When his similar attempt to depict Christ under a starry sky failed so miserably in late September, Vincent shouldered his equipment in the middle of the night and sought his subject directly under the stars. He picked a spot only a few blocks away, on a seawall overlooking the Rhône. To provide light, he set his easel under one of the gas lamps that lined the wall along the riverbank. Experience had shown him that its golden light was inadequate, even deceptive. “In the dark I may mistake a blue for a green,” he admitted, “a blue-lilac for a pink-lilac, for you cannot rightly distinguish the quality of a hue.” But the immediacy of the image mattered more than the accuracy, he insisted. And there was no other way to avoid “the poor sallow whitish light” of conventional night scenes.
Once set up, he turned his gaze south, looking downriver at the dark town. It stretched out along the great bend of the Rhône, curving and receding from left to right, visible only by its necklace of gas lamps and its jagged dark profile on the horizon: the tower of the Carmelite convent at one side, the dome of St. Trophime in the middle, the spires of St. Pierre on the opposite shore. Only a handful of windows are lighted. Boats are moored in the black water below him. It is late.
But when he looked up, he saw a different sky than he had seen three months before on another shore. Or, rather, he saw it with different eyes. In June, his rocketing dreams for the combination with Gauguin had found inspiration in Daudet-inspired fantasies of train trips to distant stars and galaxies of better worlds. Now, as the prospect of Gauguin’s coming receded like the sunset, Vincent searched the night sky for an older, deeper consolation. “I have a terrible need of—shall I say the word?—religion,” he wrote, shuddering at the confession. “Then I go out at night to paint the stars.”
As best he could, he deployed the palette of greens and blues with “citron” highlights that he had used in the failed Gethsemane—colors he had long connected to Christ—from Scheffer’s Christus Consolator to Delacroix’s Bark—and to those of his own paintings, from The Potato Eaters to The Poet’s Garden, that portrayed “a different world from ours.” He plunged the town itself into the blackest blue he could contrive. To make it even darker, he painted the string of streetlamps in bursts of “harsh gold.” The ultimate subject may have been above him, but the river, too, drew his dreamy eye. The play of light on water—on rivers, on ponds or puddles—had always led Vincent to deep meditation on the mysteries of the infinite. Looking at the receding line of lanterns, he tracked their “ruthless reflections” in the choppy river water with hundreds of short, brooding strokes. For the small jetty at his feet, where the black boats bobbed in silence, he used yellow-green to show the reach of his own lantern, but he unsettled the foreground with highlights of mauve, a red-blue mix that added a mysterious other light.
In the sky, he started by dutifully laying out the stars of the Ursa Major constellation in the southern quadrant at the center of his big canvas—the seven stars of the Big Dipper most prominent of all. But the longer he looked, the more he saw and the more his brush wandered. He saw dots and smudges, perfect circles and misshapen fragments. He imagined some stars in the palest shades of pink and green, “sparkling” like hued gems in the dark void. He compared himself to a jeweler arranging precious stones “in order to enhance their value.” To some, he added coronas of radiating strokes, like flower petals or distant fireworks, creating for each a citron aura like the nimbus that encircled the head of Delacroix’s Christ. He rendered the Milky Way with the lightest touch of his brush—an impossible blush of pale blue on the cobalt vastness. With exquisite care, he laid the brushstrokes on the night sky in a rhythm of broad dashes, “firm and interwoven with feeling.”
If he could achieve with his gentle brush and “harmonious” color the same consolation as the unapproachable image of Christ, if he could capture in paint “the feeling of the stars and the infinite high and clear above you,” perhaps his loneliness might end—or at least be comforted. The never-dark night café provided its own kind of consolation, of course, to those like him “without native land or family.” But for Vincent the transient balms of absinthe and gaslight could never suffice. Nor could he accept his own furtive argument that “the Arts, like everything else, are only dreams; that one’s self is nothing at all.” Inevitably his eyes returned to the starry night sky, where he saw another, truer, deeper consummation, however distant. With his plans for the Yellow House slipping toward failure, his yearning for that future poured onto the canvas as he labored more tenderly than ever before to express a transcendent truth through color and brushstroke: to capture the one human emotion shut out of the Café de la Gare, the most important one: the hope—no matter how faint or how far—of redemption. “Is this all,” he asked despairingly, “or is there more besides?”
