アルルの公共庭園の入口

Van Gogh painted this in the autumn of 1888 in Arles, in the south of France, where he had rented the little Yellow House and was working almost faster than he could stretch canvas. Just across the square lay the public garden, and he went at it again and again, the gravel paths, the dark cypress and pine, a few solitary strollers who never quite meet. He was decorating the house for a guest. He had talked Paul Gauguin into coming to live and paint alongside him, and he wanted the walls covered with his best work before Gauguin arrived that October. The two men lasted about nine weeks together before the friendship broke down and Van Gogh, in crisis, cut off part of his own ear.