The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  Some were large establishments with servents, cooks, and up to six filles soumises or resident prostitutes. The latter—according to the census of 1886—were women in their 20s and 30s, mainly French but a few Spanish and one German in nationality, but French in name—so presumably from the occupied territories of Alsace-Lorraine. Such was the female companionship offered to the two painters in Arles after dark.

  Both Gauguin and Van Gogh smoked a pipe—the bohemian and proletarian alternative to a cigar—so tobacco was a regular purchase. There was a tobacconist, a forty-year-old woman named Maria Ourtoul, trading conveniently in Place Lamartine. For Vincent, smoking was a great solace. He often recommended it as a source of comfort and a remedy against melancholy. So, too, was painting directly from life. As he had written to Theo, when he did that and all went well, he could lose himself in an ecstasy. “The emotions are sometimes so strong that one works without knowing one works.”

  Gauguin was dependent on tobacco. In Brittany, he had a special ceramic jar to contain a pound of it at a time. When it was empty, Gauguin became silent and melancholy, hoping his young disciples would fill it up again. In Arles, the matter was dealt with efficiently, as part of the monthly budget.

  In the future, the painters planned to cook at home. But for the time being, Gauguin and Vincent continued to eat at the Restaurant Venissat, which was almost next door. Vincent had formed the habit of eating there in the summer. It was a pink building, with green shutters, set back a little from Place Lamartine on a side road. It reminded Vincent, as so many things did, of painting.

  “This restaurant,” he wrote to Theo one day while he was sitting there:

  is very queer; it is gray all over; the floor is of gray bitumen like a street pavement, gray paper on the walls, green blinds always drawn, a big green curtain in front of the door which is always open, to stop the dust coming in. So it already has a Velásquez gray—like in the Spinners—and even the very narrow, very fierce ray of sunlight through a blind, like the one that slants across Velásquez’s picture, is not wanting. Little tables of course, with white cloths.

  And behind this room in Velásquez gray you see the old kitchen, as clean as a Dutch kitchen, with floor of bright red bricks, green vegetables, oak chest, the kitchen range with shining brass things and blue and white tiles, and the big fire a clear orange. And then there are two women waitresses, both in gray. In the kitchen, an old woman and a short, fat servant also in gray, black, white. I don’t know if I describe it clearly enough for you, but it’s here, and it’s pure Velásquez.

  In front of the restaurant was a pretty little garden, which Vincent described, paved with red brick, and on the walls “wild vine, convolvulus and creepers.” Vincent not only liked the southern look of it, he liked the food and believed it had built him up (something he felt Gauguin needed). One ate there for one franc or one franc fifty, which Vincent considered quite a lot. But he felt that at Restaurant Venissat you got value for your money.

  Rent was obviously a monthly requirement, to be paid to Bernard Soulé, the manager of the hotel on Avenue de Montmajour, a big, square four-storey structure just behind Vincent’s house. After rent, there were two other major items of expenditure in the household of the Yellow House—food and painting materials.

  There was also the expense of going out for a drink at the Café de la Gare or one of the other Arlésienne bars. Gauguin was not much of a drinker. At this time, according to an acquaintance in Brittany, a drink for him “never went beyond a few small and rare glasses of cognac, which he did not abuse and which were served to him more for appearance’s sake than for its taste.” But for Vincent, alcohol was both a solace and a problem. While living in Paris in the two years before he came to Arles, he felt he had become “almost an alcoholic.” Here, initially, Vincent cut down on his drinking. The aim of coming south was in part to settle his nerves in the peace of the country. In any case, at first he found that in the climate of Provence one glass of brandy was enough to make him tipsy.

  As the year wore on and his work rate went up, his consumption increased again. This was partly a reaction to the stresses and anxiety of work itself but also a way of quieting his mental turmoil. When worried about “disastrous possibilities,” he threw himself into painting. He worked in any case so as not “to suffer too much mentally.” And, he added, “if the storm within gets too loud, I take a glass too much to stun myself.”

