A long-standing mystery surrounding one of Vincent van Gogh's most famous paintings has been solved by researchers at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The puzzling piles of material depicted in the foreground of "The Yellow House" (September 1888) were not related to gas pipe installation as previously believed, but were actually sand used for cleaning horse manure from the streets of Arles.
The painting shows van Gogh's cozy home in Arles set beneath a magnificent deep-blue sky, but the messy piles heaped along the road in the foreground have long seemed distracting and out of place. For over two decades, art historians accepted an explanation offered during a 2000 exhibition that suggested these piles represented construction work for installing gas pipes. This theory seemed logical since van Gogh had wanted gas lighting in his studio to enable evening painting sessions, especially with Paul Gauguin's anticipated arrival.
The gas pipe theory gained credibility from van Gogh's own correspondence. On October 17, 1888, three weeks after completing the painting and six days before Gauguin's arrival, van Gogh wrote to his colleague: "I've had gas put in the studio, so that we'll have good light in winter." This timing appeared to support the construction work explanation for the mysterious piles in his painting.
However, Teio Meedendorp, senior researcher at the Van Gogh Museum, has debunked this theory in a paper recently published on the museum's website. Meedendorp points out that gas lighting installation would not have required digging up the entire road outside the Yellow House, as most of the work would have occurred inside the building with just a simple connection to the street. Furthermore, gas mains had already been laid in Arles' main roads by 1881, and street lighting was already in place, as evidenced by the prominent lamp visible on the far-left side of van Gogh's painting.
The real answer lies in historical postcards from 1902 that Meedendorp discovered during his research. A postcard showing the south side of Place Lamartine (the Yellow House was on the north side) reveals a similar pile parallel to the road's edge, with a man holding a shovel visible at the far end. The man is clearly cleaning up horse manure that had been dropped in front of one of the main city entrances, along the route from the railway station.
As Meedendorp explains, the worker in the postcard is "cleaning up the dung—mostly that of horses—deposited every day in the street," with droppings clearly visible in the foreground. He adds that "the street behind the man has already been cleaned and spread with a fresh layer of sand to absorb the urine and loose manure left by the passing animals." A second 1902 postcard showing the north side of Place Lamartine, including the Yellow House itself, also shows lumps of manure dotting the road.
The timing of van Gogh's painting coincides perfectly with changes in Arles' street cleaning practices. In August 1888, just one month before van Gogh created "The Yellow House," the Arles municipal council outsourced street cleaning to a new company specifically to deal with "dung and sweepings." This suggests that the manure problem was significant enough to require professional management.
The question remains why van Gogh chose to include such mundane urban maintenance in his beloved painting of home. Meedendorp suggests that the problem of dealing with manure just outside his front door and studio window simply seemed like part of everyday life at the time. The artist may have viewed these practical elements as integral to the honest depiction of his neighborhood.
Interestingly, the postcards reveal that horses weren't the only source of waste management concerns in 1888 Arles. The south side of Place Lamartine featured a prominent cast-iron pissoir—a public urinal that was then a relatively recent addition to French provincial street scenes. While such facilities might seem like curious inclusions in greeting postcards by today's standards, they were considered normal and even signs of municipal modernity in van Gogh's era.
This new interpretation of "The Yellow House" adds another layer to our understanding of van Gogh's artistic approach, showing how he incorporated the practical realities of 19th-century urban life into his romanticized vision of home. Rather than idealizing his surroundings, the artist chose to include the less glamorous but essential aspects of daily life in Arles, creating a more authentic and complete portrait of his world.
