The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  In the mail that Wednesday was a letter from Theo, replying to Vincent’s last appeal for cash and the worrying remarks he had made about his state of mind. Theo, who was on the point of dashing off to Brussels on business, diagnosed one reason for Vincent’s attack of nerves: “It is to be supposed that you have worked too hard, and consequently have forgotten to take proper care of your body.” As often, Theo enclosed money—fifty francs, which would temporarily calm Vincent’s most urgent source of anxiety.

  Unfortunately, his letter also contained three pieces of information likely to disturb Vincent further. One was that a Dutch painter, Meyer de Haan, was going to stay in Theo’s flat. That is, he was going to take up Vincent’s former position as his brother’s flatmate and would soon, Theo predicted, “become the central figure of a group of young people.” That was just what Vincent himself had done—form a circle of young artists. He was being supplanted.

  Vincent had been hostile to this alter ego, de Haan, and his friend Isaacson, also an artist, the moment Theo had mentioned them. He had leaped to the conclusion that they were brash knowalls from Holland with none of his own knowledge of contemporary French painting. Now, in his letter of reply, he accepted Theo’s mild defense of the two of them: it was all Theo’s fault, he must have given the wrong impression. It would be just as well, Vincent noted, for Theo to have a companion, “especially since the winter will soon be here.”

  Theo van Gogh

  Vincent and his brother suffered from a syndrome he called “melancholy.” In becoming a painter, instead of giving in to despair, Vincent felt he had chosen an “active melancholy,” but he particularly dreaded the cold, dark months of winter, which were always a bad time for him. Fortunately, he now had someone to share this somber season. It was good that Theo did, too.

  Theo mentioned more agitating news: another dealer—père Thomas—had shown no interest in buying Vincent’s work (the second time Theo had tried recently). On the other hand, Theo himself had sold a big picture by Gauguin, Breton Girls in a Ring, to a collector named Dupuis. The artist’s share was 500 francs. He had sent a letter about it to Gauguin in Brittany, but that message was still following the painter south to Arles.

  The question of sales was an extremely sensitive one for Vincent. In reality, he had sold virtually nothing in his entire career as a painter to date, just a handful of works sold or exchanged for a few francs with his friend, the dealer Tanguy. His notion of the prospective value of his paintings was subject to drastic fluctuations, depending on his mood. A few weeks before, his estimates had been buoyant; now he computed them with the arithmetic of depression.

  Then, in a state of elation, he had calculated the worth of fifteen of the décorations in the Yellow House at 10,000 francs, but now he estimated only 100 francs for each of his pictures. The consequences of this low price were dismal. If, over fifty years, Vincent spent 100,000 francs—low outgoings of 2,000 francs per year, less than he was already spending—that meant he must paint and sell 1,000 pictures at 100 francs each. It was a heavy burden, especially as he wasn’t selling any at all. And now the longed-for sale had come—but to Gauguin, not to him.

  Agonized by anxieties—and not only financial ones—Vincent was not as elated by Gauguin’s arrival as one might have expected. He mentioned it to Theo, only with a wry twist. “Gauguin has arrived in good health. He gives me the impression he is even better than me.” Altogether, given the intensity with which he had anticipated Gauguin’s arrival, Vincent’s enthusiasm, as expressed to his brother, at least, was perfunctory.

  “Gauguin is very, very interesting as a man,” Vincent declared. He would probably produce a great number of paintings in Arles and, he added tentatively, “I hope perhaps I shall too.” Then Vincent launched into a long and bitter lament about his financial predicament, his weariness, both physical and mental, his wasted efforts, his whole futile existence:

  I myself realize the necessity to produce even to the extent of being morally crushed and physically drained by it, just because after all I have no other means of ever getting back what we have spent. I cannot help it that my pictures do not sell.

  His debts were poisoning his life, even if he did succeed in paying them off—which seemed unlikely. “The pains of producing pictures will have taken my whole life from me, and it will seem to me then that I have not lived.”

