The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  Vincent clearly painted this with his sister Wil (to whom he described it) in mind. He was keen to recommend books to Wil, as he did to everyone he cared about. To him, this was much more than simply passing on tips about entertaining reading. When Vincent had lost his faith in orthodox Christianity, he had gained a new belief—homemade, quixotic and paradoxical—in modern literature. It had happened, characteristically, with great rapidity. During his most exalted religious phase he had instructed Theo to put aside all books except for the Bible and pious texts. Then came his loss of faith, his new career as an artist and the stormy love affair with Kee Vos-Stricker. Suddenly, he developed an enormous appetite for the contemporary novel.

  Reader, letter sketch

  The year after his passion for Kee, Vincent was living with a reformed prostitute, Sien Hoornik, and devouring the works of Emile Zola. That writer remained one of the cornerstones of Vincent’s mental world—in some ways a replacement for holy writ. So, too, were Zola’s followers Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Jean Richepin, Huysmans, Flaubert and the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (whose collaboration reminded Vincent of the one between himself and Theo).

  He had recommended all these to Wil the year before. “One can scarcely be said to belong to one’s time,” he insisted, “if one is not acquainted with them.” He hoped to find a copy for her of Maupassant’s Bel-Ami—the writer’s masterpiece, in Vincent’s view.

  In presenting his sister with this reading list, Vincent was giving her the key to life as he understood it. He had evidently never truly given up preaching. In Vincent’s mind, modern novels, with their close descriptions of modern life, love, suffering and labor, were more than a substitute for the Bible—they were its successor. He felt that Christ himself would agree with him on that point.

  This concentration on the here and now quieted Vincent’s churning emotions; he believed that comic literature—Daudet’s Tartarin, for example—was a cure for the “melancholy” that afflicted him, Theo and Wil:

  The diseases from which we civilized people suffer most are melancholy and pessimism. So I, for instance, who can count so many years of my life during which I lost any inclination to laugh—leaving aside whether or not this was my own fault—I, for one, feel the need for a really good laugh above all else.

  Vincent read the English novelists, too—Dickens and George Eliot. Just hearing that a fellow student at the Atelier Cormon in Paris was a reader of Balzac made Vincent feel that this stranger was someone to esteem. He read in three languages—English, French and Dutch.

  Scenes from novels were constantly coming into his mind, as when poor Margot Begemann tried to poison herself. “Do you remember,” he asked Theo then, “the first Mrs. Bovary who died in a nervous attack?” The obscurity and accuracy of this reference were typical; he compared Margot Begemann not with Emma, second wife of Charles Bovary and heroine of Flaubert’s novel, but with his first wife, of whom the reader was told little except that she died after hearing bad news about her fortune.

  A few months after his father died, Vincent painted a still life that showed his father’s Bible—massive and ancient—next to an extinguished candle. The candle stood for the ending of Theodorus van Gogh’s life and the lost power of the holy book. Beside it was the new source of truth, a yellow paperback novel of Vincent’s that was coming apart at the spine through constant reading. Its title was legible: La joie de vivre by Emile Zola.

  Vincent dreamed of painting a bookshop in the evening, with its front yellow and pink. This was, he felt, a truly “modern subject” because books were “such a rich source of light to the imagination.” This picture might hang as the central panel in a triptych, a modern altarpiece, between a wheat field and an olive grove. The bookshop would represent the sowing season of the mind, “like a light in the midst of darkness.”

  The painting Vincent now did was in a similar spirit. The books on the shelves behind the young woman were spreading light just as much as the lamp in the background. She was a person trapped by cold conventionality—as his sister Wil now was and he himself had been. But, through the book, she was receiving the message that would save her. The picture echoed another that had, to his mind, a similar message—a Rembrandt showing Mary reading by lamplight beside the cradle of the infant Christ.

