Vincent Van Gogh Read online

  He described himself as being in “a frenzy of work,” painting the pear and plum orchards laden with pink, white, and purple blossoms, trying to capture their fullness before they faded, and using up more than a hundred tubes of color. Then, worried that Theo couldn't afford to send him extra money to buy more, he did a dozen or more pen-and-ink drawings, mailing them off for his brother's approval.

  Vincent had experimented briefly with a reed pen back in Nuenen. Now he found that the reeds, which grew in abundance in the marshes around Arles, were even better for his drawings. The reed pen allowed him to make the broad, flat strokes that imitated the fluid lines of Japanese artists, “Their work is simple as breathing, and they do a figure in a few sure strokes with the same ease as if it were as simple as buttoning your coat,” he wrote. In his drawings of Arles, the jabs, dots, and hatching demonstrate a quick, flowing energy that would be characteristic of his style.

  Not only was his painting unconventional, but in town Vincent himself was viewed an odd figure. In his old clothes and floppy hat, weighted down with all his equipment, wandering about at odd hours, especially at night, he didn't try to blend in with the local population. To paint outside in the dark, he rigged up a hat rimmed with candles and set up his easel on a street corner. Stars glimmered in the real sky and on the-canvas. Flames flickered on his hat. “The night is more alive, more richly colored than the day,” he said. This image of Vincent might seem romantic and amusing, but the townspeople of Arles were not used to artists. The adults saw him as bizarre, and the teenage boys jeered and made fun of him as he crept by, his head lowered and his back “loaded like a porcupine” with painting equipment.

  The townspeople also viewed foreigners as legitimate targets for fleecing. Vincent regarded this custom fairly tolerantly, as one of the evils of a poor local economy—until his innkeeper tried to charge extra to store his canvases and then locked up his art supplies. Vincent took him to court and won, but he'd had enough of the inn and began hunting for a place of his own.

  He soon found a space that suited him. “My house here is painted the yellow color of fresh butter on the outside with glaringly green shutters; it stands in the full sunlight in a square which has a green garden with plane trees, oleanders, and acacias. And it is completely whitewashed inside, and the floor is made of red tiles. And over it is the intensely blue sky. In this I can live and breathe, meditate, and paint.” Unlike the dark, furniture-crammed houses of his relatives in Holland, the yellow house was simple, fresh, and carefully arranged by Vincent, from the white walls to the paintings he chose to hang. “This is a real artist's house,” he said. The bathroom was in the building next door, but Vincent didn't view that as a big problem. He spent the money his brother sent him to furnish the two bedrooms with sturdy wooden beds, then followed it up with a letter asking for more, which, of course, softhearted Theo provided.

  With his housing problems solved, Vincent felt upbeat. In his newly arranged studio at the yellow house, he had a place to paint when a raging mistral forced him inside. He continued his experiments with color, attempting to paint two still lifes of a table with a pot of flowers and other objects with “six different blues and four or five yellows and oranges.” On sunny days he ventured out into the countryside to paint the fields and views of the town.

  He was eager to find new subjects, so in early June he set off to see the Mediterranean for the first time. He traveled by a type of horse-drawn carriage called a diligence through the Camargue, where wild white horses roamed the countryside, to the fishing village of Stes.-MArles-de-la-Mer. There he found one of his most popular images. Boats on the Beach was completed in his studio in Arles, but his description of the preliminary study tells the story of a breakthrough in his work. He had noticed the brightly colored little boats, but as the fishermen put out to sea so early, he had time only to do a drawing. Proudly he sent it off to Theo, saying, “The Japanese draw quickly, very quickly like a lightning flash.… I have only been here a few months, but tell me this—could I, in Paris, have done the drawing of the boats in an hour?” Instead of using a tool to draw in perspective, he wrote, “this is done without measuring, just by letting my pen go'

  Back in Arles in 1888, there was such a blazing sun that some of the farmers began their harvest early. Vincent, in a fever of creativity, painted canvas after canvas of the fields and crops around Arles. He would go out at daybreak and paint nonstop until sunset, striving for what he called “the high yellow note”—vivid color and emotion in perfect harmony. The color yellow had a special significance for Vincent. It stood for life and energy.

