Landscape near Arles

Landscape near Arles (La Meule, environs d'Arles, also called Ferme à Arles) is an oil-on-canvas painting by Paul Gauguin from 1888, now in the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. The upright canvas measures 91.5 by 72.5 cm (36 by 28½ inches).

Gauguin travelled straight from a productive summer at Pont-Aven in Brittany to Arles, arriving at the end of October 1888 to join Vincent van Gogh, who hoped to found an artists' community he called the Studio of the South. The two men worked side by side at the Yellow House for about nine weeks until the stormy partnership broke down in late December. According to the museum, documents and technical analysis show that this was the first picture Gauguin began there. He painted it on a linen canvas that Van Gogh had supplied, and the motif comes from their first outing to the plain of La Crau, one of Van Gogh's favourite places.

The subject is typical of the region: a traditional Provençal farmhouse, or mas, a row of cypresses and a large haystack suited to the harvest season. The rural theme and the sharp, acid colours recall Van Gogh, but the construction owes more to Paul Cézanne, whom Gauguin admired. He reduces the haystack and buildings to clear geometric shapes and binds them together with a regular network of carefully placed brushstrokes, producing an ordered, calm scene quite unlike Van Gogh's quicker handling. The museum's label notes that by this date Gauguin had turned away from Impressionism's reliance on what the eye sees and freely altered shapes and colours to convey his own response.

Ambroise Vollard owned the painting by 1907. It later passed through the Bordeaux collector Gabriel Frizeau, the Munich dealer Justin K. Thannhauser, Baron August von der Heydt in Elberfeld and Captain Ernest Duveen in London, before reaching M. Knoedler & Co. in New York. In February 1944 Mrs Julian Bobbs bought it for the John Herron Art Institute, now the Indianapolis Museum of Art, as a gift in memory of her first husband, William Ray Adams.