The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  This was the reverse of the solitary existence that Van Gogh had been experiencing in Arles; it was more the expression of a hope: the Yellow House was to be a miniature monastic community dedicated to producing the art of the future. In this monastery there had to be an abbot—to “keep order,” as Vincent put it—and that would naturally be Gauguin, with Vincent his humble adherent. But in reality, Vincent was not at all the tranquil being he depicted. On the contrary, he was often disquietingly worked up.

  On actually seeing Gauguin, Vincent was surprised to find that his guest was much healthier-looking than he had anticipated. The portrait inscribed “Les Misérables” had created the image of desperation, as had constant complaints in Gauguin’s letters about a debilitating disease—probably dysentery—that he had picked up the year before while painting in Martinique. But Gauguin seemed finally to have shaken that off.

  The impression Gauguin generally made on people was of contained power, both bodily and psychological. Physically, both Gauguin and Van Gogh were small, even by the standards of nineteenth-century France. The French navy, in which he had once served, recorded Gauguin’s height as a little over five feet four inches, but he thought of himself as long-legged and tall. Archibald Standish Hartrick, a Scot who encountered him in Brittany, thought Gauguin “a fine figure of a man.”

  Vincent made the opposite impression. At home in Holland he had been called, mockingly, “het schildermanneke” or “the little painter.” A Dutch neighbor remembered him as “squarely built,” but that was not how most others recalled Vincent over subsequent years. Hartrick considered him “a rather weedy little man, with pinched features.” One of the staff at the hospital at Arles, Dr. Félix Rey, found him a yet more unimpressive specimen—“miserable, wretched… short and thin.”

  Although Gauguin was inclined to impress on an initial meeting, not everybody liked him on closer acquaintance. Many in the small coterie of advanced Parisian painters were suspicious, even hostile. Camille Pissarro, for instance, who had at one stage taken Gauguin under his wing, came to think of him as a thief of other artists’ ideas, and the young painter Paul Sérusier felt there was something dubious about him, a touch of playacting and also of ruthlessness. “He made you think of a buffoon, a troubadour, and a pirate all at once.”

  Gauguin’s manner was measured. His voice was somber and husky. He had, a writer named Charles Morice noted, “a large, bony, solid face with a narrow forehead.” His mouth was straight and thin-lipped, and he had “heavy eye-lids that opened lazily over slightly bulging, bluish eyes that rotated in their sockets to look to the left and right almost without the body or the head having to take the trouble to move.”

  Vincent, in contrast, was prone to disturbingly fast and jerky movements. Hartrick remembered:

  He had an extraordinary way of pouring out sentences, if he got started, in Dutch, English and French, then glancing back at you over his shoulder, and hissing through his teeth. In fact, when thus excited, he looked more than a little mad; at other times, he was inclined to be morose, as if suspicious.

  Hartrick and his cronies thought him “cracked” but harmless, perhaps not interesting enough to bother much about.

  But some saw redeeming inner qualities in Vincent when they got to know him better. He had found a few friends in Arles that year—a soldier, a postal worker and three other painters. But sometimes he went for days without speaking to anyone, and there were painful persecutions by the local youths that he did not confess, even to his brother Theo.

  Years later, Monsieur Jullian—by then the respectable librarian of Arles—felt guilt for the way he and his teenage friends had treated Vincent. They would shout abuse at him as he went past, “alone and silent, in his long smock and wearing one of those cheap straw hats you could buy everywhere.” Vincent had decorated his hat with ribbons, “sometimes blue, sometimes yellow.” This touching mark of his faith in color was bound to provoke the local youths. Vincent’s habit of “continually stopping and peering at things”—natural in a painter—excited the ridicule of his tormenters:

  I remember, and I am bitterly ashamed of it now, how I threw cabbage stalks at him! What do you expect? We were young, and he was odd, going out to paint in the country, his pipe between his teeth, his big body a bit hunched, a mad look in his eye. He always looked as if he were running away, without daring to look at anyone.