  The drawing skills he'd labored for years to acquire in The Hague and Nuenen enabled him to paint with amazing speed—so quickly, in fact, that he justified it in a letter to Theo. “I must warn you that everyone will think that I work too fast. Don't you believe a word of it.… If the emotions are sometimes so strong that one works without knowing one works, then one must remember that it has not always been so, and that in time to come there will be hard days, empty of inspiration.” Vincent feared he would run out of steam and suffer from painter's block.

  But that was one problem he would never encounter. During one swelteringly hot week in June, Vincent produced ten paintings, and five drawings of the harvest. “Landscapes yellow—old gold—done quickly, quickly, quickly, in a hurry, just like the harvester, who is silent under the blazing sun, intent only upon his reaping.” He constantly criticized and devaluated the work, his quest for “the high yellow note” bringing its dissatisfactions along with its triumphs. Of the triumphs, his greatest one up to that point was the painting he called simply Harvest at le Crau—a field of corn on the fertile plain called the Crau, painted in full sunshine from a Kill.

  The strain of these long, overwrought days affected his health. He wrote, “When I come home after a spell like that, I assure you my head is so tired that if that kind of work keeps recurring, as. it has done since this harvest began, I become hopelessly absentminded and incapable of doing heaps of ordinary things.” Then he confessed, “The only thing to bring ease and distraction is to sedate oneself by smoking heavily and drinking”—this despite his deteriorating health.

  It was inevitable that he would crash, that he was headed for a complete breakdown, but he continued driving himself. With the same manic energy, he had pursued teaching, preaching, and missionary work without success; now he pursued painting. He had found what he was meant to do. “Left to myself, I rely on my intoxication with work … and then I let myself go without limits.” He maintained that to be a real artist he had to push himself over the edge: “The more I am spent, ill, a broken pitcher, the more I become an artist, creator, in this revival of the arts.” Yet when he was painting, he experienced a happiness that eluded him in the rest of his life. The paintings celebrated his elation. The artist, who had written earlier that his brushstrokes had no system, was producing works in a style that would forever be unique to him, even those canvases without his now-famous signature, the single name Vincent.

  I would like to paint in such a way that everybody,

  at least if they had eyes, would see it.

  —LETTER TO THEO, AUGUST 1888

  IN HIS BRIGHT BLUE postman's uniform with gold buttons, Vincent's new friend, Joseph Roulin, sat stiffly posing for his portrait. Vincent thought the postman looked like Socrates, with his large head, ruddy cheeks, and long salt-and-pepper beard. He painted quickly, as Roulin could hardly contain himself. His wife had just delivered a baby girl, and he was “proud as a peacock and aglow with satisfaction.” He promised Vincent he could paint the baby in her cradle, and then he proceeded to sing the “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, in a terrible voice, vowing to christen his daughter at home instead of at church. Vincent thought him more inter-esting than anyone he'd met in Arles. When he finished the portrait, the Roulins invited him to stay for supper. Roulin, after a bottle of wine, expounded on his socialist politics and offered the younge
r artist advice about life. For Vincent, who long ago had lost faith in his own father, Roulin, “so wise and so trustful,” became a father figure: “Roulin has a salient gravity and tenderness for me such as an old soldier might have for a young one.” He painted eight versions of the postman, as well as portraits of Mrs. Roulin and their two sons. Despite his poverty, Roulin refused to be paid, so Vincent ended up buying him food and many drinks at the local café. He also gave the Roulins paintings. Spending time with them helped Vincent feel less lonely, more a part of a family life he missed.

  Also at this time Vincent painted a flamboyant portrait of a soldier of the Algerian infantry, whom he gleefully described as “a man with a small face, a bull neck, and the eye of a tiger.” The soldier faces the viewer in full Zouave uniform. His legs, clad in wild red pantaloons, are spread wide, taking up a fourth of the canvas. Vincent liked the style of this portrait—“vulgar, loud”—in opposition to the overly refined portraits that the rich commissioned in Paris. He painted his other friend in the regiment, Paul-Eugène Milliet, but complained that the young, handsome soldier was a bad poser and too much of a womanizer to sit still. Milliet probably wouldn't get the girls, Vincent grumbled to Theo, if he were an artist.

