The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  5. Perilous Memories

  November 11–14

  In the mail Vincent received an invitation to exhibit in Paris. Monsieur Edouard Dujardin—writer, editor of La revue indépendante and owner of a gallery and bookshop at 11 Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin—invited him to take part in the next exhibition he was organizing. This was a distinct sign of recognition. La revue indépendante was an influential literary magazine which strongly supported the work of Georges Seurat and his followers, notably Vincent’s good friend Paul Signac. The exhibitions organized by La revue indépendante were a valuable shop window for the radical painters of Paris. A chance to exhibit in Paris, and perhaps sell some work, was exactly what Vincent had been yearning for a few weeks earlier, just before Gauguin arrived.

  In September he had agreed happily enough to Theo’s suggestion of showing his pictures in this very place. Now, he rejected the resulting offer with fury. He had no intention of exhibiting in that “black hole.” And he was “disgusted” by the proposal that he should present Dujardin with a painting in exchange for the honor of exhibiting. Vincent wrote a rude refusal, which he enclosed in his letter to Theo, but only so that Theo should appreciate the strength of his feelings. He presumed his brother would decline politely on his behalf.

  Vincent, full of confidence for a month, had suffered a collapse of morale. Perhaps now he was painting side by side with Gauguin de tête, Vincent felt his work was developing; therefore, most of what he had achieved up to now amounted merely to studies. He was not a master, only an apprentice. But, pleased with the finished Red Vineyard, as he told Theo, he was going to paint more pictures in that manner:

  I am going to set myself to work from memory often, and the canvases from memory are always less awkward, and have a more artistic look than studies from nature, especially when one works in mistral weather. We are having wind and rain here, and I am very glad not to be alone. I work from memory on bad days, and that would not do if I were alone.

  That last remark hinted at the fragility of his condition: only with company did he dare confront his feelings about the past.

  Meanwhile, he had rather Theo just kept storing up his pictures as they arrived from Arles. As was usual with Vincent when he was excited about something, he went on and on, repeating the same point in different ways. Meeting him in person, people often found this wearing. It could be tiresome even on paper. Vincent reiterated at length, with increasing emphasis, that he now wasn’t much interested in exhibiting at all, especially with La revue indépendante. “I boldly venture to think,” he added, “that Gauguin is also of this opinion. In any case he is making no attempt to persuade me to do it.”

  There was a history to this. Gauguin had long been on bad terms with La revue indépendante. One reason was that he had fallen out with the favorite painter of the magazine and its circle—Georges Seurat—both personally and artistically.

  Seurat—much younger than Gauguin, and even than Vincent—was the most successful of the young, radical painters in Paris. His innovatory method of painting with dots—pointillism—had converted Gauguin’s mentor, the Impressionist Camille Pissarro.

  Two years before, Gauguin and Seurat had had a stupid quarrel. While he was away for the summer of 1886, Signac had offered the use of his studio to Gauguin. Unfortunately, Seurat, who worked along the corridor and was looking after the key, didn’t know about the arrangement. Consequently, when Gauguin arrived, Seurat rudely refused to let him in, perhaps suspecting that Gauguin wanted to steal a look at some new pictures which were stored inside. Angry words were exchanged; later that year Gauguin cut Seurat and Signac dead.

  Gauguin sarcastically described pointillism as petit point, a meticulous form of embroidery on canvas, mainly used for cushion covers. Beyond the personal vexation, there was a deeper divide. Pointillism seemed to Gauguin all too rational, scientific and external. He was searching for an art that dealt not with appearances but with dreams.

  In January 1888 a review had appeared in La revue indépendante of Gauguin’s pictures, which were on show at Theo’s gallery. The reviewer, Félix Fénéon, was a journalist, anarchist and passionate supporter of Seurat. His opinion of Gauguin, while not completely negative, included several jibes and praise laced with irony:

  Of a character barbarous and atrabilious, with little atmosphere, colored by diagonal strokes driving across the canvas like torrential rain, these haughty pictures would typify the work of M. Paul Gauguin, if that grièche artist were not above all a potter.

