Sunday, April 09, 2023

Pg. 99: Linda Seidel's "Vincent's Arles"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Vincent's Arles: As It Is and as It Was by Linda Seidel.

About the book, from the publisher:
A vivid tour of the town of Arles, guided by one of its most famous visitors: Vincent van Gogh.

Once admired as “a little Rome” on the banks of the Rhône, the town of Arles in the south of France had been a place of significance long before the painter Vincent van Gogh arrived in February of 1888. Aware of Arles’s history as a haven for poets, van Gogh spent an intense fifteen months there, scouring the city’s streets and surroundings in search of subjects to paint when he wasn’t thinking about other places or lamenting his woeful circumstances.

In Vincent’s Arles, Linda Seidel serves as a guide to the mysterious and culturally rich town of Arles, taking us to the places immortalized by van Gogh and cherished by innumerable visitors and pilgrims. Drawing on her extensive expertise on the region and the medieval world, Seidel presents Arles then and now as seen by a walker, visiting sites old and new. Roman, Romanesque, and contemporary structures come alive with the help of the letters the artist wrote while in Arles. The result is the perfect blend of history, art, and travel, a chance to visit a lost past and its lingering, often beautiful, traces in the present.
Learn more about Vincent's Arles at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Vincent's Arles.

--Marshal Zeringue