But once he arrived, his eye returned again and again to the little boats on the beach. Every morning, he went to the shore and saw them there: “little green, red, blue boats, so pretty in shape and color that they made one think of flowers,” he said. But every morning they put to sea before he could set up his equipment. “They dash off when there is no wind,” he explained to Bernard, “and make for the shore when there’s a bit too much of it.” On the fifth morning, he rose early and hurried to the beach with only a sketchpad and a pen. He caught the group of four shallow-drafted barks still resting in the sand, awaiting the day’s buffeting as serenely as the cab horses of Paris. Working without his perspective frame, he sketched them in all their neglected nobility: the one in front almost filling the sheet with its broad beam and sweeping prow, the other three arranged behind in the ragged row where their owners had left them: their masts leaning to and fro like the pollard birches of Nuenen, their long booms and fishing poles crisscrossing at crazy angles. Before their masters arrived to drag them to their duties, he made notes of their colors directly on his drawing.
That same day, Vincent, too, set off, abruptly cutting short his visit to the seashore after an unexplained intervention by the parish priest and a local gendarme. He returned over the wild Camargue, leaving behind all three of the canvases he had painted in Saintes-Maries because, he explained, “they are not dry enough to be submitted with safety to five hours’ jolting in the carriage.” He never did return to fetch them.
He did take his drawings, however. As soon as he arrived at the Yellow House, he sent a batch of them to Theo and took the others, including the “moored boats,” to his studio, where he set to work transposing them into paintings. First, he rehearsed the colors he had annotated by testing them out in a watercolor exactly the same size as the sketch (15½ by 21 inches). Ignoring everything Mauve had taught him about drawing with color, he traced the boats’ bold outlines in black with a broad reed pen, then filled between the lines with even daubs of bright, watery color: complementary red and green for the boats, orange and blue for the beach and beyond. Finally, he copied his drawing of brave little boats onto the left side of a larger canvas (25½ by 32 inches), leaving space on the right and at the top for more sea and sky. He broke the drawing into smaller and smaller pieces of pure, clear color: a maroon-and-cobalt hull with celadon railing; a moss-green prow with orange railing; an avocado cockpit with white ribbing; a yellow mast, lapis-lazuli rudder, robin’s-egg-blue oars; and a rainbow of fishing poles.
But when he painted the sky and sea, his vision changed entirely. Instead of setting his bejeweled boats on the watercolor’s contrasting plates of blue and orange, he transported them to a soft and dreamy world—a world of glowing sky and silvery light that Mauve or Monet would have recognized. White clouds dissolve into brushstrokes of soft blues and greens, arching over the spiky masts in a luminous vault. The beach shades from a gold-stippled taupe in the foreground, where the boats rest, to a sunny tan in the distance. White-tipped waves wet the sand in lavender. At the horizon, sea meets sky in a pastel kiss of powder blue and aquamarine. Against this gauzy dawn, the crystalline colors of the little boats leap off the canvas.
Vincent claimed that Fishing Boats on the Beach and the other paintings based on the sketches he brought back from Saintes-Maries—a virtual coloring book of imagery—proved that he had found “absolute Japan” in the South of France. “I am always telling myself that I’m in Japan here,” he exclaimed. “I have only to open my eyes and paint what is right in front of me.” He wrote Bernard and Gauguin boasting of the seashore’s “amusing motifs,” “naïve” landscapes, and “primitive” coloration. He professed his devotion to the new gospel of Cloisonnism, which he summarized as “simplification of color in the Japanese manner” and “put[ting] flat tones side by side, with characteristic lines marking off the movements and the forms.”
To Theo, he trumpeted the salability of Boats and other works like it, comparing them to Japanese prints in their desirability as “decorations for middle-class houses.” In terms that probably echoed Monet’s pitch for his Antibes paintings (just then showing on the entresol), Vincent claimed that his brief time in the South had given him a new vision: “One sees things with a more Japanese eye,” he wrote; “one feel colors differently.” Indeed, hadn’t Monet himself painted a scene of four brightly colored boats on a beach? With all these arguments and more, he pushed his brother to urge other dealers “to join in sending people who would work down here. In that case I think Gauguin would be sure to come.”
