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The Langlois bridge, named after its keeper, was one of the eleven wooden drawbridges crossing the canal from Arles to Bouc. Designed by Dutch engineers, the bridge must have reminded van Gogh of his native countryside. As he wrote to his brother Theo from Arles, 'Many subjects are exactly like Holland in character, the difference is in the colour. There is that sulphur-yellow everywhere the sun lights.'
Searching for the light of the south, van Gogh moved from Paris to Arles on 20 February 1888.
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Sale 1299, Lot 21 Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)Le pont de Langlois à Arles, 1888 Watercolor, gouache, chalk, pen and ink over pencil on paper Estimate: $6,000,000-8,000,000 
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Of the four oils one is in a private collection, the other three are in prestigious museums in Europe: the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo; the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam; and the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.
The present watercolor, one of only very few van Gogh executed, is closest to the oil in the Kröller-Müller Museum, with the horse-drawn cart framed by the bridge. This image within an image suggests that van Gogh was using a perspectival frame and the complex supports, acting almost like an elaborate frame, further emphasizing this.
The Pont de Langlois images also show van Gogh's fascination for Japanese art, especially woodcuts by Hiroshige and Hokusai, who often depicted drawbridges, combining flat color planes with graphic verticals and diagonals. In fact, so strong was his desire to find the 'Japan of the South' that he wrote in a letter to Gauguin, recalling his train trip from Paris to Arles: 'I peered out to see whether it was like Japan yet.'
The present work has a distinguished provenance: it passed from Mrs. J. van Gogh-Bonger in Amsterdam to the Rothermundt Collection in Dresden, via Hugo Perls of Berlin, to Baron Rudolf von Simolin (1885-1945), in whose family it has remained since the late 1920s.
A keen, knowledgeable collector and a generous patron, von Simolin owned works by Beckmann (15 paintings), Cézanne, Degas, Derain, Renoir, van Gogh, Kokoschka, Liebermann and others. Van Gogh's 'drawbridge' was always considered the 'treasure of the library'.
Le pont de Langlois has only been exhibited once in the last 50 years, at the major van Gogh retrospective at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller in 1990 on the centenary of van Gogh's death.
Having been exhibited so rarely, Le pont de Langlois has remained in excellent condition with vibrant and fresh colours. Van Gogh, whose artistic talent was not recognized during his lifetime, wrote in a letter to his brother Theo about Le pont de Langlois and two other works from the same year: 'So keep these three for your collection and don't sell them, because later they'll be worth 500 apiece.'
Andreas Rumbler, Director, Christie's Impressionist & Modern Art Department, Germany
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