  Though he often forgot mealtimes when he painted, Vincent was concerned about eating properly and wrote to Theo that he'd finally found a café that served decent food. Near his yellow house, the Café de la Gare was run by Mr. and Mrs. Ginoux. He painted her as a classically beautiful Arlesienne wearing an elegant black dress.

  He also spent some nights living at a cheap inn, the Café Alcazar, before his yellow house was completed. The bar was open all night and attracted the “night prowlers,” who had no money for lodging. Before long Vincent started on a painting of the interior, staying up for three nights and sleeping all day. He started it as a joke because, he said, he had paid the landlord so much money that he would “paint his whole rotten joint to repay himself” The Night Café, which he called “one of the ugliest I have done” because of the harsh contrasts of reds and greens, was explained in detail in a letter to Theo. Charming interiors painted by the Impressionists or the grand settings of the court painters held no interest for Vincent. “In my picture I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, commit crimes. In short I have tried to express the powers of darkness in a low public-housing, by using soft Louis XV green and emerald green, contrasting with yellow-greens and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere of pale sulfur, like a devil's furnace.”

  A few painters passed through Arles, and one of them, the Belgian Eugène Boch, captured Vincent's imagination. They hiked, debated about art, and watched bullfights in the Roman amphitheater. In Boch he found the model he sought for a painting of a dreamer using exaggerated colors against a starry sky, with his face pale against the deep blue “like the mysterious brightness of a pale star in the infinite.” The fanciful background of stars represented the character of an artist-poet to Vincent, who wrote, “I want to say something comforting, as music is comforting. I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal.” Seeking to infuse his portraits with a lasting quality, he was returning to sentiments he'd held in Holland before “I knew the Impressionists.”

  Boch, with his “face like a razor blade” and “very sensible ideas,” according to Vincent, had plans to go to the Borinage to paint the coal miners. Vincent encouraged him, as he hoped Boch would start an artists' commune there. This could be a counterpart in the north to the one he dreamed of putting in place in his yellow house. It was criminal, he said, that young artists in Paris struggled so hard to survive, thus falling prey to a decadent life. In Arles, surrounded by natural beauty, he fantasized that artists would bond like brothers, sharing ex-penses, ideas, and eventually profits from the collective sale of their works. The group would forge a new direction in art, one that would surpass the spontaneous imagery of the Impressionists and convey a deeper feeling. This fantasy centered on the artist Paul Gauguin, whose work he admired above all his contemporArles. With Gauguin's help, he believed, his artists' colony could work, but first Vincent had to persuade him to move to Arles.

  Vincent considered Gauguin a hero for his reckless but courageous decision to give up an affluent life to be an artist. As a teenager, Gauguin had run off to serve as a cabin boy on a ship. When he returned to Paris, he worked his way up as a stockbroker, enabling himself and his wife and their five children to live lavishly. In his spare time he studied painting, exhibiting a few pictures and winning critical praise. With typical bravado he quit his job to pursue art, and in less than three years he lost everything. His family left him and fled to his wife's native Denmark. Borrowing money from a friend, Gauguin moved from Paris to a village in Brittany, where his distinctive painting style slowly evolved.

  But four years later Gauguin, now forty-four, ill and deeply in debt, wrote to Theo asking for help. Letters went back and forth from Paris to Arles to Brittany as Vincent lobbied Gauguin to join forces with him and persuade Theo to bankroll the artists' colony venture. Finally they struck a deal. Gauguin would go to Arles, and Theo would send him 150 francs a month in exchange for paintings. Vincent was overjoyed at the thought of having a companion, someone who would make his life less lonely. In preparation for Gauguin's arrival, he decorated the house, hanging his best paintings in the guest room, including two dazzling still lifes of sunflowers painted as variations on the color yellow. They had to be painted quickly, “for the flowers fade so soon, and the thing is to do the whole in one rush.” Vincent, extremely satisfied with these works, said, “If by the time I am forty I have done a figure piece as good as those flowers … I shall be the equal of any artist.” He even suggested to Theo that it would be a good idea to make cheap prints of the sunflowers to brighten the rooms of working people.

