Vincent: May 7, 1888
Vincent has rented four rooms along one side of the big yellow house on Place Lamartine at 15 francs a month. He’d had a falling-out with the landlord at the Carrel, who was charging five francs a week for just his one room. Vincent was so incensed that he took the matter to an arbitrator, and ended up paying one franc a week less!
Meanwhile he’s moved into Joseph Ginoux’s Café de la Gare just along the way and is waiting for the yellow house to be furnished, though he can begin using it as a studio. This is where he wants to open his “Studio of the South”, an artists’ co-operative that will explore new ways of doing things, what he calls, none too modestly, the “art of the future”.
He signed the lease on May 1 for two large rooms on the ground floor and two smaller ones above, facing Place Lamartine. The other half of the building houses a grocery, and just across from it is the restaurant that his landlady, the widow Venissac, operates, where Vincent takes his meals.
He’s started a series of paintings with which to decorate his future home, mostly sunflowers, and has made a large picture of the house itself, which he calls “La Maison et son entourage”, but he’s thinking of retitling it “La Rue” after Raffaëlli’s new paintings of the streets in Paris.
You can see Vincent’s main street along the right of the picture, Avenue Montmajour, which leads to the railway bridges, one going across the river to Lunel, the other linking Paris and Lyon to Marseille. On the left in the painting, shaded by a tree, is the restaurant, and just beyond that, not visible, is the night café, which Vincent is also painting. He’s sent a sketch of “La Maison” to his brother Théo and proudly pointed out how everything is transformed by the “sulphur sun under a pure cobalt sky”.
He’s done quite a few sketches out at Montmajour in the foothills, where there’s an ancient abbey with a crumbling graveyard. Some of the work will decorate his new home, of course.
Van Gogh’s Arles on the Rhone as seem on Google Earth, looking southeast. The Roman arena can be seen between the Yellow House and the Hôtel Dieu. Vincent’s residence on Place Lamartine, known as the Yellow House, no longer exists. The hospital called Hôtel Dieu in his time is today l’Espace Van Gogh and open to visitors. The Nécropole des Alyscamps has remnants of the old cemetery where he and Gauguin used to paint.
Pont Van Gogh on the Canal d’Arles has become the common name for the Pont du Langlois, a wooden drawbridge Van Gogh painted several times. The original span, like the Yellow House, was destroyed during World War II but another, much like it, has been erected further outside of town in Vincent’s memory, as seen in the satellite image above and the photograph below.