He sent similar pleadings to Bernard and Gauguin, brushing past the former’s demurrals and the latter’s indecision. “Do you realize that we have been very stupid, Gauguin, you and I, in not going to the same place?” he scolded Bernard in mid-June. A few letters later, he pointed his friend to the same message hidden in the simple image of four medieval barks. “Life carries us along so fast that we haven’t the time to talk and to work as well. That is the reason why, with unity still a long way off, we are now sailing the trackless deep in our frail little boats, all alone on the high seas of our time.”
But the ultimate invitation was always directed at Theo. “I wish you could spend some time here,” he wrote after returning from Saintes-Maries. “I think that once again you should steep yourself more and more in nature and in the world of artists.” Echoing his pleas from Drenthe, he urged Theo to quit Goupil, or at least demand “a year’s leave (on full pay)” during which he could recover his health, promote the brothers’ enterprise, and “steep himself” in the serenity of the South. “I keep thinking of you and Gauguin and Bernard all the time wherever I go,” he wrote. “It is so beautiful, and I so wish you were here.”
With such reveries in his head, Vincent returned to the painting and inscribed a word in big letters on one boat: AMITIÉ—friendship. Then, on the empty expanse of aquamarine water, he painted four frail little boats, side by side, headed out to the trackless deep, the wind filling their sails, and nothing but glassy sea in front of them.
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ONLY A WEEK LATER, Vincent traveled north toward Tarascon, home of Daudet’s mythical clown, Tartarin. The road passed near the fabled ruins of the abbey church at Montmajour, a dizzying limestone escarpment rising a hundred and fifty feet straight up from the edge of the Rhône delta. For most of history, Montmajour had stood as a rocky island redoubt lapped by the waters of the Mediterranean. Sixth-century Christians sought safety on its forbidding heights, and gave thanks by hewing a sanctuary from the solid rock at its peak. Subsequent generations of monks had topped that first rough church with layer after layer of devotion in stone, from a Byzantine chapel to a medieval donjon to a Renaissance cloister to an eighteenth-century fortified palace and gardens. After the Revolution, all were left to crumble.
Using the road that ran up the less precipitous back slope, Vincent had climbed to Montmajour’s rocky summit many times by midsummer 1888. A lifelong lowlander, he had marveled at the spectacular view from the abbey tower, looking south toward Arles across a plain known as the Crau. Here, at the foot of the high country, the Rhône had dropped its most fertile detritus, while washing the sea’s salty deposits farther south to the Camargue. Early in the nineteenth century, a Dutch-style drainage project had reclaimed the Crau’s rocky but arable soil for cultivation, especially vineyards. The result was a picturesque vista studded with limestone islands and tiny villages set amid fields and groves. In mid-May, when Theo invited Vincent to submit some drawings for an exhibition in Amsterdam, Vincent’s imagination naturally returned to this aerial view. Over the course of a week, he made seven elaborate purple-ink drawings at Montmajour, including four sweeping panoramas of the Crau. But only days after completing the last one, his enthusiasm for them was replaced by the fervor for “Japanese” color that propelled him to Saintes-Maries at the end of May.
By the time he revisited the Crau in mid-June, however, the argument for the Yellow House had, like the Rhô
ne, shifted course; and Vincent’s eager eye had shifted with it. His return from Saintes-Maries was greeted with news that his old Cormon classmate Louis Anquetin had been crowned by the Revue Indépendante as “the leader of a new trend, in which the Japanese influence is even more apparent.” Not long after that, Vincent learned of an even more enviable milestone: Anquetin had sold a painting. The buyer was the dealer Georges Thomas, a longtime target of Vincent’s commercial ambitions, and the painting was a study called The Peasant.
Although Vincent disputed Anquetin’s primacy in the new movement known as Cloisonnism (he thought his young protégé Bernard had “gone further in the Japanese style than Anquetin”), he could not argue with a sale—something neither he nor Bernard could boast. As the movement’s anointed leader, Anquetin now set the agenda. Within a few weeks, Gauguin announced his plan to paint a large scene of Breton peasants doing a harvest dance. Before the end of the summer, Bernard would join Gauguin in Pont-Aven and also undertake to paint the natives of that exotic, rocky province at the opposite end of France. Around the same time, Theo returned from Giverny with glowing reports of the shimmering landscapes he had seen in Monet’s studio documenting the evanescent effects of light and season on the Île-de-France countryside.
