The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  Theo implored him to get food on credit if his cash ran low. There was no need to starve. Money would always arrive. It was odd that Vincent hadn’t thought of this obvious notion; there was something almost masochistic about the way he behaved.

  Theo tried as hard as he could to reassure Vincent by mail:

  Now I see from your letter that you are unwell, and that you are worrying a good deal. I want to tell you something once and for all. I look upon it all as though the question of money and the sale of pictures and the whole financial side did not exist…

  Thinking about money only led to “misery”; the best thing would be for Vincent to rid his mind of it, and also to avoid other “excesses” and the “diseases” that resulted. This sounded like a warning against the heavy drinking to which Vincent was prone. Theo’s message to Vincent was simple. He was not to concern himself with money, or with sales, just to get on with painting.

  “You speak of money which you owe me, and which you want to give back to me. I won’t hear of it. The condition I want you to arrive at is that you should never have any worries. I must work for the money.” Theo then threw in a word of caution. He felt Vincent spent too much time, energy and cash on other people and their problems:

  You don’t know how much pain you give me when you say that you have worked so hard that you feel as though you had not lived. In the first place I don’t believe this is true, for in point of fact you are living and living like the great ones of the earth and the aristocrats. But I beseech you, warn me in time, in order that you may not feel that you have been living in misery, and that you have fallen ill because you lacked a piece of bread to keep alive. I hope Gauguin’s company will be pleasant for you, and that you will recover within a very short time.

  It was a noble letter. And that last part was true: Vincent was living the free and fulfilling life of the artist. It could have been an idyll—except for the turmoil within him.

  On Saturday Gauguin wrote to Theo—Monsieur Van Gogh to him—acknowledging his earlier letter about the sale, which had just arrived, and letting him know as tactfully as possible that his brother’s mental state was odd.

  “Your brother is, as it happens, a little agitated, and I hope to calm him down bit by bit.” He noted that Vincent had received the money order and, since he had many things to tell his brother in Paris, he would also be writing. Otherwise, Gauguin’s letter was all about his own affairs—naturally enough, since he was reporting to his dealer. He was anxious to hear what Theo thought of the pictures, including the Vision, he had just dispatched from Brittany. Their roughness of execution, he wanted to point out, was intentional, part of a conscious strategy.

  Vincent also wrote to Theo, with a hint that his morale was rising. “My brain is still feeling tired and dried up but this week I am feeling better than during the previous fortnight.” He then plunged straight into what was now on his mind: wide-eyed admiration of his new housemate:

  I knew well that Gauguin had made sea voyages, but I did not know that he was a regular mariner. He has passed through all the difficulties, and has been a real able seaman and a true sailor. This gives me an awful respect for him and a still more absolute confidence in his personality.

  What could Gauguin have been telling Vincent? Viewed coldly, his youth wasn’t all that much to boast about. A difficult, fatherless boy, Gauguin had wanted to go to sea. But he did too badly at school to enter the French Naval Academy, the standard path to a career as an officer. So instead, in December 1865, he joined a merchant ship as a trainee pilot. He then made several voyages across the Atlantic to South America before joining the navy, in which he served through the Franco-Prussian war.

  Gauguin later recorded a little of his life at sea, and what he did relate—like his pictures—took the form of evocative yarns:

  On my first trip as a pilot’s apprentice on the Luzitano [one began] bound for Rio de Janeiro, it was part of my apprenticeship to do the night watch with the lieutenant. He told me the following.

  He had been a cabin boy on a ship that made long voyages in the Pacific with cargoes of all sorts of cheap goods. One fine morning, while he was washing the deck, he fell into the sea without anyone’s noticing it. He did not let go of his broom, and thanks to this broom the boy kept afloat for forty-eight hours in the ocean. By an extraordinary chance a ship happened to pass and save him.

  Then, some time later as this ship had put in at a hospitable little island, our cabin boy went for a walk and stayed a little too long. So he remained for good and all.

