The Poet's Garden

In September 1888 Vincent van Gogh was fixing up the little Yellow House in Arles, in the south of France, and he had a guest coming: the painter Paul Gauguin, whom he badly wanted as a companion and fellow artist. To decorate Gauguin's bedroom, van Gogh painted a series of the public park right across the square from the house, on the Place Lamartine. He called it the poet's garden, imagining the old Italian poets Petrarch and Boccaccio walking there, and this is one of those canvases. The medieval bell tower you can just make out through the trees belongs to the nearby church of Saint-Trophime. Gauguin arrived that October, and within two months their partnership had collapsed into the crisis that ended with van Gogh cutting his ear.