In both debates, he thrived on confrontation. If critics like Kahn and painters like MacKnight thought his colors too bright, he made them brighter. His wildflowers demanded a yellower yellow than the one in his tubes—a cruder, sunnier, “savage” yellow—and he searched his palette for just the right touch of green to make it shriek, or a deep complementary to make it pop. His goal, he said, was “to arrange the colors in a way that makes them vibrate.” And if Theo criticized his work as too hasty, too “haggard,” and urged him to slow down, he painted even faster—impossibly fast. He compared his painting style to the eating style of a local paysan ravenously slurping bouillabaisse, and claimed that the faster he worked, the better the results. Describing himself as a man “driven by a certain mental voracity,” he despaired of “ever painting pictures that are peaceful and quietly worked out.…” “It will always be headlong,” he lamented.
But, of course, it never was. Just as his campaigns of persuasion unfolded over many letters, and his letters sometimes went through multiple drafts, his paintings often gestated for weeks or months or even years before brush touched canvas. The image of a vase of sunflowers had been in his head since at least a year earlier, when he saw a bouquet of the huge flowers in the window of a Paris restaurant near Theo’s gallery. At the time, he had painted a series of individual blossoms, arranged in a morbid narrative and depicted in the descriptive, backward-looking draftsman’s style of The Hague. In the year since, however, Vincent had discovered the new testament of Cloisonnism, and the image of sunflowers in his head took new form and new color.
He practiced this new vision on a jug of early-blooming wildflowers in May, and then rehearsed it again in June with the boats on the beach at Saintes-Maries—“so pretty in shape and color that they make one think of flowers.” All summer, as he raced from field to field in search of imagery and hunted from brothel to brothel for models, this vision of simple flowers haunted him. “I reproach myself for not painting flowers here,” he wrote in early August. “Under the blue sky, the orange, yellow, red splashes of flowers take on an amazing brilliance, and in the limpid air, they look somehow happier, more lovely than in the North.” When the first sunflowers appeared soon thereafter, the plan sprang back to life. “I am thinking of decorating my studio with half a dozen pictures of ‘Sunflowers,’ ” he announced to Émile Bernard.
To the Symbolist Bernard, Vincent promised “effects like those of stained-glass windows in a Gothic church.” To his dealer brother, he promised “a symphony in blue and yellow” that would rival Monet’s Antibes paintings, as well as a huge “decorative scheme” (grown to a dozen panels) to match the ambitious projects of Seurat. Vincent himself was naturally drawn to the gawky, late-starting flowers that now dotted gardens everywhere in Arles, no doubt seeing his own story in their glorious blooming, mad bounty, and sad decay. But his most important audience was the painter he expected to walk in the door of the Yellow House any day. “Now that I hope to live with Gauguin in a studio of our own,” he wrote longingly, “I want to make decorations for the studio. Nothing but large sunflowers.”
But first he had to work them out. “Great things do not just happen by impulse,” he had written early in his career, “but are a succession of small things linked together.” He spent long days and sleepless nights planning the color “program” that would both differentiate and unite so many images. He described it to Bernard as “a decoration in which the raw or broken chrome yellows will blaze forth on various backgrounds—from the palest malachite green to royal blue.” He plotted the variables until his head spun in a “damnably difficult mess” of combinations.
Having heard the criticism that Monet’s Antibes paintings, for all their luscious atmosphere, suffered from a “total lack of construction,” he pledged himself to the “logical composition” of Cézanne and the “reasoned color” of Dutch masters like Vermeer. Like these and other “scientific” painters, he claimed, he had prepared for his series of sunflowers with hours of careful calculations: calculations of everything from the size and orientation of each canvas to its exact color scheme and the amount of paint it would consume, color by color. Only through this kind of elaborate advance planning, with his mind “strained to the utmost,” could he hope to produce “a quick succession of canvases quickly executed.”
But no matter how much preparation he did, it never seemed enough. “Alas, alas,” he wrote Bernard, “the most beautiful paintings are those which you dream about when you lie in bed smoking a pipe, but which you never paint.”
