The Yellow House

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The Yellow House: Vincent van Gogh

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Vincent van Gogh Oil Painting - The Yellow House

Keywords: Yellow, House

Work Overview: Artist Vincent van Gogh
Year 1888
Catalogue F 464 / H 1589
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 76 cm × 94 cm (28.3 in × 36 in)
Location Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

The Yellow House (Dutch: Het gele huis), alternatively named The Street (Dutch: De straat),[1][2] is an 1888 oil painting by the 19th-century Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh.

This title refers to the right wing of the 2 Place Lamartine, Arles, France, the house where, on May 1, 1888, Van Gogh rented four rooms. He occupied two large ones on the ground floor to serve as an atelier (workshop) and kitchen, and on the first floor, two smaller ones facing Place Lamartine. The window on the first floor near the corner with both shutters open is that of Van Gogh's guest room, where Paul Gauguin lived for nine weeks from late October 1888. Behind the next window, with one shutter closed, is Van Gogh's bedroom. The two small rooms at the rear were rented by Van Gogh at a later time.

Van Gogh 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 also Van Gogh's landlady, and who 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.[3] 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 (Paris Lyon Méditerranée)[4] 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 gaslight installed in his atelier.[5]

The building was severely damaged in a bombing raid by the Allies on June 25, 1944,[6] and was later demolished.

The painting was executed in September 1888, at which time Van Gogh sent a sketch of the composition to his brother Theo:.[7][8]

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 yellow 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.

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),[9] paying homage to a suite of sketches showing streets in Paris, by Jean-François Raffaëlli, and recently published in Le Figaro.

This painting never left the artist's estate. Since 1962, it has been in the possession of the Vincent van Gogh Foundation, established by Vincent Willem van Gogh, the artist's nephew, and on permanent loan to the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

The Yellow House itself no longer exists. It was severely damaged in bombing-raids during the Second World War, and later demolished. The place without the house looks almost the same. A placard on the scene commemorates its former existence.

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The “yellow house” is the one that Van Gogh was to share with Gauguin – but as it turned out, his dream of a studio in the south shared by like-minded painters lasted only two months.

When he first got to Arles in February, he lived in rooms above a restaurant, but that didn’t suit his vision of what his “studio of the south” would be. He moved to a second location because he thought he was being over-charged in the first one (went to court and won a refund), but kept looking for a more permanent home.

Then in May, he rented the house. He wrote to Theo, triumphantly, “Well today I rented the right wing of this building (a sketch is enclosed) which is made up of four rooms or rather two with two closets. It is painted yellow outside, inside the walls are white lime-washed, facing the sunshine. I got it for a rent of 15 francs a month.”

But to give you an idea of his life at the time, in the same letter he wrote, “I wouldn’t be afraid of anything unless it was this bloody health. And yet I’m better than in Paris, and if my stomach has become terribly weak that’s a problem I picked up there, probably due mainly to the bad wine, of which I drank too much. Here the wine is just as bad, but I only drink very little of it. And so the fact is that as I hardly eat and hardly drink I’m very weak, but my blood is improving instead of being ruined. So once again, it’s patience I need in the circumstances, and perseverance.”

Van Gogh then went about furnishing it. He visited the used furniture dealers and haggled for beds, chairs, a table, mirrors and everything his household studio would need – all paid for by his brother Theo. You can see the result in his series of bedroom paintings. He even did “portraits” of two of the chairs he bought – one was specifically his chair, the other, Gauguin’s.

Having furnished the studio, he created paintings specifically to decorate it for Gauguin’s arrival.

Vincent thought strategically of what paintings he wanted in his studio to show Gauguin. He chose a theme – sunflowers – and set about painting them.

He wrote to Theo, “Now that I hope to live with Gauguin in a studio of our own, I want to make decorations for the studio. Nothing but big flowers. Next door to your shop, in the restaurant, you know there is a lovely decoration of flowers; I always remember the big sunflowers in the window there.

If I carry out this idea there will be a dozen panels. So the whole thing will be a symphony in blue and yellow. I am working at it every morning from sunrise on, for the flowers fade so soon, and the thing is to do the whole in one rush.”

During the summer he’d painted harvest scenes of wheat fields, he’d been down to the Mediterranean and painted fishing boats and he’d painted many portraits, both of the people around him and some self-portraits. In all, in the course of about a year in Arles he produced approximately 300 paintings and drawings.

In Vincent’s mind, the money that Theo sent him every month, was in exchange for his paintings. As far as he was concerned, it was a “business enterprise”. He thought about it that way because he couldn’t bear to think of it as being charity. So, to uphold his end of the enterprise he sent the paintings. He would take the paintings off their stretchers and roll them up together, with 10 to 20 paintings in a roll. He would either just ship them by post, or on occasion, if a friend was going to Paris, have the friend take them along.

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On 1 May 1889, Vincent rented part of a yellow stucco-faced building on Place Lamartine at a rate of 15 francs a month. He used it as a studio at first, and on 1 September he began living there too. He called the building the Yellow House and planned to lavishly decorate its interior with paintings.

Vincent wanted to turn the house into a “studio of the south” where artists could live and work together. He needed company and a sounding board, and living with others was more economical besides. Using money from his brother Theo, he had new furniture made – two beds, chairs and a table – and got the house connected to the gas supply so he could work by artificial light in the evenings and in winter. He created a number of works for the purpose of decorating the house; they included four sunflower paintings, The Public Garden with a couple strolling, The Tarascon Stagecoach, The Night Café, The Yellow House (“The Street”), Starry Night over the Rhône and The Trinquetaille bridge. 

The ground floor of the Yellow House contained a simple studio and a kitchen. Upstairs were two more rooms: Vincent’s bedroom and one for the artists he intended to host at the “studio of the south”.

Vincent invited Paul Gauguin, whom he had befriended in Paris, for a visit, and Gauguin arrived on 23 October. Though they lived and worked together in harmony at first, their respective personalities and divergent ideas about art soon strained the relationship. On 23 December, tensions ran so high that in a fit of madness Vincent cut off part of his ear and gave it to a prostitute. Gauguin went back to Paris on 25 December. Vincent was admitted to hospital and discharged in early January. In February, however, he suffered again one breakdown. Meanwhile, the neighbourhood residents were in revolt: they considered Vincent a threat and sought to have him sent to an asylum. Though they did not get their wish, Vincent was sent back to hospital.

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