“Garden in Arles”
Here is a Van Gogh piece with colorful flowers to help brighten your day.
“Garden in Arles” is an oil on canvas painting by the Dutch artist, Vincent van Gogh, from July 1888. This painting is a dramatic transformation from the darker interior paintings van Gogh made during the beginning of his career. After moving to Paris, he found great inspiration from the artists around him. First the impressionists lightened his palette, then the neo-impressionists turned his mind to color theory.
Van Gogh has said of pointillism, “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”
Here, van Gogh paints a vibrant landscape filled with color. Dots and dashes of yellows, blues, greens, reds, and oranges cover the canvas. Cypress trees stand in the background, flanked against a building with stone walls. A pathway brings the viewers gaze to the left. All of this stands against a soft sky of light green.
In this piece, the influence of the pointillism style is highly evident. In 1887, Van Gogh befriended Paul Signac and the two spent time together painting along the Seine River and discussing art. Van Gogh was inspired by the color theories emerging with the pointillism movement and adopted some of the techniques to use in his own art. Mainly, placing swaths of colors next to each other, which up close looks abstract, but when viewed at a distance, takes form.
Van Gogh painted this during his stay in Arles. He was trying to start an artists’ colony and was painting at a feverish rate in an attempt to inspire artists who to join him. Paul Gauguin would join him just months later. Paul Signac visited van Gogh in Arles the following year, in March 1889. Van Gogh wrote in a letter to Signac in April 1889, a month before admitting himself into the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France:
“I remain greatly obliged to you for your friendly and beneficial visit, which contributed considerably to raising of my spirits. At present I am well, and I work at the sanatorium and its surroundings. From there I have just returned with two studies of orchards.”
“Garden with Flowers” is part of the collections of the Kunstmuseum den Haag in the Netherlands. It is on long-term loan from the Cultural Heritage Agency.
For more on Vincent van Gogh, please visit his short biography here.
ou can find more artists to learn about here.
