Such thoughts drew him irresistibly back to Paul Gauguin, the Bel-Ami of the Midi that he had expected to usher in “a great revolution in portraiture.” Of all Vincent’s paintings the world had seen since January, Gauguin had expressed particular admiration for the Arlésienne—Vincent’s portrait of Madame Ginoux based on Gauguin’s own drawing of her. Still convinced that his commercial viability was tied to Gauguin and the “southern” imagery that they had pioneered together, Vincent reached out to his former housemate with groveling praise (“Dear maître”), tender affection (“since my return I have thought of you every day”), and urgent pleas for reconciliation. He even offered to join Gauguin in Brittany, where, he solemnly promised, “we will try to do something purposeful and serious, such as our work would probably have become if we had been able to carry on down there”—that is, in Arles.
Daydreams and smoky evenings filled with thoughts of portraits and models and memories of the Yellow House led Vincent inevitably, again, to the search for a studio. The Ravouxs had given him the use of a small room off the back hall of the little inn to spare him the long climb upstairs with his cumbersome kit. They had even set aside a place in the barn where he could dry his paintings. By the time Theo and his family visited in early June, however, Vincent was already talking about renting a house somewhere in the village.
He wrote to the Ginouxs requesting that they send the two beds from the Yellow House, still stored in their café attic, and began to militate for retrieving the paintings stacked so haphazardly both at Tanguy’s and in Theo’s apartment. He had to have a studio to prevent them from going to ruin, he argued, and to retouch those that needed it. “By keeping them in good condition,” he reminded Theo, pleading for himself as well as his paintings, “there will be a greater chance of getting some profit out of them.” “Neglecting them,” he sputtered, in an accusation that rang with personal grievance, “is one of the causes of our mutual penury.”
By mid-June, only days after Theo’s visit, he had found one particular house (for four hundred francs a year) and begun the long march of persuasion. “This is how it is. Here I pay 1 franc a day for sleeping, so if I had my furniture, the difference between 365 francs and 400 would be no great matter, I think.” Somewhere along that road, his old dream of a studio merged with the larger quest for home and family. His search for a studio became a hunt for a house that all could share. He immediately began thinking about how to decorate this combined artist’s studio and family home—the first since the Schenkweg—and fixed it in his imagination with a painting.
But even his biggest canvases proved too small for this double dream. He needed a new, larger size to paint his new, larger-than-life vision of home and family at last. He had seen many big, panoramic pictures over the years, but none more recent or more powerful than Puvis de Chavannes’s magisterial mural at the Salon in Paris, Between Art and Nature. To achieve the same enveloping pictorial world—the embrace and escape of pictures like that—Vincent began working on a canvas almost three and a half feet wide and half as tall: as big a painting as he could balance on his easel.
On this vast horizontal blank, and others like it, Vincent made his last and most vehement pleas for Auvers.
No scene lent itself more perfectly to the new format than the fields above the rim of the river valley. Both Theo and Jo admired the view of the Crau that Vincent had painted in Arles—so much that they hung it in the living room of the Paris apartment. What better subject for his first beckoning panorama than this boundless vista of neatly tended plots in a receding puzzle of ripe yellow wheat and green potato plants, stacks of mown hay and furrows of freshly turned soil? He filled the broad foreground with a profusion of flowers, mostly poppies, painted in an ardor of pigment and brushstroke that grows freer, looser, and more fervent as it sweeps toward the viewer like a flood. The narrow strip of sky at the top he dispatched with a wide brush and a cloudless blue.
Next, he turned his wide-angle lens to the forest floor. Not the forest primeval, with its wild variation and untamed undergrowth, but a grove of mature poplar trees planted in neat rows—probably a formal bois on the grounds of the local château. He focused his eye on the carpet of wildflowers beneath: a sous-bois of “grass with flowers, pink, yellow, white and various greens.” A golden light filters down through a canopy of leaves that hovers just above the painting but is nowhere visible. The ranks of trees show only their trunks—row after row of violet stripes in plunging perspective, disappearing into a high, dark horizon of deeper and deeper woods. In the middle of this cultivated Elysian grove, as tame and touching as a stage set, Vincent placed a well-dressed couple on an intimate stroll. Such were the glowing moments of communion with nature that awaited Theo and Jo in the valley of the Oise.
