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It’s through a darkened archway behind one of the main streets in Arles, the former Roman town in the very south of France’s Provence: a garden, divided into geometric portions around a central pond and fountain, each section with different coloured blooms.

Overlooked by a portico of two stories, the garden is pleasant. Small, enclosed, secure, intimate. And there’s something eerily familiar about it. Something you can’t immediately put your finger on.

But there’s evidence in the tourist boutiques at one end of the garden to help you work it out: this garden was painted by Vincent van Gogh: the garden of the sanitorium in Arles. And here we are, standing in it. Almost identical to that represented by van Gogh in April 1889.

By Glanum, the Alpilles hills near St Remy ...

... and van Gogh was here.

About 30 km north, near the equally ancient town of St Remy de Provence, there are the excavated ruins of Glanum, a town dating back to 300-500 years BC, initially Ligurian and Gallic, later Greek then Roman.

From a lookout above the ruins, there’s a glorious panorama of Glanum with Provence spreading into the distance, in the middle of which sits St Remy, dominated like all European towns by its church and steeple.

That’s eerily familiar, too. But is it just because all European towns here are dominated by a church and steeple?

Nearby is the monastery of St Paul de Mausole, the asylum where van Gogh spent a year in 1889-90, leading up to his return to Paris and his suicide in July 1890.

From his 15 months at Arles, van Gogh left 200 paintings and over 100 drawings and watercolours. In his year at St Remy, he completed more than 150 works whilst under “treatment” for a mental condition which practitioners and sufferers alike probably would recognise today as The Black Dog: bipolar disorder; manic depression. He was also epileptic. There’s a walk that visitors can do marking some of those works from locations that could have been the spots where the artist painted them.
There’s a grove of olive trees. The Alpilles hills behind with two holes bored through them by the elements. Stands of irises.

An olive grove by the St Paul's asylum near St Remy.

The same trees captured by van Gogh?

Another is Starry Night, a work van Gogh painted of the night sky around St Remy, perhaps his most popularly famous work since its immortalisation in the Don McLean song Vincent (Starry, Starry Night) and its adaptation later by Elton John for the funeral of Princess Diana.

Now, when the layperson thinks of van Gogh, they think, “Starry, starry night, paint your oalette blue and grey … “, and on to, “ … the world was never meant for one as beautiful as you …”

According to René Foveau in his booklet, van Gogh (Sté PEC, 1996), available from tourist stores in Arles and St Remy, the setting of Starry Night remains an unknown Provencal village. The St Remy guide says it was painted from memory. But in the middle of the work is a church and steeple in a setting looking uncannily like that captured, at the time unwittingly by this ignorant tourist, in a photograph from the lookout at Glanum.
Indeed, Starry Night could be a montage of settings around St Remy, given the similarity of the hills in the background to those backing onto the asylum.

Realising this, a sensation runs through the body. Half the appreciation of art is relating to it, and being in the locations, experiencing the built and natural landscapes directly, the plants and activities, is a reasonably effective way of relating.

Now, philistines compared with some of our cobbers, we become interested in van Gogh.

There are locations, structures, and landscapes all around St Remy and Arles which van Gogh used for his works during his stays in the south of Provence, and we can experience them.

Foveau describes the Arles garden as “reproduced”, but it is in the same location, within the same building, Arles’s Hotel Dieu.

The other Starry Night, the one van Gogh painted over the Rhon at Arles. But painted (September 1888) before his Starry Night around St Remy (June 1889).

Just near our accommodation in Arles is the spot on the banks of the Rhóne from where van Gogh painted his other starry night work, Starry Night over the Rhóne, looking down the river with Arles on the left bank and the stars spread out before him. We stood at what we estimated might have been the very spot from where the artist conceived this work, over the road from where he’d lived in Arles in 1888-89, in “The Yellow House”.

The Yellow House, was destroyed by bombing in 1944, but the railway bridge in the background astride Avenue de Stalingrad remains.

South of Arles, a kilometre or two from town, is the bridge van Gogh used in “The Drawbridge”. In the centre of the old town, in Place du Forum, is Le Café la Nuit the subject of “Café at Night, Place du Forum”, where the artist whiled away time, but looking almost exactly as represented by the artist save for the modernist canopy now hung from its front wall.

“The Shop” is on the corner of the block in which these words are being written now. It’s location is right outside our window.

Irises outside St Paul's near St Remy.

Sitting one night after the bull “races” in a café across from Arles’s Roman arena, we watched the day disappear and the night settle.

The arena’s lights came up highlighting the rough and weathered pale stone. The sky darkened behind it and through its arches and, across the street, the new moon leapt from turret to turret. The sky melded into a rich electric blue, en route from the pale of day to night’s navy.

It was the light that attracted van Gogh to Arles, we’re told, and the light’s effect on colours. We can relate to that.

St Remy info (www.saintremy-de-provence.com)
Arles info (www.arlestourisme.com)