At the end, perhaps back in the studio, he added to the painting a shadowy couple standing on the shore: lovers arm in arm, wandered in from a distant star.
IN EARLY OCTOBER, Gauguin wrote Theo: “I will soon be joining [Vincent]…I shall leave for Arles toward the end of the month.” At the same time, he sent to Arles the portrait that Vincent had requested as a token of brotherhood. “We have fulfilled your wish,” he grandly announced. The news dropped Vincent to his knees. “Now at last,” he wrote Theo the same day, “something is beginning to show on the horizon: Hope.”
Even more thrilling than the news itself was Gauguin’s description of the painting on its way. In a self-portrait, Gauguin had imagined himself as Hugo’s famous outcast, Jean Valjean, with “the mask of a bandit” hiding an “inner nobility and gentleness.” In this way, Gauguin explained, he meant to show not just his own features, but a portrait of all painters everywhere who felt “oppressed and outlawed by society.” It was a vision of artistic ostracism and shared suffering that could have come from Vincent’s own pen. “His description of himself moves me to the depths of my soul,” Vincent wrote.
After months of torturous advances and retreats, all his expectations for the Yellow House burst forth at once in a flood of ecstatic, adulatory letters. He pledged himself to work tirelessly to provide the “very great master” Gauguin with “peace and quiet in which to produce, and to be able to breathe freely as an artist.” Flinging aside all his previous reservations, he welcomed Bernard to join them, and Laval, too—and even two of Gauguin’s other Pont-Aven protégés whom Vincent had never met. All were welcome to the brotherhood of the Midi. “Union is strength,” he cried.
But only one man could lead them. “There must be an abbot to keep order,” Vincent insisted. “Gauguin and not I will be the head of the studio.” Theo could serve as “first dealer-apostle,” Vincent allowed; but he, too, owed this single allegiance. “You have committed yourself to Gauguin body and soul,” he solemnly instructed his brother. Only in this way could they achieve the procreative triumph that Vincent had long envisioned. “I can see my own painting coming to life,” he imagined. “And if we stick to it, all this will help to make something more lasting than ourselves.”
But in Paris, Theo read Vincent’s surge of giddy letters with increasing concern. After months of negotiations, he knew all too well Gauguin’s Gallic egotism and fecklessness (his “final” commitment to go to Arles was conditioned on the payment of an additional hundred francs). And he knew even better his brother’s heedless ardor. He had lived through all the great, fiery arcs of Vincent’s passions: bugs and birds, brothels and bordellos, Christ and the benighted miners, Mauve and his magic brush, Herkomer and black-and-white illustrations, Millet and the heroic peasants, Delacroix and color: a succession of gospels and saviors. The self-advancing Gauguin must have seemed a particularly unsteady fulcrum for such a heavy load of expectation.
How heavy a load became clearer with every new expense (another binge of spending followed Gauguin’s letter), every plea for more money, and every promise to pay it all back. (In October, Vincent proposed yet another fantastical plan to reimburse Theo for everything he had spent over the years.)
Indeed, Vincent had come to see the combination with Gauguin as balancing the books of a lifetime. When sister Wil sent a recent photograph of their mother, Vincent immediately made a painting based on it, triumphantly rerendering the face of the past in the same “ashen coloring” and vibrant Veronese green as his bonze self-portrait.