And when they returned from their outings, they came home to the scene he painted on another big canvas. A dirt road winds toward a distant country house, standing half-hidden by trees on the far side of a parklike glen and fields of green wheat. Behind it, the setting sun fills the sky with brilliant color. The fading light etches a pair of nearby pear trees in dramatic silhouettes of Prussian blue, creating the kind of picturesque vignette, the surprise of beauty, that would always stop Dorus and Anna van Gogh on their walks around Zundert for a moment of silent appreciation. In the distance, he painted Auvers’s famous château, nestled in greenery. But in Vincent’s dreamlike vision, the elaborate castle—a vast amalgam of two centuries of building and planting, parterres and terraces—was reduced to a simple silhouette of forget-me-not blue: an image of home on the horizon, rest at journey’s end, that summoned his brother to the best of both bourgeois comfort and rustic sublime.
If Theo’s young family appeared nowhere in these visionary vistas of country life, they didn’t have to. Theo, like Vincent, had seen Puvis’s big painting at the Salon, and Vincent’s mural-shaped invitations invoked that image wordlessly. In a letter to Wil, Vincent described Puvis’s friezelike tableau of family life in Arcadia:
On one side two women, dressed in simple long robes, are talking together, and on the other side men with the air of artists; in the middle of the picture a woman with her child on her arm is picking a flower off an apple tree in bloom.
In early July, Vincent made this vision of family and art his own with another inviting panorama. He chose as his subject not the Michel-like vista of the plateau, or the Gauguin-like mystery of the woods, or the Corot-like magic of a country sunset. Instead, he took his easel and paints and ungainly canvas to a house just a few steps from the Ravoux Inn: the house of Charles Daubigny.
Other than Millet, no painter of Vincent’s lifetime had touched his heart or shaped his art more than Daubigny: hero of the Barbizon; champion of plein air painting; liberator of the brush from Salon rectitude; godfather of Impressionism; friend and mentor to generations of painters of nature, from Dupré and Corot to Cézanne and Pissarro. He had brought many of them to Auvers: first to his studio barge, Le Botin, then to a succession of houses that he built on the verdant riverbank. The last and grandest of these was a long, narrow structure of pink stucco and blue roof tiles overlooking the river and a beautiful, parklike garden.
Daubigny died before he could enjoy this hillside paradise of fruit trees and flower beds, lilac hedges and rose-bordered paths. The tragedy of it reached as far as Amsterdam, where a twenty-four-year-old parson’s son and failing pastoral candidate anxiously awaited the next turn of his fate. “I was downcast when I heard the news,” Vincent wrote when he heard of Daubigny’s death in 1878. “It must be good to die in the knowledge that one has done some truthful work and to know that, as a result, one will live on in the memory of at least a few.”
Twelve years later, Daubigny’s widow still lived in the big pink house near the station—an image of abandoned womanhood and faithful grief that transfixed Vincent’s imagination. He had planned on painting the garden of her vigil from the moment he arrived in Auvers and heard the touching story. The public was admitted
from time to time and still caught glimpses of the black-clad Sophie Daubigny-Garnier. Vincent had already made one study of the garden—so intent on doing so that he used a linen towel when he couldn’t find a canvas.
This time he brought his big double-square canvas and filled it with all the gardens of a lifetime: the wandering paths of the Etten parsonage, as he had painted it for Gauguin; the shimmering leaves of the olive groves outside Arles; the swirling vortices of the night sky over the garden of Gethsemane. In Vincent’s reverie, it was blooming season for every plant. Every leaf on every tree trembled with light. The yellow wildflowers of spring still dotted the grass, and manured flowerbeds radiated vivid lavender. Dull bushes came alive with swirls of color and vibrations of shade. Lime trees marched toward the distant house on impossibly thin trunks with wavy crowns of foliage in cloudlike formations.
Like the “poet’s garden” outside the Yellow House, this garden had its ghosts, too, its Petrarch and Boccaccio. Not just the spectral figure of Madame Daubigny, which Vincent added in the background, wearing widow’s weeds and standing forlornly next to an empty table and chairs—another echo of parsonage gardens past—but the dead artist himself, as “seen” in the empty lawn chair and in the mysterious cat that skitters across the foreground, but mostly in the great effusion of life all around: the rapture of nature that Daubigny had painted so often, and that even now resurrected him in memory.
