Two Lovers (Fragment)

This is only a piece of a larger painting. Van Gogh made it in Arles in 1888, the year he rented the yellow house and waited for Gauguin to join him, dreaming of a whole workshop of painters in the south. In his letters he described a canvas of a garden with a pair of lovers walking through it. At some point most of that picture was lost or cut down, and what survives is this lower strip: the two figures walking close together, and the flowering ground beneath them, the greens and reds set straight from the tube side by side.