  Our little cabin boy pleased everybody, so there he was settled, with nothing to do, forced to lose his virginity straight away, fed, lodged, petted and flattered in every way. He was very happy. This lasted two years; then one fine morning another ship happened to be passing and our young man wanted to go back to France.

  “My God, what a fool I was,” he said to me. “Here I am, obliged to fight my way against wind and wave… And I was so happy!”

  In his letter to Theo, Vincent suggested a precise literary analogy for Gauguin—rugged sailor and man of action. Gauguin had, he thought, “an affinity” with a book called Pêcheur d’Islande, or Icelandic Fisherman, by Pierre Loti. This was a bestseller from the year before last, 1886. It was Loti’s most recent publication, Madame Chrysanthème, that had greatly influenced Vincent’s ideas about the furnishing of the Yellow House and his self-portrait as a Japanese monk. Now, Icelandic Fisherman also took a place among the cult books of the Yellow House.

  The connection between Gauguin and this book was not—as one might have imagined—one of Vincent’s astonishing associative leaps. It was one that Gauguin had made himself, at least by implication. His own life and that of the author ran on almost embarrassingly parallel tracks.

  Loti was a nom de plume. The writer’s real name was Julien Viaud. He was two years younger than Gauguin, and he too was a sailor, an officer in the French navy. At one point he had served in the same flotilla as Gauguin. Loti/Viaud had published a series of books. The second, which really made his name, described the “marriage,” according to local custom, of a British naval officer to a fourteen-year-old girl on Tahiti.

  Loti was one of those authors who are destined to be forgotten after their deaths but who purvey some vital dream to their contemporaries. Vincent and Gauguin were of precisely the generation to whom Loti spoke most seductively. The fantasy he presented was one of escape: a route out of the financial and sexual constraints of middle-class European life into a distant Eden. This was something both Vincent and Gauguin yearned for; indeed, Gauguin had already tried to live out the dream in Martinique, with decidedly mixed results.

  Loti did not only write of remote locations. Mon Frère Yves from 1883 described the life of a semi-literate, hard-drinking Breton sailor. The ringing of wooden Breton clogs recurs throughout the book, “hammering the hard granite paving-stones.” Brittany, time and again, is described as “primitive” and “savage.”

  These are just the words and sounds that Gauguin had singled out when writing to Schuffenecker from Pont-Aven:

  You’re a true Parisian. Give me the country. I love Brittany. I find here the savage and primitive. When my clogs clang on this granite earth, I hear the dull, muffled tone, flat and powerful, that I try to achieve in painting.

  It was all very “sad,” and sadness was his character as an artist.

  Gauguin Photograph © 1891

  Gauguin had taken over Loti’s entire package: a new, ready-made identity for an ex-businessman. He even dressed as a Breton fisherman, in fisherman’s jersey, beret and clogs. Gauguin frequently emphasized that he was a savage, a primitive man. He wasn’t quite sure, or too concerned, exactly what type of savage he was—French or Peruvian—but it was a Breton sailor’s costume that he wore. As it happened, Vincent also thought of his own life as a voyage in a frail boat on perilous seas.

  For the time being, everything that Gauguin had to say was fascinating to Vincent. Gauguin’s
tales of the tropics struck him as “marvelous.” “Surely,” he reflected, “the future of a great renaissance in painting lies there.” He decided that the tropics were the place for Meyer de Haan and Isaacson—those two Dutch painter friends of Theo’s whom he had never met, whose work he had never seen and of whom a few days before he had been highly suspicious. Now they had turned into a couple of surrogates for himself.

  Vincent’s notion of the future of painting took a nationalistic form: if French artists such as Gauguin worked in French colonies such as Martinique, it followed that Dutch painters ought to go to the Dutch territories in the East Indies and found a school of colorist painting in Java. “What things could be done there!” Vincent exclaimed. He would go there himself if he were ten or twenty years younger.