  But, crammed though it was with Vincent’s deepest feelings and beliefs, the painting as a picture was not a great success. Compared to the portraits he produced with a sitter before his eyes, the young reader was insubstantial and unconvincing—a ghostly creature of ectoplasm rather than living flesh. The hands holding the books seem to lack bones, like the tentacles of an octopus. This way of working—in which Gauguin was encouraging him—was not producing the expected results. Up to now the atmosphere in the Yellow House had been harmonious. That was about to change.

  6. Divisions

  November 15–23

  On Thursday, November 15, the newspapers were full of the final day of the Prado case. It had been very much like a scene from a novel. Prado presented himself as if he were a hero from Balzac, and his use of language resembled the prose of Zola, mingling sexuality and horticulture in a heady metaphorical brew. His mistress, Eugénie Forestier, was for him “the wind that carries off from a man his ripest desires, as it removes the exuberance of scent from a flower.”

  This rhetoric would have appealed to someone of Vincent’s literary tastes, while his own experience of life had some points of similarity with Prado’s. He too could say, with the accused murderer:

  Who am I first of all? What does it matter? I am unfortunate. An adventurer, isn’t that right? My God, hurled on to this vast stage of human life, I yielded, a bit by chance, to everything I felt beat in my heart and boil in my brain.

  Prado played the part of victim brilliantly. Nonetheless, he was found guilty with no extenuating circumstances. When the death sentence was pronounced against him, he inclined his head and said nothing.

  In the studio, the painters continued to work so closely together that their projects intertwined. But the results were mixed. Around this time Vincent made a picture of a bullfight. The priming of the canvas was exactly the same as that for the Memory of the Garden, suggesting that it was produced not long afterwards.

  Now, bullfighting was a subject that Gauguin himself had always intended to attempt when he arrived in the South. He had written as much to Vincent in July: “I always had a fancy to interpret the bullfights in my own way, according to my own ideas.” But he arrived in Arles after the last fight of the season had taken place so, for Gauguin, this project was to remain forever unrealized. He was still hoping to do a bullfight painting fifteen years later, on the other side of the world.

  Vincent, on the other hand, had witnessed—and described—some of the bullfights in the Roman Arena soon after he arrived in Arles. These were, he felt, a “sham,” “seeing that the bulls were numerous but there was nobody to fight them.” What he’d seen was not the Spanish-style corrida in which the bull is finally killed by a matador with a sword but the local Provençal sport which was, strictly speaking, not a fight at all, but a race—la Course Camarguaise.

  In this event, the objective was to seize various tassels, rosettes and ribbons from the horns of the animal, then take refuge quickly behind the barrier around the arena. The men who tried to do this were known as razeteurs. The best razeteur was one who managed to tweak off the most awkwardly placed of these cockades. This process was not dangerous at all to the bulls, which were herded away afterwards, but highly risky for the razeteurs. (Vincent saw one who crushed a testicle while leaping the barrier.) These events took place regularly in Arles. There had been one on September 30, featuring five bulls from the Camargue and one Spanish-cross cow, and one on both October 7 and 14.

  The Course Camarguaise was one of the most ancient rituals of Provence—akin to the bull games of ancient Crete and the wild-beast games that had been staged by the Romans in the arena. However, it was not the spect
acle itself that interested Vincent but the spectators. “The crowd,” he told Bernard, “was magnificent, those great colorful multitudes piled up one above the other on two or three galleries, with the effect of sun and shade and the shadow cast by the enormous ring.”

  Spectators at the Arena

  And this was what he now set about painting from memory. His mental viewpoint is from the upper tiers of seats in the great open, oval structure on a hot day. Many of the Arlésiennes have opened their red parasols even though—from the predominately blue tone of the audience—this seems to be the shady side of the auditorium. Below, a man stands and waves both his arms, hat held in one hand, as if something exciting has just happened.

  The sandy floor of the arena itself is visible only in the distance, but it is just possible to make out a bull, a huge cockade still dangling from one horn, and a running figure. In the center of the picture there is a woman in Arlésienne costume with the distinctive profile of Madame Ginoux, talking with another woman beneath a parasol. Seated behind them are Roulin the postal supervisor, with his wife, Augustine, holding their baby daughter, Marcelle. In the bottom left another woman turns away from the spectacle in the arena. She has a specific, clearly remembered face—thin, with a sharp chin and prominent eyebrows. But who is she?