By the time all Vincent’s “calculations” burst onto canvas in late August, the giant heliotropes were the last blooms left in the gardens, and already beginning to fade. But, of course, with the new gospel of exaggeration animating his palette and brush, he barely needed to look at the vase of wilted sunflowers sitting on a table in the Yellow House. He may have skipped altogether the preliminary charcoal drawing that had always guided him in the past, and gone straight to paint. Roughing in just enough of the composition—the vase, a few flowers, and the tabletop horizon—he locked in to the Cloisonnist program and complementary logarithms that had kept him awake at night. Before long, he was working on three paintings simultaneously: two with three flowers apiece and one with at least a dozen huge blossoms in various states of eclipse. It was less an orderly progression than a rhetorical outburst. “I am working at it every morning from sunrise on,” he reported to Theo, “for the flowers fade so soon, and the thing is to do the whole in one rush.”
Inevitably, once his brush touched canvas, all Vincent’s nights of careful planning collided with the impetuous rush of paint. For a man whose enthusiasms knew neither patience nor caution, the infinite permutations of color and stroke proved an irresistible lure to improvisation: a spontaneous eccentricity of line, a serendipitous clash of color, an ardor of impasto, a lyrical flight of brushwork. Every errancy, accident, or inspiration triggered a new round of calculations as the weeks of planning wrestled with his brush in a furious dialectic of purpose and effect. He compared his working sessions to a “fencing match,” pitting “intensity of thought” against “tranquility of touch.”
Vincent understood this contest well, and, at different times, championed both its contestants. One day he would insist on the necessity of speed, citing both the bestselling Monet and the immortal Delacroix. But when Theo questioned his consumption of paint or the hasty, unpredictable results, he insisted that every stroke and color choice had been determined beforehand, citing Monticelli—“the logical colorist, able to pursue the most complicated calculations, subdivided according to the scales of tones that he was balancing.” Other times, he would blame the wild winds of the mistral for his turbulent brushwork, comparing himself to Cézanne, who also had to tame a “reeling easel.”
But the real storm that shook Vincent’s easel and trembled his hand was the one inside his head. Indeed, he worked best under the pressure of exigency, whether a tempest on the beach at Scheveningen, the raging mistral of the Crau, or the damning voices of the past. Only friction—between himself and the elements, between hope and experience, between elaborate planning and evangelical zeal, between the Cloisonnist mandate to simplify and his obsessive need to persuade—only friction could induce the “feverish state” of creativity from which, he believed, all his best work emerged. “I count on the exaltation that comes to me at certain moments,” he wrote, “and then I let myself run on extravagances.” He described the “terrible lucidity” that came over him in such moments, “when nature is so beautiful, I am not conscious of myself any more, and the picture comes to me as in a dream.” He claimed as his model Japanese artists, with their “lightning” execution and absolute sureness of touch (“as simple as breathing”). He invoked Monticelli, too, defending the much-maligned Marseille painter, and himself, against charges of painting in a mad or drunken frenzy. “They call a painter mad if he sees with eyes other than theirs,” he scoffed, daring any drunkard to attempt either
man’s acrobatic feats of color.
But Vincent had always preached the paradox of calm in the storm, joy in sorrow, comfort in pain. And he had already exalted his own inner turmoil by committing to memory a famous tribute to Delacroix: “Thus died—almost smiling—a painter of a noble race, who had a sun in his head and a thunderstorm in his heart.” Bystanders like Milliet, who gaped at Vincent’s assault on the canvas or mocked the manic theater of his dialogue with images, saw exactly the same exhausting and combustible choreography of certainty and doubt, of dervish intelligence and fanatic heart, that flamed through his writing. “Everyone will think that I work too fast,” he warned Theo self-knowingly. “Don’t believe a word of it. Is not emotion, the sincerity of one’s feeling for nature, what attracts us, and sometimes the emotions are so strong that one works without knowing one works, and the strokes come with a continuity and a coherence like words in a speech or a letter.”
