Arena in Arles

Van Gogh painted this in Arles late in 1888, in the weeks when Paul Gauguin had come to share his yellow house and the two of them were arguing their way through a tense autumn together. Under Gauguin's influence he stopped working straight from life and did this one largely from memory, which is why the great Roman amphitheatre here is almost an afterthought. The bullfight is happening somewhere down below, out of sight, and what fills the canvas instead is the crowd. Look at how the faces dissolve into flat patches of colour, each block ringed with a heavy dark outline. A few of the people are said to be friends and neighbours he painted elsewhere. Within a month of finishing it the two men had fallen out, and Van Gogh had cut off part of his own ear.