The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  “I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime.” Someone who saw the Night Café, Vincent reflected, would conclude that its painter had full-blown delirium tremens—and it was true that Vincent’s consumption of drink was sometimes out of control.

  Vincent was always reading newspapers, magazines and novels. Another painting from that year was a portrait of his books, piled up on the table-top, some open, some closed. Most of them were yellow-covered paperback editions of his favorite modern authors, men such as Gustave Flaubert, the brothers Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant and, above all, Emile Zola. When he looked around in Arles, the works of these men came back to him. The Café de la Gare no doubt reminded him of Zola’s novel L’Assommoir, about the degradation, derangement and death brought on by drink.

  Night Café

  As soon as Vincent had bought the bedroom furniture, his mind was racing with ideas for the poky, rented, skewed four rooms on Place Lamartine. “I have it all planned,” he wrote on the evening of September 9, excited by his purchases, and sitting in the Café de la Gare. “I really do want to make it—an artist’s house, but not affected, on the contrary, nothing affected, but everything from the chairs to the pictures full of character.”

  The notion of a house for an artist was in the air. Edmond de Goncourt, the survivor of the two brothers, had published a deluxe, two-volume account of his own dwelling in Paris. But in the Yellow House—quite different from de Goncourt’s luxurious house—everything was to be simple. That was an ideal as well as a matter of necessity. The rush-bottomed chairs, for example, were just the same as the ones Vincent sat on when he took his dinner in the Restaurant Venissat, next door to the Café de la Gare. They were ordinary, unpretentious Arles chairs. But that kind of simplicity—apart from its being unavoidable for reasons of cost—pleased Vincent. It spoke to him of monastic life and of the spare interiors in Japanese dwellings (the bonzes in Madame Chrysanthème lived among plain yellow walls and unframed pictures).

  His new home, Vincent decided, would be an artist’s house in the most direct way—by being filled with his art. His pictures would form a décoration for the walls. By that, he meant not just that they would be decorative, but that they would evoke multiple meanings and emotions—amounting to his whole world—through their contrasting colors and subjects. Some paintings depicted the immediate neighborhood—the parks outside, the banks of the Rhône, the Café de la Gare—all of which reminded him of Zola and the artist Honoré Daumier, whose lithographs also hung on the walls of the Yellow House, in company with Japanese prints and Vincent’s pictures. Other paintings portrayed Vincent’s friends. The décoration was a fitting backdrop to Vincent’s most ambitious plan: the Yellow House would be home to a miniature community. Most often, Gauguin was Vincent’s imagined housemate, but there were other possibilities. Perhaps Emile Bernard would come. Then there was Charles Laval, the friend of Gauguin’s who had shared in his intrepid painting adventure to Martinique.

  In Vincent’s mind, the Yellow House expanded. There were two other tiny compartments, cupboards really, on the upper floor. Surely it would be possible to fit everybody in? Another visitor might be his brother Theo, coming down from Paris to recuperate from ill health and the exhaustion of his art-dealing life.

  The Yellow House would house an artists’ colony. That, of course, was not a new idea. Northern Europe, especially the cheaper coastal fringes, was strewn with the rookeries of bohemian painters. But to found such a group in the remote Midi, land of blazing sun and brilliant color—that was absolutely new, and Vincent’s own idea. His would be a studio of the South, a band of brother artists whose work was so unknown it did not even have a proper name. Vincent called them the “painters of the Petit Boulevard” after their Parisian haunt, the Boulevard de Clichy, rather than the smart Boulevard Montmartre. Some were painters who used simplified shapes and colors in the manner of the Japanese prints that were then so fashionable and widely collected among the up-to-date—including Vincent.

  It seemed obvious to him that the artists of the Petit Boulevard should work in the bright, clear light of the south, which was, he imagined, exactly like that of Japan. He and the others would live and paint together—different in individual style but sharing a common aim, exchanging ideas, commenting on each other’s work just as Vincent, Bernard and Gauguin now did by letter. However, to coax his friends to Arles seemed an impossible task. There were moments at which Vincent wondered whether it might be easier for him to migrate to Pont-Aven.

