Interpretive Resource

In February 1888, Vincent van Gogh left Paris for Arles, in southern France, hoping that the warm climate would renew his art. Installed in a small residence known as the Yellow House, van Gogh soon began to envision "The Studio of the South," an artists’ cooperative whose presiding genius would be Paul Gauguin, whom he had met the previous November. Gauguin did go to Arles that October—supported by Vincent’s brother Theo, an art dealer—but the high-strung temperaments of both artists made prolonged cohabitation difficult. After nine weeks, van Gogh suffered a breakdown and mutilated his own left ear, prompting Gauguin’s return to Paris.

In anticipation of Gauguin’s arrival in Arles, van Gogh embarked on a number of paintings intended for Gauguin’s bedroom. Four of these works depict the Poet’s Garden, a small, enclosed public park directly in front of the Yellow House. "I have tried to distill in the decoration . . . the immutable character of this country," van Gogh wrote to Gauguin, noting further that he had sought to picture the motif "in such a way that one is put in mind of the old poet from these parts (or rather from Avignon), Petrarch, and of the new poet from these parts—Paul Gauguin."

The view is unprepossessing, but van Gogh infused the park’s unkempt grass and trees with great vitality by means of repetitive brush strokes and thick impasto, especially in the chrome-yellow sky and scraggly foliage. Prominent in this teeming, autumnal tapestry are a compact, round bush and a "weeping" tree (van Gogh’s own characterization); their contrasting forms evoke the psychological tension between resolve and release. At the left, we glimpse the purplish tower of the church of St. Trophime, the only reminder of the bustling town beyond the garden walls.