Arlésiennes (Mistral)

Arlésiennes (Mistral, 1888) at the Art Institute of Chicago was painted during Gauguin's two-month stay at the Yellow House in Arles, where he was attempting to realize Van Gogh's dream of an artist's community in the south of France. The painting of the Arlésiennes — women of Arles in their distinctive traditional costume — in the public gardens was a subject both artists engaged with during this period, and comparing their treatments is among the most instructive exercises available in Post-Impressionist art history. Van Gogh's Arlésiennes versions are charged with emotional intensity and heavily worked surface; Gauguin's is cooler, more synthetic, more deliberately simplified. The jute support — a coarse woven ground that contributed its own texture to the surface — was one of the material experiments he undertook at Arles. The Art Institute's acquisition of this canvas alongside several other major works from the Arles and Brittany periods makes Chicago one of the most important sites for studying Gauguin's development through the late 1880s.

The figures are rendered with Gauguin's characteristic Synthetist economy — outlined forms, flat colour areas, no cast shadows. The jute support creates an unusually rough ground. The overall colour scheme is cooler and more restrained than Van Gogh's Arles palette, reflecting Gauguin's more intellectually controlled approach to colour as symbolic rather than purely expressive.