  The Paris-Lyon-Mediterranée Railway, or PLM, was Vincent’s means of contact with the outside world. Its trains carried his mail to the north, where his brother and artist friends lived, and their mail back to him in the south. (In cases of dire emergency, there was also the telegram.) Letters were picked up at regular intervals, from five in the morning until ten at night. And there were four postal deliveries a day, so Vincent and his circle could transmit ideas and information to each other with some rapidity. The only aspect difficult to convey by mail—and a vital matter to Vincent and his fellow painters—was color, which was why their letters were full of detailed descriptions of pictures, shade by shade, hue by hue, and their drawings were carefully labeled “bleu,” “orange,” “violet” or “vert.”

  In the month after he moved into the Yellow House, Vincent worked furiously. During the warmth of mid September, he painted day after day in the public gardens of Place Lamartine and, as he did so, a chain of extravagant associations formed in his mind. He had read an article about the medieval Italian writer Boccaccio in a magazine. Soon, it struck him that he was like Boccaccio, and Gauguin resembled Boccaccio’s wise and noble friend, the poet Petrarch. These little parks were Provençal gardens of love, especially the one in the corner nearest the brothel district, which filled him with erotic thoughts. Gauguin would be the new poet of the South! Together, they would make a new Renaissance.

  During the second week of October alone, Vincent painted five large pictures, then felt completely exhausted; his eyes were so tired he could scarcely see properly. On the night of Saturday, October 13, he slept for sixteen hours at one stretch in his new bed. A violent mistral was blowing, whipping up clouds of dust and keeping him indoors. He had had, as he put it, a “queer turn”: some sort of attack or collapse.

  It gave him the idea for a new picture. “This time,” he wrote, the subject was simply his bedroom—the color alone made it seem simple and grand and suggestive “of rest or of sleep in general.” But, actually, the picture did not give an entirely tranquil impression. That was partly due not to Vincent, who painted what was before his eyes, but to the architecture of the Yellow House. The end wall of the room was not at right angles to the sides but slanting. The rushing perspective of the room, however, was Vincent’s. And, more than rest and repose, the painting suggested furniture and fittings hurtling along under the impact of some tremendous force.

  Vincent feared, not for the first time, that he was going mad. He needed to eat more regularly, he felt, and paint less for a few days; otherwise, he might become “ill.” He confided to Theo that if he did go mad it would not take the form of persecution mania, which rather suggested that he had wondered whether it might. It was at this point, on the day that he finished the Bedroom—Wednesday the seventeenth—that Gauguin, after delaying so many months, announced his imminent departure from Brittany.

  The obstacles to his leaving had suddenly cleared. Theo had sold some of his ceramics, so Gauguin could pay off a proportion of his debts for food, lodgings and medicine (he was surprisingly punctilious about that sort of thing). His illness—which had been causing painful stomach cramps and discharges of blood into his chamber pot—had cleared up. He had already sent his trunk containing his fencing gear and heavier possessions. He himself would soon follow.

  Writing to his friend Emil Schuffenecker, Gauguin expressed his satisfaction at the way things were going.
“However fond of me Van Gogh may be he isn’t falling over himself to send me to the Midi board and lodging paid just for my fine blue eyes.” To Gauguin, Theo was always “Van Gogh,” and Vincent was just Vincent. He saw the former as a “cool Dutchman” who had studied the art market and concluded that he, Gauguin, was the coming man. Finally, everything was going his way. “You know well that in art I am always fundamentally right. Mark this well, at the moment among artists a wind is blowing which is most decidedly favorable to me.”

  Gauguin was even enthusiastic about the South. He had written a little poem in one of his recent letters to Vincent, an ode to the sun of the Midi. It began, “Oh chrome God!” and continued through multiple crossings-out. Poetry was not Gauguin’s métier.