But this beckoning image of the “lush country” and “lovely greenery in abundance” that Vincent promised in Auvers, of “the quiet like that of Puvis de Chavannes,” spoke to Theo in a code deeper still. Daubigny had spent his final years not just with his wife and children, but also with a fellow artist, Honoré Daumier, the painter and immortal caricaturist, grown blind in old age. The three of them had sat together at a garden table under a vine arbor and filled Daubigny’s house with both great art and laughter. In this dream landscape, they had lived out their lives together—husband, wife, and afflicted confrère: a model for the home and studio, family and brotherhood, that Vincent imagined for himself and Theo and Jo in the Edenic valley of the Oise.
IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL, alluring vision—as much as paint and words could make it. But real life for Vincent in Auvers was anything but idyllic. He had arrived in May holding on by the thinnest thread: terrified by the possibility of another attack, still racked with guilt over the money diverted from Theo’s new family, haunted by the stacks of unsold paintings in Paris. He poured his despair into a letter so bleak that he didn’t dare to mail it: “I am far from having reached any kind of tranquility … I feel a failure … a lot that I accept and that will not change.… The prospect grows darker, I see no happy future at all.”
The past never stayed in the past. The simple task of extracting his furniture from Arles turned into a torment of memory. Despite his repeated requests, and offers to pay the shipping charges, the Ginouxs prevaricated with absurd Tartarin tales (that Mr. Ginoux had been gored by a bull) and sheer disregard (“the traditional laziness,” Vincent grumbled), threatening with each delay to resurrect the demons he had struggled to leave behind (what he called “that business which has been talked about so much in Arles”).
Gauguin would not let him forget, either. He dismissed Vincent’s offer to come to Britanny as “unrealizable” because his studio lay “quite some distance from the town,” he explained, “and for a person who is ill and sometimes in need of a doctor, it could be risky.” Besides, Gauguin had again set his sights on exotic climes—Madagascar, this time (“the savage will return to the wild,” he explained). Bernard planned to accompany him there. Vincent briefly let himself dream of joining his comrades (“for you must go there in twos or threes”), but soon submitted to the truth. “Certainly the future of painting is in the tropics,” he wrote Theo, “but I am not convinced that you, Gauguin or I are the men of that future.”
The same resignation marked his personal life as well. He was too old not just for Madagascar, he said, but for wife and children, too. “I am—at least I feel—too old to retrace my steps or to desire anything different,” he confessed. “That desire has left me, though the mental suffering of it remains.” More and more, he complained about the limits on his time, on his work, on his energy; and brooded on the precariousness of both sanity and life. He imagined how differently he would have spent the previous decade—his entire artistic career—“knowing what I know now.” He mourned the ebbing of his ambition as well as his manhood, and cried out like a man twice his age against the “desperately swift passing away of things in modern life.” He looked in the mirror and saw a “melancholy expression,” which he called “the heart-broken expression of our time,” and compared it to the face of Christ in the Garden.
In June, his mother sent another thunderbolt from the past. She had just returned from Nuenen, where she marked the fifth anniversary of her husband’s death with a visit to his grave. She sent Vincent a devastating account of her pilgrimage (“I saw everything again with gratitude that once it was mine”) that left him babbling with guilt and remorse. In a letter he wrote to console her, he reached out to a biblical passage that spoke more directly to his own feelings of inexplicable suffering and irreversible fate. “As through a glass, darkly,” he wrote, invoking the passage from 1 Corinthians in which all burdens are made bearable by the promise of ultimate purpose, “so it has remained; life, the why or wherefore of parting, passing away, the permanence of turmoil—one grasps no more of it than that.” “For me,” he confessed, “life may well continue in solitude. I have never perceived those to whom I have been most attached other than as through a glass, darkly.”
This sentence of solitude, the judgment of the past, had followed him even to the garden valley of Auvers. The ranks of beautiful places and happy faces that lined his studio walls could not hide the fact that he had no friends at all. By July, his relationship with Dr. Gachet had fallen into the familiar spiral of alienation and rancor. Vincent’s unceasing demands and Gachet’s high-strung detachment set the two on a collision course. The doctor’s frequent absences from Auvers confirmed Vincent’s fear that he could not be counted on in a crisis. Vincent’s strange behavior and vehement views on art (and possibly his attentions to Marguerite Gachet) threw the doctor’s household into an uproar. Gachet imposed prohibitions on painting in the house; Vincent hurled his napkin down and stalked away from the dinner table. The final break came in an argument over Gachet’s refusal to frame a Guillaumin painting.
