Van Gogh’s beautiful paintings of a tourist trap (Photos)

In the year 1888, Vincent Van Gogh is living in southern France near Arles. He is staying in his now-famous yellow house. In the autumn of that year, fellow painter Paul Gauguin joins him and the two spend several months painting together before they have a falling-out (resulting in the ear mutilation incident). His time in Arles is particularly productive, and he’s able to paint 184 paintings in a period of just a little over one year.

Van Gogh paints his sunflowers here, seascapes, orchards in bloom, portraits of his friends, and the cafe around the corner. Much of his painting from this period is drenched in sunshine and warm air. It glows with golden hues and reflect his happiness.

Van Gogh’s art has gone through development over his life. He is becoming increasingly abstract in his attempt to paint pure emotion. He wants to visualize emotion and share them on the canvas for all to see. In a letter, he writes, “I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.”

(See the PHOTO GALLERY at the end of this article to see full views of Van Gogh and Gauguin's paintings of the "tourist trap," Les Alyscamps.)

I think this is why Van Gogh's paintings are so beloved. He holds nothing back. His paintings are suffused with the desire to communicate with his viewers. Most of all, to show them his love.

Van Gogh is never a commercially successful painter, and yet he dedicates his life to art. Throughout his discouragement, mental illness, and quarrels with friends, he continues to paint. The only reason a man would be so persistent is if he is truly a man in love. Van Gogh is in love with beauty.

He wants everyone else to be in love with beauty, too. His desire is to make visible the hidden heart of the world, the fire blazing within that glows with divine heat. Van Gogh is so emotionally insistent that he often paints in a sort of daze. He admits, “The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it.” He’s overwhelmed. He wants us to feel what he feels and the only way to make us feel it is by trying to show us. Words aren’t enough.

This causes Van Gogh conflict throughout his personal life and career. He’s never able to dull his emotions enough to fit in with life-as-usual. He works quickly, in fits of rapture, desperate to capture the beauty he is seeing. The canvases that result are so far from the norm that they’re un-sellable. His brother is an art dealer in Paris and he has tried, he really has, but no one wants the paintings. People cannot see what Van Gogh sees. They take one look at his canvases and they’re just too much. Too much rawness, too much emotion, too much suffering.

Van Gogh is well aware that his emotional, unrelenting search for beauty is causing problems. He says, “If one has such an encounter it is to be expected it will bring him into conflict, especially conflict with himself, because one sometimes literally does not know what to do or what not to do.”

Later in his career, Van Gogh begins to deliberately seek the struggle and tries to leave his emotional reactions behind, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that he learns to purify those emotions and offer them up as a sacrifice to beauty. He knows that coming so close to beauty can burn a person up but is willing to risk it. This emotional and spiritual maturation will result in his greatest work, The Starry Night.

The night paintings come a few years later, though. In 1888, he’s still feverishly painting in heated reds and golds under the Arles sunshine. Summer wanes, as it always does, and the leaves begin to fall from the trees. Gauguin arrives in October and the two head out to paint together.

They walk to a tourist trap called Les Alyscamps, which is one an old Roman road leading to Arles. The road is flanked by ancient sarcophagi. It’s a city of the dead that is now used as a lover’s lane. Couples stroll along the road, which is lined with poplar trees, and linger on the steps of a chapel at the far end, of perhaps they stop and sit close to each other on the benches tucked in among the gravestones.

Van Gogh takes in the scene and starts painting. He ends up making four paintings of the place. Some include falling leaves, some depict the couples walking among the trees, one spoils the scene by revealing one of the nearby factories. They all show the trees and the graves. They’re all dominated by strong orange colors contrasted with the shadowing blue of the tombs. The visual impression the canvases create, the pure emotion of them, is dying love.

The lovers stroll in an artificially beautified tourist attraction. Even though it’s a burial site for the dead, the road has been intentionally curated to seem picturesque. It’s the kind of place people go to create social media content and take selfies. Essentially, it’s a backdrop.

It’s no accident that Van Gogh doesn’t paint the place during the summer. During summer, he’s out in the orchards and among the flowers. In the autumn, though, this lane among the tombs and lined on both sides by factories and ugliness, this place where dying leaves fall on the shoulders of lovers, this is what he wants to paint. The scene fits his mood. Here he is, an artist dying to share his love with the world and share the wonders he has seen, and no one cares. He’s already fighting with Gauguin. His canvases languish unsold. His masterpieces are met with shrugs.

He will continue painting, though, and I love these paintings of Les Alycamps not because of their autumnal sadness. I love them because even in the sadness and the dying away, even in this little road lined with death and the pollution of human productivity, there is beauty. The lovers Van Gogh paints are, of course, sincere. They are beacons of hope. Their love is leading them to the chapel. Perhaps it’s a nod to the sacrificial nature of married love.

To me the chapel brings to mind what happens on the altars of Catholic churches every single day, and how suffering is transformed there, every single day, into resurrected glory. Sacrifice is its own kind of beauty, and if the lover’s path winds through trees whose leaves are blazing red and orange, and if those trees look for all the world like burning bushes, well, wouldn’t that be a divine sign of the eternal love that awaits us?