Les Alyscamps

Van Gogh painted this in the last days of October 1888, and he was not painting alone. Paul Gauguin had arrived in Arles a few weeks earlier to share the little Yellow House with him, and for a short while the two worked side by side, out of the same paintbox of ideas. One of the spots they set up at together was the Alyscamps, an old alley on the edge of town — a Roman burial road whose name is a worn-down version of 'Champs-Élysées,' the Elysian Fields, lined for centuries with stone coffins and, by then, tall poplars going gold. Van Gogh made several views of it in those few days, before the autumn rains drove them both indoors. Gauguin stood at the same place and painted it too. He set up at a different angle, and he left the ancient tombs out of his picture entirely.