Van Gogh’s Arles, Before the Losses
Two early photographic albums have brought a vanished layer of Van Gogh history into sharper focus. The Van Gogh Academy in Auvers-sur-Oise has acquired and displayed albums by Gustave Coquiot, the art critic who wrote one of the first biographies of Vincent van Gogh, Vincent van Gogh (1923). The images record sites in France associated with the painter’s work, many of them altered or destroyed in the decades that followed.
Taken in the 1920s, the photographs show the Yellow House in Arles, the River Rhône, the Langlois Bridge, the Arles hospital courtyard, and other locations that Van Gogh transformed into paintings. The comparison is revealing. Coquiot’s camera captures the ordinary fabric of these places, while Van Gogh’s canvases turn them into something more charged and personal — a landscape filtered through memory, color, and feeling.
The historical value of the albums is heightened by what no longer survives. The Yellow House, where Van Gogh lived in 1888 and 1889, was damaged by Allied bombs in 1944 and later demolished. The Langlois Bridge, one of his favorite motifs on the outskirts of Arles, was rebuilt around 1930 and then blown up again in 1944. Coquiot’s photographs preserve evidence of structures that war and modernization erased.
The albums also illuminate the social world around Van Gogh. They include family photographs, especially of Coquiot’s wife Mauricia, a circus performer and feminist politician. Coquiot’s material was acquired by Wouter van der Veen after a Paris auction in March 2023, and he later secured the albums themselves for the academy.
The photographs also connect to figures Van Gogh knew in Arles, including Jules Armand, the pharmacist and grocer who sold artists’ supplies and may have shown work in his shop window. Coquiot’s images of Arles make clear how closely Van Gogh’s art was tied to specific streets, buildings, and riverbanks — and how much of that world has since disappeared.
The albums are on view at 1 Rue François Mitterrand, Auvers-sur-Oise, open Fridays and Saturdays until 20 June. For viewers, they offer something rare: a documentary counterpart to Van Gogh’s paintings, and a reminder that even the most familiar art histories rest on places that can vanish.