  It was his wildly fluctuating moods that seemed to lie at the root of the trouble. In Paris he had suffered so severely they made him fear for the future. At times he put them down to “bad wine”; possibly the problem was it was actually too much wine. Vincent complained repeatedly that his blood had not circulated, which he cannot have meant literally. Metaphorically, he seemed to be talking about the terrible lethargy of depression. When he was in this state, alcohol was enlivening; conversely, when he was agitated, it soothed him. But in neither case was it doing him any good.

  In those first days, Vincent was keen to introduce Gauguin to one of his few local friends—Paul-Eugène Milliet, a junior military officer in the 3rd Regiment of Zouaves stationed in the barracks on the other side of Arles—particularly as Second Lieutenant Milliet was leaving on November 1. Vincent always wanted his friends, however heterogeneous, to meet each other.

  In the days before Milliet left, he and Gauguin struck up at least an acquaintance. Probably they met either in one of the cafés—the Café de la Gare being the most convenient—or the brothels, which were social centers as well as a source of other pleasures.

  Gauguin and Milliet had one important thing in common: they had both been to the tropics. Gauguin, born in Peru, had recently visited Martinique; Milliet had been in Tonkin—it was the first thing that Vincent ever mentioned about him. Later known as Indochina, then Vietnam, Tonkin was the most recent object of French imperial expansion. Previously, it had belonged to China.

  Milliet had been stationed there for a year with his regiment and had returned in the spring. Two of his comrades had been murdered in a brawl outside the brothel in Rue du Bout d’Arles that March, shortly after Vincent arrived. Milliet himself had impressed Vincent by spending the night before an important examination relaxing in a bordello. He had recently been bidding fond farewell to every strumpet and trollop in town as he was due to be posted to North Africa the following month.

  Milliet was the sort of confident, virile type Vincent admired. (The young officer reminded him of General Boulanger, a military strongman and notorious philanderer who seemed about to seize control of France.) For his part, Milliet accepted Vincent and had accompanied him on sketching excursions to the Alpilles.

  Theirs was an odd friendship, but it worked—perhaps because Milliet was much younger and therefore not a challenge to Vincent’s views. Vincent had more trouble with equals and superiors. As it was, the painter became testy on the occasions that Milliet questioned his opinions on painting.

  Vincent wanted to meet up with friends not only in cafés and brothels but also at the Yellow House, which was cozier since he had had the new gas lighting put in. To Theo, he mused, “I like the look of the studio, especially in the evening, with the gas burning.” The thought of this domestic refuge immediately suggested the décorations that he would like to put in it—so he asked Theo to look out for more prints of earthy ordinary people by Daumier to hang on the wall.

  Vincent planned that he and Gauguin would paint just such pictures in the Yellow House. He looked forward to creating these “portraits of people in the light of a gas lamp.” The subjects would be his little circle of friends—the Ginouxs from the bar, Roulin the postal supervisor and his family, a few fellow drinkers and frequenters of the brothel.

  There was no question that the social possibilities in Arles were limited, especially in comparison with Pont-Aven, with its cosmopolitan colony of painters (with many of whom Gauguin, admittedly, was not on good terms). Vincent’s circle of acquaintances was tiny and about to get even
smaller with Milliet’s departure.

  Language was an element that cut Vincent and Gauguin off from the people around him. The mother tongue of most inhabitants of Arles was Provençal—another name for Occitan. It was much closer to Catalan than to standard French. Arles was, in fact, the center of a revival of this language and culture, initiated by a poet, Frédéric Mistral, and his followers, who were called the Félibriges. Poems and writings appeared in the local press; there was one in one of the town’s two weekly newspapers, the Forum républicain, that Sunday, lauding Arles as a city that had seen Caesar and Constantine. Vincent dreamed that these Félibriges might come one day to the Yellow House, realizing that he and they had a common goal: a renaissance in the South.

  From day to day, the language barrier had a more immediate effect: when their neighbors spoke among themselves, Gauguin and Vincent could not understand what they said. Vincent, however, liked the sound of what he didn’t comprehend: “the dialect of these parts,” he observed, “is extraordinarily musical in the mouth of an Arlésienne.”