  Taken as a whole, the picture is only a partial success. Most of the crowd are unrealized, no more than black outlines against the blue-green shade. These blend uneasily with the few faces that Vincent knows better. Though a large and ambitious picture on a piece of jute, this was, for Vincent, extremely thinly painted. In many places—for example, the face of the woman on the right who is talking to a man with bristling blond hair—bare textile is visible. It looks very much as if, for one reason or another—perhaps lack of suitable models or vivid memories—Vincent simply gave up this painting halfway through. He never described or mentioned it. On the other hand, he didn’t destroy his bullfight either.

  Gauguin was now working, according to Vincent, on “a large still life of an orange-colored pumpkin and apples and white linen on a yellow background and foreground.” In subject, this was not so different from the picture proudly displayed that week in the window of Bompard fils, the local art dealers in Place de la République.

  The paintings exhibited there were regularly boosted by paragraphs in L’Homme de bronze. In this case, the writer was full of admiration for a picture set in September of ripe gray and black figs tumbling from a basket set upon the ground. It is unlikely that Gauguin and Vincent thought much of it, though they could hardly avoid seeing it, since the Place de la République was the central square of Arles.

  Gauguin’s picture belonged to the same artistic family, but it had the exact, daring color harmony of Vincent’s Sunflowers—translated into an autumnal still life of fruit and vegetables from Marguerite Favier’s shop next door. The Sunflowers were the paintings of Vincent’s that Gauguin most admired. He had said something extremely flattering about them that very week, which Vincent relayed to Theo. “Gauguin was telling me the other day that he had seen a picture by Claude Monet of sunflowers in a large Japanese vase, very fine, but—he likes mine better.” Pumpkin and Apples was never heard of again, perhaps because Gauguin abandoned or destroyed it.

  The other painting Gauguin was undertaking at this point was a subject that Vincent had treated much earlier in the year: the washerwomen. Laundresses and washerwomen were one of the staple themes of contemporary painting—either Degas’s slatternly Parisian creatures, engaged in activities much more strenuously physical than those of respectable ladies, or more wholesome peasant women at rural washing-places such as were depicted by Pissarro and Gauguin himself.

  Earlier in the year Vincent had also painted women washing both at the laundry platform on the Roubine du Roi Canal near the Yellow House and at another spot to the south of town. Vincent had represented the women as small figures in the distance, but he had also thought of painting them from up close—like Gauguin’s women in Martinique—with their colorful costumes.

  Vincent did not paint this subject, the laundresses at close quarters, possibly because to do so he felt he would have had to carry out studies from models, which were almost impossible for him to find. But Gauguin now did. So the origin of his new picture was complex indeed: he was executing a picture that Vincent had imagined on the basis of an earlier painting of Gauguin’s own.

  In preparation, Gauguin drew the outline of a local woman muffled up against the cold in her shawl, viewed from behind. Then, on a piece of jute, he began a picture of two women at the Roubine du Roi Canal. It was, just as Vincent had envisaged, a partial rerun of the Caribbean landscape owned by the brothers Van Gogh.

  Like his picture of Martinique, this new one had a standing figure seen from behind in the foreground and another bending over further back. The earlier landscape was scattered with browsing dogs and goats; one large beast thrust its head into this Arlésienne composition, nibbling at a tuft of vegetation right at the front of the picture. In both pictures there was water in the background. But the new painting was very far from the idyllic mood of the black women gathering mangoes in Martinique.

  It was harder to decipher than anything Gauguin had ever produced: a bewildering picture in which many of the forms were teasingly ambiguous. Gauguin had chosen a viewpoint at the top of the steep bank of the little canal, looking vertiginously down. The waters of the canal swirl like a mountain torrent, cresting into a small white wave. (Could even the recent rains have produced such an effect in a placid backwater?) Behind the hunched figure of the standing woman, an autumnal bush flares in orange and red so vivid it looks like flame.

