The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  Gauguin’s new picture also concerned his feelings about women. He took a new piece of jute and began a scene of farmyard life with an unexpectedly sensual edge. In the middle of the composition was a peasant woman with her dress pulled down to her waist so her torso was naked, white and vulnerable. She had collapsed on to a mound of pale gray material, presumably hay, with one arm—reddened from working in the sun—extended on the mound in front of her, and her head resting on the other.

  At the summit of the haystack are a couple of gentle bulges resembling breasts or buttocks. Her pitchfork is lying to one side of her and her blue dress is piled up on the other. In the left foreground and top right of the painting are the most unexpected ingredients: two large, yellow pigs. The nearest of these creatures is cut off by the frame, its ear flopping down in a closely observed piggy fashion; the second is ambling round the back of the haystack, its curly tail waving jauntily in the air.

  It was evident that Gauguin had made every effort to suggest a visual link between the pigs and the woman. Her white cap, which she is still wearing, flops in precisely the manner that the closer pig’s ear lists on the side of its face. The sleeve of her white chemise, folded over and trailing behind her, mirrors the curvature of the other animal’s tail, thus making a witty but lewd analogy between her bottom and the animal’s rump.

  The woman lolls forward, overcome by heat, or weariness, or desire; she looks like a voluptuous, swooning slave in a sadomasochistic masterpiece of Delacroix, the Death of Sardanapalus. This was a masculine fantasy of female surrender, set not on the bed of an ancient potentate but amid the muck and mess of a farmyard.

  The figure had been studied from a living model in Brittany, where they were more familiar with artists and their strange demands and it was easier to persuade the locals to pose than it was in Arles. He had brought with him a colored drawing of the woman, holding on to the back of a chair. It was natural therefore that in the painting she was wearing Breton costume, as were three of the women in Gauguin’s vineyard painting. The pigs, however, were less easy to explain.

  It was true that Gauguin—unlike Vincent—was fond of including animals of all kinds in his work. Rooting pigs were to be found on the back of the little ceramic with a nude figure of Cleopatra that he had asked Schuffenecker to send from Paris to add to the decorations of the Yellow House. There were also not just one but two texts—both piggy and sexy—stored away in Vincent’s literary archive.

  A month and a half before, in mid September, Theo had sent him a copy of a Parisian weekly, Le Courrier français—the very same one that had published the special issue about the Rhône floods two years earlier. It was aimed at young men about town. Its staple subject-matter was the nightlife of the capital, and a common theme was sexual liaisons between middle-class men—such as the readers—and available, working-class women. The illustrations were outrageously lascivious; two had been the subject of prosecution for obscenity that year.

  Gauguin, In the Heat

  Vincent’s eye had been caught by a short story, “La Truie bleue,” by a young writer named Charles Morice. He recommended it to Theo as “very good” and added, “it just makes one think of Segatori.” This tale was a standard Courrier français item in one way, in that it concerned a pick-up on a Parisian street, but it was extremely odd in another, since the narrator met up not with a woman but with a pig. Translated, its title was “The Blue Sow.”

  The man telling the story is wandering aimlessly one day when he encounters the beast. “I noticed, lounging in front of me and walking almost at my pace, all alone and with the determined walk of one who knows where she is going… a SOW.” The creature is smartly dressed in blue silk, suitably let out to contain her girth, and her little corkscrew tail is “decorated with a knot of bright blue of a grace that was quite impertinent.”

  Rapidly, and wordlessly, the narrator falls in love with this creature. She exudes an aura of sensuality, undiluted by tiresome bourgeois social conventions, which he finds intoxicating. He is charmed by her gait, her look, her grunt. Their eyes meet for an instant, reflected in a shop window, hers seeming to contain “a depth of malicious experience, the science—all the science of life.”

  It was likely that Vincent recommended “The Blue Sow” to Gauguin as he had done to Theo. Perhaps Agostina Segatori came up in conversation when they were talking about the Prado trial and that reminded Vincent of the story.

