Arles: A Little Town Living in the Long Shadow of a Painter

Vincent Van Gogh died on this day, July 29, in 1890.

The train to Avignon took a little under three and a half hours, but the lay-over there was nearly an hour long. So, although the runtime from from Avignon Centre to my destination was just about sixteen minutes, it was close to five hours since I had left Paris that I got down at Arles. In February 1888, the same journey had taken Vincent van Gogh close to 20 hours. 

So, here I was, in Arles, after dreaming about this trip for years – and how I would have loved to check in at Hotel-Restaurant Carrel, Van Gogh’s first address in town! Or at Café de la Gare, where he took up an upstairs room after he moved out of Carrel over a disagreement on room tariff (and which he later immortalised in his painting Night Café: “…a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime”, as he says in a letter). But sadly, neither of the two places stands today – though you can locate the general area where they stood in Van Gogh’s time. I had to settle instead for a pretty little family-run hotel on nearby Rue des Suisses – a rough-hewn stone house from the early 16th century whose cheerful interiors, very light and airy, happily belie its heavy-set features. The hotel, I was told, has been in business since 1833 – which means Van Gogh (1853-90) would have passed it by often enough as he sauntered down Rues des Suisses towards Rue Voltaire and then on to the ancient Roman-era Amphitheatre, a spectacular Colosseum-like arena that still hosts bullfighting events around Easter every year (and did so in Vincent’s time as well). Van Gogh happened to witness a few bullfights in that arena, as he wrote to his brother Theo in Paris. It must have been a riveting experience for the painter.

But let me not get ahead of myself here. Of course, Arles is dotted with Roman relics – it was, after all, one of the most prominent cities of the extended Roman Empire up until the 4th century, outside of Rome – and the amphitheatre (or the ‘arena’) is arguably the most significant among them. But it was not Van Gogh’s favourite haunt – none of the ancient monuments was – either in his first few weeks in town or later. What really excited him – indeed, enthralled him – was the countryside beyond the town’s limits  and the ordinary men and women who  lived and toiled around him. Nothing much else seriously interested him – not relics from Roman antiquity, at any rate. He did paint the amphitheatre, of course, but his focus was unwaveringly on the human figures populating the canvas, the spectators, not the spectacle playing out in the arena. “..(T)he crowds were magnificent”, he tells Theo,”those great colourful multitudes piled up one above the other on two or three galleries, with the effect of sun and shade and the shadow cast by the enormous ring”. His Les Alyscamps paintings are also celebrated works of art, but the ancient Roman necroplis (lying a little to the south of the town) where they were painted are present in those canvases in little else  than the title of the series. They are marvellous naturescapes otherwise. 

But to get back to the trail of Van Gogh’s Arles addresses. Where is his Yellow House, where he moved in after he was done with the room on top of the Café de la Gare, and which happened to be where he spent the most time while at Arles, till end-December 1888, and off and on thereafter till early May 1889 when he gave himself up, voluntarily, to the asylum in Saint-Remy? I reached Place Lamartine, not far from the train station, late one afternoon in June, looking for the house that Van Gogh had described to his sister Wilhelmina in words of ineffable beauty:

My house here is painted the yellow colour of fresh butter outside with raw green shutters; it stands in the full sunlight on a square which has a green garden with plane trees, oleanders and acacias. And it is completely whitewashed inside, and the floor is made of red bricks. And over it the intensely blue sky. There I can live and breathe, think and paint.

Van Gogh is referring here to the front right wing of the house at 2, Place Lamartine containing two large rooms at street level and two smaller rooms on the first floor which he rented in May 1888. This was the kind of place in France’s warm south that his heart had yearned for when he chose to leave Paris behind him – Paris with its clammy winter nights, its swirling fogs and maddening crowds. And this was the kind of house around which he had built his dream of a thriving artists’ community where he and his friends could live and work together cheaply and in peace. The house to which he repeatedly invited his friends – most of all Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard – to relocate. The house he, with his meagre resources, had yet furnished with tender care, gladly leaving the larger bedroom for Gauguin‘s use. The house that broke his heart when he had to abandon his dream project, as the darkness of unreason closed in upon him one December night in ‘a low public house’ of the kind he had  already portrayed in Night Café.

I found Place Lamartine exactly as contemporary accounts, including Van Gogh’s letters, describe it – except that the Yellow House has vanished from the scene. It was badly – albeit accidentally – damaged in an Allied bombing raid in June 1944 when the real target was a nearby bridge across the river Rhone. The building was demolished soon after the war. Otherwise the square in which I now stood, with its neat little garden, its plane trees and oleanders and acacias, could have come straight out of the painting, or of Van Gogh’s letters to Theo about the place. The four-storey building behind Yellow House survives – in part as a brasserie while a hotel, appropriately called Terminus Et Van Gogh, is housed in another part – as do the two railway bridges in the background on the far right. In the painting, a steam train is chugging across the nearer bridge, sending up a column of white smoke into an ultramarine sky. I hung around the square for some time, hoping to see a train cross the bridge. A train did arrive in the end, a local train, but it went in the other direction, away from where the clutch of buildings stand today. And of course, there was no plume of smoke: steam engines  disappeared from this part of the world a long time ago.

