Memory of the Garden at Etten

Van Gogh painted this in Arles in November 1888, and it is not a place he could see from the window. It is the parsonage garden at Etten, in the Netherlands, where he had lived years before, rebuilt entirely from memory. Gauguin, sharing the house with him that autumn, kept pushing him to paint from imagination instead of from the motif, and here Van Gogh tried it. The two women in front may carry something of his mother and his sister. The space is flattened, the colours laid in broad areas and ringed with dark contours, closer to Gauguin's way of working than to his own. He made it as decoration for his bedroom in the Yellow House, a garden from one life hung on the wall of another.