  Certainly, there were passages in Gauguin’s picture that recalled “The Blue Sow.” For example, the gentle curves of the hay echoed feminine anatomy. A little to the left of the woman’s naked breast, a second bosom seems to rise from the surface of the stack. Equally, the upper contours of the haystacks rhyme with the pigs’ backs.

  Exactly thus in “The Blue Sow,” the “soft milky clouds” were seen by the narrator as “essentially soft, feminine things.” “Nothing will persuade me that those vague, rounded forms which make my senses dream are not the shapes of caresses, kisses, and voluptuousness.” René Magritte was yet to be born but Gauguin’s exercise in rustic eroticism had a suggestion—thirty years before the word was invented—of the surreal.

  But there was nothing of the farmyard in the porcine Parisian fable, nor of the intense summer heat that had caused the woman in the painting to strip to the waist. Those, and more pigs, were described in another text which Vincent admired: Émile Zola’s The Sin of Father Mouret. This was one of Zola’s strangest works, not realist at all but highly fantastic, but its theme, like that of “The Blue Sow,” was close to Vincent’s own experience.

  It deals with a devout priest, Serge Mouret, who has a sister, Désirée—“desire”—who is physically blooming but mentally childlike. Her great interest in life is her farm animals—which cause her brother intense nausea. Waves of disgust go through him as she shows off her pets in the manure-strewn yard which swarms with rabbits and hens and other beasts. The whole scene is charged with heat, the word “chaleur” is repeated again and again.

  Desiree’s new addition to her menagerie is a little pig. When it appears, the priest is overwhelmed by the gross physicality of the animals:

  He smelled in one reeking breath the fetid warmth of the rabbits and poultry, the lewd odor of the goat, the jejune fat of the pig. It was as if the air were filled with fecundity, and it weighed too heavily on his virgin shoulders.

  As Gauguin said, he liked to follow his fancy when painting and only find the title later. At first he called his new picture simply Pigs, a description that covered the two animals and also the half-naked woman. Later on, Gauguin had a different idea. He exhibited the painting as En Pleine Chaleur, or In the Heat. The first title seemed to refer to Charles Morice’s story; the second recalled the Zola novel.

  The picture was filled with Gauguin’s own intimate feelings of sexual attraction and repulsion. In his mind pigs stood for guiltless carnality—that was why he liked them. “For a long time,” he wrote years later, “I had virtue dinned into me; I know all about that but I do not like it.”

  If Gauguin’s painting of the grape harvest was marked by his religious boyhood, so, paradoxically, was this: it was an exercise in pure, poetic, almost cerebral lechery. “I should like to have been born a pig,” Gauguin reflected at the end of his life. “Man alone can be ridiculous.”

  When Gauguin later dispatched his new work to Theo, he expressed particular satisfaction with two paintings: Pigs and Human Misery. Gauguin believed them to be “fairly bold” and also “a little coarse.” That coarseness was both a matter of style—the abstracted forms, the loose brushwork—and also, especially with the pigs, the sexuality of the subject matter. “Is that,” Gauguin wondered, “because the Southern sun puts us in heat? If they should alarm the customers don’t hesitate to put them on one side, but personally I like them.”

  One diversion that Arles offered, even on a rainy day, was its museums. Vincent had visited them shortly after he had arrived the previous February. There was the Musée R
éattu, the local museum of paintings—mainly academic works by artists with Provençal connections. This, Vincent thought “a horror and a humbug” that ought to be in Tarascon (that is, it belonged with Tartarin and his fellow cap-hunters, in the realm of farce). There was also a museum of Roman and Early Christian antiquities, on Place de la République, which Vincent deemed “genuine.” These would be of interest to Gauguin, who liked classical art.

  Opposite was one of the great early medieval churches of Southern France, the Cathedral of Saint-Trophîme. This, Vincent had mixed feelings about. He thought its carved porch “admirable,” but he was ill at ease with the serried figures of saints, Christ in judgment above the door, the damned being led to eternal torment, others to heavenly bliss:

  It is so cruel, so monstrous, like a Chinese nightmare, that even this beautiful monument of so grand a style seems to me of another world, and I am as glad not to belong to it as to that glorious world of the Roman Nero.

