The Lovers: The Poet's Garden IV

Van Gogh painted this in October 1888, in a rush of hope. He was decorating the Yellow House in Arles for a guest he had been begging to come, the painter Paul Gauguin, and he filled the room meant for Gauguin with views of the small public park across the street. He called that park the poet's garden, and the poet he had in mind was Gauguin himself. This version adds a courting couple walking arm in arm past a row of cypresses, the man said to resemble Vincent. The welcome did not last. Their weeks together ended in a bitter quarrel, and the painting had a harder fate still. The Nazis seized it as degenerate art in 1937, and it has not been seen since. What survives of it is an old photograph.