Vincent has come to Arles. He is living at the Hôtel Restaurant Carrel
on rue de la Cavalerie, in view of the old Roman arena. The town, he says,
is full of happy people – it's as "formidably cheerful as Holland is sad"
– but he complains that the citizens are lazy and irresponsible too.

The compensation is in the landscape, on windless, cloudless days,
when the air itself is alive with biting colour, its vibration the only
movement in vast vistas of serenity. He is wasting no time, the canvases
filling with fever. All of it has to be painted, everything he sees.

A Danish artist, Christian Vilhehn Mourier-Petersen, who's 30, accompanies Vincent on his outings each day.
Vincent has prepared three paintings for the Société des Artistes Indépendants next week.

Vincent has rented four rooms along one side of the big yellow house on Place Lamartine
at 15 francs a month. He'd had a falling-out with the landlord at the Carrel, who was charging
five francs a week for just his one room. Vincent was so incensed that he took the matter
to an arbitrator, and ended up paying one franc a week less!

Meanwhile he's moved into Joseph Ginoux's Café de la Gare just along the way and is waiting
for the yellow house to be furnished, though he can begin using it as a studio. This is where
he wants to open his "Studio of the South", an artists' co-operative that will explore
new ways of doing things, what he calls, none too modestly, the "art of the future".

He signed the lease on May 1 for two large rooms on the ground floor and two smaller ones above,
facing Place Lamartine. The other half of the building houses a grocery, and just across from it
is the restaurant that his landlady, the widow Venissac, operates, where Vincent takes his meals.
He's started a series of paintings with which to decorate his future home, mostly sunflowers, and
has made a large picture of the house itself, which he calls "La Maison et son entourage", but
he's thinking of retitling it "La Rue" after Raffaëlli's new paintings of the streets in Paris.

You can see Vincent's main street along the right of the picture, Avenue Montmajour, which leads
to the railway bridges, one going across the river to Lunel, the other linking Paris and Lyon to Marseille.
On the left in the painting, shaded by a tree, is the restaurant, and just beyond that, not visible,
is the night café, which Vincent is also painting. He's sent a sketch of "La Maison" to his brother Théo
and proudly pointed out how everything is transformed by the "sulphur sun under a pure cobalt sky".

Vincent bought a pair of beds and finally moved into the yellow house yesterday. It's as sunny inside as the exterior walls. He says he likes the atmosphere there and seems to have forgotten the row he had with the Carrel over the rent.

He's done paintings of two cafés, one over by the Roman forum where he sometimes has a drink and something to eat, the other around the corner from his house that stays open all hours. Both pictures are quite startling. One shows an exterior all ablaze with light, but up in the sky the stars seem to be competing for attention. They're shimmering crazily. Vincent is quite proud of the fact that he's rendered the night sky without any black, just blue and green and violet.

He's done the same thing with the new gas lights in his interior picture. They glow with a fierceness that casts strange shades across the vagabonds and drunks who linger in the place. "Little sleeping hooligans", Vincent calls them. No wonder he says it's a place to "go mad or commit crimes". He seems to have gone mad himself – all the surfaces are askew.

Today on the Place du Forum, the Café La Nuit invites tourists to pretend they are Van Gogh and Gauguin by joining the locals for a drink on the terrace outside the brightly painted bar.

Dali House has a post about Van Gogh's famous bedroom within the Yellow House.

Vincent has a guest, Paul Gauguin, who he knows from Paris. They met last autumn and Vincent's
been begging him to come and help him launch his Studio of the South. Paul is quite a character,
full of stories of his travels. He grew up in Peru and has been to the Caribbean. He was in the
merchant marine and worked as a stockbroker before he decided to become an artist,
rather late in life, just like Vincent.

They get along famously, even when they argue about the "right" way to paint. Full of theories,
both of them. Gauguin wants poor old Vincent to try working from memory instead of always
having a life subject or a model in front of him. Maybe Vincent doesn't have
the same kind of memories as Paul.

One of Vincent's favourite places to paint
is the old Roman cemetery, the Nécropole des
Alyscamps. He and Gauguin go there all the
time now. The name comes from Elisii
Campi — Elysian Fields. The Romans
made it their burial ground beyond
the city limits, as was their custom.

It used to be quite famous. Wealthy people
from all over Europe were interred there
for nearly 1,500 years, until they moved
St Trophime's body to St Etienne in the
12th century, and then no one really
cared to rest there any longer. He'd been
the first bishop of Arles, in the third century,
and they say Jesus was at his funeral!

We could have seen it coming. Vincent and his friend Gauguin had a horrible fight.

They were always drinking and arguing. Now Vincent is in hospital. They'd come back all smiles
from a trip to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, comparing notes on the Delacroix and
Courbet paintings they'd seen, and then just fell to bickering when Paul said he wanted to return to Paris.