Van Gogh’s “Yellow House” Wasn’t Always Yellow — Two 1930s Paintings Suggest It Turned Blue Before WWII
For generations, Vincent van Gogh’s “Yellow House” has lived in the public imagination as a fixed image: a sunlit corner building in Arles, its façade a declaration of the artist’s faith in color and community. But new attention to two little-known paintings from the late 1930s suggests that, decades after Van Gogh left, the building may have worn a very different skin.
Van Gogh painted “The Yellow House” in September 1888, shortly after renting rooms in the building on Place Lamartine. The right side of the structure — identifiable by its green shutters — was his. Two small bedrooms sat upstairs; his studio was just inside the front door, with a kitchen at the rear. Although the exterior was already yellow when he moved in, it appears to have been dulled by time. Van Gogh, chronically short of money, arranged for someone else to repaint it, choosing yellow again. He soon began referring to it affectionately as “my little yellow house,” a phrase that has helped cement the site’s mythic status.
The house’s story is inseparable from the brief, combustible experiment Van Gogh attempted there. At first, he used the building primarily as a studio, then began sleeping there from September 1888. In October, French artist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) arrived to stay. The partnership ended violently on December 23, when Van Gogh mutilated his ear — an episode that has come to define the Arles period as both artistically incandescent and psychologically precarious.
By the 1920s, the former grocery shop and Van Gogh’s rooms had been repurposed as a café-bar and tobacco shop known as the Civette Arlésienne. With only black-and-white photographs from before World War II widely available, it has long been assumed that the exterior remained some version of yellow.
That assumption is now complicated by two independent depictions of the building made on the eve of the war. The first is “The House of Van Gogh” (1938) by Swiss artist Willy Guggenheim, who worked under the name Varlin. Guggenheim visited Arles in August 1938 and painted the building with a blue façade. A photograph from the same trip shows him at his easel outside the site. The following year, Romanian artist George Tomaziu painted “Street in Arles” (1939), again presenting the exterior as a pale blue.
Because the two works were made separately — and because both artists traveled to Arles with the knowledge that Van Gogh had famously dubbed the place the Yellow House — the matching color choice reads less like artistic license than observation. The paintings suggest that, by the late 1930s, the building may indeed have been repainted blue.
The question is not merely cosmetic. It underscores how quickly physical sites can drift away from the images that canonize them, and how fragile the material record of art history can be.
That fragility became irreversible in 1944. On June 25 of that year, American bombers attacked Arles, devastating Place Lamartine, which lay near the strategically important station and the rail bridge across the Rhône. The former grocery shop was destroyed, and the Yellow House was severely damaged. Van Gogh’s bedroom was obliterated; Gauguin’s room partly survived. The studio and kitchen walls fared better, but the ceiling collapsed.
The building could have been rebuilt. Instead, it was demolished. A commemorative plaque installed on the façade in 1922 disappeared in the destruction and was never recovered.
Today, the site is marked only by absence — a gap in the city’s fabric where one of modern art’s most charged addresses once stood. Had it survived, it is easy to imagine it becoming one of France’s most visited destinations outside Paris, reshaping Arles’s economy around a single, intensely photographed corner.
In other Van Gogh-related news, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has introduced a new logo, unveiled with a detail from one of its best-known holdings: Van Gogh’s “Irises” (May 1889).
