Les Alyscamps

Les Alyscamps (1888) at the Musée d'Orsay was painted during Gauguin's Arles stay with Van Gogh — a canvas depicting the ancient Roman necropolis at the edge of Arles, with its famous rows of sarcophagi and medieval chapel tower. Both artists painted at Les Alyscamps; the comparison of their versions is instructive. Van Gogh's Les Alyscamps paintings are saturated with autumnal color and deep emotional investment in the specific place; Gauguin's is more compositionally controlled, the figures of Arlésiennes strolling among the sarcophagi integrated into a formal design rather than a lived experience. The ancient necropolis's combination of Roman antiquity and the specific social life of contemporary Arles — local women walking among the old tombs — provided a subject that combined the historical and the observed in a way that suited Gauguin's interest in the traces of pre-modern culture within contemporary life. The Orsay's possession of this Arles canvas alongside major works from his Breton periods makes Paris the primary location for understanding his 1888 output.

Gauguin applied paint in broad, flat areas of strong color bounded by firm contour lines — a technique he called Synthetism, derived partly from medieval stained glass and Japanese prints. His palette is deliberately non-naturalistic, using vivid magentas, ochres.