But what if Gauguin did come? Even from a distance, he had found Vincent’s tireless persuasion and endless demands for affirmation “intimidating.” Theo knew better than anyone the trials of living with his brother: the insecurity and defensiveness, the alternating currents of guileless optimism and abyssal depression, the inner war of grand ambition and easy frustration. (“I am afraid of getting discouraged if I do not succeed at once,” Vincent confessed that September.) How would Gauguin, a man of forty with multiple careers and a world of experience, respond to Vincent’s devouring need to reshape the people and things closest to him because he could change so little else about his life? Even now, awaiting “the abbot’s” arrival, Vincent was already lobbying to put off Bernard’s coming and dictating the terms of Gauguin’s happiness as sure-handedly as he had planned Sien Hoornik’s rehabilitation: “He must eat and go for walks with me in lovely surroundings,” he wrote Theo, “pick up a nice girl now and then, see the house as it is and as we shall make it, and altogether enjoy himself.”
In addition to his own experience, Theo had the reports of Lieutenant Milliet and Eugène Boch, both of whom had visited him recently in Paris with firsthand accounts of Vincent’s embattled life under the southern sun. The Dane Mourier-Petersen (who later called Vincent “mad”) had stayed with Theo briefly after leaving Arles, and Theo undoubtedly knew from both sides the story of Vincent’s rancorous falling-out with Dodge MacKnight, his first candidate for a “combination” in the Yellow House. Vincent himself talked ominously of “madness” and the need to “beware of my nerves.”
As if confirming Theo’s worst fears, Vincent launched a preemptive assault on Gauguin only a week after receiving his final agreement to come. When the self-portrait Gauguin had described so thrillingly arrived in Arles, Vincent found the colors “too dark” and “too sad.” “Not a shadow of gaiety,” he complained. How could the Bel-Ami of the Midi paint such a “despairing” and “dismal” image? “He must not go on like this,” Vincent sputtered. “He absolutely must cheer up. Or else …”
What would happen if this castle in the air collapsed, like so many before it? Theo had already pressured Vincent to move on: a pressure that would only intensify if Gauguin balked again. In a fury of denial, Vincent claimed that he would stay in Arles for ten years, living the unbothered life of a Japanese monk, “studying a single blade of grass” and “drawing the human figure” contentedly. But he had said the same thing in The Hague, before scandal and failure drove him home to Nuenen; and the same thing in Nuenen, before scandal and failure drove him to Theo in Paris.
In his darkest moments, Vincent must have considered returning to Paris; but even that road of shame was fraught with uncertainty. Not only was Theo’s health precarious, but his heart was drawn in other directions. Alone in the rue Lepic apartment, “feeling emptiness everywhere,” Theo complained of “a void” that Vincent could not fill. His thoughts had turned again to love and marriage and a family of his own.
IN HIS DELIRIUM of anticipation, Vincent ignored the signals from Paris that the net beneath his high wire might be removed. In a celebration of the perfect union to come, he painted another view of the public park outside his door—the “Poet’s Garden” of Petrarch and Boccaccio. An immense fir tree spreads its shade over a winding gravel path and an island of luxuriant grass. Its feathery bulk blocks sun and sky, filling the upper half of the canvas with buoyant, radiating fronds of a deep and wondrous turquoise—a color exquisitely poised between blue and green: a perfect marriage; unfathomably lovely. In its Persian-fan shade, a couple walk hand in hand.
When it was dry, Vincent hung it in the tiny bedroom he had prepared for Gauguin along with the other paintings of the Poet’s Garden and the sunflowers of summer as a harmonious chorus of welcome. At the same time, in the pots on either side of the front door of the Yellow House, he planted two oleander bushes—reminders of the fecundity of madness, and the toxicity of love.
CHAPTER 34
Imaginary Savage
CHARLES LAVAL LOVED PAUL GAUGUIN SO MUCH THAT HE WOULD have followed him through Hell. And in April 1887, he did just that. Lying feverish and delusional on a seaweed-stuffed mattress in a hut built for negro slaves, shivering uncontrollably in a swamp of his own sweat, Laval never questioned his decision to come to Martinique with his friend and maître Paul Gauguin.