  Vincent caused no disturbance, M. Jullian recalled, “except when he had been drinking, which happened often.” Looking back, the librarian saw that he was “really a gentle person, a creature who would probably have liked us to like him, and we left him in his terrifying isolation, the terrible loneliness of genius.”

  Adding to Vincent’s general air of eccentric vagrancy was his lack of teeth, ten of them having been extracted in Paris eighteen months before and replaced by false ones. Years of rough living had left him looking older than his thirty-five years. (His birthday, on March 30, had fallen that year a month after he arrived in Arles.)

  Gauguin, too, had had his share of sufferings, including near-destitution at times in the previous few years, and his draining tropical disease. But they had not yet destroyed his air of dynamism and strength. Few considered Gauguin other than formidable. No one seems to have thought the same of Vincent. His brother Theo was perhaps the only person who believed he might become a significant painter.

  Vincent had been accepted as a colleague and a friend in Paris before he left for Arles by such promising younger artists as Paul Signac, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Emile Bernard. But there was no hint that any of them thought he had the potential for greatness.

  Indeed, on October 23, 1888, neither Gauguin nor Vincent had large reputations in the world of art. They were both members of a loose coterie of experimental, mainly youthful painters based in and around Paris. This group was the forerunner of what came to be called the avant-garde (though that term was not yet used). These new artists no longer formed a single school, as a critic noted a few years later. They reminded him of the geometric patterns of a kaleidoscope, now fusing, now flying apart, but all revolving within “the circle of the new art.” They were searching for something beyond Impressionism, the dominant radical movement of the older generation. The Impressionists themselves—Monet, Renoir, Pissarro—were now in their late forties and fifties.

  The embryonic and emerging younger artists exhibited not in the annual Salon, where established, academic painters showed, but in less formal shows, some in cafés and on the premises of friendly magazines. Even in this little world, Gauguin and Vincent were not the most prominent figures. The leading innovative painter in Paris was the twenty-nine-year-old Georges Seurat, who had devised a new method of painting based on dots of pure color.

  In comparison, Gauguin was just beginning to establish himself as a force. In the past couple of years he had attracted a small following of much more youthful painters, all searching for a new art that did not yet have a name. These disciples were on the point of calling him “master.”

  Vincent himself had almost no reputation at all. He was known to a circle of fellow painters, Gauguin among them, as an odd fellow with intriguing ideas. He had been working as an artist for less than a decade, mostly in isolation, and his work had been seen in public only twice, on both occasions in exhibitions he had organized himself in Montmartre drinking-spots.

  Nobody, including the painter himself, realized that in Provence Vincent van Gogh was engaged in one of the most astonishing creative sprints in Western art. During his year and a bit in Arles, he produced some two hundred paintings—around a third of the number Gauguin executed in his entire life—and many of those pictures were masterpieces. Although some had been dispatched to Theo in Paris, the bulk of them were there in the Yellow House. The pictures were everywhere—tacked to the walls, hung in frames, stacked in storage. There was much to talk about as the sun rose on October 23, 1888, but the most startling novelty for Gauguin was those extraordinary paintings. Ver
y few people alive were in such a good position as Gauguin to comprehend Vincent’s achievement; and no one had better reasons to admire and assimilate it—or to resist it.

  Sun poured in through the south-facing windows of the Yellow House that Tuesday morning, a fine, clear autumn day. The light in the front room downstairs, which one stepped into straight from the street, was among the attractions of the place. Vincent had chosen it as his studio. So there were his easel, palette and all he needed to paint. The room smelled of his pipe smoke as well as of turpentine, pigment and Vincent himself—the climate was hot and washing arrangements limited.

  The windows of this work room faced straight out on to the street, so passersby could peer in. But Vincent, at least in his more ebullient phases, did not mind being watched while he painted. He felt people might then understand that he was doing a real job of work.

  The space was permeated by noises as well as odors and the life of the street. While working there one could hear chatter outside, mostly in Provençal. Occasionally, a farm wagon or horse-drawn carriage would rattle past. Whenever a train went over the bridge just down the Avenue de Montmajour, its chugging was clearly audible. The steam whistles were loud at night.

