La casa gialla

Van Gogh painted this in September 1888, and it is a portrait of a hope more than of a building. The pink-fronted house with the green shutters, at 2 Place Lamartine in Arles, was the one he had rented that May. He wanted to turn it into what he called a Studio of the South, a place where painters could live cheaply and work side by side, and he had talked Gauguin into coming down from the north to join him. So when he set up this view under a hard blue sky, he was really painting the home of a dream that was about to be tested. Look at the ordinary details he keeps in. A train crosses the little bridge in the distance, trailing smoke, because the railway ran right past his door. People stroll on the corner outside the café below. Gauguin arrived in late October and stayed about nine weeks, and the friendship curdled into the crisis that ended with Van Gogh cutting his own ear. The house itself did not survive either. A bombing raid in June 1944 wrecked it, and the ruin was pulled down, so this bright square of paint is now one of the few places it still stands.