  Gauguin was half angry, half pleased by the barbaric image of himself that was summoned up. In particular, he was taken with the unusual word, “grièche,” that Fénéon had picked to describe him. It meant “bitter, irritable, discontented” and might be more readily applied to a fishwife than a painter.

  Gauguin repeated it, jokingly, as if to remind anyone who might have forgotten that he was a formidable character. In fact, Fénéon was a fan of Gauguin’s. The teasingly rude review was his critic’s way of expressing an interest. But Gauguin was riled. It was not surprising that he did not encourage Vincent to exhibit with La revue indépendante.

  In the Yellow House both painters were trying out an unorthodox priming to use on the jute. Generally, canvases were coated with animal glue, boiled up from some material such as rabbit skin, which prevented the paint from rotting the threads of the fabric. This was then covered with gesso, or fine chalk, mixed with white paint. Most artists, including Vincent, usually bought their canvases ready-primed and cut to size.

  But, partly for economy, partly for artistic reasons, the painters of the Yellow House did much of this work themselves. They were cutting the jute sackcloth to the dimensions they wanted for a picture and tacking it over the wooden frame that kept it taut. They then applied a very unusual ground—not smooth, white gesso but liquid barium sulphate, which was thinner and light brown in color.

  The effect of this was to accentuate the rough weave of the jute, which now showed clearly through Gauguin’s pictures and gave them the strong, “primitive” texture that he wanted. Vincent painted in his usual broad manner across the fibers of the sackcloth, which also gave his pictures an earthy quality akin to the earthenware he so liked. The only question was, would the barium-sulphate ground work or would these new pictures flake?

  Another innovation concerned frames. These were a significant cost—the bill for the walnut and pine frames he had ordered for his décorations had led Vincent to run out of money while he was preparing the Yellow House—but they were important and, like so many aspects of painting, it suddenly seemed possible to think of them in a brand-new way.

  Traditional frames were heavy things of carved wood, often gilded. But Seurat had, among his other new ideas, pioneered an unprecedented approach to frames. He painted the surroundings of the picture—the border and frame—with dots of color just like the paintings themselves. These responded to every nuance of color and tone in the painting itself.

  Vincent had often used newly fashionable white frames—for the Bedroom, for example, or the fruit trees in blossom he had painted in the spring (Gauguin announced that this had been “partly” his idea). Now, the two painters thought up an entirely new type—as rustic, radical and inexpensive as the sackcloth canvases.

  Theo’s new lodger, de Haan, had apparently paid 2,000 francs for an especially elaborate carved picture surround; Vincent had been paying 20 francs to a carpenter in Arles for each frame. The homemade frames cost just 5 centimes, the price of a copy of L’Homme de bronze. Vincent mentioned it to Theo: “We find it very easy to make frames with plain strips of wood nailed on the stretcher and painted, and I have begun doing this.” This radical simplicity pleased Vincent. He sent Theo a drawing of the new sort of frame, around the Red Vineyard.

  However, Gauguin wasn’t happy with the stretchers Vincent had in the Yellow House. He wanted Theo to purchase a different variety, which could be tightened with screws rather than wooden wedges. The tightness of
a canvas was a highly personal matter, as it affected the feel of the brush. This new sackcloth surface required careful tightening. Nor did Gauguin like the paints that Vincent had. He asked Theo to buy him an adjustable stretcher, with screws; and requested Bernard to get some paints from Père Tanguy and send them south.

  Evidently, Gauguin intended to stay in Arles for a while. He also wrote to Schuffenecker, his dogsbody, asking for another parcel of oddments, including his Degas etchings and his linen, to be sent to Arles. “I’m going to annoy you again,” he announced jovially. “Would you be good enough to look in my things? There must be one or two pairs of sheets there. We have need of them here.”

  Every day that week was wet, and on Wednesday there was a positive deluge. The Rhône was dangerously close to the top of its embankment on the other side of the Place Lamartine. If it had gone over, the ground-floor studio of the Yellow House would have flooded.

