The Novel Reader

Gauguin had been living in the Yellow House at Arles for about three weeks when Van Gogh painted this, in the middle of November 1888. The two men argued about nearly everything, and one of Gauguin's pushes was that Vincent should work more from his head instead of always from a model sitting in front of him. This is one of the results. There was no sitter. Writing to his sister Wilhelmina, Van Gogh described the woman and the yellow book in her hands, a modern novel, the kind of reading he thought everybody ought to be doing. He tried only a handful of pictures this way before going back to the model, and by the end of December Gauguin had left Arles for good. The painting has stayed in private hands ever since.