Landscape from Arles

Painted at Arles in 1888 during Gauguin's tumultuous stay with Van Gogh, this work reflects the intense period of artistic exchange and personal conflict that ended in Van Gogh's self-mutilation and their permanent separation. Gauguin abandoned a successful Parisian stockbroker career to pursue art, ultimately leaving Western civilization altogether in search of what he called 'primitive' authenticity, first in Brittany and then in Tahiti. His rejection of academic naturalism in favor of symbolic color and simplified form was foundational to Symbolism, Fauvism, and Expressionism. He saw painting as capable of conveying spiritual and emotional truths inaccessible to descriptive realism.

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.