Uma Alameda no Jardim Público de Arles

Van Gogh painted this in the middle of September 1888, in the town of Arles in the south of France. Just across from the small yellow house he was renting lay the public garden, and that autumn he was painting it again and again. He had a reason. He was fixing up the house and covering its walls with pictures to welcome another painter, Paul Gauguin, whom he hoped to live and work beside in a little community of artists in the south. Here summer is just tipping into fall, the trees going from green to yellow, people out walking the path. Gauguin arrived that October. By late December the two had quarrelled badly and Van Gogh had cut off part of his own ear.