The Poet's Garden

The Poet's Garden at the Art Institute of Chicago was painted in October 1888 as part of Van Gogh's four-painting decorative scheme for Paul Gauguin's room in the Yellow House. He had conceived the Poet's Garden series as his most ambitious decorative project: four canvases to hang in Gauguin's room that would create an environment of colour and intellectual atmosphere appropriate for two painters living and working together. He wrote to both Theo and Gauguin about the garden's associations with Petrarch and the medieval troubadours of Provence, whom he imagined had walked in this same ancient garden — a fiction he acknowledged as such while maintaining it as a poetic framework. Gauguin arrived in late October, just as Van Gogh was completing these garden canvases, and the two months of their cohabitation that followed were among the most intellectually charged and personally catastrophic in the history of Post-Impressionism.

The blue bench and the dark cypress punctuating the background are compositional anchors in an otherwise lush and loosely handled garden. The foliage is built from swirling strokes of green and gold. The spatial organisation is deliberate and decorative, consistent with the series' intended function as room decoration.