They had met the previous summer on the cool, rocky coast of Brittany—the same summer Vincent spent closeted in the rue Lepic apartment painting flowers. Gauguin had blown into the little artists’ resort of Pont-Aven like a gust of tropical wind off the nearby Gulf Stream. The community of young painters—mostly British, American, and Scandinavian—hungry to make sense of the upheavals in Paris, flocked around him. Here was a man who had painted alongside the heroes of Impressionism, from Manet to Renoir, who had shown with them as early as the refusé days and as recently as the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in May, only months before. In that show, Gauguin’s work had shared the walls with Seurat’s Grande Jatte—an image of electrifying newness. With his flamboyant dress, exotic background, and mysterious reserve, the thirty-eight-year-old Gauguin seemed to hold the key that would unlock all the art world’s secrets. In a fever to win his favor, the young artists of Pont-Aven paid for his lodgings, attended him at table, and sat spellbound at his nightly audiences at the Gloanec Inn.
None competed more ardently or listened more enthralled than Charles Laval. Wearing the pince-nez of an aesthete and the wispy beard of an ascetic, the twenty-five-year-old Laval combined the refined sensibilities of his father, a Parisian architect, and the soulful yearnings of his Russian mother. He had come of age on the fringes of Impressionism, studied with Toulouse-Lautrec, and exhibited at the Salon while still a teenager. Financially secure but spiritually thirsting, Laval, who had lost his real father at age eight, distinguished himself among all the young painters of Pont-Aven as Gauguin’s most devoted acolyte.
Thus, it was no surprise when, the following winter, Laval accepted his master’s invitation to join an expedition to the Caribbean in search of the erotic license and artistic truths known only to primitive cultures. Gauguin painted an irresistible picture of a “free and fertile” land where “the climate is excellent and one can live on fish and fruit which are to be had for the taking.” It was an image ripped directly from the pages of Pierre Loti’s fabulist account of his trip to Tahiti, The Marriage of Loti. Charles Laval, besotted like so many aimless sons of the bourgeoisie by Loti’s vision of paradise on earth, could hardly refuse.
PAUL GAUGUIN, 1891 (Illustration credit 34.1)
In fact, Laval had every reason to believe in Gauguin’s seductive vision of a paradise in the Americas. As everyone at the Gloanec Inn knew, Gauguin traced his ancestry to the colonial Spanish rulers of Peru, where the young Paul had spent his early years. Sometimes he hinted at an even earlier, more primitive and noble lineage among the great native rulers of the New World, including perhaps the Aztec emperor Montezuma—a notion to which his dark skin and sharp features seemed to bear witness. He talked of wealthy family connections still in Lima, where he had lived a childhood pampered by tropical breezes and Chinese servants.
With stories like these, Gauguin cast their trip to the Caribbean more as a triumphal return than a careless adventure. Indeed, he had chosen their destination—a tiny island called Taboga—because of its proximity to his brother-in-law, a successful merchant who had recently returned to his native Colombia. In the northern part of that country, on a narrow isthmus called Panama, French companies had undertaken a massive construction project: a canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In the flood of money and matériel be
ing poured into this remote region, his brother-in-law would make a fortune, Gauguin assured his young disciple, and could well afford to stake them to their piece of paradise in Taboga.
Laval, too, had a relative among the scores of companies that had rushed to Panama, but he knew nothing of money or business. On these matters, especially, he trusted Gauguin. After all, Gauguin had worked at the Paris stock exchange, the Bourse, for years before becoming an artist. As a broker and “liquidator,” he had parlayed a respectable inheritance from a mysterious benefactor into a haut-bourgeois lifestyle of hired carriages and Sunday outings. He had acquired a family along the way as well, including a wife and five children, although its workings must have been deeply obscure to the conventional Laval. The one son who lived with Gauguin in Paris, Clovis, had been safely set aside in boarding school, seemingly no impediment at all to his father’s long absences; the others remained with his Danish wife, Mette, in distant Copenhagen. Gauguin said little about any of them, and Laval dared not inquire. Like his unusual accent (Spanish was his first language), murky finances, and uncertain pedigree, such questions were all subsumed in the enigma that was Paul Gauguin.
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