  His pride in the yellow house led him to spend his whole al-lowance fixing it up for his friend. He rushed to finish paintings, “living on twenty-three cups of coffee, with bread that I still have to pay for.” He had gas lines run downstairs to light the main room so that they could work in the evenings. Frantic to impress Gauguin, he had “no time to think or feel; I just go on painting like a steam engine.”

  To give Theo some idea of the interior, Vincent painted a picture of his bedroom. Unlike the garish Night Café, Vincent's Bedroom at Arles offers a lighter mood with softer, more soothing colors. “Color is to do everything… and is to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, looking at the picture ought to rest the brain, or rather the imagination.” To achieve this sense of calm, he used paler complementary colors—walls of blue violet, a butter yellow chair and bed, a scarlet coverlet, sheets and pillows of yellowish green, an orange washstand, and a blue washbasin. He painted no shadows and no stippling, as the picture was meant to be in the flat tints of Japanese prints. This remained one of his favorite paintings, and he copied it three times, with one copy intended for his mother, one for Theo to sell, and the other to save. In his letters he continued to remind Theo that his best work must be kept intact.

  In the fall Gauguin sent his trunk ahead to Arles and soon arrived himself by the night train. He first went to the café, where the landlord recognized him from the self-portrait he had sent to Vincent. If Vincent presumed that his friend would be overwhelmed by the yellow house and especially by his paintings, he was in for a big disappointment. Gauguin said almost nothing about either, except to write years later that what struck him was how messy the house looked. “Between two such beings as he and I, the one a perfect volcano, the other boiling inwardly too, a sort of struggle was preparing. In the first place, everywhere and in everything I found a disorder that shocked me. His color box could never contain all those tubes, crowded together and never closed.” Most likely Gauguin was shocked by the power and skill of Vincent's new work. He hadn't expected such competition.

  At first the two artists enjoyed each other's company
. To Vincent's delight, Gauguin took over the cooking and the household accounts, as he was more organized. They worked side by side in the vineyard, in the public garden, and in the fields, facing in opposite directions, painting one great canvas after another. At night in the cafés they discussed art over dinner and many drinks.

  Gauguin encouraged Vincent to paint from his imagination instead of from life. Vincent wrote, “Gauguin has more or less proved to me that it is time I was varying my work a little. I am beginning to compose from memory.” Vincent's passion at the time was robust, heightened color; Gauguin's was imagining his subjects from memory. Although both men believed that the artist's role was to move beyond imitating nature to a deeper construction of reality, their styles and techniques differed. Vincent favored thick paint and vigorous brushstrokes. Gauguin used thin, flat planes of strong color and simplified shapes, giving his painting a dreamlike quality.

  Vincent could take advice from the older artist on his work, but he remained his obstinate self. “Our arguments are terribly electric, sometimes we come out of them with our heads as exhausted as a used electric battery.” By December Gauguin pronounced Arles a filthy dump and its inhabitants ugly. Vincent wrote, “I think myself that Gauguin was a little out of sorts with the good town of Arles, the little yellow house, where we work, and especially with me.” The truth was that Gauguin had never been enthralled with the idea of an artists' commune. He'd needed some immediate financial support and saw Arles as a stopping-off point before he sailed for Tahiti. Vincent had put his hopes on a man who was basically self-absorbed and out for himself.

  The two paintings Vincent did of his own wooden chair and Gauguin's fancier armchair, the seats empty except for objects symbolic of the artists' very different personalities, represent Vincent's sadness at the situation. The chairs also work as portraits of the two artists. Gauguin is represented by a candlestick, two modern French novels, and a richly textured carpet to indicate his vitality and sophistication. Vincent's more modest chair holds his pipe and tobacco. Onions sprouting from a wooden box emphasize his affinity with the simpler, rural life. But if Vincent intended the paintings to convince Gauguin to stay, they made no difference. Gauguin had informed Theo of his imminent departure. Vincent's yearning to have a companionable housemate as well as “a colorists' school in the south” was merely a pipe dream. Gauguin lapsed into stony silence, and no matter how hard Vincent tried to please him, the older artist remained surly and uncommunicative.