14 September 2007
The Yellow House, where Vincent van Gogh lived in Arles in 1888 was hit in an Allied bombing raid 1944 and subsequently pulled down:
So the artist’s bedroom, which he painted in October 1888…
… no longer exists. Vincent loved this painting and considered it one of his favourites. My friend David Brooks, who runs the most complete online van Gogh website, has written about it extensively here.
As we were walking through Arles I was surprised to see that some entrepreneurial Arlesians had decided to cash in on the rise in van Gogh tourism and recreate the bedroom in a little house just by the arena. We had to see it. It was superb!
The attention to detail was painstaking, correct down to individual brushstrokes, so actually it is a reconstruction of the painting, not the bedroom itself. Worth a punt, in any case. It made me smile.
