III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY
The Yellow House
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In May 1888 Van Gogh took four rooms in a yellow house on Place Lamartine. The painting records the building, the street, and the life he meant the rooms to hold.
At a glance
- Artist
- Vincent van Gogh
- Date
- 1888
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 72 × 91.5 cm (3 ft)
- Collection
- Van Gogh Museum
- Inventory
- s0032V1962
Look closer
Open shutters, nearly closed
On the first floor of the yellow house, nearest the corner, both shutters stand open. That is the guest room. The next window along has its shutters nearly shut; behind it was Van Gogh’s own bedroom. The painting does not label the rooms, but it does discriminate between them with this small difference in the woodwork. Two large ground-floor rooms served as atelier and kitchen. The rear rooms came later.
The pink building at the edge
Close to the left edge sits a building painted pink. Van Gogh indicated that this was the restaurant where he took his meals, at 28 Place Lamartine. It was run by Widow Venissac, who was also his landlady and who owned several of the other structures in the view. The house he rented and the place he ate were parts of one small commercial patch of street.
Avenue, ditch and bridges
To the right of the yellow house, Avenue Montmajour runs down toward two railway bridges. A train is just passing on the nearer line, the local connection toward Lunel on the far bank of the Rhône; the other line belonged to the Paris–Lyon–Méditerranée company. In the left foreground is a corner of the pedestrian walk around the public gardens. A ditch climbs the avenue from that side: it carried the gas pipe that would later let Van Gogh install gaslight in the atelier.
The story
The painting shows a short stretch of Place Lamartine in Arles as Van Gogh knew it in 1888. The yellow house itself is the right wing of number 2. On the first of May that year he rented four rooms there: two large ones on the ground floor for workshop and kitchen, and two smaller ones upstairs facing the square. The canvas is both a cityscape and a record of a practical arrangement he had only just put in place.
Compositionally the house sits slightly off centre, its sulphur-yellow walls and green shutters catching the light against a broad blue sky. Neighbouring façades step away in pink, ochre and muted green. The street is not emptied for the occasion. Figures stand and move at ground level; a train crosses one of the bridges. The viewpoint takes in the corner of the public garden’s walk, the gas ditch, and the avenue that leads the eye out of the square toward the railway. Nothing in the arrangement pretends the house stands alone. It is embedded in the ordinary traffic of the place.
Van Gogh also gave the picture an alternative title, The Street (De straat), which fits what the eye actually does. The yellow house is the brightest mass, but the painting spends equal care on what surrounds it: the pink restaurant at the left, the bridges, the strip of garden edge. The rooms upstairs are distinguished only by their shutters — open for the guest room nearest the corner, nearly closed for his bedroom next door. From late October 1888 that guest room was occupied for nine weeks by Paul Gauguin. The painting itself dates from earlier in the year, when the plan for a shared studio life was still ahead of the fact.
The materials are straightforward: oil on canvas, seventy-two centimetres high by ninety-one and a half wide. The genre sits between cityscape and landscape, which is accurate to the view. Place Lamartine was not a picturesque old quarter but a modern edge of town, with gas, trains and a landlady who owned more than one of the buildings on the block. Van Gogh painted the premises of a working arrangement — rent, meals, light, and the hope of company — rather than an isolated emblem.
The house did not survive the next century. It was severely damaged in an Allied bombing raid on the twenty-fifth of June 1944 and was later demolished. What remains of that corner is the painting, now in the Van Gogh Museum, inventory number s0032V1962.
Why it mattered then
In 1888 the yellow house was not a symbol. It was a lease. Van Gogh had moved into four rooms on Place Lamartine and was fitting them for work: atelier and kitchen below, sleeping rooms above, with the possibility of more space at the rear. Painting the exterior fixed the place he had chosen and the street that supplied his meals, his gas and his view of the trains. The guest room with the open shutters was already part of the design. When Gauguin arrived in late October, he stepped into a room the painting had already marked as waiting. The picture belongs to the months when the household was still a plan being made solid in paint and furniture, before the short shared residency ran its course.
Why it matters now
The building is gone, destroyed in 1944 and demolished afterward. The painting is therefore the chief public record of how that corner of Place Lamartine once looked and how Van Gogh had parcelled its rooms. It rewards slow looking because so much of the information is structural rather than anecdotal: which shutters are open, where the restaurant sits, how the avenue meets the bridges, where the gas ditch runs. Those details keep the work from floating free as a mood study. They tether it to rent, meals, railway companies and a landlady’s block of properties. For anyone trying to understand Van Gogh’s Arles period as a set of practical decisions as well as a sequence of pictures, this canvas remains one of the clearest documents.
The surprising detail
The yellow house no longer stands. Allied bombs struck it on 25 June 1944; what remained was later pulled down. A painting made to record a freshly rented home and the street around it outlived the walls by decades and is now the durable version of the address.
What is disputed
Room identifications and the restaurant’s function follow Van Gogh’s own indications and later reconstruction from them. The painting itself does not label the windows or the pink building; those readings depend on his correspondence and on matching the façade to the known plan of 2 Place Lamartine.
Remember this
The Yellow House maps a lease and a street — shutters, restaurant, gas ditch and railway — more than it isolates a single famous façade.
Test yourself
Why does the small difference between the two first-floor shutters matter to how the painting is read?
Because it is the only visible distinction Van Gogh gives between the guest room and his own bedroom. The corner window with both shutters open was the room Gauguin would later occupy; the next, nearly closed, was Van Gogh’s. Without that detail the upper floor would read as a single yellow band. With it, the house is already divided into separate lives under one roof — which is what the rental was for.
Go deeper
Image: Vincent van Gogh, Public domain. Licence: Public domain. Source.