As an eccentric neurotic himself, Gachet showed some sympathy for Vincent’s oddities of manner and dress. Others were less tolerant. Young Paul Gachet later described Vincent’s “comic way of painting”: “It was very odd to watch him,” he recalled. “Every time he put his little strokes of paint on the canvas he would first lean his head back to look up with half-closed eyes … I had never seen anyone paint like that.” Marguerite Gachet put off for a month Vincent’s request to pose, and finally consented only to let him watch her while she played the piano. His request for a second sitting went unanswered. Vincent’s intense exertions behind the easel bewildered and menaced Adeline Ravoux as well. “The violence of his painting frightened me,” she later told an interviewer, and she described the portrait that resulted as “a disappointment, for I did not find it true to life.” She, too, declined to grant a second sitting.
Indeed, the year in the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole had left an indelible mark on Vincent’s demeanor—an anxious alertness to the possibility of imminent collapse, visible in his vacant expression and fugitive gaze—that unnerved grown men, not just adolescent girls. “When you sat opposite him and talked face-to-face,” a witness in Auvers recalled,
and someone came up to one side of him, he would not just turn his eyes to look to see who it was, his whole head would turn … If a bird came past when you were chatting with him, instead of just glancing at it, he would raise his whole head to see what sort of bird it was. It gave his eyes a sort of fixed, mechan
ical look … like headlights.
Anton Hirschig, a young Dutch painter, arrived at the Ravoux Inn in mid-June, sent by Theo, like a draft replacement, to provide his brother with the companionship of a fellow artist and the comfort of a countryman. The twenty-three-year-old Hirschig found Vincent a nervous, twitching, frightened man—“a bad dream,” “a dangerous fool”—with a mind ominously unmoored. “I still see him sitting on the bench in front of the window of the little café,” Hirschig later wrote, “with his cut-off ear and his wild eyes in which there was a crazed expression into which I did not dare to look.”
Vincent had no better luck with the Spanish artist who took his meals at the Ravoux Inn (“Who is the pig that did that?” he said when he first saw Vincent’s paintings); or another Dutch artist who worked in Auvers; or the family of English-speaking artists who lived next door, “painting away, day in and day out”; or the French artist who visited Auvers but successfully avoided any contact at all. Even the brothers’ old comrade from the rue Lepic, Pissarro, who lived only six miles away, never came to see him. Vincent did briefly befriend one of the neighbors, an artist named Walpole Brooke, but Brooke quickly disappeared down the same hole of mutual hostility as Hirschig, of whom Vincent wrote, “He still has quite a few illusions about the originality of his way of seeing things … He won’t come to much, I think.”
Locals had even less tolerance for the visitor’s bizarre ways. They avoided him in the cafés and fled when he accosted them in the street with entreaties to pose. One of them heard Vincent muttering to himself, “It’s impossible, impossible!” as he stalked away from one such rejection. Most of the townspeople knew nothing of the events in Arles or the asylum of Saint Paul, but they could see the mutilated ear easily enough. “It was the first thing you noticed when you saw him,” one of them said, “and it was very ugly.” Some compared it to “a gorilla’s ear.” The residents of Auvers may not have shared the Arlesians’ superstitions or prejudices against painters, but they were still repulsed by Vincent’s tramplike appearance, unkempt beard, self-trimmed hair, and indeterminate accent—they guessed German or English—that spoke of rootlessness and rough living. As in Arles—and everywhere else he went—Vincent attracted the attention of teenage boys. Dressed in his peasant’s rags and toting his strange bag of painting gear, he looked “like a scarecrow,” one of them later told an interviewer. Local ruffians chased him through the streets shouting a familiar chant: “fou”—crazy. But some of the boys of Auvers were more sophisticated than the “street arabs” of Arles. Many were summer idlers from Paris schools, sons of the vacationing bourgeoisie. Their games with the strange vagabond were more inventive than throwing rotten vegetables; but no less cruel.
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