Blue Tree Trunks. Arles

In the autumn of 1888 Gauguin came south to Arles and moved in with Vincent van Gogh, sharing a small house and, for about two months, a studio. The two men argued constantly about how to paint: Van Gogh wanted the motif right in front of him, while Gauguin trusted memory and imagination. This landscape is Gauguin's side of that argument. The trunks running up the canvas are a flat, unnatural blue, without the light and shadow a real grove would show. The figures among them wear the costumes of Breton peasant women, carried in his head from Brittany, where he had been staying only weeks earlier, and set down here in a vineyard near Arles. He finished it shortly before the December night when the two men's experiment collapsed and he left for good.