I once lived in a yellow house. It was the home of my dreams, an old Victorian with a fascinating history complete with segregation markings, births and deaths and an occasional nocturnal “visitor.” My Yellow House came wrapped with the prerequisite gingerbread trimming, tall single paned wavy glass windows warped and unwieldy, cracking and shedding plaster walls painted multiple colors over multiple decades, polished curving wooden staircase that gave one vertigo from its tilty stance, mellow yellow pine floors worn so thin that one could see the rooms below, a tin roof that sang in staccato notes as the rain pelted it, a wide bay window that looked onto a modest park of magnolia trees and tumbling vines, the smell of mustiness that comes with age, a sense of heritage and belonging to something larger than oneself.  Our Yellow House held many memories as we added to the patina of age and living.

And in the back of the Yellow House stood a mighty tree standing sentinel, guardian over the many generations of habitants that were to come and go with the ebb of life. We moved into the Yellow House in January, a bitter cold, snowy day. Before going inside we walked to the magnificent tree that arched the width of our yard and into adjacent neighboring yards, held hands attempting to span its girth. It was too large, but that was fine, it was now our turn to become caretakers, guardians of our Yellow House.

Vincent van Gogh lived in a Yellow House in Arles. It too was the home of his dream. He dreamt of a brotherhood of artists who would eat, share lives and paint as they forged a new dimension a new direction in art, an art for the future. It would be a home of safety and spirituality, all for the common good of its inhabitants.

The Yellow House of van Gogh’s dreams had a fresh coat of butter-yellow paint, vivid chrome green shutters, and the inside doors a shade of blue. The walls were a simple white wash, the floors paved in the local red tile. The Yellow House walls were askew to the roads outside, the windows of the studio facing towards the walking passersby, who gazed in with curiosity. The home was filled with the permeating orders of solvents, oils and Vincent’s tobacco smoke. 

Upstairs were two irregular long, narrow bedrooms, one door separating Vincent’s sleeping and personal quarters from those of Gauguin. The main floor studio, shared by two men was almost 300 square feet. Furnishings were slow in coming and very simple in design. The primary decorating was to be the paintings that they created. Gaslight was installed to allow the painting of portraits in the evening after the plein air painting of the day. All was anxiously arranged just prior to the arrival of Paul Gauguin.

It was in this Yellow House that van Gogh painted his first raw and emotional sunflowers, gifts to Gauguin and hung on his bedroom walls. Six years later Gauguin wrote, “In my yellow room sunflowers with purple eyes stand out on a yellow background; they bathe their stems in a yellow pot on a yellow table. In a corner of the painting, the signature of the painter: Vincent. And the yellow sun that passes through the yellow curtains of my room floods all this fluorescence with gold; and in the morning upon awakening from my bed, I imagine that all this smells very good.” Memory did not serve Gauguin well, but the overall impression is right…life in the Yellow House was yellow, the color of optimism and eventually envy.

For nine weeks Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin lived side by side in the Yellow House. Van Gogh painted approximately three dozen canvases and Gauguin less than half that number.

We start out in Yellow Houses of our dreams but life twists and turns and we exit with only our memories of life within yellow walls.