Garden at Arles

A sandy path curls up from the bottom of the canvas and disappears into a thicket of blossoms, and almost every inch of the rest is packed with flowers. Van Gogh painted this in Arles, in the south of France, during the summer of 1888, when he was turning out garden and harvest scenes at an astonishing pace. Look at the brushwork and you will find he never repeats himself: the irises at the left are short vertical bars, the grasses at the right are quick slashes, the distant trees are stubby commas, and the dark cypresses rise like exclamation marks against a pale green sky. He built the whole picture out of separate marks rather than blended color, a habit he picked up partly from the Paris painters he had just left behind and partly from the flat, patterned Japanese prints he collected.

Working outdoors here was less romantic than it sounds. The mistral, the fierce wind that sweeps down the Rhône valley, regularly knocked over his easel, and he took to driving stakes into the ground to hold it steady. He also complained to his brother Theo that a garden in full bloom demanded far more patience than an open landscape, since there was simply too much to sort out. That struggle shows in the best way: the middle distance is a happy tangle of blue, yellow and red where no single plant is clearly identifiable. The low white wall and red rooftop at the back are the only signs of human order in the whole scene, and the flowers seem to be winning.