This is a short post to share some locations to follow the steps of the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh in Provence, in Arles and Saint Rémy de Provence.
Van Gogh was born in 1853, and at the age of 27 he decided to become an artist, to which he dedicated the next and last decade of his life. During that time he was financially supported by his brother Theo, with whom he moved.
In February 1888, he left Paris seeking the light and colors of Provence and settled in Arles, where he invited his friend Gauguin and where he hoped to establish the “Studio of the South“.
After a mental crisis in Arles, during which he cut off part of his ear, he interned himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum for treatment and rest. The asylum nowadays is open for visits and is located in Saint Rémy. The village and its surroundings provided several of the landscapes he painted.
Between Arles and Saint Rémy he spent just around two years but was the most productive period of his life with over 200 paintings (out of ~900 in his career).
The best museums to see his paintings are the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, the Kröller-Müller museum in Otterlo (Netherlands), the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the Metropolitan and MoMA in New York. And a good complement to those museums is to visit Arles and Saint Rémy in Provence, where in some places together with the landscapes there are panels with copies of the paintings to relate to one another. In Arles there is also a small museum, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, about his life and style.
I will share some of those examples below.
The Blog by Javier 