The Yellow House, Vincent van Gogh, 1888
Vincent van Gogh, portraitVincent van GoghDutch, 1853–1890

The Yellow House

1888 · Painting · 72 × 91.5 cm

Can I see it?

Unknown

Where is “The Yellow House” now? Collection: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Unknown.

Van Gogh Museum

Amsterdam, Netherlands

The owner is known; whether it is on view today is not.

In this state since
Source
The museum

About the painting

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

The house was the right wing of 2 Place Lamartine, Arles, France, 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 nearest 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 shutters nearly closed, is Van Gogh's bedroom. The two small rooms at the rear were rented by Van Gogh at a later time.

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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 of the Yellow House, the Avenue Montmajour runs down to the two railway bridges. 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).

In the left foreground 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.

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

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Details

Accession number
s0032V1962

In the catalog

Sources

  • Wikidata
  • Image: Van Gogh Museum — Vincent van Gogh · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

In the life of Vincent van Gogh

The whole life
  1. February 1886

    Moves to Paris to join his brother Theo

    Van Gogh left Antwerp to join his brother Theo, an art dealer, in Paris. So began a very fruitful and eventful Paris period: he painted some two hundred and thirty pictures there, more than anywhere else.

  2. February 1888

    To Arles, dreaming of a “Studio of the South”

    The public still neither accepted nor bought his paintings, and in February 1888 Van Gogh left for Arles in the south of France to found a “Studio of the South”, a brotherhood of like-minded artists in which he gave Gauguin the leading role. Theo backed the plan with money.

  3. 23 October 1888

    Gauguin arrives in Arles

    After much pleading Gauguin arrived in Arles, and in November the two painted together: Gauguin portrayed Van Gogh in “The Painter of Sunflowers”, and their first joint outing was to the Alyscamps. At Gauguin's suggestion Vincent painted from memory, producing “Memory of the Garden at Etten”.

  4. 23 December 1888

    The severed ear

    After an altercation on the evening of 23 December, Van Gogh, seemingly hearing voices, severed his left ear, wholly or in part, with a razor and delivered it, wrapped in paper, to a woman at a brothel. Next morning a policeman found him unconscious; in hospital he was diagnosed with “acute mania with generalised delirium”.

  5. May 1889

    Voluntarily into the Saint-Paul asylum

    Van Gogh left Arles and voluntarily entered the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum, a former monastery in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, accompanied by the Protestant clergyman Frédéric Salles. Of his two cells with barred windows one became a studio, and the clinic and its garden became the main subjects of his paintings.

  6. 29 July 1890

    Died

All works

From the collection of Van Gogh Museum

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