  Gauguin recalled a chaotic untidiness in the studio. “I was shocked,” he wrote. “His box of colors barely sufficed to contain all those squeezed tubes, which were never closed up.” In this reaction Gauguin wasn’t alone. Theo had complained that after his brother moved into his flat in Paris, the place deteriorated because Vincent was so “dirty and untidy.”

  Vincent had been working in the Yellow House since the previous May, although he had only begun living in the building on September 16. There had been plenty of time for him to deposit debris all around him, like the active volcano Gauguin compared him to.

  This domestic confusion was part of the zone of disturbance Vincent created around him—by his manner, the rhythm of his speech, his movements, the insistence with which he expressed his views. Despite the disarray, however, there was a pleasant simplicity about the house with its white walls, blue doors and floors of local red tile.

  The studio, like the other rooms at the front of the Yellow House, was an irregular shape. The walls of the building followed the arrangement of the streets outside, which were not at right angles. Although the jaunty little classical structure looked foursquare, it was actually askew.

  The two long, narrow bedrooms upstairs faced the square. Vincent’s was furnished with a puritanical sobriety—a plain deal bed, a couple of chairs, a simple washing stand with hairbrushes and shaving gear, a towel on a hook, a mirror. Six days before Gauguin arrived, Vincent had completed a picture of this interior.

  One had to pass through Vincent’s to reach Gauguin’s room. It was smaller and had no fireplace but was more opulently appointed, with a walnut bed, dressing table and matching picture frames. Both rooms looked straight out on to one of the little parks in Place Lamartine outside, which had an oval pond in the middle. When the green shutters were open on a fine day such as that one, sun poured in. But it was the paintings that were astonishing. Those, Gauguin wrote later, “shone out” from the surroundings, indeed, there was hardly any gap between them; the whole room was only 2.7 by 3.7 yards—not much bigger than a storage room—and it contained six big canvases. There were four landscapes of the gardens in the Place Lamartine—not as they were that fine autumn morning, with the leaves beginning to fall, but as they had been a month before when the greens were already starting to turn to gold.

  These four pictures were on the side walls of the room, but the paintings that really caught Gauguin’s attention and stayed in his mind were at either end, beside the window and above the bedhead.

  “In my yellow room,” he wrote six years later, using a little poetic license:

  sunflowers with purple eyes stand out on a yellow background; they bathe their stems in a yellow pot on a yellow table. In a corner of the painting, the signature of the painter: Vincent. And the yellow sun that passes through the yellow curtains of my room floods all this fluorescence with gold; and in the morning upon awakening from my bed, I imagine that all this smells very good.

  Gauguin’s description was not exact. There were actually two sunflower paintings in the bedroom, and only one of the pictures was yellow on yellow; the other had a turquoise backdrop. But both were crackling with electricity in a way that no floral paintings had ever done before.

  Sunflowers

  Vincent had arranged the decoration and furnishing of the Yellow House after long and careful thought. On first arriving in Arles at the end of February he had taken a room at the Hôtel-Restaurant Carrel in the Rue de la Cavalerie, just inside the medieval gate of the city before Place Lamartine. He paid five francs a week for the room. Later, that was reduced to four—but he still felt he was being overcharged. He didn’t like the food, which he also thought expensive (Vincent tended to be strange about eating and suffered from pains in his stomach).

  Often, walking out of town towards Montmajour, Vincent had passed the Yellow House, standing in the sun on the corner of the square. Eventually, on May 1, he signed a five-month lease for the empty right-hand part of the building.

  If he couldn’t yet live in the unfurnished rooms of the Yellow House, at least he could soon use it as a studio. Six days later—the dispute about overcharging at the Hôtel-Restaurant Carrel having grown acrimonious—he moved to the Café de la Gare along the street, where he slept and ate from then on. He became a member of the little community of Place Lamartine.

