Four rented rooms at 2 Place Lamartine — studio, sanctuary, and the stage for the most brilliant and most catastrophic fifteen months of Vincent van Gogh's life.
The Yellow House (The Street) · 1888 · Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Tired of Paris, Van Gogh went south in 1888 chasing the light of Provence. In the small city of Arles he found it — and a house the color of fresh butter.
After a boarding house proved too expensive, Vincent rented four rooms on the right side of a two-story house at 2 Place Lamartine — two rooms per floor, for 15 francs a month. A studio and kitchen below; two bedrooms above, looking onto a small public garden with a pond at its center.
He signed in May 1888 but moved in only that September, once the house had been painted, furnished, and made his own: yellow outside, whitewashed within — bright walls he longed for, to see his canvases in full light.
"I really want to make of it — an artist's house, but not precious… everything from the chair to the painting having character."
— Vincent to Theo, September 1888The plan went far beyond a studio. Vincent dreamed of a "Studio of the South" — an artists' association where younger painters could live and work with a sense of community, funded by donated canvases from Impressionists like Monet and Degas. Theo backed the dream, and one artist answered the invitation: Paul Gauguin, who arrived in October 1888.
The Yellow House wasn't just a subject — it was a commission Vincent gave himself. He set out to fill its rooms with decorations, and produced some of the most famous paintings on Earth. Tap any canvas to view it large.
"I'm thinking of decorating my studio with half a dozen paintings of Sunflowers," he wrote — and painted seven canvases of blooms in a vase to hang in the house, especially in Gauguin's room, as proof of what he could do. He described one as a painting all in yellow: fourteen flowers, yellow vase, yellow ground.
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His own room on the upper floor of the Yellow House, rendered in flat, glowing color — the bed, two chairs, and his pictures on the wall. Painted as an image of rest and calm in the home he had finally made for himself.
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The housemate. Gauguin moved in at the end of October 1888 under a deal brokered by Theo: 250 francs a month for the household, one Gauguin painting to Theo in return. Two months of working side by side — and arguing about what art should be.
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Gauguin's answer: a portrait of Vincent at work on his sunflowers, painted inside the Yellow House. Vincent painted what he saw; Gauguin insisted a true artist paints from memory and imagination. The disagreement would help break the household apart.
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Painted in the Yellow House in January 1889, after the catastrophe of December 23rd — steady, unflinching, back at the easel within weeks. One of the most searching self-portraits ever made.
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The house next door was the Restaurant Vénissac, where he ate every day; the café of his painting The Night Café stood just beyond. Even the heaps of sand along the street in his painting were real — placed there, the Van Gogh Museum found, to absorb the dung of passing horses.
Tap to enlarge +The whole arc of the Yellow House — sanctuary, studio, collapse — fits inside little more than a year.
Vincent rents four rooms at 2 Place Lamartine for 15 francs a month and writes to Theo about his find the same day.
Freshly painted and furnished, the house becomes home. He paints The Yellow House (The Street) and plans his "Studio of the South."
The guest room hung with Sunflowers, the two artists begin a brilliant, combustible cohabitation.
As Gauguin declares he's leaving, Vincent suffers a psychotic episode and severs part of his ear in the house. Gauguin departs days later without visiting him.
After painting again through January — La Berceuse, the bandaged self-portraits — his health fails. He stores his furniture and enters the asylum at Saint-Rémy. He never returns.
The house is gone; the yellow is not.
For Vincent, yellow carried sunlight, hope, warmth, and friendship — and Arles supplied it in blinding quantity. The house of "fresh butter" yellow under a cobalt sky became the emblem of everything he wanted his life there to be.
Evidence indicates he severed the lower part of his left ear with a razor during the crisis of December 23rd — then wrapped it in paper and delivered it to a woman at a nearby brothel before being hospitalized the next morning.
You can stand at Place Lamartine in Arles, but not enter the house: it was wrecked by an Allied bombing raid in 1944 and later demolished. An informational panel now marks the spot where it stood.
"Inside, I can live and breathe, and think and paint."
— Vincent van Gogh, to Willemien, 1888