Arlésiennes
Paul Gauguin
PAUL GAUGUIN, 1888. OIL ON CANVAS.
During a brief and tumultuous stay with Vincent Van Gogh in Arles, Gaugin painted seventeen canvases of rural life. Many of them were scenes that had been painted by Van Gogh previously, and it is in the comparison between the two that we can see the true nature of each artist most clearly. Here, Gauguin paints the Yellow House, right across the road from Vincent’s residence, as four women wrapped in shawls walk the path in front. It is a remarkably deliberate work, lacking the loose spontaneity and explicit emotion of Van Gogh’s. Here, every element is considered not for its realism but for its compositional benefit. Gauguin’s only loyalty is to the final image - he warps space and time, as in the bench that curves upwards against the perspective, he changes faces and poses to create aesthetic balance and beauty, and he changes the shape and placement of objects to draw the eye where he pleases, as in the foreground bush and conical ferns here. The work is a masterpiece of charged repression, hiding mystery and emotion beneath its considered, perfect veneer as if Gauguin presents both the interior and exterior lives of his subject all at once.