By the end of August, burning with anticipation of Gauguin’s arrival, Vincent submitted yet another image of sunflowers to the “furnace of creation.” This time, the logic of complementaries lost the battle to the “extravagance” of brilliant effect. The whiplashing mistrals of conception and execution further disentangled object from atmosphere, color from context, and image from reality. The result was “a picture all in yellow”: yellow flowers on a yellow-green background in a yellow vase on a yellow-orange table. Vincent pronounced it “certainly different,” and assigned it a very special role. Like the flowers themselves, which turned to the east every morning to salute the rising sun, Vincent’s yellow canvas would greet the Bel-Ami due at the door any day. “The room you or Gauguin will have,” he wrote Theo, merging his dreams of a new brotherhood in the Midi with memories of the last one in Paris, “will have white walls with a decoration of great yellow sunflowers.”
THE THRILL OF anticipation at Gauguin’s coming, and the promise of renewal that came with it, filled every corner of Vincent’s life in Arles. He leaped out of bed early every morning, rushed to his studio, and worked until sunset. “I am vain enough to want to make a certain impression on Gauguin with my work,” he confessed, “so I cannot help wanting to do as much work as possible before he comes.” He ate heartily twice a day at the Café de la Gare, claiming that the better food there not only quieted his stomach, but also improved his work. He took “splendid walks” into the countryside, especially among the vineyards, where preparations for the fall harvest were already under way. He bought a fine new black velvet jacket and a new hat to greet his guest in style.
A special visitor also required special accommodations. By September, the Yellow House had been painted inside and out, but was still without gas. Vincent could work there during the daylight, but had to return every night to his room over the all-night café. He had never intended to use more than just the large studio downstairs: a single room for both painting and sleeping. The rest would serve as “storehouse for the campaign,” he told Theo. But Gauguin’s coming changed all that. Only a true “maison d’artiste”—“an artist’s house … in an absolutely individual style”—would do to welcome his new partner.
Struck by a newspaper story about an “impressionist house” built of violet-colored glass bricks, Vincent spent long hours devising a “scheme of decoration” that would transform the plain commercial building at 2, place Lamartine into a studio that reflected the new new art—the art of Japan. “The real Japanese have nothing on their walls,” he told Theo, drawing on his reading of Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème. “The rooms there are bare, without decoration or ornaments.” As if planning a Cloisonnist painting, he imagined a space defined by white walls, bright light, red tile floors, and squares of blue sky. “Nothing precious,” he vowed, nothing “commonplace”: none of the curio-shop clutter of most artists’ houses. “I am so set on making an artist’s home … not a haphazard production, but a deliberate creation.”
But like all Vincent’s deliberate creations, the Yellow House was subjected to contrary currents. Loti’s Japanese may have kept “the drawings and curiosities all hidden in the drawers,” or placed only a single scroll or exquisite arrangement of flowers in a niche, but Vincent had a world of arguments to make and only one place to make them—where he had always made them—on his walls. Quickly scrapping the plan to hang only sunflowers, he framed dozens of his own paintings in oak and walnut and placed them throughout the house—especially in the small bedrooms upstairs where he and Gauguin would sleep. Rather than leave any wall empty, even in the kitchen, he hung “a great wealth of portraits and painted figure studies” along with the usual gallery of prints.
Then he filled the rooms with furniture. The Japanese model of “simple white mats” and his own pledges of “order and simplicity” could not long restrain Vincent’s mania for homemaking. As in The Hague, when he prepared the Schenkweg studio for the return of Sien and her baby from the hospital, he went on a binge of furniture buying that included beds, mattresses, linens (lots of “bedding”), mirrors, dressing tables, chests of drawers, chairs, and unspecified “small necessities.” Everything had to be bought in twos, of course, except for a single kitchen table and a frying pan big enough for two. In addition to the two bedrooms upstairs, he planned two studios downstairs: the big front room for Gauguin, the kitchen for himself. Finally, he bought two planters to put on either side of the front door, so blooming bushes would greet the newcomer.