As I exited the square from the left – across from where a Monoprix supermarket stands today – I passed by a stone memorial erected in honour of two lieutenants of the US Air Force who were killed in action near Place Lamartine on 14 August, 1944. As I approached the river, a sign inscribed below a large print of Starry Night over the Rhone pointed to the exact spot at the river’s bend where Van Gogh worked on that magnificent canvas in September 1888. It was a sun-drenched late afternoon yet, and I had to come back to the riverside after sunset that night to get a sense of what the scene might have looked like all those years ago but for the changes inevitably wrought by time – and this frame here is the best I could wrap my hands around.

Van Gogh had long obsessed with painting the night sky and the nightly landscape. “Often it seems to me night is even more richly coloured than day”, he had written to sister Wil once – and gradually his desire to create nighttime canvases took hold of him completely. So, when  he was finally  able to commit his ideas around the theme to canvas, his relief was palpable. “….(T)he starry sky painted by night, actually under a gas jet”, he wrote ecstatically to Theo while sending him a small sketch of the painting. “The sky is aquamarine, the water is royal blue, the ground is mauve. The town is blue and purple. The gas is yellow and the reflections are russet gold descending down to green-bronze. On the aquamarine field of the sky the Great Bear is a sparkling green and pink, whose discreet paleness contrasts with the brutal gold of the gas….”

This canvas is part of the Musee d’Orsay’s permanent collection in Paris, but, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, it was on loan to the Foundation Vincent Van Gogh at Arles, and on display in a special exhibition there, just when I happened to be in Arles. A remarkable coincidence, by all accounts, because this was the first time ever that the painting had come back to Arles after it had left the southern town along with Van Gogh’s personal effects 135 years ago!

I had planned to be at Place du Forum, a lively square not far from anywhere and offering a dizzying variety of restaurants and cafes, for my evening meal. Not at just any one of those attractive joints there but at the place Van Gogh rendered on canvas for eternity in his Café Terrace at Night. The café still stands and looks pretty much like it would have in Van Gogh’s time – but, sadly for me, it was closed for business on account of renovation. I had to be content with gazing at the café while standing at the exact same spot where the painter presumably set up his easel, namely the north-eastern corner of the plaza and looking all the way south, down the Rue du Palais.

This was his first major painting where Van Gogh used a starry sky as a backdrop: Starry Night over the Rhone appeared a few days later while the hors concours Starry Night was not to come until almost a year later, when Van Gogh was at the asylum at St-Remy. Excited after he completed Café Terrace at Night, he wrote to Wil:

A huge yellow lantern lights the terrace, the façade, the pavement, and even projects light over the cobble-stone of the street which takes on a violet-pink tinge. The gables on the houses on a street that leads away under the blue sky studded with stars are dark blue or violet, with a green tree. Now there’s a painting of the night without black. With nothing but beautiful blue, violet and green…I enormously enjoy painting on the spot at night.

A short work from the Forum, via the Rue de la Republique and on to Place Felix Rey, and you are at Van Gogh’s last address in Arles – a place now known as L’espace Van Gogh but in use in his time as the Arles city hospital. Van Gogh was first admitted here on December 23, 1888, after his violent falling-out with Gauguin, leading to Van Gogh mutilating himself. Released from the hospital in early January 1889, he had to be committed to it twice more: in early February for about 2 weeks, and again on February 26 – this time on an extended stay till May 8, 1889.

Early on, his recovery was swift and he surprised Dr Felix Rey, with whom the painter became friends while he was at the hospital, who soon permitted his ward to go outdoors to paint. The relapse in early February was as intense as it was sudden, with Van Gogh obsessively complaining that he was being poisoned. He was soon lucid again, however, and returned home to his Yellow House for a few days – before some of his neighbours took it into their head to believe that the artist was a dangerous criminal at large and needed to be locked up for the community’s peace of mind. They collectively petitioned the city mayor, and Van Gogh entered the hospital for the third time – this time to agonise long and hard over how his future was to pan out. In May he agreed with Dr Rey that his best chance of long-term recovery lay in specialised treatment of which the local hospital was sadly incapable. Van Gogh then moved into the St-Remy asylum located some 30 kms north of Arles. He was to spend the next twelve months here, before he proceeded to his last port of call, the tiny town of Auvers-Sur-Oise near Paris where he was to take his own life just 70 days later. 

Of the paintings associated with his stay at this hospital is the little masterpiece showing the hospital’s courtyard garden. The place is no longer a hospital, however. The complex now houses the town library, a cultural centre dedicated to Van Gogh’s memory, a couple of cafes and some souvenir shops. What struck me about the garden at L’espace Van Gogh, however, was how little it seems to have changed since Van Gogh’s day, with some large trees which figured in the painting still standing today. Clearly, extrordinary care has gone into ensuring visual continuity here. 

The long summer day was not near its end yet, and the Van Gogh trail had still to run its course fully. But it had thrown up enough intimations of how an artist’s palette overlapped his life in this pretty little Provencal town that one could ruminate on endlessly.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com