The Yellow House (The Street)
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · September 1888
On the right of a sunlit square in Arles stands a two-storey house painted butter yellow with green shutters. Vincent rented four rooms in it in May 1888 and moved in that September, and this is his portrait of the home where he hoped to found a community of artists in the south. The window with the open shutters on the first floor, at the corner, was his bedroom. Beyond the house you see the restaurant where he ate, a railway bridge with a train crossing it, and the deep cobalt sky he loved to set against yellow.
The painting is composed like a stage set, with the road and pavement running in from the lower left and the buildings stacked toward the bridge. Vincent kept the yellow of the house almost pure and made the sky as dark and blue as it would go, so that the two colours fight. Look at the sandy pink of the square, painted in loose horizontal strokes, and at the little figures, a woman in a doorway, two people at a cafe table, which give the scale. The trees on the left are barely more than green scribbles. Everything is bright and simple and slightly too big, the way a house looks when you are happy to be living in it.
Gauguin arrived a month after this was painted and left nine weeks later, after the crisis in which Vincent cut off part of his ear. The house was damaged by bombing in 1944 and later demolished, so the painting is the best record of it. Vincent described the scene to Theo in a letter with a small sketch, saying he wanted to capture the house under a sulphur sun and a pure cobalt sky, a hard subject that he was determined to conquer.
Did You Know? The Yellow House itself no longer exists; it was hit by an Allied bomb in 1944 and the ruin was pulled down.
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