Vincent van Gogh: The Yellow House (1888)
Oil on canvas (72 cm x 91.5 cm)
Apparently, yellow is not a popular colour amongst 21st-century Europeans and Americans who, when surveyed, placed it way behind blue, red, and green. In fact, more people named it as their least favourite colour than their best-loved.
That surprises me, as I've always liked the colour yellow and all the things that are coloured yellow; from
stars to sunflowers, ducklings to daffodils.
Painters too have always had a thing for yellow and it was one of the primary colours used in prehistoric cave art; the yellow horse of Lascaux was painted 17,000 years before Franz Marc gave us his famous blue horses.
If the English Romantic painter Turner was one of the first 19th-century artists to use yellow to suggest moods and emotions, it's the great Dutch post-Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh who is probably the painter most associated with the colour.
During his period in the South of France (1888-1899), Van Gogh celebrated yellow in all its shades, from pale lemon to bright sulpher yellow. He even famously lived in house painted yellow and - it is believed by some - once attempted suicide by consuming yellow paint.
I don't know if that's true; and nor do I know if Van Gogh suffered from a rare medical condition - xanthopsia - which can alter perceptions of colour and give the world a yellowish glow. I doubt it. And I prefer anyway to think that Van Gogh, who was well-versed in colour theory, simply loved yellow for its emotional intensity (its joy and vitality).
Perhaps, in the end, too much yellow - like too much sunlight and too much reason - can become overwhelming and end in madness. But a world without yellow would be immensely poorer and duller.
And so that's why I'm going to paint my kitchen yellow ...
A Lick of Yellow Paint
(SA/2024)
