To view the Provence, France landscape filled with tall, elliptical cypress tress, flowering olive groves, vast blue skies, and the intense sunlight on terra cotta limestone hills helps to understand why Vincent Van Gogh moved to Arles. Tucked away among numerous historic ruins, where an ancient Roman amphitheater remains, now used for viewing bullfights, Arles houses the hospital where Van Gogh spent a year recuperating after his traumatic experiment living with Paul Gauguin.
The original yellow house where the two shared a painterly, but unsuccessful artistic life was destroyed, but the hospital where Van Gogh stayed and imagined over 200 paintings reflects the garden he preserved for posterity in The Courtyardof the Hospital at Arles, now recreated to resemble the fountain and arched terraces Van Gogh portrayed in brilliant colors and emotive brushstrokes. Only a few steps away from the hospital, the café still exists where he sat under a scalloped canopy, which he depicted in The Café Terrace on the Place de Forum, Arles. The café’s exterior stucco walls painted bright yellow, the outside also burnishes with the hues apparent in this painting, one of Van Gogh’s famous night scenes.
While Van Gogh only sold one painting in his life, the legacy he left in Arles, dotted by its provincial shops with viridian green and cobalt blue shutters, eclectic, ethnic population, and a train station where the traffic stopped from Paris, completely differs from where Paul Cezanne resided in Aix en Provence within the same time period. Yet both their color palettes reflect the light and landscape of Southern France. Van Gogh through powerful, expressive renderings of land and sky, Cezanne through restrained spatial stability and still lifes constructed with familiar objects. After a short visit, one might wish to also refresh and recuperate in this “kingdom of light’ as Van Gogh wrote in his letters to his brother, Theo.
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It is no wonder that those who visit Arles and Aix en Provence suddenly connect to these masterful painters at the beginning of the 20th century. One person who toured this countryside enthusiastically related she never understood Van Gogh, all that vibrant emotion in his paintings until she visited Provence. Then she knew immediately what inspired all these radiant colors. Starry Night becomes a startling reality strolling the streets in Arles, and then listening to Don McLean’s famous song by the same name. Play it again and remember Van Gogh, an outcast, struggling and often rejected artist who never understood or imagined what he accomplished. He only painted because to do anything else would have made his day-to-day hours unbearable. When his subsequent bouts with mental instability made that impossible, Van Gogh ended his life and the possibility of creating more evocative paintings. But these scenes in Arles still remain to remind those who visit this indeed is where Van Gogh created, lived, and loved his remarkable art.