  So they were in very different states of mind, the two men who met that morning in the Yellow House, one full of renewed health and confidence, the other teetering on the edge of derangement. They had a lot of talking to do. After a while they went out, so that Gauguin—who had walked only the few yards from the station to Place Lamartine, and in the dark at that—could take a look at the town of Arles.

  2. Beginning and Carrying On

  October 24–28

  Wednesday, October 24, turned out to be another fine autumnal day. Winter was coming but was not there yet. It was good painting weather. The two men set to work, rising early—Gauguin regarded a seven o’clock start as later than usual.

  In Brittany, Gauguin was accustomed to come down to breakfast around seven, work until breaking for lunch at eleven-thirty, resuming painting at one-thirty or two, then carrying on until five. In Arles Vincent sometimes stayed out in the fields at his easel all day, snacking off a little bread and milk, since he thought it too much bother to go back into town.

  But if he was frugal about food, Vincent was very fond of coffee—in fact, he was addicted to it. When short of cash he had lived on little else, except bread. One of the first items he bought when he rented the Yellow House was coffee-making equipment. In Arles he sometimes ate a couple of eggs for breakfast, which he thought good for his stomach. Gauguin’s habitual morning meal was café au lait with bread and butter.

  On that first day of life together, Vincent—though perhaps not Gauguin—went out into the fields to paint. His outdoor painting equipment included a portable easel—not the more bulky type used indoors—and a box filled with tubes of paint, brushes, turpentine, sticks and other paraphernalia. As a result, when fully loaded, he looked—he thought—like a bristling porcupine. He wore either a blue workman’s jacket and trousers or white, both liberally marked with dabs of pigment as a result of carrying wet canvases. Vincent topped off his outfit with a straw hat such as the local shepherds wore. If he took a left turn out of the front door of the Yellow House, and another left into the Avenue de Montmajour, after a few minutes Vincent would be in the plain of the Crau.

  He had come to have many powerful feelings for this place; oddly, because it was difficult to say exactly why he had settled in Arles. His reasons for coming to the South of France were clearer, though they characteristically mixed the personal and the aesthetic in a fashion that, to a superficial observer, would have seemed downright peculiar.

  “My dear brother,” he reminded Theo, “you know that I came to the south and threw myself into work for a thousand reasons.” He was “looking for a different light,” partly because he “believed that observing nature under a brighter sky might give one a more accurate idea of the way the Japanese feel and draw.” Japanese prints, with their bright, flat, clear colors, were a source of inspiration to many European artists of the time, as mentioned earlier, and a passionate interest of Vincent’s. When his train had approached the Midi the previous February, Vincent had stuck his head out of the window in his excitement, hoping to see the landscapes of Japanese prints.

  He had wanted to see a “stronger sun,” then, for artistic reasons, because he felt the “colors of the prism” were “veiled in the mists of the north.” It would help him to understand not only Japanese art but also the intense colors of Delacroix, another artistic hero. But he needed the light for personal reasons, too. Like many northerners, he craved the southern warmth and radiance. The previous winter in Paris, he had had some sort of breakdown, he had felt “mental weariness,” emptiness, he was “dimmed with sadness.” Vincent felt the country was a better and a healthier place than the town and that the southern countryside in particular would be more carefree than the gloomy North. (He had gathered as much from a favorite book, Tartarin de Tarascon by Alphonse Daudet.)

  But none of these factors really explained why he settled in Arles, which was far from being the most obvious choice. It wasn’t on the coast; it wasn’t especially picturesque. Many people found it tawdry despite its ancient monuments, a run-down town which had once been great—it was briefly capital of the Western Roman empire—but struggled to find a role in the modern world. Gauguin decided it was “the dirtiest town in the whole south” and with, in Vincent’s view, “uncommonly good reason.” The sharp stones of its twisting streets hurt the feet. The hotels were grubby.