  By that he meant that the world of Dante’s inferno, depicted here, seemed as remote as the horrors and tortures that had taken place in the Roman arena a few hundred yards away.

  He preferred the here and now: “the Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlésiennes going to their First Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the absinthe drinkers”—but he felt cut off from them, too: they were like beings in another world.

  Medieval architecture—and antiquities generally, apart from certain paintings—gave Vincent the creeps. He was depressed by the medieval church, which was much like St. Trophime, in Zola’s The Dream; later, when he was incarcerated in ecclesiastical cloisters for the good of his health, he thought these gloomy surroundings contributed to the hallucinations and fears that assailed him.

  Gauguin did not agree. He thought the carvings of St. Trophime an excellent example of art that was stylized and unnaturalistic, “with proportions very far from nature” and yet Vincent had in fact admired the sculptures, without suffering any nightmare. Art, the carvings of St. Trophime showed, was not realism but an expression of what one felt in a certain “state of soul.”

  Gauguin prided himself on being immune from religious superstition: “A skeptic, I look at all these saints, but to me they are not alive. In the niches of a cathedral they have meaning—there only.” He was not terrified by the “childish grotesqueries” of the gargoyles.

  Walking up the wide steps to investigate the interior—the “cross above,” and “the great transept”—Gauguin was not impressed by the priest in his pulpit “babbling” about hell. “In their seats the ladies talk about fashion. I like this better.”

  Everything, Gauguin believed, was both serious and ridiculous. The castle, the cottage, the cathedral and the brothel were all aspects of life. What was one to do about it? Nothing. “The earth still turns round; everyone defecates; only Zola bothers about it.”

  Nonetheless, the sculptures of Saint-Trophime got into both Vincent’s and Gauguin’s minds. Vincent, as one might expect from someone with so powerful a visual sense, was led into associations by what he saw. The obelisk in the square outside St. Trophime, a relic of the ancient hippodrome at Arles, suggested comparisons to him. A cypress tree, for example, was as beautiful in its way as an Egyptian obelisk.

  The Christ in judgment above the portal of the cathedral made him think how little he liked most portrayals of Jesus; only Rembrandt and Delacroix, he thought, had really been able to paint this subject. Then it made him think how Christ himself was the greatest of all artists—an artist not in paint or stone but in human beings. Just by speaking his parables—the sower, for example—he had created a new life for mankind. (This was a theme of certain Dutch theologians.)

  Below Christ on the portal was the symbol of St. Luke, the patron saint of painters—a castrated ox. This made Vincent think what a humble, dirty, physical affair painting was; and yet it was in some way connected with what Christ had done: a means of making new ways of living and feeling. He wrote all this to Bernard, and Gauguin had read these letters in Brittany and pondered them.

  Gauguin was struck, for all his urbane skepticism, by the hellish “grotesqueries” of Saint-Trophîme. As an eleven-year-old boy, after all, he had chanted the words of Bishop Dupanloup: the child who gave way to the siren call of fleshly demons would become prey to a terrible fiend.

  That was exactly what one of the most arresting carvings on the cathedral showed: the punishment of lust by a goggle-eyed devil. Gauguin said nothing about this, but the following year he made a carving in which a demon, with his own features, reaches down to grasp a naked woman while gnawing his thumb in torment. It seemed to echo the scenes of damnation and salvation in Arles. He gave it a title of bitter irony: Be in Love and You Will Be Happy.

  On Tuesday, November 13, Theo wrote Gauguin a letter from his office in Paris. Unlike his communications with Vincent, this was businesslike, brisk and written on his firm’s headed writing paper, but it brought more excellent news for the painter when it arrived on Wednesday. Theo wrote that Gauguin’s new paintings were having a great success in Paris:

  Degas is so enthusiastic about your works that he is speaking about them to a lot of people, and he is going to buy the canvas representing a spring landscape, with a meadow with two female figures in the foreground, the one sitting and the other standing.

