You can see that same weeping ash (to the right) in the Poet’s Garden, his pastoral painting from a year earlier that also depicted the public garden in Arles across from the Yellow House. The semicircle of trees and shrubs around the painting’s intimate and welcoming center looks like a family gathered around its living room. They seem to beckon us to join them in this happy place. That wasn’t accidental; Van Gogh painted it for the room he hoped his friend, the painter Paul Gauguin (the poet of the title), would occupy in the Yellow House. Throbbing with the hum of life, this garden is as inviting as his bedroom.

And so we come full circle, to the bedroom, the yin of The Poet’s Garden’s yang, one an interior, the other a landscape, yet two sides of the same coin. For him, a space devoid of people, whether bedroom or garden, acknowledges our existence through our absence. Though he liked his solitude, Vincent was no recluse. He loved people, was open and gregarious, and made close and lasting friendships.

In 1889, after he had voluntarily entered the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Van Gogh wrote to his sister that “I haven’t left my room for two months. I don’t know why…. The feeling of loneliness takes hold of me in the fields in such a fearsome way that I hesitate to go out. With time, though, that will change. It’s only in front of the easel while painting that I feel life.” Even in his sorrow he saw, if only fleetingly, a light at the end of the tunnel. Even in his solitude, he drew comfort from his paintings—awash in color, bathed in light, suffused with compassion, presence, and life.