  Quite why Vincent had got off the train there, nobody ever knew. Perhaps Toulouse-Lautrec, who came from the South, had mentioned it. Degas, who had never been there, had told him he was looking forward to painting the famous women of the place. But possibly it was just on a whim that Vincent came to Arles, liked what he saw and stayed. He told an acquaintance that he only wanted to interrupt his journey in Arles for a short time, but he became fascinated by the possibilities of the area.

  The landscape was calculated to appeal to the eye of a Dutchman. The plain around Arles was, like much of the Netherlands, reclaimed land. Until the drainage canals had been dug in the sixteenth century the town had risen almost like an island from the surrounding wetlands. The Roman name of the place, Arlate, simply meant “town in the marshes.”

  The very flatness of this landscape appealed to Vincent. It reminded him—as it would remind anyone brought up on Dutch painting—of the landscapes of the great painters of the seventeenth century—Ruysdael, Hobbema, Philips Koninck. He was fascinated especially by the view across the plain from the heights at Montmajour. In the summer, he went there again and again, to that “flat landscape, where there was nothing but… infinity—eternity.” Gauguin, however, had no fond memories of low country.

  Naturally, the contrast in terrain between Brittany and Provence was a topic of conversation between the two painters. For the time being, Vincent meekly accepted what Gauguin had to say about the Breton scenery—namely that it was larger, more pure and “definite” than the “shriveled, scorched and trivial” surroundings he found in the South.

  This was discouraging, but Vincent took comfort from the fact that Gauguin sensed artistic possibilities in his new surroundings and especially the female inhabitants. “Above all things,” he reported to Theo, “he is intrigued by the Arlésiennes.” At least Gauguin seemed to be settling in, and that was the main thing.

  The size of the pictures Vincent now began to work on—a thirty—was a sign of ambition. Parisian dealers in art materials classified the sizes of the pre-prepared canvases they sold by number. It was a system derived from the widths produced by looms, arranged to suit the suppliers, not the painters. But artists had grown used to it. A size thirty was large, suitable for inclusion in an important exhibition, and that was the size Vincent had selected for the décorations of the Yellow House.

  He finished two new paintings over the next few days, “a new study of a sower, the landscape quite flat, the figure small and vague,” and a “study of a ploughed field with the stump of an old yew tree.” He never said which came first, but for both meteorological and psychological reasons, it was probably the Sower that he began on that first morning of Gauguin’s stay.

  The sky was almost clear on the twenty-fourth—just a little light cloud—and the temperature balmy, which were the conditions to be seen in that picture. Psychologically, too, the s
ubject was an apt beginning to a new phase of work.

  This was a stretch of countryside bordering the road to Tarascon, and a continuation of the road that went past the Yellow House, which Vincent had painted again and again through the year. It was familiar territory in every way: almost exactly the place—with the violet Alpilles and the medieval ruins of Montmajour behind—where he had painted the best of his harvest pictures and also his Ploughed Field. Those were among the works from the past year with which he was most pleased.

  The Sower and the Old Yew Tree, letter sketch

  In addition to the familiar terrain, the sower broadcasting his seed was an image that had been with him almost since he had become an artist. It stood for a painter—or an evangelist—sowing the seed of beauty and truth. With great excitement, Vincent had painted a picture on this theme in the summer, but eventually he had decided it was a failure. He still had the ambition to paint a truly successful Sower.

  As a choice of subject, it was significant, suggesting Vincent’s determination to show his own art at its best before he was influenced—as he expected to be—by Gauguin. The Sower represented his highest ambitions for his work in Arles, and was all the more timely because it was actually painted during the sowing season.

  This Sower, however, was not the masterpiece he planned. The figure hurries along in a way quite unlike the measured confidence of the earlier violet man standing in the sun, bringing regeneration. His right leg is badly drawn. The brushwork has a flurried quality, perhaps reflecting Vincent’s anxious condition.