  The one thing that cheered him up was a painting that had arrived in Gauguin’s baggage trunk: Emile Bernard’s most important work of the summer, Breton Women in a Meadow. This caused a lift in Vincent’s morale. It was, he thought, “magnificent.” He added, with a momentary flicker of better spirits, “after all, we must all be of good cheer.” He very much admired what he saw, “those Breton women walking in a meadow so beautifully composed, the color with such naive distinction.”

  This was one of the most radical paintings yet produced by a European artist; it had emerged from a creative conjunction of artists that summer in Pont-Aven. While Vincent was producing his astonishing Sunflowers in Arles, hundreds of miles north, Gauguin and Bernard were at work on equally audacious projects. They had indeed been a virtual trio, with Vincent taking part at a remove, by mail.

  It had been on his suggestion that Émile Bernard had joined Gauguin and Laval in August. Bernard, an extremely precocious twenty-year-old, was already acquainted with Gauguin but knew Vincent much better. They had been good friends at art school in Paris and afterwards. The proposal that Bernard should link up with Gauguin was typical of Vincent’s urge to interfere benignly in his friends’ affairs, but it had proved directly contrary to his other plan: to get Gauguin to come to Arles.

  For several years Gauguin had had an idea of the kind of art he wanted to make: not an evocation, like Impressionism, of naturalistic appearances and shimmering visual sensations but of feelings and dreams. It would be an art that resembled music: an “abstraction,” a word that he used in a letter to Vincent a few weeks before Bernard arrived.

  Gauguin could imagine it, but he couldn’t actually paint it. And young Bernard brought just the clue Gauguin was looking for. A devout Catholic, Bernard was fascinated by medieval art as well as Japanese prints. The simple, strong outlines and flat, bright colors of stained glass and other medieval art offered an example of a mystical, non-naturalistic way of working.

  Under the stimulus of Gauguin’s company and that of the innovative artists who had already gathered around him, Bernard produced Breton Women in the Meadow. It depicted local women in their traditional costumes, but they were set in the solid green of the grass like figures in a thirteenth-century window. There was little perspective, not much light and shade: just figures thickly outlined in black, floating in a parallel universe of green.

  Within a week or two, it seemed, Gauguin went one better and painted Vision of the Sermon. Gauguin’s painting resembled Bernard’s in its simplification but had much greater intensity. Instead of a flat green background, Gauguin substituted a brilliant red. He activated that scarlet space with a tree that curves diagonally across the canvas. And he added two other elements: mystery and ambiguity.

  Gauguin, Vision of the Sermon

  For all its formal boldness, Bernard’s painting was essentially what the title says it is—a lot of women in a field. In Gauguin’s picture, there were at least two levels of reality. In the foreground and on the left are the Breton women (plus a priest who may or may not be a self-portrait). In the middle of the deep-red field Jacob wrestles with the angel, an open metaphor for spiritual struggle or the striving of the artist.

  It was a painting that was impossible to pin down. Was it religious in spirit or a snide attack on superstition? Gauguin seemed to believe the former, as he attempted to present it to two local churches, one after the other. But, to no one’s surprise, it wasn’t accepted by the priest responsible for either. Meanwhile, hearing by letter of these feats of painting, Vincent was half inclined to set off for Brittany himself. But, instead, thinking about stained
glass, he plunged into Sunflowers, a foray into pure yellow as bold as Gauguin’s voyage into absolute red.

  The painting Gauguin had sold wasn’t the Vision, of which he was very proud. That had yet to arrive at Theo’s gallery. It was an earlier, less radical work. But he still had every reason to be overjoyed. This sale was exactly the result that he had been scheming for since the summer. In 1888 the market in new, experimental art was itself a novel thing. The art market itself, for which Theo worked and Vincent himself had worked, was large, powerful and international. Works by old masters and respected stars of the annual Salon could reach astonishing sums. In 1876, a work by Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier—an artist Vincent admired and Gauguin despised—had fetched 380,000 francs, making him the most expensive living artist.

  In comparison, the only Impressionist who made a really good income was Claude Monet, the shrewdest businessman. Nonetheless, in 1888 there was a firm view in the art market that Impressionist prices were going to rise. The idea, the basic strategy of the trade—as of many other markets—was to buy low and to wait until prices went up. And the fundamental idea of artists, if they could afford it, was to set a high price and sit tight. Vincent and Gauguin both understood this principle.

