A painting Vincent van Gogh made in October 1888, during the feverish Arles period that also produced his sunflowers and his bedroom canvases, has been donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The work — Tarascon Stagecoach — is the centrepiece of a 63-work gift from the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, split among three American museums. The Art Newspaper

The painting depicts a horse-drawn coach standing in the yard of the Auberge de la Poste, an inn on the boulevard that ran along Arles's old ramparts. Van Gogh was reading Alphonse Daudet's satirical novel Tartarin de Tarascon (1872) at the time, a book that includes a chapter where an aged stagecoach recounts its hard life in the first person. On 13 October 1888 he sketched the composition in a letter to his brother Theo, capturing the scene in quick pen lines before committing it to canvas. The Art Newspaper

LACMA unveiled the painting earlier in 2026. It is not the only arrival from the Pearlman Foundation: the museum is also receiving Édouard Manet's Young Woman in a Round Hat, which becomes the first Manet painting in LACMA's collection. NBC Los Angeles The remaining works are divided between the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Brooklyn Museum. The Art Newspaper

The Pearlman Foundation's gift was first announced in August 2025, when The Art Newspaper reported the three-way split and identified Tarascon Stagecoach as a promised gift to LACMA. By the end of that year, the same publication had described it as the most important Van Gogh acquisition announced in 2025. The Art Newspaper

For anyone wanting to see the painting, it will be on the move. After its current display at LACMA, Tarascon Stagecoach travels to the Brooklyn Museum for the exhibition Cézanne to Modigliani: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection, running 2 October 2026 to 18 April 2027. From there, it heads to MoMA later in 2027, together with the rest of the Pearlman works. The Art Newspaper; Brooklyn Museum

Henry Pearlman, who died in 1974, built his collection around Post-Impressionist and modern masters, with a particular depth in Paul Cézanne's watercolours. The foundation named for him and his wife Rose has now chosen to disperse that holding across the United States rather than keep it together — three museums, three cities, one van Gogh at the heart of the gift.