  Hardly had Vincent rented the Yellow House—for fifteen francs a month—than he began to think about furnishing and equipping it. The building had been shut up and uninhabited for a long time and was in poor condition. Vincent, despite his disheveled appearance, had pronounced nest-building tendencies. In Paris, where he had shared a flat with his brother Theo, he had filled it with carefully selected objects. When later his sister-in-law was shown the apartment, every vase or ornament she praised turned out to be something that Vincent had found and thought pretty.

  But what Vincent thought pretty—just like his own paintings—was much rougher and simpler than what most people liked. “What a mistake,” he exclaimed, “Parisians make in not having a palate for crude things.” He loved “common earthenware,” for example, and often posed his flower subjects in vases made of it. Early in May, out of his limited allowance—all provided by Theo—he bought two chairs, a table and “things for making a little coffee and soup at home.”

  These starred in a new painting:

  a still life of a blue enameled iron coffee-pot, a royal blue cup and saucer, a milk jug with pale cobalt and white checks, a cup with orange and blue patterns on a white ground, a blue majolica jug decorated with green, brown and pink flowers and leaves.

  Although he still had no furnishings or beds, Vincent bought table linen for the house, selecting a hard-wearing variety.

  On May 27 Vincent agreed to contribute towards the costs of having his half of the building repainted, inside and out. He paid his half of the bill—ten francs—on June 10. From that point, the Yellow House, previously dilapidated, became visibly much fresher and brighter than the twin, left-hand side of the structure, occupied by a grocer’s shop.

  The outside walls were the fresh, almost edible color of butter. The shutters were vivid green, the doors inside a soothing blue. There, in and on the house, were the major notes in the color scale—yellow, green, blue and the rich red of the studio floor. The ground-floor front room became Vincent’s studio. The studio and its furniture took on roles in his pictures. The strength of the colors suited his mood that summer.

  Sketch of Still Life with Coffeepot

  Just before Gauguin arrived Vincent had gaslight installed in the studio and kitchen at a cost of twenty-five francs. He planned to paint portraits indoors at night, just as he had recently painted after dark in the central square and beside the Rhône, the glow of the streetlight eked out by can
dles on his hat.

  It was not until September that Vincent could afford to furnish the two bedrooms upstairs. On Saturday, September 8, advised by his friend, the postal supervisor at the station, Joseph Roulin, and his wife, he bought two beds. Vincent selected a simple one made of white deal for his room and a more luxurious walnut one for the guest room—with luck to be occupied by Gauguin. They were big double beds in the local style, not iron bedsteads. This gave them, Vincent felt, “an air of solidity, permanence and calm.”

  The Yellow House

  He also bought two mattresses and—because the beds came to 150 francs and his money was running short—sheets and blankets for only one. That same day he bought a mirror—because he had the self-portrait in mind—a few bits and pieces and twelve chairs. The latter figure, however, might have been just in Vincent’s mind; he thought he painted twelve sunflowers, though that was not the real amount. He was apt to be absent-minded about factual details. He wrote Rue de Laval on an envelope instead of Rue de Lepic, which was Theo’s correct address, presumably because he had been thinking about Charles Laval, a painter friend of Gauguin’s. Describing the yellow of the sun that burned in the sky above his house, Vincent accidentally wrote “souffre” not “soufre”—not “sulfur” but “suffer”—perhaps an insignificant slip. Twelve was a suitably apostolic number for gatherings connected with the Yellow House.

  On that Saturday Vincent had received a generous 300 francs enclosed in a letter from Theo. By Sunday only fifty remained, but the house was almost ready. A few days before, he had been feeling despondent and ill; now, suddenly, he felt a rush of confidence and energy.

  For three nights, he sat painting in the Café de la Gare—to the entertainment of Ginoux and the other habitués, who included local streetwalkers and their clients. This was a room in which Vincent had spent many evenings—reading, writing letters, thinking, talking, drinking—amid the prostitutes and the drunks who snoozed on the little tables. His picture, he wrote, was intended to “express the terrible passions of humanity.”