The Yellow House

The Yellow House — the studio Van Gogh rented at 2 Place Lamartine in Arles — was the setting of his most ambitious project: establishing a 'Studio of the South,' a community of artists who would work together in the Provençal light. He moved in September 1888, invited Gauguin to join him, and immediately began painting the house itself as a symbol of that dream. The almost hallucinatory yellow of the exterior, rendered in cadmium yellow against the blue sky, was entirely intentional: he described it to Theo as 'sulphur yellow' and 'burning.' The house was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944. The painting now hangs in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, as a document of a moment of intense hope.

The yellow facade is built from thick, even strokes of cadmium yellow against a strongly Prussian-blue sky. The street in front is rendered in shorter, drier strokes of blue-grey and white. The precision of the architectural geometry — windows, shutters, doorways — is unusual in Van Gogh's landscape work.