Landschaft bei Arles

In October 1888 Gauguin arrived in Arles, in the south of France, to share a house and a studio with Vincent van Gogh, who had been urging him for months to come. This was the first canvas Gauguin painted there, worked on a piece of linen van Gogh had stretched for him. The two men painted side by side for about two months, arguing constantly about how it ought to be done. You can feel the pull of both arguments here. The sharp, sour colours sit close to van Gogh, while the way the haystack and the farm buildings lock into firm geometric blocks comes from Gauguin's admiration for Cezanne. The stay ended that December in the crisis in which van Gogh cut off part of his own ear, and Gauguin left for Paris.