Saint-Remy-de-Provence
— the wheat field beneath van Gogh's window.
Not only on a wall.
Saint-Remy-de-Provence, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A small town in the Alpilles, surrounded by olive groves, almond orchards, and Roman stones. Van Gogh spent a year here at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, the former monastery on the southern edge of town, and painted the wheat field from his bedroom window. The cypress trees still move the way he painted them. On Wednesdays the market fills the plane-tree squares; the rest of the week the streets stay quiet enough to hear the cicadas. South of town the Roman quarter at Glanum has been quietly weathering for two thousand years.
The place, in three passes.
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence is a small town in the Alpilles, a low limestone range in the Bouches-du-Rhône department of southern France, about 20 kilometres south of Avignon and 25 kilometres northeast of Arles. The town's population sits around 10,000, swelling each summer with visitors drawn to the Wednesday market, the surrounding olive groves and almond orchards, and two adjacent sites south of the centre: the Roman ruins of Glanum and the former monastery of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, where Vincent van Gogh admitted himself in May 1889 and painted some 150 works in a single year. Nostradamus was born in the town in 1503. The mistral, the cold north wind that defines Provence, comes down the Rhône valley and through the Alpilles in winter and early spring.
The light at Saint-Rémy is the same light that brought a procession of painters to Provence in the late 19th century. Van Gogh, in the last year of his life, made some of his most reproduced works from a single bedroom at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole: The Starry Night in June 1889, Irises in May 1889, Wheat Field with Cypresses in June 1889, the series of Olive Trees, and Wheat Field with a Reaper. He wrote to his brother Theo that the southern sun did something to colour he had not seen in the north, turning ochres into gold and shadows into violet. The clarity comes from the mistral, which scrubs the haze from the sky and leaves the air dry enough that distant ridges read sharp at noon.
A kilometre south of the town centre, two Roman monuments stand on what was the road from Glanum to Arles: the Mausoleum of the Julii, around 30 BCE, and the Arch of Glanum, around 20 BCE, together known as Les Antiques. Behind them lies Glanum itself, a Gallo-Greek then Roman settlement founded in the 6th century BCE around a sacred spring and abandoned in 260 CE after Alemannic raids. The site was buried under alluvium for nearly seventeen centuries and rediscovered in 1921; excavation continues. The Mausoleum is the best-preserved Roman funerary monument in France and one of the most complete in Europe. The limestone used at Glanum was quarried from the Alpilles themselves; the same stone walls many of the town's older houses.
