Vincent: February 20, 1888
Vincent has come to Arles. He is living at the Hôtel Restaurant Carrel on rue de la Cavalerie, in view of the old Roman arena. The town, he says, is full of happy people – it’s as “formidably cheerful as Holland is sad” – but he complains that the citizens are lazy and irresponsible too.
The compensation is in the landscape, on windless, cloudless days, when the air itself is alive with biting colour, its vibration the only movement in vast vistas of serenity. He is wasting no time, the canvases filling with fever. All of it has to be painted, everything he sees.
Let us pray the mistral wind, when it comes, is not too severe. It carries madness in its arms.
A satellite image of France showing the relative positions of Paris and nearby Auvers-sur-Oise and, far to the south, Arles.
Van Gogh was in Arles from February 1888 to May 1890, though a full year of that time was spent at the asylum of St Paul-de-Mausolée in Saint-Rémy de Provence, 15 miles to the northeast. He lived in Auvers from the end of May 1890 until his death two months later. The photo shows Vincent when he was just 19. By the time he moved to Arles he was nearly 35 years old.