  These floods, along with the mistral, were the curse of Provence. There had been a disastrous inundation two years before, at just the same time of year. A huge amount of rain had fallen on Mediterranean Europe in October 1886 and the rivers Rhône and Durance had burst their banks. In a roundabout way, this catastrophe was one of the things that had drawn Vincent’s attention to the area.

  There was a festival—the fête du soleil, or fair of the sun—held in Paris after Christmas that year. A huge electric light, 8 yards across, was suspended from the ceiling of the Palais de l’industrie, imitating the scorching radiance of the South.

  And at the stand of Le Courrier français—a racy magazine which brought out a special issue dedicated to the floods—customers were greeted by a “charming little Arlésienne.” Altogether, there was a great deal to attract a light-hungry Dutch painter who had moved to Paris only to find himself still in a chilly, northern, wintry city.

  This time there was no flood. Thursday, November 15, was overcast but dry. It remained so for most of the rest of the month.

  Inside the Yellow House, Vincent plunged deep into his own past. It was a perilous thing to do, but with Gauguin’s company he felt emboldened. His new painting was of two women—one old and gray-haired, one much younger and carrying a red parasol—walking in a garden. In the background, a female gardener bends over to tend the plants. The angle of vision is extremely steep.

  This mental image was airless and claustrophobic. The beds and paths reared up behind the walkers like the painted backcloth of a play. But it was, for a garden, alarmingly dynamic. A path swirled around a couple of island beds. Cypresses twisted violently just to the rear of the women.

  A Memory of the Garden, letter sketch

  It was hard—most uncharacteristically for one of Vincent’s pictures—to work out exactly what was where. Were the women walking? Were they on the path or on the flower bed? There didn’t seem enough room for them to stand between the flowers and the nearest cypress. It was also quite unclear where the scene was supposed to be and who those women were. To Theo, Vincent gave two differing accounts of the location. First, he said it was a memory of the garden at a place called Etten.

  Theodorus van Gogh, Vincent’s father, had been pastor in this village from 1875 until 1882. It held powerful memories for Vincent, although he had only actually lived there for a few months, from April to December 1881. But this had been a pivotal moment in his life: he had abandoned his efforts to become a preacher and was embarking on an equally quixotic attempt to become a painter.

  In Etten that summer he had fallen violently in love with his widowed cousin, daughter of his mother’s older sister, Kee Vos-Stricker. He was twenty-eight when he fell for Kee, and she was older by seven years and had an eight-year-old son. They spent the summer months of 1881 talking and walking around Etten. Eventually, Vincent proposed: she answered, “Never, no, never.”

  Final though that seemed, at the end of November Vincent traveled to Amsterdam to plead his cause again. At her house, he was told that when he arrived, she had left. “Your persistence,” said her family, “is disgusting.” Vincent then put his hand in the flame of the lamp and said, “Let me see her for as long as I can keep my hand in the flame.” But they blew out the lamp and said, “You shall not see her.”

  Afterwards, Kee’s brother took Vincent to one side and pointed out that only money would make a difference in this matter. “When I left Amsterdam,” Vincent remembered, “I had a feeling as if I had been on a slave market.” Whatever Kee’s feelings might have been, it was clear that the fundamental objection to Vincent was his lack of cash.

  This no doubt made sense to her family—Vincent, after all, had no income and no prospects—but to him the verdict was unbearable. To kill his love was like killing himself. The sanctimonious hypocrisy of Kee’s family gave him a feeling of physical chill (Vincent loathed cold). He had a feeling “as if I had been standing too long against a cold, hard, whitewashed church wall.”

  Vincent’s response to the rebuff over Kee was to go out and find a prostitute. He had fought “a great battle” and his urge for an ordinary sexual life came out on top. “One cannot forgo a woman for too long with impunity. And I do not believe that what some call God and others the Supreme Being and others nature is unreasonable and pitiless.” That December Vincent had a furious row with his father, who threw him out of the house. Such were the memories that Etten held for Vincent.

