Does This Van Gogh to Arles?

Our first shore excursion with Viking Delling took us to Arles, best known for its association with Vincent Van Gogh.  The famed Dutch impressionist painter made an artistic quantum leap during his stay in that Provençal village, completing an estimated 300 works during his year in Arles, where he cherished the light.

Van Gogh seems to have developed a passion for the color yellow in Arles, and he frequently toted his canvases from town out to fields of vibrant sunflowers to capture their essence in a famous series of paintings.

We passed by the saffron-yellow inspiration for his Terrasse du Café le Soir, a nighttime painting in which he first introduced a starry night in its background.  That sidewalk restaurant is now savvily called Café Van Gogh.  Delicious aromas wafted from a huge pan as cooks were mixing fresh ingredients into the Mediterranean dish Paella, which I always associate more with Spain.  It could be a great place to have lunch followed by an afternoon exploring more of Arles.

In 1888, Vincent painted The Starry Night Over the Rhone during his year in Arles, a preview of the style of his most famous painting, The Starry Night, which he painted the next year from his window in an asylum in another village of Provence, Saint-Rémy.

Arles is also where Van Gogh infamously sliced off his ear with a razor.  Our guide said he gave it to a brothel worker, making me think he must have been in love with a prostitute who accused him of never listening to her.

Apparently, Van Gogh did give his ear to the 17-year old cleaning girl at a brothel that he frequented with his friend, artist Paul Gauguin, but that was after a heated fight with Gauguin, with whom he shared The Yellow House.  Van Gogh had been hoping to start of an impressionist art community in Arles, but after just two months cooped up together, Van Gogh thought Gauguin was going to leave, dashing Vincent's dream.

According to Gauguin, Van Gogh charged him with an open razor.  Coming to his senses at least temporarily, Van Gogh returned home, where in a drunken stupor he lopped off his own ear.  Van Gogh was so drunk that he blacked out, and he said he didn't remember what happened.

There are many elements to the story that could lead my fiction-writer mind into alternative theories, but I won't go into those here.  We walked past the lot where the Yellow House stood until being bombed in WWII and never rebuilt.

That's something frustrating about Provence compared to villages on the Rhine and Moselle.  Wars totally demolished many villages in Germany and left them as rubble, but they have been painstakingly rebuilt in their original styles.  

Provence, like the fictional Levon in Elton John's song, wears their war wounds like crowns rather than rebuilding or repairing in the original style, but I'll get back to that in a future post.

Gauguin soon left town and reportedly never saw Van Gogh again, although they did correspond occasionally.

Police rightly insisted that Van Gogh seek treatment in a hospital.  By that point, Van Gogh already had a reputation for being a terrible drunk as well as being a troublemaker.  According to our guide, that hospital in Arles was not really an asylum but more of a general clinic.  Van Gogh painted pictures of the gardens there, and they remain much as they were, including the yellow walls surrounding the courtyard.

Artists congregate in that courtyard to paint their own masterpieces, or perhaps projects for an art class they took pass/fail. 

In any case, Van Gogh is now championed as a hero of the region, but he was thrown out of Arles with a hearty good riddance to bad rubbish by the townspeople.

Keep in mind that very much like the starving artist stories we've all heard, Van Gogh only became a celebrated artist after he died.

Van Gogh came from an upper middle class family, so he wasn't "starving" in any case.  His brother Theo, an art dealer, supported him and might have been his only fan, although Gauguin seemed to respect his vision.

Nobody thought much of Van Gogh's talent throughout most of his life, and he sold few paintings.  Most art critics and the general public disliked the avant-garde Impressionist movement.  Being deemed insane certainly didn't help his cause, but the last couple of years of his life, when some would say he became Post-Impressionist, some art critics began to appreciate his talent.

Van Gogh left Arles in May of 1889 and died of a gunshot wound, probably by his own hand, in July of 1890, at the age of 37.