  But Gauguin tended to become irritated with those who did not speak pure, northern French. He told an anecdote about an earlier visit to the Midi. He had been drawing on the beach near the Spanish frontier. “A gendarme from the Midi, who suspects me of being a spy, says to me, who comes from Orléans: ‘Are you French?’ ‘Why, certainly.’ ‘That’s odd. Vous n’avez pas l’accent (lakescent) français.’” When it came to linguistic snobbery, Gauguin emphatically did not count himself a “savage from Peru.” He thought Vincent’s French accurate, however, to the point of grammatical pedantry; indeed, Vincent wrote French more beautifully than Gauguin did. It was the language Vincent spoke, and even used to his Dutch brother and younger sister.

  In Arles entertainments were few. Sometimes a play was put on; a troupe of actors from nearby Nîmes was to perform the following week, for example, though if Vincent and Gauguin went to the theatre, they never mentioned it. Gauguin was a keen fencer—in Brittany he helped out in a little fencing school—and had brought his masks, gloves and foils with him. They were kept in the small cupboard in the Yellow House.

  Gauguin could hold forth about this sport at length, and probably did. Essentially, his views on swordplay and painting were the same. It was a matter of strategy—the winner was the one with the best head, not the fastest hand or arm. The fencing gear, with its sharp blades, made Vincent nervous. He hoped that Gauguin would never use these “infantile weapons of war” in earnest. Gauguin’s other favored athletic contest was boxing.

  In the evenings in Brittany, he and his companions liked to play board games such as checkers, for which he drew his own board on a piece of newspaper, or play music. He had taught himself piano and mandolin, the former very slowly. He could pick out such pieces as Schumann’s Berceuse.

  Vincent, in contrast, was not a musician, though he had begun to learn the piano, nor a player of sports or games. His leisure activities were walking, reading, writing and talking. He liked the kind of verbal wrangle for which there was a Dutch word, “wruivering.” But he longed to find a soulmate with whom he could reach complete agreement, or as he put it, say together, “That’s it.”

  Gauguin had also started work on that first day, but it always took some time for his ideas to coalesce. Whenever he changed location he needed a “certain period of incubation” in which to discern the inner essence of his new surroundings. Gauguin didn’t expect to do serious work for a month—until then, everything he painted would be an experiment. And, indeed, it was several weeks, he remembered, before he was able “to catch distinctly the sharp flavor of Arles and its surroundings.” But that did not hinder him from working hard (though not as hard as Vincent).

  He began two pictures, one of which, according to Vincent, was a “Negress”—so she was clearly not an Arlésienne. This was a significant choice of subject, since it was as a painter of tropical subjects from Martinique that Gauguin had made his initial impact on Vincent and Theo. They had bought one of these, and he had given them another. It was indeed these pictures that had brought Vincent and Gauguin together.

  Vincent and Theo had met Gauguin soon after he returned to France, penniless and still ill, in mid November of the previous year (if they had not bumped into each other before in the hurly-burly of Parisian bohemia). The work that Gauguin had brought back from the Caribbean made a huge impression on Vincent, most of all a picture of four black women gathering mangoes, with a band of deep-blue sea in the background. This—which they dubbed “the Negresses”—was the one the brothers Van Gogh bought. Gauguin also swapped another Martinique landscape for one of Vincent’s earlier pictures of sunflowers painted in Paris (obviously, he had always loved Vincent’s depictions of that bloom).

  From the moment they had seen those paintings from Martinique, Vincent was convinced Gauguin was the great painter of the future—a master of richer colors, and hotter, paradisiacal lands. “Everything his hands make,” Vincent declared to Bernard, “has a gentle, pitiful, astonishing character. People don’t understand him yet, and it pains him so much that he does not sell anything, just like other true poets.” So—to please Vincent, or to assert himself or both—Gauguin began work on a picture of a black woman. But it was not a success. Later, Gauguin probably painted another picture over it—a portrait of Roulin’s wife—so as to save the canvas.

