Lane at Alchamps, Arles

Lane at Alchamps, Arles at the Sompo Museum of Art in Tokyo depicts the ancient Roman necropolis of Les Alyscamps on the outskirts of Arles, which had been a celebrated pilgrimage site in medieval times and a fashionable picturesque subject for nineteenth-century painters. Both Van Gogh and Gauguin painted Les Alyscamps during November 1888, treating the same subject from slightly different vantage points as a kind of parallel exercise revealing their divergent approaches. The lane of sarcophagi flanked by trees leading to the Romanesque church of Saint-Honorat offered a subject laden with funerary atmosphere that both artists deflected toward purely formal concerns.

Gauguin's version of Les Alyscamps is characteristically flatter and more color-schematic than Van Gogh's — the autumnal foliage treated as areas of warm orange and red bounded by firm contours rather than as agitated marks. The recession of the tree-lined lane is handled with tonal gradation rather than linear perspective.