  A second bush flickers in front of her; again, it seems like fire. The green foliage to her right reads at first, or even second look, like a shadow cast by this phantom blaze. Gauguin’s picture was a bizarre blend of the rustic and the hellish.

  It was true that the Roubine du Roi Canal washing-place was not a particularly savory spot. A stone’s throw away were the brothels of the Rue du Bout d’Arles—just over the railway and behind the gasworks. This was the place where the women from the maison de tolérance at No. 1 would do their laundry; so, too, would the other women of the district, such as Marguerite Favier from the grocer’s shop next door.

  Gauguin had harbored dark suspicions of the women in Martinique. They put magical charms on the fruit they sold, he had been warned, in order to ensnare you. Perhaps Gauguin was also wary of the Arlésiennes, despite those hygienic visits to the brothels. After all, they too had a reputation for exerting a fatal attraction. This painting, in contrast to the lyrical landscapes of the Alyscamps, suggested that Gauguin felt far from comfortable in Arles.

  Gauguin, Washerwomen

  On Sunday the eighteenth the fog was so dense that work would have been difficult in the Yellow House without the gaslight on, even during the day. Vincent felt that the foundations of southern houses were inadequate, so one felt the damp more in the Midi, but with the fire lit the house was quite cozy: there were fireplaces in the kitchen and Vincent’s bedroom. Lighting and tending the blaze was now a regular daily chore and the purchase of coal and wood a regular monthly expense: another 4 francs. So the odor of coal smoke was added to the other smells of the Yellow House.

  Over the next few days it brightened up, though it continued to get colder. As the weather outside improved, however, the atmosphere within was deteriorating. Around the middle of the week, Gauguin wrote to Bernard. It was clear that since his previous letter, things had started to go wrong. Then, he had recommended that Bernard come and stay in the comfortable household Gauguin had established in the Yellow House. This time he poured out complaints about his new place of residence, its inhabitants, its surroundings and—above all—Vincent:

  I feel completely disorientated in Arles, I find everything so small and mean, both the landscape and the people. In general Vincent and I are very little in agreement, especially on painting. He admires Daudet, Daubign
y, Ziem and the great Rousseau, all of whom I feel nothing for. And he hates Ingres, Raphael, Degas, all of whom I admire; I reply, “Corporal, you’re right,” to get some peace.

  “Corporal, you’re right” was the refrain of a popular song. It was a witty way of ending a conversation, which Gauguin used from time to time when dealing with tiresome officials. But it probably only inflamed Vincent’s desire to expound his convictions.

  Gauguin both muddled and exaggerated Vincent’s ideas. His list of his housemate’s great artistic loves is an odd one. He added Alphonse Daudet to the list, who was one of Vincent’s favorite writers, not a painter. Did he muddle Daudet with Daumier—typically getting a name wrong—another painter Vincent loved? Or was he just getting tired of hearing so much about what Vincent did and didn’t like?

  It was perfectly normal for artists to have differing personal pantheons that reflected their ideals and aspirations. There was no need to quarrel about it. But when two people are cooped up together day and night, small discrepancies of temperament become points of friction. Tact and diplomacy are required; but it is an understatement to say that Vincent was short on those qualities. He was unable to leave a point of disagreement alone.

  Years later, when he wrote down his memories of his stay in Arles, Gauguin was still grumbling about Vincent’s idiosyncratic views:

  Despite all my efforts to disentangle from that disordered brain a logical reasoning behind his critical opinions, I could not explain to myself the complete contradiction between his paintings and his views.

  This was unfair, but it was perfectly true that Vincent’s tastes were different from Gauguin’s—and sometimes unconventional for an avant-garde artist. For his part, Vincent, as his hero-worship faded, ended up finding Gauguin’s opinions always “a little vague and obscure.” Patience was slipping away.