The Lovers: The Poet's Garden IV

The Poet's Garden series that Van Gogh developed in the autumn of 1888 was conceived as an integral part of his decorative program for the Yellow House — the paintings he intended to line the walls of the room Gauguin would occupy during their hoped-for collaborative stay. He imagined the Arles public garden as a space associated with Petrarch and Boccaccio, connecting the Provençal landscape to the Italian literary Renaissance and investing it with cultural prestige appropriate to a painter's dwelling. The presence of lovers — a couple walking through the garden's allées — transformed the landscape into a theater of human life, the garden as a setting where beauty and desire naturally met. This fourth version of the Poet's Garden subjects demonstrates Van Gogh's ability to sustain a motif through multiple treatments, each version finding a different angle, time of day, or human element within the same basic setting. The series was personal as well as decorative: Van Gogh's letters in this period reveal his longing for company, for the artistic community he believed Gauguin's arrival would inaugurate, and the lovers in the garden may express his hope for the human warmth the Yellow House could provide. Gauguin arrived in late October 1888, and their famous nine-week collaboration ended catastrophically in December.

The garden setting is rendered with Van Gogh's Arles decorative intention — vivid colors, strong patterns of light through foliage. The couple figures are relatively small within the landscape, the garden itself dominant. His palette deploys the warm greens and yellows of the Mediterranean autumn garden against which the figures move as darker silhouettes.