Garden Behind a House

Van Gogh's Garden Behind a House at the Kunsthaus Zürich is among his most intimate and domestic Arles subjects — a private garden rather than the public parks that occupied much of his garden painting during the summer of 1888. The enclosed private garden had a specific character different from the public poet's garden: it was a cultivated, personal space defined by the particular choices and neglects of its owners, its specific plantings and arrangements a form of individual expression. He was renting the Yellow House at this period and had his own small garden space alongside it, and the attention he brought to this garden behind a house reflects both his interest in domestic life as a subject and his ongoing engagement with the specific character of Mediterranean garden plants. The Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland's largest art museum, holds several significant Van Gogh works as part of its comprehensive collection of European modernism. The garden painting is characteristic of Van Gogh's ability to find rich material in modest, everyday subjects: the enclosed domestic garden as complete a world as the panoramic wheat fields, requiring the same quality of sustained attention to reveal its visual richness.

The garden space is rendered with Van Gogh's mature Arles technique — vivid color, energetic brushwork, the garden's specific plantings distinguished through varied color and stroke. The enclosing house wall provides architectural definition at one edge. His palette captures the warm abundance of a summer garden in the south.