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In February 1888, it took Vincent van Gogh 18 hours to reach Arles from Paris by train. Once there, he found a room at the Hotel Carrel just inside the city’s medieval walls and began to paint. The swirling incandescent works that he created over the following two years, ageless paintings like Sunflowers and The Starry Night, have come to define the very idea of art, but Van Gogh met a nemesis of sorts in Provence. After his hopes of forming an artist’s colony with Paul Gauguin were dashed the Dutch artist mutilated his own ear, ended up in the city’s hospital and then, turbulent genius overwhelmed by mental illness, the asylum at nearby St Remy. Or so the legend goes.
