Vincent is known as a passionate artist with powerful emotions. This is certainly the picture you get from his letters. He wrote to his brother Theo with fiery enthusiasm about his sometimes wild plans. Many of them came to nothing. But Vincent never gave up. He picked himself up and made new plans.

The 33-year-old Vincent arrived in Paris in 1886 with hopeful expectations for the future. He saw a great deal of new art and made friends with young artists.

However, two years later the city had lost its appeal for him. Vincent found the art world too competitive. Furthermore, his health suffered from the combination of his particular lifestyle and the cold winters. He felt sick and depressed.

It had become impossible for Vincent to work in the city. He conceived a new plan: to create a place for like-minded artists in a warmer climate. In February 1888, Vincent boarded a train bound for Provence in the South of France.

Vincent disembarked from the train in Arles. His new surroundings lifted his spirits. The landscape in the South of France inspired him, with its blossoming trees, vineyards, and wheatfields. He felt surrounded by colour and painted non-stop.

‘I’m in a fury of work as the trees are in blossom and I wanted to do a Provence orchard of tremendous gaiety.’

In Arles Vincent painted at the height of his powers. As a true ‘colourist’, he harnessed the expressive power of colour and produced bold colour combinations. He used colour for the effective rendering of specific emotions.

Besides painting, Van Gogh also worked on fulfilling his dream of creating a ‘Studio of the South’. This would be a place for artists to live and work together. Vincent wrote an impassioned letter about the project to Theo, hoping that his brother would finance it.

‘For many reasons I’d like to be able to create a pied-à-terre which, when people were exhausted, could be used to provide a rest in the country for poor Paris cab-horses, the poor Impressionists.’

When he had been in Arles for about four months, Vincent found a small house painted yellow, which he saw as an ideal artists’ retreat. '(...) the way I envisage it, the house will be just full of paintings from top to bottom.'

In the autumn of 1888, Vincent finally welcomed his first guest at the Yellow House: the painter Paul Gauguin.

The arrival of Gauguin sent Van Gogh’s head spinning with high expectations and enthusiastic plans. Referring to Gauguin, he wrote that he was ‘very, very interesting as a man, and I have every confidence that with him we’ll do a great many things.’

Initially the two artists worked side by side in amicable harmony. But the situation soon began to deteriorate. Their debates about art sometimes became bad-tempered. As time went on, the tension increased.

Vincent suspected that Gauguin wanted to leave. ‘I myself think that Gauguin had become a little disheartened by the good town of Arles, by the little yellow house where we work, and above all by me’, he wrote on 11 December.

On 23 December 1888 there was a fierce quarrel, after which Vincent, in profound agitation, cut off his left ear. Gauguin immediately left for Paris.

The episode in which Vincent cut off his ear marked the beginning of his illness. His physician thought he had epilepsy, caused by too much coffee and alcohol and too little food.

Nowadays the diagnosis would tend towards psychosis. Further mental collapses soon followed. It is agonising to read, in Vincent’s letters, of the fears and doubts with which he was grappling, while at the same time trying to retain hope.

Eventually Vincent could no longer cope with living alone in the Yellow House. He had no choice but to accept the crushing reality of his illness. He had to renounce his dream of an artists’ community. In May 1889, Vincent had himself voluntarily admitted to a psychiatric institution.

The sixteen months in Arles had been an emotional roller-coaster. But in spite of its tragic ending, painting continued to give Vincent comfort and something to hold onto.