Also in June, Vincent read a review of the exhibition of Monet’s Antibes paintings then on view at Theo’s gallery. In florid descriptions, the critic celebrated Monet’s “intimacy” with nature and praised him for documenting with his sensitive, light-filled brush the elemental beauty of France’s southern coast at Antibes, just as he had done earlier for the northern coast at Belle-Île. Proclaiming Monet the “poet and historian of the Midi” and the successor to Millet and Corot in elevating rural life to its rightful place in art, he urged his countrymen to embrace once again the sublime poetry of their own homeland. Why look to Pacific islands or ancient civilizations to find “primitive” imagery when such untouched Edens could still be found in France itself?
While Vincent was in Saintes-Maries, the author of that review, Gustave Geffroy, wrote Theo a letter expressing an interest in buying some of Vincent’s work.
In Geffroy’s article and overture; in Anquetin’s choice of subject matter; and in the reports of new imagery from Paris, Pont-Aven, and Giverny, Vincent saw new opportunities to plead the cause of the Yellow House. His letters and art erupted with arguments. No one had a more “intimate knowledge” of nature or “loved the countryside” more than he did, he protested; no one was more deeply schooled in the simple life of peasants and their primitive bond to the land than he was; and no place was better suited than Arles for artists to reconnect with the uncontaminated poetry of nature. “[I] look round and see so many things in nature that I hardly have time to think of anything else,” he wrote in direct response to Geffroy’s challenge, “for just now it is harvest time.” Abruptly canceling a return trip to Saintes-Maries, he loaded his painting equipment on his back and set off into the blazing sun and swirling mistral of the Crau.
In the next two weeks, he painted almost a dozen images in support of his Arcadian claims. He painted view after view of the Crau’s golden wheat fields, raising the horizon higher and higher to focus his obsessive brush on the summer bounty of color. “The wheat has all the hues of old gold,” he wrote as he painted, “copper, green-gold or red-gold, yellow-gold, yellow-bronze, red-green [and] flashing orange colors like a red-hot fire.” He modulated the light from a blinding midday yellow to the russet tones of sunset, when the wheat shone “luminous in the gloom.” He adjusted the sky, too, from cobalt to lavender to turquoise and finally to a yellow as unrelenting as the sun itself “in the full furnace of the harvest at high noon.” He painted unmowed fields churning in the wind awaiting the scythe; a thresher making his slow way through the high stalks, leaving sheaves of reaped wheat in his wake; and the huge mangy haystacks that filled the barnyards, offering impromptu beds to their exhausted builders.
Egged on by his own arguments and hounded by the fierce heat and furious wind, he raced from painting to painting, sometimes completing two in a single day, chasing his vision of a “painters’ paradise” in Provence. “I have seven studies of wheat fields,” he boasted to Bernard, “done quickly, quickly, quickly and in a hurry, just like the harvester who is silent under the blazing sun, intent only on his reaping.”
One of these images in particular summed up Vincent’s new view of an alluring rural utopia, simultaneously familiar and exotic, that beckoned all true artists to the Midi. On a spot of high ground just east of Arles, he set his perspective frame facing north, toward the Alpilles, and captured a spectacular panorama of the golden Crau. “I am working on a new subject,” he reported to Theo, “fields green and yellow as far as the eye can reach.” On a canvas more than two by three feet—bigger than any he had used previously in Arles—Vincent’s imagination transformed the stony, sun-baked checkerboard of cultivation into a lush Shangri-La. The sunlight falls softly and evenly, leaving not a single shadow, burnishing the new-mown fields and saturating every corner of the mosaic plain in vivid color: white sandy paths, lavender reed fences, orange tile roofs, a spectrum of yellow and gold fields interlaid with mint-green shards of new growth. Forest-green groves, brakes, and copses stutter into the distance as far as the purple rocks of Montmajour and, at the horizon, the lilac Alpilles under a cloudless cerulean sky.
