Landscape near Arles

Landscape near Arles (1888) at the Indianapolis Museum of Art was painted during the two months Gauguin spent at the Yellow House with Van Gogh — a period that produced some of the most important canvases of both artists' careers and ended in one of the most dramatic breakdowns in the history of art. The Arles landscape, with its flat Crau plain, Alpilles mountains in the distance, and the specific quality of Provençal light, provided both artists with abundant subject matter, and their different approaches to the same landscape reveal everything about their opposed temperaments. Gauguin's treatment was characteristically more detached and analytical than Van Gogh's intensely empathetic engagement with the same terrain: where Van Gogh felt the landscape, Gauguin organized it. The Indianapolis Museum of Art, with its strong collection of European painting and its particular commitment to Post-Impressionism, holds this canvas as one of the most important documents of the Yellow House period available in the American Midwest.

The Arles landscape is organized into horizontal bands of earth, vegetation, and sky handled with broad, flat areas of color rather than broken Impressionist strokes. Gauguin's interest is in the color relationships — ochre earth, deep green vegetation, blue sky — rather than in atmospheric nuance or surface texture.