  Vincent felt that to find—or paint—a good painting was as difficult as finding a diamond. “It requires pain and one must risk his life as a dealer or as an artist.” Once one had done so, however, the thing to do was to keep one’s nerve and hold out for the right price. “Art,” wrote Gauguin to his skeptical wife, Mette, “it is my capital.” The problem was how the artist was to survive until that distant day when the world accepted his work at his own valuation.

  Vincent, in practice, depended entirely on his allowance, and extra hand-outs, from Theo. But earlier in the year, after long discussions in the bars of Montmartre, he had elaborated a scheme. It was a self-help society for avant-garde painters. More established artists such as Monet and Degas would contribute canvases, as would their struggling colleagues. Profits would be pooled, from which the less established could live. Vincent still thought, however impractically, like a merchant in art.

  Hearing of this proposal, Gauguin came up with his own variation: new art would be floated, like a company on the stock market. Speculators would invest in new artists and, when their reputations rose, draw a handsome dividend. This depended on Gauguin’s own experience of a decade working in the Parisian financial markets. He was so proud of this idea that he swore Schuffenecker to secrecy about it. From these exercises in hopeless impracticality, two points can be deduced. First, Vincent’s and Gauguin’s minds ran on similar but slightly divergent lines. Second, that Gauguin had a capacity to take up the other’s ideas, almost unconsciously, as his own.

  The Van Gogh brothers came from a family of art dealers. Two of their uncles, Hein and Cent, were in the business. Uncle Cent, after whom Vincent had been named, was a big wheel in the international picture trade.

  This other Vincent van Gogh had gone into partnership with the Parisian art-dealing firm run by Adolphe Goupil. He had retired in 1872, but his old firm was the obvious one for his brother’s eldest son to enter. Thus, extraordinary though it would seem in 1888, to anyone looking at the outlandishly bohemian tenant of the Yellow House, Vincent had begun his adult life as a respectable businessman with, apparently, excellent prospects. He had started in the art trade at the age of sixteen in 1869 and carried on until 1876, when he was sacked.

  Vincent’s temperamental unsuitability for and lack of interest in selling art had become obvious, but his dismissal was a source of shame and anxiety to his parents. Theo, on the other hand—more diligent, practical and balanced—had followed the same path with success. He had also begun at sixteen, but he had progressed steadily, moving to Paris in 1875. Now, still only thirty-three, Theo was one of the more prominent of the dealers in Paris who took an interest in experimental painting.

  Vincent had not forgotten the lessons of his first profession. His ideas might seem wild, but he kept an eye on the market. Two years before, in the early spring of 1886, Vincent had unexpectedly arrived in Paris from Antwerp, where he had been living. To Theo’s alarm, he moved in with him.

  Then, Vincent had known nothing of Impressionism and its successors, but he rapidly accumulated a group of radical young artists around him. Most of them were contemporaries at the Atelier Cormon, where Vincent attended life classes for a while—among them Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Émile Bernard. None had much of a reputation.

  The brothers Van Gogh began collecting pictures—Vincent always talked about “we” in this context—partly through exchanges of work between Vincent and his friends, partly through purchases using Theo’s money. They tried to corner the market in Adolphe Monticelli, a neglected painter from Marseille whom Vincent hugely admired, and they speculated in Gauguin. It looked as if they had been shrewd about the second.

  As far as Gauguin was concerned, the sale of a picture proved that his affairs were finally improving. Gauguin’s first letter to his friend Schuffenecker was mainly about prices. He was a little anxious that Schuff, who had plenty of his pictures, might sell them low and spoil the newly founded impression that a Gauguin was worth 500 francs. “Vincent also recommends you not to let anything of mine go at a vile rock-bottom price.”

