This paper applies methods of Van der Put and Van derPut-Saito to the fourth Painlev\'e equation. One obtains a Riemann--Hilbert correspondence between moduli spaces of rank two connections on $\mathbb{ P}^1$ and moduli spaces for the monodromy data. The moduli spaces for these connections are identified with Okamoto--Painlev\'e varieties and the Painlev\'e property follows. For an explicit computation of the full group of B\"acklund transformations, rank three connections on $\mathbb{ P}^1$ are introduced, inspired by the symmetric form for ${ \rm PIV}$ as was studied by M. Noumi and Y. Yamada.
Categories: math.AG