In a triumph of Cloisonnist gospel over the observable reality of haze and glare, the atmosphere is crystal clear all the way from the bristling cane enclosure in the foreground to the serrated line of mountains miles away. Every fragment of color, from the little blue hay cart at the center of the canvas to the white citadel of Montmajour’s ruins near the horizon, shines translucently, unblurred by dust or distance. On this vast, serene landscape, tiny peasants go about their labors in a cartoon narrative of rural life: a reaper finishes his work in one field; a horse-drawn cart trots along the edge of another; a couple walk home in the distance while, not far away, a farmer stands on the back of his wagon and pitches wheat into his grain loft. In the foreground, the ancient artifacts of the harvest are arrayed in silent testimony: ladders against a haystack, the empty blue cart, and a spare set of wheels in brilliant red.
After completing the image in a single day under the burning sun, Vincent came home bursting with new confidence in his art (“this picture kills the rest”) and new arguments for his mission in the Midi. “I am on the right track,” he exclaimed. “If Gauguin were willing to join me … it would establish us squarely as the explorers of the South.” In a reverie of regression, he renewed his vow of solidarity with the peasants of Nuenen. “During the harvest my work was not any easier than what the peasants who were actually harvesting were doing,” he insisted. “In the long run I think I shall come to belong to the country altogether.”
To support the primitive bona fides of his new images, he recruited both the rustic icons of Millet and the “innocent and gentle beings” of Zola. Following Geffroy’s nativist injunctions, he compared his simple images not to Japanese prints, but to the “naïve pictures out of old farmers’ almanacs where hail, snow, rain or fine weather are depicted in a wholly primitive manner.” He cited as direct inspiration a harvest painting that he had seen in Paris by the newly elevated Anquetin. He claimed a newfound kinship with Paul Cézanne, admired by both Gauguin and Bernard and artistic godfather to the Cloisonnist imagery that now united all three men. Just as Cézanne had become “absolutely part of the countryside” that he painted so often around Aix, only fifty miles away, Vincent claimed an ineffable connection to the Crau. “Coming home with my canvas, I say to myself, ‘Look! I’ve got the very tones of old Cézanne!’ ” he wrote. “I work even in the middle of the day, in the full sunshine, without any shadow at all, in the wheat fields, and I enjoy it like a cicada.”
To Theo, Vincent invoked a pantheon of shared favorites and Goupil bestsellers: from the skyscapes of Philips Koninck and Georges Michel to the Barbizon pastorals of Millet
and Dupré to the landscapes of Monticelli. But mostly he invoked the current entresol star. A sunset over the Crau had “just the effect of that Claude Monet,” he attested; “it was superb.” Where Monet had the Mediterranean at Antibes, Vincent had the Crau—“stretching away toward the horizon” as “beautiful and infinite as the sea.” Just as Geffroy had claimed for Monet’s coastal vistas the power to lull the senses into a dreamlike state, Vincent claimed for his Elysian panorama the power to soothe the weary soul with contemplation of the infinite. “[In] that flat landscape,” he wrote, “there [is] nothing but eternity.”
To underscore that point, he returned in July to the heights of Montmajour and drew his beloved valley from an even loftier perspective. Had the walk from town not been so long or had the wind not blown so hard across the rocky hilltop, he probably would have painted the dizzying view from the abbey ruins. But even with just pen and paper, Vincent could summon up a vision of paradise. On two large sheets (19 by 24 inches), he drew a bird’s-eye view of the entire valley. “At first sight it is like a map,” he said.
From the limestone outcropping of the Mont de Cordes in the east to the banks of the Rhône in the west, spotted with villages, barns, and farmhouses and crisscrossed with fences, roads, and even a train track, he documented the view at his feet. Then, with an intensity and inventiveness astonishing even by Vincent’s standards, he filled the outline with an ecstasy of tiny pen strokes. No furrow, no fence picket, no stubble of wheat, no plug of grass, no change in texture, no matter how far away, went unrecorded by his obsessive quill. With endless dots and dashes, hash marks and hatchings, strokes and squiggles—each one an argument for the splendor and sublimity of the Crau—he transformed the maplike vista into a magical place. As soon as he finished, he mailed the two drawings to Theo as report, invitation, and plea. “Refresh your eyes with the wide-open spaces of the Crau,” he enjoined his brother. “I so much want to give you a true idea of the simplicity of nature here.”
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