The Yellow House

The Yellow House is an oil painting from 1888 in which Vincent van Gogh depicts the building in Arles where he had rented a studio on Place Lamartine. He moved in during 1888 hoping to settle in a home he could feel was his own. He used two large rooms on the ground floor as a workshop and kitchen, and two smaller ones upstairs overlooking the square. He hoped to share the house with his brother Theo and with other artists, and in October 1888 Paul Gauguin moved into the guest room, where he stayed for about nine weeks.

The picture shows the yellow façade with green shutters, partly shaded by a tree, under an intense blue sky. Van Gogh sets the warm yellow of the walls against the blue and even paints the ground yellow, so that sunlight seems to fill the whole scene. On the left stands a pink building that housed the restaurant where he ate every day. At the far end the street runs toward the railway bridges, and a train passes over them, a small sign of the modern life beginning to reach the town. The windows carry meaning too: the upstairs window with its shutters open belonged to Gauguin's room, and the next one, with shutters almost closed, to Van Gogh's own bedroom, which he later painted in The Bedroom in Arles.

At first the artist called the work The House and Its Surroundings, and later The Street, a nod to a series of drawings of Paris streets recently published in a newspaper. The painting stayed within the artist's family estate until it passed to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation, which lends it on permanent loan to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The house itself was damaged in an air raid during the Second World War and later demolished, so the painting now stands as the main record of a building that no longer exists.

Painter

Vincent van Gogh

Date

1888

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

72 × 92 cm

Museum

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Genre

landscape painting, cityscape

Depicts

tree, multi-story urban building, house, sky, street, train

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