Nerves on edge, Vincent began to act strangely. Gauguin wrote, “During the latter days of my stay, Vincent would become excessively rough and noisy, and then silent. On several nights I surprised him in the act of getting up and coming over to my bed.… It was enough for me to say quite sternly, ‘What's the matter with you?’ for him to go back to bed without a word and fall into a heavy sleep.”
Another time Vincent crept in, laughing madly, and wrote on the walls, “I am the Holy Spirit; my spirit is whole.” Gauguin went on to claim that Vincent had attacked him in a bar by throwing a glass of absinthe at his head and then had passed out. The next morning Vincent told Gauguin he had only a vague memory of what had happened.
On Christmas Eve, at dinner, Vincent and Gauguin probably drank too much wine and started arguing. Gauguin might have goaded Vincent about his inability to paint from memory or his lack of success with women. When he threatened again to leave Arles, Vincent became agitated and unruly. Gauguin took off alone to get some fresh air. As he headed across the Place Victor Hugo, he recognized Vincent's quick, short steps behind him. Vincent, reported Gauguin, looked quite mad and approached him in the street saying, “You are taciturn, I shall be likewise.” Gauguin gave him a piercing glare, and Vincent lowered his head and ran off toward home.
Alarmed, Gauguin checked into a small hotel nearby and went to bed. Vincent returned to the yellow house and slashed off his earlobe with a razor. After he stopped the bleeding, he stuck a large beret on his head and brought the severed ear, wrapped in newspaper, to a brothel that he and Gauguin frequented. Calling for a girl named Rachel, he handed this gory Christmas gift to her, saying, “Keep this object like a treasure.” Back at the house, he passed out in his bed and lay there unconscious until the police, who had heard about the incident, found him the next day.
Gauguin showed up around noon to find a crowd gathered outside in the street. He entered, stared at Vincent, lifeless and rolled in his sheets, and told the police, “Awaken this man with great care, and if he asks for me, tell him I left for Paris. The sight of me may prove fatal for him.” Gauguin actually returned to Paris a few days later with Theo, who had taken a train down to Arles to be with his brother. The two artists never saw each other again.
Vincent couldn't or wouldn't remember the details of this terrible night, but one thing is true: In a deranged or drunken moment, he forever marked his place in history as the mad artist who cut off his ear.
Within two weeks Vincent was discharged from the hospital. “I am completely recovered and am at work again and everything is normal,” he wrote to his mother and his sister Wil in Holland. And to his credit, he went back to the brothel and apologized to Rachel for the outrageous act he couldn't remember. She assured him that half the people in town were crazy and told him not to worry.
Back at the yellow house, he painted yet another self-portrait—a forlorn, resigned figure standing in his studio, a Japanese print in the background. With the familiar fur cap covering the top of his bandaged ear, Vincent stares out into space. “What happened?” he seems to ask. He painted several still lifes to prove to himself he could still work, and then turned to a painting he had begun before he was hospitalized, a portrait of Roulin's wife. He titled it La Berceuse (woman rocking a cradle) because she holds in her hands a rope for rocking an unseen cradle. He and Gauguin had read a book about the hard lives of Icelandic fishermen, and Vincent planned the painting as a response, so that the sailors in their fishing boats “would feel the old sense of being rocked come over them and remember their own lullabies.” The motherly, consoling figure was comforting to Vincent as he recovered from his illness. He wrote to Theo thait in his mind's eye he had visited every room in their childhood home, and had seen the views, the church, the kitchen garden, even the magpie's nest in a tall acacia in the graveyard. “Whether I really sang a lullaby in colors is something I leave to the critics.” He painted five versions of this portrait. After he let his model choose one, he gave a copy to Gauguin in trade, two to Theo to sell, and the other to Theo to keep.
Vincent reassured Theo that work and sensible living would cure him, but in spite of all his efforts, he was readmit-ted to the hospital within a month. This time he imagined that people were trying to poison him, that he heard voices. His cleaning woman, bewildered by his strange behavior—withdrawals into silence, alternating with wild outbursts—informed the police. Again he rallied, this time after ten days.
The villagers of Arles were not sympathetic, and his few friends were helpless to protect him. Bands of teenagers, whom he called “hooligans,” followed him in the streets and threw rocks at his house. “Crazy redhead,” they taunted, climbing up and peering in his windows as he crouched inside. Gossips swore he went around town shouting and grabbing women about their waists. The neighbors signed a petition claiming he was dangerous. They feared for their safety.
Busy in Paris, Theo was unable to come to his brother's rescue. His bosses at Goupil were unlikely to give him extra time off. More significant, just before Vincent's first attack, Theo had become engaged to Johanna (Jo) Bonger from Amsterdam, who was the sister of their good friend Andreis Bonger. Vincent realized that Theo's attention would be taken up by his new wife, but he wished him well.
“I assure you that I am much calmer since I picture that you have a companion for good. Above all, do not imagine that I am unhappy.” Once Vincent had counted upon leading a normal life with a wife and children, but at this point he knew it would never happen. Vincent implored Theo to do nothing, as he was “in full possession of my faculties and not a madman.… Let things be without meddling.”
