Van Gogh’s Muse: Arles France
Updated: Aug 28
Some towns seem to know they’re beautiful. Arles doesn’t really strike me that way, and I think that may be part of why I liked it so much. It has Roman ruins, medieval streets, colorful buildings, old stone walls, and enough history to keep almost anyone happily wandering for days, but it isn’t polished in the way some towns in southern France can be. There are places where the paint is faded, where the buildings look a little tired, and where the edges are rougher than what you might find in a postcard-perfect village. I enjoy a little grit and rusticity, and Arles has just enough of both to make it feel real rather than overly manicured.
I’ll confess that before we came, I mostly knew Arles because of Vincent van Gogh. He’s one of my favorite artists, along with Monet and Cézanne, and I knew he had spent about fifteen months here after leaving Paris. It was one of the most productive periods of his life, and the landscape, light, streets, cafes, and surrounding countryside inspired hundreds of paintings and drawings. That alone made me curious to see the town through his eyes, and once we arrived, I began to understand why Arles had such a hold on him.
Van Gogh had an extraordinary gift for taking what most of us might walk past without much thought and turning it into something unforgettable. A café terrace, a bedroom, a chair, a field, a river at night, sunflowers in a vase - none of these subjects had to be grand for him to find something powerful in them. He had this remarkable ability to make the ordinary feel alive, and I think Arles is best experienced in much the same way. The city has even created a walking route that takes visitors to some of the places he painted, and there’s something quite moving about standing in a place he once stood and then looking at what he created from it.
What struck me most was the difference between simply seeing a place and truly seeing it. Van Gogh wasn’t merely recording reality; he was translating it. A river became luminous. A café became electric with color. A field became motion. A night sky became something almost alive. Standing in Arles, it’s hard not to wonder how often we move through our own lives without really noticing what is in front of us because we’re waiting for beauty to announce itself in some grander way. Van Gogh didn’t seem to need that. He found it in chairs, streets, faces, rooms, fields, and trees, and perhaps that is one of the reasons his work still affects us so deeply.
Arles, of course, carries stories much older than Van Gogh. Long before he arrived, the city had been an important Roman settlement and eventually became one of the major centers of Roman Provence. The amphitheater, ancient theater, baths, and other monuments that remain today are reminders of just how significant the city once was. What I always find remarkable in places like this is how naturally those ruins sit inside modern life. You can walk past a café, turn a corner, and suddenly find yourself standing in front of a Roman amphitheater that has been there for nearly two thousand years. History isn’t separated from daily life here; it’s simply woven into it.
There’s something wonderfully humbling about that. We think of our own lives as enormously important while we’re living them, and of course they are, but a place like Arles reminds us that cities outlive generations, empires, governments, wars, religions, and countless versions of what people once believed would last forever. And still, morning comes. Someone opens a shop. Someone orders coffee. Someone walks a dog. Someone takes a photograph. Life keeps moving forward around structures that have already witnessed more history than any of us can imagine.
Arles also has a deep connection to photography, which made me like it even more. Each summer, the city hosts Les Rencontres de la Photographie, one of Europe’s most important photography festivals. Photographers from around the world gather there, exhibitions fill different spaces throughout the town, and the city becomes a kind of open conversation about seeing. That feels especially appropriate for Arles because, in a way, Van Gogh came here for the same reason. He wanted to see differently. Photographers arrive today hoping to do much the same.
And maybe that is what Arles offers best - not perfection, but perspective. It asks you to slow down enough to notice the faded wall, the old doorway, the way late-afternoon light falls across stone, the shadow beneath an arch, the Roman arena still standing while the modern city moves around it, or the café that looks ordinary until something about the angle, the color, or the light makes you stop. That’s the kind of beauty I’m increasingly drawn to. Not always the grand and obvious kind, but the kind that requires a little participation from us.
By the time we left, I understood a little better why Van Gogh had been so inspired here. It wasn’t simply because Arles was beautiful. It was because there was so much to see if you were paying attention. And perhaps that’s the larger gift - not just of Arles and not just of Van Gogh, but of learning to look more carefully at the world around us.
The extraordinary is often hiding inside the ordinary. Sometimes all we need to do is slow down long enough to notice it.
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