  As usual, his math was off; twenty years before, he had been fifteen. Evidently, however, Vincent didn’t feel up to further traveling. Instead, he would remain in Arles, and others would visit him before sailing from Marseille: “Now it is most unlikely that I shall leave the shore and put to sea, and the little yellow house here in Arles will remain a way station between Africa, the Tropics, and the people of the North.”

  3. Lessons among the Tombs

  October 28 – November 4

  Vincent and Gauguin had now been living together in the Yellow House for six days. Gauguin had begun to settle in and they were establishing a routine. It was time to tackle a new and important subject together. Now, they would begin to do what Vincent had always hoped for: work side by side, a few yards apart, on parallel subjects. This was the real initiation of the Studio of the South.

  The two painters could learn from one another and, especially, Vincent would gain from Gauguin’s example. Still, there was an undercurrent of rivalry. Both men possessed huge talents but neither their ideas nor their temperaments were identical. Apparently, Gauguin was the master; in reality, for most of the time—though he did not entirely know it—Vincent was the greater painter, though his confidence was low and Gauguin’s high.

  As Vincent had long planned, they were going to paint the autumn foliage of Arles, which was looking magnificent. His project for the décorations of the Yellow House included pictures showing the changing seasons. But so far, apart from a couple of canvases done in the days of exhaustion before Gauguin’s arrival, he had painted only spring and summer in the area. Also, the two of them were going to work in a new place, one that Vincent had never depicted.

  They issued from the Yellow House, Vincent wearing his paint-daubed working clothes and straw hat, and festooned with his working equipment, Gauguin dressed as a Breton sailor. They carried their portable easels, boxes of paints, brushes and primed canvases across town to the other side of Arles, where a Roman cemetery called Les Alyscamps was located. This—with the ancient arena and theatre—was counted among the most notable sights of the city.

  “Les Alyscamps” was a mutation into Provençal of “Elisii Campi,” or the Elysian Fields—the blessed land where the virtuous dead of the classical world were believed to spend eternity. It had been built, as was normal Roman practice, outside the city walls, along the Via Augusta that led to Rome. Consequently, when the first Christians appeared in Arles, it was an ideal place for secret meetings.

  On one occasion, it was believed, Jesus Christ himself had attended and left the miraculous imprint of his knee on the lid of a sarcophagus. As a result of this holy relic, Les Alyscamps became the most highly regarded cemetery in early medieval Europe. Bodies were shipped there from distant places, among them, according to legend, that of the hero Roland and other paladins of Charlemagne. But the place that Gauguin and Vincent entered on that warm October day was much diminished since those days of glory.

  For many years, the authorities of Arles had made a habit of presenting the most beautifully carved sarcophagi to visiting notables; others had been removed to museums. When the Craponne Canal—named after its engineer, Adam de Craponne—was dug in the sixteenth century, it had cut across the cemetery, destroying much of it. In 1848 the railways had been built in a great arc around Arles, and they too had scythed into Les Alyscamps.

  Finally, the Paris–Lyon–Mediterranée railway had decided to site its main southern workshop for manufacturing locomotives and rolling stock just in this location. The result was a big industrial complex, far larger in extent now than the dwindling cemetery. This now comprised the Allée des Tombeaux—the avenue of tombs—a walk shaded by poplar trees with a medieval arch at the entry and a Romanesque chapel at the end. Between the poplars and the canal ran an embankment a couple of yards high. Gauguin clambered to the top of this and set up his easel. By doing so he obtained a view past the autumnal trees to the Romanesque chapel of Saint-Honorat. The painting that he began on the top of the bank, however, represented only a small part of what he could see, and that not accurately. But then, Gauguin was not especially interested in reality.

  He ignored the great workshop just to his left, from which a din of clattering and hammering could be heard, since this was a weekday and a thousand men were at work, and edited out the avenue of old tombs at the bottom of the bank which was the main point of Les Alyscamps for most visitors.