The police locked him in a cell with a guard at the door. Shut in a small room with one window, he spent his days feeling helpless, like a caged animal. He tried to be patient, realizing that to rant and rave against the injustice would only build a case against him. “What a staggering blow between the eyes it was to find so many people here cowardly enough to join together against one man, and that man ill,” wrote Vincent, who always felt such compassion toward people in distress.
Paul Signac, a painter friend from Paris, was traveling to the south of France, and Theo asked him to look in on Vincent. Signac thought Vincent seemed fine, and he persuaded the authorities to let Vincent go out for a few hours so that they could visit the yellow house. The police had sealed the house, but Signac smashed the lock and forced it open. There, immersed in the shadows, were Vincent's paintings of sunflow-ers, landscapes, portraits, all created in the year since Signac had last seen him.
Many years later, the impressed artist wrote to another friend, “Imagine the splendor of those white washed walls, in which flowered those colorings in their full freshness. Throughout the day he spoke to me of painting, literature, socialism. In the evening, he was a little tired. There had been a terrific spell of mistral and that may have enervated him. He wanted to drink about a quart of essence of turpentine from the bottle that was standing there. It was high time to return to the asylum.”
Yet right after their visit, Signac wrote to Theo, telling him he had found Vincent in perfect health and sanity and quoting Vincent's doctor as suggesting that his patient needed only a tranquil place to work to avoid another attack. “How dismal the life he is living must be for him,” said the sympathetic Signac.
A month later Vincent was discharged from the hospital. Vincent's landlord, under pressure to find a new tenant, evicted him from the yellow house. With nowhere to live, Vincent's only option was to pack up his paintings, store some at Ginoux's inn, and ship the rest off to Theo in Paris, letting go forever of his dream of an artists' colony.
The doctor diagnosed Vincent's problem as seizures triggered by mental stress and poor physical condition. Three other doctors over a two-month period indicated that he was seriously ill. “M. Rey [Vincent's doctor] says that instead of eating enough and at regular times, I kept myself going on coffee and alcohoL I admit all that, but at the same time it is true that to
achieve the high yellow note I attained last summer, I had to be pretty well keyed up.” In his 444 days in Arles, he had produced two hundred paintings and more than a hundred drawings and watercolors. His compulsive behavior had enabled him to make extraordinary paintings, but it also had taken a toll on his health.
The days you least anticipate you find a subject which holds its
own with the work of those who have gone before us.
—LETTER TO THEO, MID-NOVEMBER 1889
EVICTED FROM HIS yellow house and anxious about his health, Vincent turned to his friends for advice. The postman Roulin, who had visited him every day in the hospital, couldn't help. He'd been transferred to a new district and would be leaving town. Dr. Rey offered Vincent a small apartment in his house, but Vincent worried about his ability to live alone. As a last resort, a local Protestant minister named Sailes, whom Theo had enlisted to check on Vincent, suggested he consider a mental institution in the town of St.-Rémy, about fifteen miles away. Vincent decided to apply for admission with the understanding that he be allowed to paint. Theo assured him it was just for a rest, that he would soon recover.
There have been many differing theories about Vincent's condition, and much has been written about it. The director of the hospital in St.-Rémy wrote on his admission form that in his opinion Vincent suffered from “acute mania, with hallucinations of sight and hearing which have caused him to mutilate himself by cutting off his ear.… My opinion is that Monsieur van Gogh is subject to epileptic fits at very infrequent intervals.”
Was he a lunatic? A dangerous madman? If so, how could he have painted such extraordinary masterpieces, especially during his stay in the asylum? The most popular theory, generally accepted, is that he suffered from an unusual form of epilepsy, possibly complicated by the effects of absinthe or digitalis poisoning. Today there is medication for epilepsy, but then none existed, and those who suffered from it found no relief. Certainly there were moments when Vincent lost his reason, but he was not insane. Other than the weeks when he was incapacitated from an attack, he painted masterpieces and wrote intelligent, thoughtful letters about them. Between attacks he sometimes lacked energy and felt weak and nervous, but his creative ability was not affected.
Completely lucid when he arrived at the asylum, Vincent described his surroundings in precise detail. Originally a monastery in medieval times, St.-Paul-de-Mausole, as it was called, stood at the edge of a charming little village surrounded by olive groves and tall cypress trees, two miles from the craggy limestone hills called the Alpilles. “I have never been so peaceful as here and in the Hospital in Arles—to be able to paint a little at last. Quite near here there are some little mountains, gray and blue, and at their foot some very green cornfields and pines. I shall count myself very happy if I can manage to work enough to earn my living. For it worries me a lot when I think I have done so many pictures and drawings without ever selling one.”
From his small cell with its faded green flowered curtains, he looked through the bars on his window and watched the sun rising on a square field of wheat. He painted scenes from that window but never included the bars. With only ten male patients, there were thirty empty rooms in the dormitory, so he received permission to use one of them as a studio. He tried to adapt to his constricted new life. “The food,” he wrote, “tastes rather moldy, like a cockroach-infested restaurant in Paris.… As these poor souls do absolutely nothing (not a book, nothing to distract them but a game of bowls and a game of checkers), they stuff themselves with chick peas, beans, and lentils.” This, he joked, caused a few digestive problems.
