the sky animated by the huge quarter moon, and the last rays of the setting sun. At the same time that colors render these elements, they reveal Van Gogh’s mental state on apprehending them. Bright light and nature saturated and shook the painter’s feelings of depression. He thrived on the reality of subjects he rendered, though he knew this reality could obliterate that of his own existence (Leymarie). In June 1890, Van Gogh had a serious attack while strolling in the fields near the mental hospital. Possibly the emotional imbalance discernible in the landscape composition as well as in the poses of the figures is a concrete reflection of the precarious existential status of an artist who trusts this confession to his painting.
— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998