  Two others were definitely sold—“the upright landscape with two dogs in a meadow, the other one a pool by the side of the road”—for which Theo suggested Gauguin should receive 375 francs and 225 francs respectively. Another, the Ring of Breton Girls, could also be sold for 500 francs, provided Gauguin made a small change. As it was, one of the girl’s hands seemed to touch the frame in distracting fashion.

  This was exciting news for Gauguin on two counts. One was that his sales through Theo’s gallery now began to look as if they were bringing in a steady income. Here were three pictures sold or virtually sold, plus the one that Degas wanted to buy. But the fact that Degas was not only buying a painting but enthusing about Gauguin’s work all over Paris was yet more exhilarating.

  Gauguin admired Degas most among all living artists. On occasion he took compositions of Degases as models for his own, translating the latter’s cast of ballet dancers and other Parisiennes into Breton peasants. Degas’s emphasis on drawing and his slow, cerebral method of building up pictures in the studio were examples to Gauguin.

  Now, this same Degas was buying his paintings and singing his praises. As he explained to Bernard:

  That is the greatest possible compliment to me: I have as you know the greatest possible confidence in the judgment of Degas—moreover it’s a very good starting point commercially speaking. All the friends of Degas have confidence in him.

  Gauguin’s optimism increased exponentially. There was only one puzzling aspect of Theo’s letter: he wrote of having sold a picture of two dogs in a meadow. As far as Gauguin could remember, he had never painted such a canvas. It was some time before the explanation dawned on him. Then he sat down to reply:

  You can imagine that I searched in my memory for a long time to recall what picture could have two dogs in it and I realized that the 2 black and red calves had been taken for carnivores. It came to me eventually and I’m glad to clear up the confusion.

  He agreed it was necessary to adjust the Ring of Breton Girls.

  Gauguin then went on to describe the atmosphere in the Yellow House, where everything was proceeding well: “Good Vincent and grièche Gauguin are still living happily together and eat at home—simple cooking that they make themselves. But My Gawd (as they saaay) this damn rain is impeding them terribly for open air work.” Here Gauguin tried to imitate the accent of the South of France, which he found absurd.

  Gauguin wrote in triumph to Bernard, describing these successes. He predicted that in ten years or so Bernard, too, would be a great success (it had taken Gauguin about that amount of time to gain this success, from the period in the late 18
70s when he began to take painting more seriously). But, despite the good news, his mind was full of suspicions concerning machinations in the Paris art world.

  Theo had written to Vincent with some gossip he had heard about his rivals, Signac and Seurat:

  They are to start a campaign (having La revue indépendante as the organ for their propaganda) against us others. They are going to represent Degas Gauguin above all Bernard etc…. as worse than devils and to be avoided like carriers of a plague.

  Bernard was not to breathe a word of this important information: “Keep it to yourself and don’t say anything to Van Gogh otherwise you’ll make me seem indiscreet.”

  Gauguin sent his regards to Bernard’s charming sister, with whom he was perhaps a little in love. He was still dreaming of founding a studio in Martinique, but for the time being he was happy to invite Bernard to Arles, now that he—Gauguin—had put the Yellow House in order. It seemed that Bernard might not have to join Milliet in the army, as he was claiming to be unfit. “If you don’t do your military service after all,” Gauguin assured him, “you can come here with no fears. I have now arranged a way of life which would be economical for three, so if you had nothing because your father cut off your allowance you would find a secure existence here.” Gauguin seemed to have taken over the household.

  Meanwhile, Vincent was engaged on another picture painted from memory and imagination. It depicted a young woman intently reading at night in a book-lined room. Behind her was the glowing sphere of a large lamp spreading light. In her hands was a book bound in the distinctive yellow wrapping of a cheap French novel. The reader was wide-eyed with fascination.