When Theo objected to this spree of spending, Vincent defended every extravagance as necessary. “If Gauguin and I do not take the opportunity to fix ourselves up like this, we may drag on year after year in small lodgings where we cannot fail to go to seed,” he argued tartly. “I have pretty well done that already.” After a supplementary “loan” of three hundred francs disappeared, Vincent countered his brother’s worried concern with buoyant promises of long-term savings, rich returns, improved health, “freer” work, and inevitable success. “And now you can tell yourself that you have a sort of country house,” he added brightly, “though unfortunately rather far away.”
In his fervor of scene-setting, Vincent refurbished not just his house in Arles, but his whole attitude toward the Midi. After the summer’s battles with wind and sun, the disappointment of models, and the contumely of neighbors, he embraced once again the “crude and casual” South of Tartarin. He painted for Theo (and Gauguin) an irresistibly inviting picture of a land where an artist could find the primitive simplicity, cosmic comedy, and sublime humanity of Daudet’s clown. He portrayed himself as Voltaire’s hapless hero, Candide, let loose in a land of impossible color and Daumier caricature. He extolled the artistic charm of provincial dullness by citing the two most famous dullards in French literature, François Bouvard and Juste Pécuchet, Flaubert’s Laurel and Hardy of comic pretension and antic overreach.
He advertised this vision not just in his jaunty self-portrait as a traveler on the “sunny road to Tarascon,” but in a playful study of a group of wagons camped beside the road. These rickety two-wheeled covered carts belonged to “the performers in a traveling fair,” he reported to Theo as he spun an elaborate conceit of painting as a sideshow trick and himself as a carnival performer. “That’s what I’m good at,” he boasted in the spirit of Tartarin,
doing a fellow roughly in one sitting. If I wanted to show off, my boy, I’d always do it, drink with the first comer, paint him, not in watercolor but in oils, on the spot in the manner of Daumier. If I did a hundred like that, there would be some good ones among them. I’d be more of a Frenchman and more myself, and more of a drinker. It does tempt me so—not drinking, but painting tramps.
No one played a more important role in this new, boisterously welcoming vision of the Midi than Joseph Roulin, a postal official at the Arles train station. Normally, Vincent would have reflexively loathed Roulin as just another petty bureaucrat. Indeed, he had already fought openly with the postal authorities over his awkward packages, and it may have been these altercations that first brought the
strange Dutchman to Roulin’s attention. Or they might have met at the all-night café, where both men ate and drank.
Almost six and a half feet tall, with a thick salt-and-chestnut beard—“a whole forest”—groomed to two points, a brow like an escarpment, and a perpetual drunken glow, the forty-seven-year-old Roulin could have stepped out of a Daudet novel. He drank, sang, and orated with gusto until the bars emptied, except for Vincent. He boasted his republican politics with the booming voice and bureaucratic flourish appropriate to his office, and paraded about at all hours in his heavy postal livery—a deep blue double-breasted coat with brass buttons, scrolling gold embroidery at the sleeves, and a stiff cap with POSTES emblazoned over the bill.
Vincent compared his face to Dostoyevsky’s (“the look of a Russian”), his oratory to Garibaldi’s (“he argues with such sweep”), and his drinking to Monticelli’s (“a drinker all his life”). But it wasn’t just alcohol—absinthe especially—that sealed their improbable bond. “[Roulin’s] wife was delivered of a child today,” Vincent announced at the end of July, “and he is consequently feeling as proud as a peacock, and is all aglow with satisfaction.” Vincent loved babies and, in the past, had often used them to gain access into adopted families. And so it was with the newborn Marcelle and the family of Joseph Roulin—wife Augustine and teenage sons Armand and Camille—who lived in a dark government building wedged between two railroad bridges only a block from the Yellow House. Vincent attended Marcelle’s christening and immediately laid plans to paint a portrait of the chubby infant. “A child in the cradle,” he wrote in wonderment, “has the infinite in its eyes.”
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