A Lane Near Arles

One of the many pleasures of Vincent van Gogh's paintings is the way he changes his style of painting at different places in the composition whilst retaining their overall harmony.  Here we have densely stippled foliage, a path defined by broad strokes of yellow and lavender, and a sky in which the zig-zag swirls of blue suggest the movements of a Provençal breeze. As you can see below, there are also blocks of pure colour - the green of the fields, the yellow of the house, the blue (!) of the tree trunks.  But it all works perfectly together. The same can be said of other landscapes from this time, like Farmhouse in Provence with its wonderful lilac wall and turquoise sky.  You imagine van Gogh looking at these landscapes and intuiting the phenomena before him - tree, path, sky - in such a way that the right means of conveying them in paint came almost instinctively.

Vincent van Gogh, A Lane Near Arles, 1888