Landscape from Arles

The plain of Arles lies in flat, bright fields of colour — grass, water, trees and roofs separated out as decorative shapes rather than described, the landscape rebuilt according to the painter’s inner vision. Paul Gauguin painted this view in October 1888, the month he arrived at Arles, in the south of France, where Vincent van Gogh was already living and working; the two painters shared the autumn, and the episode ended in the quarrel after which van Gogh cut off part of his ear. Gauguin had been a stockbroker who painted on Sundays before he left Paris for Pont-Aven; by 1888 he was the recognised leader of a group of younger painters there, and the invitation to Arles had been van Gogh’s idea of forming a colony of artists in the south, in a house the colour of fresh butter. The decorative programme Gauguin worked out in these months — outlines drawn round the shapes, colour laid on flat and unmixed, the picture arranged like a design on a wall — was the lesson he carried home from Brittany and took with him to Tahiti, and it is the reason the canvases of this autumn look less like landscape painting than like stained glass. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.