Arles Artistry: Experiencing a City Through van Gogh’s Eyes

If there’s an upside to the continuing uncertainly about travel it’s that you can see normally touristy places like a local. On a late fall cruise in France, we have the normally busy streets of Arles basically to ourselves.

It’s a golden opportunity to see the places that inspired many of Vincent van Gogh’s most famous artworks stripped to the basics, much as he would have seen them.

So, let’s have a little fun and imagine these scenes as Vincent might have. 

We’re here with a small group from an AmaWaterways Rhone River cruise aboard AmaKristina to savor scenes that are little changed from the nineteenth century. These scenes from an art tour of Arles are tweaked with some Photoshop stylization–and with profound homage to the brilliant artist whose techniques have fascinated us for a century and a half.

AmaWaterways has found an extraordinary guide for our tour to help us envision the streets through Vincent’s starry eyes. David is an American art historian who has lived for many  years in Arles studying and teaching “because it’s always so beautiful here.”

It’s December and the leaves have fallen, revealing the incredibly gnarly branches and mottle bark of the iconic French plane trees that line the roads. The twisting narrow streets and brilliant skies that have inspired generations of artists are nearly deserted.

The tour visits locales that are remarkably unchanged from the time Vincent arrived in Arles in the winter of 1888. He was escaping the bustle and frustrations of life in Paris and he sought out the vivid colors and more predictable sunshine of Provence.

Van Gough rented rooms and wandered Arles and the countryside day and night in search of inspiration. We walk to one of his haunts, the Café du Forum, that inspired the famous painting Café Terrace at Night. Although it was closed for the season during our visit, the café’s walls are adorned with streaks of  gorgeously evocative hues.

Eventually, Vincent set up a studio in a place known as the Yellow House, where he embellished his now famous style of swirling brush strokes of bold colors.

Arles was a center of artists even then and van Gogh had lots of competitors to critique his work. Famously, Paul Gauguin came to join him for a couple of tumultuous months that ended with the famous freak-out in which the genius used a knife to cut off a chunk of his left ear (and in some versions of the story gifted it  to lady of the starry night).

In the former hospital where he was patched up and treated for delirium, they even sell action figures with detachable ears in a gift shop. Um…let’s enjoy the building and its courtyard that still looks exactly as he painted it.

We can only imagine what went on inside his troubled mind in those days, but we’re fortunate to have some clues in the way he interpreted the city in his paintings.

Arles has inspired generations of artists. Just let the spirit move you and you’ll see why. Plan to see them this year before the tourists rediscover Arles.

Arles is a destination on the Colors of Provence Rhone river itineraries of AmaWaterways AmaKristina beginning in March and running through December. Other highlights include Avignon, Tournon and Lyon.

Story by Wallace Immen, The Cruisington Times

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