  But was this painting actually of the garden at Etten? Vincent later called it a memory not of Etten but of Nuenen, a completely different Dutch village, where his father had moved in 1882. It had been his last parish.

  This place held another set of associations for Vincent, some of them bitter. In the dark and cold of December 1883, unsure that Theo could continue to support him, he returned to the family home. He was then thirty and still had no means of support. The eccentricity of his dress and behavior embarrassed his parents; their failure to support him in his determination to become an artist irritated Vincent. Nonetheless, his father made an attempt at making the peace. His family put up with the ridicule that he attracted.

  But matters were not improved by another love affair, less serious on his part, with Margot Begemann, the daughter of an elder of the church. She was twelve years older than him, emotionally unstable and plain. When her family insisted that she must not marry Vincent—mocking her and saying she was too old—Margot took a large dose of strychnine and would have died had Vincent not made her throw up. He carried her to her house, where her brother made her more thoroughly sick.

  What, Vincent cried out, should we think of such a religion, which drives people to acts of mania? “Oh, they are perfectly absurd, making society a kind of lunatic asylum, a perfectly topsyturvy world.” He made a series of drawings of the garden at Nuenen, with a solitary female figure; under one he wrote the word “melancholy.”

  It was at Nuenen, not at Etten, that Vincent might have expected to find the two women who were actually in his picture: his widowed mother and his youngest sister, Wilhelmina. Wil—who suffered from “melancholy” and pains in her stomach just as he did—was the only one of his three sisters to whom Vincent was close. She had ambitions to write; he fondly hoped that she might marry a painter. Touchingly, he was also keen that she should see his work, and hoped she might come to visit him in the Yellow House. The truth was that Wil, now in her mid twenties, was stuck at home with her aged mother, her life passing by.

  Vincent ignored his two other sisters, Anna and Lies, but he sent beautiful letters to Wil, simpler and more tender than those to Theo, Bernard or Gauguin, and full of his hopes and thoughts. Later in the week, he described his garden picture to her, detailing the colors and the plants, and drew a little sketch.

  It was, he explained, intended to be like a “comforting” piece of music: not a realistic depiction of the garden but something like a poem, in which the colors and curving, meandering lines brought the subject to mind but, as in a dream, “stranger” than it was in reality.

  “I know this is h
ardly what one might call a likeness,” he wrote, “but for me it renders the poetic character and the style of the garden as I feel it.” Vincent did not claim that the two women had a realistic or, as he put it, “a vulgar and fatuous” resemblance to his sister and mother. Nonetheless, the harmonies of color somehow evoked them. “The somber violet with the blotch of violent citron yellow of the dahlias” suggested his mother’s personality; the orange and green checks against the somber green of the cypress summoned up a “vaguely representative” impression of Wil. There was indeed little “vulgar resemblance” between the woman in the painting and photographs of Wil, who had an oval face and less prominent brows. The features in the picture belonged less to her than to Kee Vos-Stricker.

  Wil and Kee and, for that matter, Margot Begemann, were all trapped. Perhaps they merged into one another in his imagination, as did the various gardens Vincent had known. The one in the painting looked more like the grounds of the parsonage at Nuenen than it did Etten, but it looked even more like one of the public parks in the Place Lamartine.

  If this picture was a dream, as Vincent wrote to Wil, it was a jangling, jarring one: an amalgam of painful memories. It was intended, Vincent told Wil, to hang in his own bedroom. But unlike the Red Vineyard, Vincent’s garden picture wasn’t a great success—which didn’t bode well for the new method of working from memory.

  Vincent continued to tinker with it until the paint was piled up on it like icing on a cake. It ended up amazingly slathered with pigment—more so than anything else he, or Monticelli, ever painted: an index of his determination to get the picture right. In the end, though, he felt that he had spoilt it. “I think,” he reflected, “that you also need practice for work from the imagination.”