Field with Flowers Near Arles (1888) by Vincent Van Gogh.Van Gogh moved to Arles on February 21, 1888 and took a room at the Hotel-Restaurant Carrel. Van Gogh was a smoker, with a smoker’s hack. He didn’t eat well, and did not take care of himself. The tortured artist was “dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable”, and “very ugly, ungracious, impolite, sick” according to Jeanne Louise Calment, who died at the (world record of) age of 122 in 1997. She was also a local who knew the artist in his prime when she was a young teenager.