Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The Yellow House lives up to its name. Painted in that hue, sharpened to midday brightness by emerald shutters and bitumen-black windowpanes, it anchors a yellow world. The shade swallows, splashes and speckles the street, the roadworks, the leaves, even the lamppost. As egg-yolk, biscuit, ochre, mustard, topaz and caramel jostle and mingle, the effect is feverish, dazzling to the eye but exhausting to the mind. As a painting, “The Yellow House (The Street)” (1888) is a knockout; as an image of a home, it’s less than tempting — and anything but mellow.Only Vincent van Gogh could have imagined such a queasy, fulgent haven. The artist, who was born in the Netherlands in 1853, moved to Arles, location of the Yellow House, from Paris in February 1888. By then he had failed to make a career as an art dealer and a preacher and was struggling as an artist. Often he was supported by his art-dealer brother, Theo.At first, Van Gogh used the Yellow House as a studio, but in September he moved in. By Christmas, afflicted by psychological anguish and in a fraught friendship with his housemate, Paul Gauguin, he was in hospital after mutilating his ear. In May 1889 he checked himself into an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence where he remained for more than a year before returning to northern France. He died by his own hand in July 1890.Despite this bleak narrative, the artist’s southern sojourn produced some of the most astonishing paintings of the modern era. This comet trail of splendour is now mapped by Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, a scintillating exhibition at London’s National Gallery.The Yellow House, and the colour that stamped it, were key to his exultant swansong. Writing to Theo in August 1888, Van Gogh exclaimed: “Sunshine, a light which for want of a better word I can only call yellow — pale sulphur yellow, pale lemon, gold . . . How beautiful yellow is!”Little wonder that the blowsy, extravagant sunflowers of southern France inspired his most famous paintings. They were crucial to the elaborate decorative scheme he devised for the Yellow House (which he imagined as a “studio of the South”, inhabited by artist colleagues). Four of the “Sunflower” canvases were painted in a single week in August 1888 as Van Gogh waited impatiently for Gauguin to come and join him. A further three were executed during the winter.At the National Gallery, there is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see two of those “Sunflower” paintings either side of “La Berceuse” (1889), a portrait of Van Gogh’s neighbour Augustine Roulin. Envisioned by Van Gogh in a sketch sent to Theo, the triptych has never before been realised.It is a curious trio. The “Sunflowers”, one from the National Gallery, the other on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, are emblems of seething, searing, life-meets-death turmoil. In the former, a mosaic of impastos — from the primrose basket-weave background to the dense burnt orange daubs of the seed heads — evoke both vitality and desiccation. In the latter, the blooms are sprightlier, turning hopefully towards the life-giving planet even as they wilt.Van Gogh’s idea for the paintings’ arrangement was that “the yellow and orange tones of [Roulin’s] head take on more brilliance through the proximity of the yellow shutters.” (“Shutters” refers to the paintings either side as if they were hinged pictures on a traditional triptych.) But Roulin — her surreal flame-bright complexion at odds with her matronly curves and meekly clasped hands — looks cramped between those anything-but-still still lifes. Only her eyes, their acid-green matching that of her skirt, hint at inner effervescence.Van Gogh’s gift for evoking the jangled, dissonant radiance of our world is the touchstone of his greatness. From the painful, convulsive beauty of “Starry Night over the Rhône” (1888), with its elegiac midnight-blues clawed by tiger-yellow stars, to “The Bedroom” (1889), a tilted, airless, gravity-defying chamber where his own paintings loom vertiginously over the bed, his spellbinding cocktail of intoxicated chromaticism and virile, insomniac brushstrokes sparks and sizzles through every gallery.Yet there was order in Van Gogh’s chaos. The show demonstrates his obsessive efforts to conjure different dimensions out of his daily vistas. In Arles, for example, in the humble public garden he imagined a verdant refuge for “oneself, Botticelli, Giotto, Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio”.He painted this Eden of creative titans as a cool glade in “The Poet’s Garden (Public Garden in Arles)” (1888), where a couple wander down a shadow-splashed path under a teal-blue canopy of fir leaves. Yet “The Public Garden, Arles” (1888) summons the same space in incandescent autumnal hues of copper, terracotta and whisky-orange. Meanwhile, “Entrance to the Public Gardens in Arles” (1888) feels less lofty, more domesticated, peopled as it is by a cottage-loaf lady, a newspaper-reading gent and townspeople snoozing on benches.In the asylum, where Van Gogh worked fruitfully, a nearby olive grove is translated through a spectrum of seasons and moods. In “Olive Trees” (1889), on loan from the Nelson-Atkins museum in Kansas City, he summons the violet shadows that lap the roots at twilight. In a version on loan from the Minneapolis Institute of Art, a halo of sun kindles the grove into a writhing, swirling kaleidoscope of mauve, burnt sienna, sage-green and butter-yellow at once typical of a scorching Provencal summer but also so stylised and Hokusai-fluid — Van Gogh was influenced by Japanese art — that it could be a hallucination.The discordance between reality and imagination was, for Van Gogh, the crucible of his brilliance and misery. Unlike the Impressionists, who simply wanted to capture the fleeting beauty of the world, Van Gogh knew art could express more. Driven as much by the images in his own mind — restless, oneiric, extreme — as by the natural world, he pushed himself, his art and those around him to the limits of possibility.Nothing is peaceful in a Van Gogh painting. A sequence of drawings of the landscape around the Montmajour Abbey render it wild, tame, stony, wooded, overlooking a fertile agricultural plain and rearing up to a jagged, turreted tower. Van Gogh’s varied perspectives dovetail with his multiplicity of marks: slashes, strokes, hatching, cross-hatching, loops, hooks, lines, some flowing, some stiff as Montmajour’s rocky outcrop.Van Gogh said that the painter of the future would be a “colourist such as there hasn’t been before”. In certain paintings here, such as “The Stevedores” (1888), his psychedelic telepathy strips the world back to its metaphysical embryo. But his staccato draughtsmanship, its frantic dots and dashes acting as a manic calligraphy for his unquiet vision, was equally important.Van Gogh’s temperament doomed him to loneliness. Although Gauguin did take up residence in the Yellow House, the ear debacle led him to hotfoot it to Paris. But he recognised his colleague’s golden touch, describing the London “Sunflowers” as “a perfect page of an essential ‘Vincent’ style”. That golden touch is shining still.September 14-January 19, nationalgallery.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
