The Yellow House (Het gele huis) is Vincent van Gogh’s painting of the house on Place Lamartine in Arles where he lived from September 1888 and where he dreamed of founding a “studio of the south” with other painters. He painted it in September 1888, with the yellow building set against an intensely blue sky, and he himself called it The Street. It is an oil on canvas measuring 72 × 91.5 cm and is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The real house no longer exists: it was damaged in a bombing raid in 1944 and later torn down.
The Yellow House meaning: what it shows
The painting shows the corner of Place Lamartine in Arles. The Yellow House is the building in the center with the green shutters: in May 1888 Van Gogh rented its right wing, four rooms, with the two second-floor windows facing the square. The corner one, with its shutters open, was the guest room where Gauguin stayed; the next one, almost closed, was his own bedroom. On the left is the restaurant where he usually ate; in the background, the railroad bridge, near which his friend the postman Joseph Roulin worked. In the foreground, the square with its gardens and a few people strolling. All of it under a cloudless cobalt-blue sky.
For Van Gogh the house was much more than a place to live. It was the first home of his own in years, and the place where he wanted other painters to live and work together, far from Paris. The museum sums it up this way: he had finally found a place where he could not only paint but also welcome his friends, and his plan was to turn the building into an artists’ house. That is why he furnished it with such care, painted the sunflowers to decorate it and waited for Gauguin all summer long.
The letter to Theo: “these yellow houses in the sunlight”
Shortly after settling in, Vincent sent Theo a description and a sketch of the painting (letter 691, on or about September 29, 1888, the same letter in which he sketches Starry Night over the Rhône): “it’s tremendous, these yellow houses in the sunlight and then the incomparable freshness of the blue”. He also described the yellow ground, the “pure cobalt sky” and the “sulphur sun”.
A month later, on October 23, 1888, Gauguin arrived at the house. The two months they shared ended on the night of December 23 with the breakdown in which Vincent cut off part of his ear. After the hospital, and after his neighbors petitioned to have him confined, Van Gogh left the Yellow House in the spring of 1889 and in May entered the asylum in Saint-Rémy. The full story is in Van Gogh and Gauguin and in Van Gogh’s Ear.
Analysis: color and composition
Yellow against cobalt
This is one of the paintings in which Van Gogh pushes furthest the contrast of complementary colors he had learned in Paris: the yellow facade and the ocher ground against an almost uniform cobalt-blue sky. There are no grays and no transitions; the tree’s shadow on the restaurant is green, not black. The green of the shutters, repeated in the trees in the background, is the third color that holds the whole together.
A street composition
Van Gogh called it The Street, and the composition explains why: the house is set off-center to the left, and the street rising toward the railroad bridge, with the locomotive and its smoke, leads the eye to the back right. The tiny figures give the scale. It is an ordinary building on the square treated with the attention usually given to a monument.
What happened to the Yellow House
The house was hit by an Allied bombing raid on June 25, 1944, during World War II, and was so badly damaged that it was demolished. Today Place Lamartine looks quite a lot like the painting, but nothing is left on the lot where the Yellow House stood. A plaque marks the spot, one of the stops on the Van Gogh trail in Arles, which also takes in the café terrace on Place du Forum and the hospital where he was treated.
Where to see The Yellow House
At the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, in the permanent collection, next to The Bedroom, its natural pair: the outside and the inside of the same house. It never left the family until it passed to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation in 1962. Our Van Gogh Museum tickets page explains prices, opening hours and how to book; the painting is also among our wallpapers.
All the Van Gogh works in the Van Gogh Museum that have a page on this site, with details for your visit: Van Gogh at the Van Gogh Museum (in Spanish).
Fact sheet
| Title | The Yellow House (Het gele huis / The Street) |
|---|---|
| Artist | Vincent van Gogh |
| Date and place | Arles, September 1888 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 72 × 91.5 cm |
| Catalogs | F 464 · JH 1589 |
| Location | Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), no. s0032V1962 |
| Period | Arles (1888–1889) |
Related works
- The Park and Pond in Front of the Yellow House (Arles, 1888): a related drawing.
- The Yellow House (watercolor): a related watercolor.
- Park with Fence (Arles, 1888): a related drawing.
- The Bedroom (October 1888): the inside of this house.
- Sunflowers (August 1888): painted to decorate Gauguin’s room.
- Gauguin’s Chair (1888): the Yellow House’s guest.
- Starry Night over the Rhône (1888): painted on the banks of the Rhône, very close to the house, and described in the same letter.
- Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin (1888): the neighbor on the other side of the bridge.
Sources: the work’s page at the Van Gogh Museum (s0032V1962); letters 678 (to Willemien, September 9 and about September 14, 1888) and 691 (to Theo, on or about September 29, 1888), Van Gogh Museum and Huygens Institute edition, vangoghletters.org; Wikipedia, “The Yellow House”.