He ventured from his cell to paint in the courtyard, bordered by an overgrown garden. A profusion of irises had caught his eye. He set up his easel near the fountain to paint masses of purple petals glowing against the emerald foliage and azure sky. The other patients watched him from a respectful distance. Later, as he moved through the long, arched hallways of the hospital, he heard their cries. Sensitive to human suffering, Vincent tried to comfort the other inmates, often staying with them when they had attacks. He listened to the descriptions of their symptoms, amazed that they, too, heard voices and saw distorted shapes.
“I think I have done well to come here; first of all, by seeing the reality of the life of the various lunatics and madmen in this menagerie, I am losing the vague dread, the fear of the thing. And little by little I can come to look upon madness as a disease like any other.” He was able to see the effects of epilepsy on several of the patients, which helped him understand his own condition. Optimistic by nature, Vincent chose to make the best of the situation, to benefit from the regularity of his life there. But sometimes the pitiful behavior of the patients depressed him. They shouted constantly, tore off their clothes, and smashed furniture. Other than soaking in a tub of cold water for two hours twice a week, they received no treatment for their illness. It upset him that Dr. Peyron, the director of the asylum, had so little motivation to improve the situation.
After a month he talked Peyron into allowing him to go out into the surrounding fields to paint. An attendant went along with him. With new oils and canvas sent by Theo, Vincent immersed himself in the beauty of the countryside. “Since it is just the season when there is an abundance of flowers and thus the color effects,” he wrote to Theo, “it might be wise to send me another five meters of canvas.” He muted the violent colors of the previous summer as a way of seeking a calmer mood for himself. Drawn to the tall cypress trees, he said, “They have not been done the way I see them.”
Road with Cypress and Star, with its dynamic shapes and thick application of paint, shows Vincent at the height of his powers. It is his most dramatic painting of a subject that dominated his attention in St.-Rémy. Here he reached his goal to paint a “modern” landscape by representing the spirit of a place, rather than simply picturing a tree. The somber form of the tree is like a portrait—a lonely giant against a brooding landscape. Perhaps the lone tree spiraling into an agitated sky matched the state of his own mind.
By mid-July he had completed an astonishing number of artworks: thirty-one paintings and forty drawings. “What is a drawing?” he asked. “It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.” Drawn with a reed pen, his sketches of cypress trees are masterful, filled with pulsating spirals, short curvy strokes, and contrasting light and dark lines. Patterns of dots and overlapping curlicues give the drawings the rich effect that color achieves in painting. His works in St.-Rémy incorporated these qualities, producing a sense of movement and energy.
He felt he might be cured, even though Dr. Peyron told him he would need to stay there at least a year. But he had reason to feel optimistic, as he was able to work all day. He spent his evenings reading in English the historical plays of William Shakespeare, sent by Theo.
Then one day he opened a letter from Theo and read that Theo and Jo were expecting a baby. Nothing in Vincent's letters supports the notion that he was jealous. Perhaps he worried about Theo's financial support. But a few weeks later, after an upsetting visit to Arles to retrieve some of his paintings, he suffered a severe seizure. He began hallucinating and tried to swallow his paints. Quickly his attendant restrained him. Afterward Vincent couldn't remember what had happened. But he did write, “When you suffer much … the very voices seem to come from afar. During the attacks I experience this to such a degree that all the persons I see then, even if I recognize them … seem to come toward me out of a great distance, and to be quite different from what they are in reality.”
He avoided working outside again for two months and refused to leave his bedroom. His mind might have been clear, but he felt weak and demoralized. When he started drawing again, the nuns who worked at the asylum would not return his paints. They realized Vincent was an artist, but he was hardly famous, and his works were strange enough to be dismissed.
As someone brought up in the austere Dutch Reformed Church, Vincent found t
he faith of the nuns superstitious and stifling. It so disturbed him that he began to experience frightening religious hallucinations. Yet after each attack he rallied, forcing himself to “eat like two now, work hard, and limit my relations with the other patients for fear of a relapse. I am now trying to recover like a man who meant to commit suicide, and finding the water too cold, tries to regain the bank.”
Away from his friends and family in an alien place, he became homesick, and thoughts of his childhood and the landscape of Brabant, the family garden, the little graveyard, and the church haunted him. He made a number of drawings from memory. The looming cypress in The Starry Night can be found in the south of France, but the tall church steeple in the small village nestled at the foot of the mountains is Dutch. From memory and from life, he combined these two settings purposefully to create a lasting impression, not simply a pretty scene. Looking at the stars swirling in the night sky produces a dizzying effect, as if the artist were painting an ecstatic vision. Although this painting departed from reality, it was no hallucination. In this carefully worked-out composition, the vigorous lines were inspired by German woodcuts. It symbolized for Vincent a deeply spiritual mood. The Starry Night is bolder and more visionary than the night paintings done in Arles. There he concentrated on color; in St.-Rémy line became the insistent element. When he sent the painting to Theo, his brother didn't comment on the sky but only on the familiar landscape.
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