Flowering Garden with Path

Only three years separate this from the dim brown peasant studies Van Gogh had painted in Holland, but he might as well have changed planets. He reached Arles, in the south of France, early in 1888, and the light and colour there stunned him. He painted this flowering garden that July and wrote to his brother Theo about the blue sky, and how the orange and yellow and red of the flowers took on an amazing brilliance in the clear southern air, something he found happier and more full of love than anything up north. The whole surface pulses, greens and reds and purples set side by side, the path pulling your eye straight back through the beds.