  Gauguin decided to use the 500 francs to pay off his debt to the inn at Pont-Aven run by the widow Gloanec. The letter was short because Gauguin was still shattered from his long train journey. “I am too tired and my head is too done in,” he concluded, “to write any longer.” Only then, in a postscript, did he mention the Yellow House. Could Schuff fetch a couple of his ceramics from Theo’s gallery—one with the figure of Cleopatra and some pigs on it, the other with horns—put them in a parcel and send them to Arles? “We are in a nice enough little home here and I’d like to have a bit of pottery in front of my eyes.” Schuff was used to running these errands, and to putting Gauguin up at short notice.

  Gauguin was reasonably content with his new lodgings. Looking around the Yellow House, so densely packed with Vincent’s work, Vincent’s ideas, Vincent’s dreams, Vincent’s taste and Vincent’s clutter, he saw a “nice enough” little dwelling. But evidently he felt a need to put his own mark on it.

  Gauguin, like Vincent, was an enthusiastic homemaker. When still living with his wife, Mette, and the children, he had designed and carved idiosyncratic furniture for their apartment. With Schuffenecker in Brittany, he had just decorated a sideboard with scenes of Adam and Eve in Paradise. Vincent’s paintings were everywhere in the Yellow House, but there was only one painting of his—the Self-Portrait “Les Misérables.” If this was going to be his home, it required at least a couple of pieces of his pottery.

  These ceramics were the most original creations Gauguin had produced—at least until the Vision. Like many of his works, they were hard to pin down. They were rough and raw like the handiwork of primitive man, or the simple earthenware vessels that Vincent admired. Simultaneously, they were full of the imaginative fantasy—bulbous, meandering shapes, naked figures—that was subsequently to be dubbed “l’art nouveau.”

  In a couple of these ceramics, Madame Schuffenecker, wife of his friend Emil, was encircled by a snake. Quite a few people, looking at that sensual and unnerving portrayal—the bourgeois housewife as pagan goddess—wondered whether there had been an affair between Gauguin and the beautiful, domineering wife of his good and long-suffering friend Schuff.

  The two pieces he had selected for the Yellow House were among the more bizarre he had produced. More than simply ornaments, they were subversive, aggressive, dark in hue, awkwardly made. The Cleopatra pot was a roughly molded square, half vase, half sculpture, on one side of which a naked woman reclined. The “horned’ vase was even odder. From its side protruded the faces of two rats and from its top waved not horns but the tails of the rodents.

  In addition to homemaking, Gauguin was also keen to put some order into the administration of
finances at the Yellow House. (For all his haughty bohemianism, he had a practical side.) He had not been there long, as he later remembered, before he noticed that the household accounts were a muddle. They were just as disorderly as the Yellow House, and for the same reason—Vincent.

  What, Gauguin asked himself, was he to do? Obviously, the situation was delicate. There was a risk of wounding “that very great susceptibility of Vincent’s.” It was thus with many precautions and much gentle coaxing, of a sort Gauguin considered very “foreign” to his nature, that he approached the matter. But, in the event, Vincent readily agreed to his proposal. He was greatly impressed; he thought Gauguin had a “marvelous way” of apportioning expenses from day to day.

  Gauguin described this system:

  We kept a box—so much for hygienic excursions at night, so much for tobacco, so much for incidental expenses, including rent. On top of it lay a scrap of paper and a pencil for us to write down virtuously what each took from this chest. In another box was the rest of the money, divided into four parts to pay for our food each week.

  This was an orderly arrangement, reminding one that Gauguin, as well as having been a stockbroker, had also been a sailor.

  Just as seamanlike were the first necessary expenses that came to Gauguin’s mind: “hygienic” nocturnal excursions. That meant, to the brothel. The theory that sexual activity, at least occasionally, was healthy was a popular one then, and later. Sigmund Freud was a contemporary—three years and two months younger than Vincent. But in reality, sex in a provincial brothel was far from hygienic. Syphilis was common, and incurable.

  These establishments were known as maisons de tolérance, because they were tolerated rather than approved of by the authorities. A little old-fashioned in Parisian eyes, they were still very popular with soldiers and, since Arles had a large barracks, it also had no fewer than six brothels. These were gathered conveniently close to the Yellow House in the warren of streets just inside the old town walls from Place Lamartine.