  Instead, Gauguin painted open woodland, with the tower of Saint-Honorat rising mysteriously above the foliage. At first glance, it was not even clear that this was a church. The domed structure seemed vaguely classical, and also vaguely exotic. To the side of the painting rose a great wall of yellow leaves: the poplars of the avenue. Low down on the right side was a bush of a red so vivid it exceeded anything that even that October in Arles could boast.

  This intensification of color was one of the lessons that Gauguin taught to younger painters. This, Vincent felt, was part of the abstraction he and Bernard had been pioneering in Brittany:

  They will not ask the correct tone of the mountains, but they will say: “In the Name of God, the mountains were blue, were they? Then chuck on some blue and don’t go telling me that it was a blue rather like this or that, it was blue, wasn’t it? Good—make them blue and it’s enough!”

  That was evidently exactly what Vincent now heard being expounded by his new companion:

  Gauguin is sometimes like a genius when he explains this, but as for the genius Gauguin has, he is very timid about showing it, and it is touching the way he likes to say something really useful to the young.

  Gauguin, Les Alyscamps

  Timid or not, shortly before he left for Arles, Gauguin had given precisely this kind of advice to a young man called Paul Sérusier, who had returned to Paris and showed his amazed friends a cigar-box lid, painted under Gauguin’s instructions with a little landscape. It was entirely covered in pure, bright colors such as purple, vermilion and Veronese green, and became known to Sérusier and his circle as the Talisman—a touchstone of a new way of painting.

  Vincent already believed that the painter did not have to copy the color he saw before him. He could alter it, or omit it, or anything else, in order to make the picture more expressive. But Gauguin had pushed this indifference to reality very far in his Vision, with its field of unbroken vermilion.

  Vincent was doubtless looking with great interest at Gauguin’s new painting as it progressed. Gauguin’s art, Vincent came to feel, was something to live up to, “that a good picture should be equivalent to a good deed, not that he says so, but it is in fact difficult to be much in his company without being mindful of a certain moral responsibility.” And, despite his vagueness and piratical shiftiness, there was indeed a heroic aspect to Gauguin’s determination, his willingness to sacrifice everything for a new kind of painting; the same was of course true of Vincent.

  In the middle distance of his picture of the Alyscamps, Gauguin placed three figures wearing black and white. They were women of Arles, Arlésiennes, who were just as notable among the attractions of the town as were the ancient ruins. So, not surprisingly, the women were among the first sights that Gauguin wanted to inspect after he had arrived. H
e was already angling to persuade one of them to pose.

  Their traditional costume could just be made out in Gauguin’s rather abbreviated version. Everyday clothes—there were others for brides, young women and special occasions—comprised a black dress and shawl with full white muslin stomacher and a very small lace cap at the back of the hair, bound round with broad black velvet or ribbon, fastened with gold or jeweled pins. This mode of dress was believed to be ancient. In reality, like many “traditional” customs, it was relatively new—a provincial version of Parisian women’s eighteenth-century wear.

  Like their clothes, the women of Arles themselves were thought to be survivals from the remote past. Arles was itself an ancient place, a Greek town, Theline, before it was the Roman Arlate. In addition to its architectural relics, it had produced one famous sculpture—the Venus of Arles—dug up in the seventeenth century on the site of the Roman theatre. This sculpture, second in fame only to the Venus de Milo, created a lasting association between Arles and the goddess of love. Consequently, the living women of Arles came to be seen as younger sisters of Venus, possessing a stately Grecian beauty and a powerful, potentially dangerous, attraction.

  A literature had grown up around the subject of the Arlésiennes. Alphonse Daudet, one of Vincent’s favorite authors, had written a short story in his book Letters from My Windmill about a young farmer from the Crau who kills himself out of hopeless passion for a girl from Arles. Daudet had then transformed this into a play—L’Arlésienne—with music by Bizet, which had recently been successfully revived on the Parisian stage. The Arlésienne was a Provençale cousin to Carmen—as alluring, as fatal.

  Gauguin saw them as figures from the classical past, as he reported to Bernard in a letter that very week: