About The Yellow House

The Yellow House tells the moving human story behind a pair of the most influential and explosive housemates in art history – Vincent Van Gogh (John Simm) and Paul Gauguin (John Lynch).

For just nine weeks, in late 1888, Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin share a home, The Yellow House, in Arles, southern France. Approaching middle age and still flat broke, both men abandon respectability, family and friends to commit themselves utterly to painting, united by an unshakable belief in the importance of Art. They endure what most people would find intolerable – loneliness, insecurity, and the total lack of any financial or worldly comfort. Their last hope is each other – if only they can get along.

When they move in together they hardly know each other. But as their relationship rapidly intensifies, it shifts from brothers of the brush, to very best of friends, to being like a marriage, to professional rivals. They drink. They argue. They whore. They bicker. They love each other; and they fear each other. Gauguin rightly worries that Van Gogh is on the brink of a psychological crisis; Van Gogh claims Gauguin puts too much salt in the stew.

Throughout it all, they paint together. This despite the clash between Van Gogh savage and noisy brushwork and Gauguin's reflective restraint being so severe they can barely work in the same room. In just nine weeks of this penniless, fraught obscurity they produce between them over forty acknowledged masterpieces – with a combined current value of almost a billion pounds.

The relationship finally ends in an iconic and bloody climax – when Van Gogh cuts off his own ear. But was it Gauguin's fault? Or did Gauguin, as he claims, do everything he could to help his friend? As their relationship starts to spiral rapidly downhill, so does Van Gogh's mental state, culminating in a bloody climax when he cuts off his own ear. Eighteen months after leaving The Yellow House, Van Gogh shot himself, bleeding to death over several days. Years later, Gauguin died, a syphilitic, in self-imposed exile in Tahiti.