  His other picture, a landscape, was also a five-finger exercise, very far from the “abstraction” and audacity of his Vision. It was a picture of a typical local farmhouse, known as a mas, with a large haystack in front and a tall, twisting cypress behind. The partially cloudy sky depicted the weather conditions of Thursday and Friday of that first week in October.

  This was a subject that Vincent had painted and drawn during the summer. He had sent one of these drawings—each swirl and whorl of the pen filled with intense vitality—to Bernard, who had passed it around in Pont-Aven. But Gauguin’s picture was nothing like that drawing. It was calm and orderly, the haystack a carefully constructed cone. His handling—in serried rows of brush strokes—was also very far from Vincent’s, but close to another painter of the South: Paul Cézanne.

  The style of Cézanne was Gauguin’s default position. As a collector in wealthier days he had bought Cézanne’s pictures and was still, despite financial problems, loath to part from one. The older man had been one of Gauguin’s most important earlier influences; indeed, at one point, he had—half laughingly—suggested that Pissarro administer a sleeping pill to Cézanne so that they could interrogate him about his secrets while he slumbered. Gauguin was markedly curious about other artists’ innovations. In this case, Cézanne had become so suspicious of Gauguin’s inquisitiveness that he had departed suddenly for Aix-en-Provence.

  To Gauguin, it went without saying that Cézanne—and not the eccentric Dutch newcomer with whom he had just moved in—was the great painter of southern French landscapes. He admired Cézanne’s disciplined, rational approach: it was a way of working ruled by the head (as he felt art, and fencing, should be).

  Vincent, for his part, had a low opinion of Cézanne. He found his parallel brush strokes “almost timid’ and “conscientious.” Cézanne and Van Gogh, according to Emile Bernard, did not hit it off. One day they had met over lunch at the shop of the art dealer and color merchant père Tanguy. Vincent boldly showed the older man his work. “After inspecting everything, Cézanne, who was a timid but violent person, told him, ‘Honestly, your painting is that of a madman.’”

  Vincent also painted a landscape, another view in the fields outside Arles, during the first few days of Gauguin’s stay. It had a sky of lemon yellow—dawn or sunset—streaked with bands of cloud. In the foreground there was an ancient yew tree: a massive, venerable trunk, gray and gnarled, that rose up like a human being, dominating the picture and the furrowed field behind. (See his sketch on p. 30.)

  Yew trees had two common associations—they were grown in cemeteries and, even when old, they had
the power to throw out new shoots. Thus, they suggested both death and regeneration. Which, if either, was it here?

  Vincent was immensely aware of the emotional and spiritual connotations of flowers and trees. He could see rampant sexuality in shrubs and tragic suffering in willows. This yew tree resembled a man: a stricken arboreal hero. Branches stuck out like arms, the root advanced at the front like a leg—indeed, much like Vincent’s own leg when he had painted himself in the summer on the road to Tarascon.

  It was doubtful whether this old tree was capable of much new growth. It had a few brownish leaves, it was true. But there were funereal cypresses on the horizon, and the wintry light in the picture was very far from the ecstatic blaze of the summer Sower, in which the sun flooded the world with gold. True, Vincent’s violets were originally richer; he used poor-quality red, which later faded. Even so, this—like the new Sower—was an autumnal painting, hope and energy flagging. By the end of the week, however, Vincent’s own spirits were rallying.

  On Saturday the twenty-seventh, Theo got back to Paris after a business trip to Belgium. There, waiting for him, was the long lament of despair and anxiety that Vincent had composed just after Gauguin had arrived. But Theo was “overjoyed” to discover that Gauguin had finally come to Arles.

  Theo tried to staunch the stream of financial anguishes that had flowed from Vincent’s pen. First, he sent yet another postal order. He was worried that if money ran out, his brother might act as he had earlier in the autumn—virtually ceasing to eat, living on endless cups of coffee and crusts of bread while sending frantic letters to Paris. Now there was a danger that he might have two penniless painters in Arles to rescue from semi-starvation. Theo could not always be there, ready to send money at a moment’s notice, since he was obliged to travel on business. Vincent, moreover, had shown an ability to run through cash at a rapid and unpredictable rate.