Voila Vincent: Ah, Arles! The high yellow note

Amazing unforgettable Arles! We arrive in Arles to find we are in time for the famous Saturday Gipsy Market which is one of the longest, most colourful markets we have ever visited: flamenco skirts with frenzied frills, tasselled shawls dropping gaudy gilded coins, dollar store merchandise, and Van Gogh straw hats flood the market. Hopeful sellers chat and flirt and every so often do a little happy jig as they woo buyers with their glinting gypsy grins and wicked charm.

For centuries gypsies have used Arles as a meeting place and a crossroads. Southern France feels so very Spanish these last few days with all the bullrings and the flamenco décor we are seeing, notwithstanding the frequency of tapas appearing on many menus. (Here, our digital camera died, with absolutely no warning– so photos for the next couple of days are snaffled from the net.. We could not have been more distraught. These few days were serious highlights for us, and to have lost our camera, right at this point, was a real disaster.) On our walk we passed another amazing Les Arenes, built in the 1st century by the Romans. At the time this one was built it boasted the facility to evacuate the 25000 attendees in only 5 minutes, if needed.

Arles is an amazing place! A place to spend a lot of time. It is all atmosphere: ancient houses with red tiled roofs and soft distressed yellow and pink faded stuccoed stone, period bridges with ancient light fittings, intricate iron balustrading on balconies, beautiful little religious grottos hanging over narrow ancient alleyway entrances, and tiled sections niched into the soft pastel over the lintels of narrow terraced houses. Not much has change in hundreds of years.

Arles is the town Van Gogh worked himself into such a frenzy that he ended up, in anguish, cutting off much of his ear, and ending up in an asylum. I adore Van Gogh, and have been aching to get here to walk in his footsteps. We ate where he ate. We drank where he drank. We stood where he stood to paint, so that we could reason why he chose exactly that spot, of all, to view his subject matter. Amazing to see from his perspective. To hypothsize why he chose this aspect, and not another. We visited the sunlit Yellow café he painted and imagined him setting up his easel, thick with his messy daubs of paints (I doubt he would have been a tidy painter) and attacking his subject with a frenzied passion.

We tracked down his home. Here, thanks to Theo’s money, he rented the Yellow House, which we unearthed just outside the stone walls of the ancient city, but within easy walking distance, stumbling distance if needs be, of the café culture and the night life. Though bombed in 1944, the footprint of Vincent’s small Yellow House remains, and, to make it more vivid, in the Van Gogh Foundation rooms, we actually saw a model of how it might have looked with the sunflower room decorated, along with the single bed he prepared for Gaugin’s visit, and the woven chair he lovingly bought for Gaugin to sit on, while dressing. “There’ll be the prettiest room upstairs,” Vincent wrote to Theo, “which I’ll try to make as nice as possible, like a woman’s boudoir.” (Vincent Van Gogh, Letter to Theo, Arles, 1888)

His own room he wanted spare, like a monk’s. Nothing for himself. Almost penitent about wanting the few items that he did, that he had to rely on Theo, to fund. In this house, in this town, Van Gogh dreamed, with the coming of Gaugin, of setting up an art school, for people of like minds. People with passion who wanted to pursue the beauty of his passion: Impressionism. Three hundred paintings he whipped up in the frenzied 15 months he had been here. He hoped there would be more. But it all went so terribly wrong.

Gaugin stayed in the Yellow House with the yellow sunflower painting over the bed, for only two volatile months. Then left. The day he left, 23 December 1888, Vincent cut off his ear. The following day, Christmas Eve, he was hospitalised. That was Van Gogh’s last Christmas alive. “Mr Rey says that instead of eating enough and regularly I have been particularly sustaining myself with coffee and alcohol. I admit all that, but it will still be true that I had to key myself up a bit to reach the high yellow note I reached this summer.” (Vincent Van Gogh, Letter to Theo, Arles, 1888)

And yellow is how I will remember Arles. Though the sunflowers have dropped their petals now, the fields surrounding the town are all still yellow-tipped with ripe rice in all the fields. These, too, are edged with eager little yellow wildflowers setting themselves up to ring out Vincent’s high notes as the season progresses. We slept, that night, in a Mas close to Arles. Farms are no longer called Fermes here, but all seem, now, to be called Mas. This one produces olive oil for sale. It also harvests wheat for pasta flour, and stores and sells the wheat shafts as hay bales. Everything around seems yellow. We dream of Vincent.