Yellow House (Arles)
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| The Yellow House |
| Vincent van Gogh, 1888 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 72 × 91.5 cm |
| Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam |
- For other uses, see the disambiguation page Yellow House.
The Yellow House is the title generally given to an oil painting by the 19th-century Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh.
This title refers to the right wing of the building next to the spectator. 2 Place Lamartine, Arles, France, was the house where, on May 1, 1888, Van Gogh rented four rooms, two large ones on the ground floor to serve as atelier and kitchen and, on the first floor, two smaller ones facing Place Lamartine. The window at first floor near the corner with both shutters open is that of Van Gogh's guest room, where Paul Gauguin lived for nine weeks, starting in late October of that year. The next window with one shutter closed hides Van Gogh's Bedroom. The two small rooms at the rear were rented by Van Gogh at a later time.
The left wing housed a grocery (French: Comestibles, inscribed on the signbord over the marque).
The building suffered various rebuildings, before it was severely damaged in a bombing raid by the Allies on June 25, 1944 [1] and afterwards completely erased.
Van Gogh himself indicated that the restaurant where he used to have his meals was in the building painted pink close to the left edge of the painting (28 Place Lamartine). It was run by Widow Venissac, who was Van Gogh's landlady as well, and who also owned several of the other buildings depicted.
To the right side of the Yellow House, the Avenue Montmajour runs down to the two railway bridges. The first line, with a train just passing, served the local connection to Lunel, which is on the opposite (that is, right) bank of river Rhône. The other line was owned by the P.-L.-M. Railway Company: it connected Paris and Lyon to Marseille.[2]
In the foreground to the left, there is an indication of the corner of the pedestrian walk, which surrounded one of the public gardens on Place Lamartine. The ditch running up Avenue Montmajour from the left towards the bridges served the gas pipe, which allowed Van Gogh a little later to have gas light installed in his atelier.[3]
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[edit] The painting
The painting was executed in September 1888, at which time Van Gogh sent a sketch of the composition to his brother Theo:
- Also a sketch of a 30 square canvas representing the house and its setting under a sulphur sun under a pure cobalt sky. The theme is a hard one! But that is exactly why I want to conquer it. Because it is fantastic, these yellow houses in the sun and also the incomparable freshness of the blue. All the ground is yellow too. I will soon send you a better drawing of it than this sketch out of my head.
- The house on the left is pink with green shutters. It's the one that is shaded by a tree. This is the restaurant where I go to dine every day. My friend the factor is at the end of the street on the left, between the two bridges of the railroad. The night café that I painted is not in the picture, it is on the left of the restaurant.
- Milliet finds this horrible, but I don't need to tell you that when he says he doesn't understand that one can have fun doing a common grocer's shop and the stiff and proper houses without any grace, but I remember that Zola did a certain boulevard in the beginning of L'assommoir, and Flaubert a corner of the embankment of the Villette in the dog days in the beginning of Bouvard and Pécuchet which are not to be sneezed at.[4]
Initially, Van Gogh titled the painting as The House and its environment (French: La Maison et son entourage). Later he opted for a more meaningful title and called it The Street (French: La Rue),[5] paying homage to a suite of sketches showing streets in Paris, by Jean-François Raffaëlli, and recently published in Le Figaro.[6]
[edit] The letter sketches and the watercolour
[edit] Resources
[edit] Pedigree
[edit] Notes
- ^ A photographic document of the damaged house survived (Van Gogh Museum, Archief M. E. Tralbaut), annotated by the author "La Maison de Van Gogh après le Bombardement du 25 Juin 1944" and stamped "Photo E. Barral"; it is reproduced in Wilkie, In Search of Van Gogh, page 92
- ^ The Railway Bridge, another painting by Van Gogh, supplies a view from this bridge back to Place Lamartine.
- ^ Letters B22 and 556
- ^ Letter 543
- ^ Letter 543, Letter B18
- ^ La Rue, par Jean-François Raffaëlli, Le Figaro, supplément litteraire, Paris, March 3, 1888
[edit] References
| Vincent van Gogh |
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 Groups and series of works: The Décoration for the Yellow House | The Roulin Family | Display at Les XX, 1890 | Auvers size 30 canvases | Auvers Double-squares and Squares |
