Ein Weg bei Arles

Van Gogh painted this quiet tree-lined lane outside Arles in 1888, the year he moved south hoping the Provençal light would remake his work. It did. He wrote to his brother Theo almost daily that summer about the yellows and greens of the fields, and you can see that appetite for colour here in the way the road and the trees are laid down in thick, hurried strokes. The little yellow house at the roadside is the kind of ordinary detail he kept returning to that year, when he was also renting the famous Yellow House in town and dreaming of a studio where painters would live together. The picture later travelled a strange route of its own. Bought for the museum in Szczecin, it was moved inland during the Second World War to escape the bombing of the shipyards, and it has stayed in Greifswald ever since.