The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  Gauguin complained that his companion had “an unlimited admiration for Meissonier and a profound hatred for Ingres. Degas was his despair and Cézanne was nothing but a fraud. When thinking of Monticelli, he wept.”

  Gauguin in studio ca. 1889 with Washerwomen in background

  Ernest Meissonier, the most commercially successful painter in Paris at the time, was an academic hack as far as most advanced artists were concerned, but Vincent found much merit in his work (a point on which posterity, on the whole, has agreed with Gauguin). “Now,” Vincent insisted, “if you looked at a Meissonier for a year, there would still be something in it to look at next year, you may be sure of that. Not to mention his lucky days, when he had perfect flashes of genius.”

  One would have to be blind, Vincent believed, to think that Meissonier was not a real artist “and a first-rate one.” Gauguin declared, with his military scenes in mind, that Meissonier was “the painter of those armored hordes where everything looked like iron—except the armor.”

  As so often, Vincent’s passionate advocacy was caused by the feeling that Meissonier’s paintings gave him. He was particularly fond of a picture called the Reader which he had known for many years and wanted an etching of for the Yellow House. It showed a long-haired, bearded man wearing seventeenth-century costume intently perusing a manuscript in a tall, shuttered room. It was the kind of Meissonier that reminded him of the old Dutch masters, but more—obviously—it reminded him of himself. Meissonier’s reader was the brother of Vincent’s own Reader, his young woman reading in a book-lined room.

  Vincent connected Meissonier, who was born in 1815, with other painters of the mid century, several of whom Gauguin listed with irritation: Charles-François Daubigny, Félix Ziem, Théodore Rousseau. Vincent called them “the generation of ‘48”—the year of Republican revolution—and persisted in believing that their work was compatible with Impressionism.

  Vincent had loved their paintings long before he had ever come to Paris and discovered Impressionism. He loved them still, because he found emotion in their work. Looking at a dawn landscape, lit by the morning star, he was reminded of them: “Daubigny and Rousseau have depicted just that, expressing all that it has of intimacy, all that vast peace and majesty, but adding as well a feeling so individual, so heartbreaking.”

  Many a time Vincent reminded Gauguin that others had already achieved what they set out to do: that was, made paintings that were consoling. He himself could not forget “all those lovely canvases” of Rousseau and the others. “It seems hardly probable that anyone will do better than that, and unnecessary besides.”

  Of those outdated painters whom Vincent defended, Adolphe Monticelli was the oddest. Monticelli was regarded as hopelessly eccentric by contemporaries and has had little support from posterity, but Vincent was convinced he was a great painter. Monticelli’s wild use of thick paint and flurried brush strokes suggested ways in which he could develop his own art.

  Vincent had a Dutch feeling for earthy, physical paint in which anyone could trace the movement of the artist’s hand. He revered Rembrandt and Frans Hals and saw possibilities in paint that were seen by no one else in France at the time, and certainly not by Gauguin.

  Gauguin summarized the difference between them well to Bernard:

  He is romantic and me, I incline more to a primitive state. From the point of view of color, he likes the chance effects of impasto in the manner of Monticelli, whereas I detest all that messing about with brushwork and that kind of thing.

  Vincent was indeed romantic. He wanted a passionate engagement with what he painted, whether a person, place or thing. He smeared and slashed tubes of pigment on the canvas like a man who relished the feel and smell of the stuff. Gauguin, on the other hand, inclined “to a primitive state.” He wanted the simplicity and poetry of an earlier age; he loved Botticelli, Ancient Greece, Persia, the Middle Ages, the exotic arts of hot countries, and he admired methodical, classically inspired painters—Degas, who idolized Ingres, who in turn worshipped Raphael. This cool, lineal manner, expressing warmly erotic feelings, was of limited interest to Vincent. Nor was the rather different formal discipline of Cézanne. Gauguin overstated or misremembered some of his housemate’s aversions: Vincent revered Degas, although he could be sharp about Cézanne.

  Gauguin was not the only one to find Vincent hard to live with. Shortly after Vincent had arrived in Theo’s apartment in Paris two years before, trouble started. Theo’s great friend Andries Bonger reported that Vincent hadn’t the slightest idea of how to behave in society. “He is always quarrelling with everybody. Consequently Theo has a lot of trouble getting along with him.” Bonger described how Vincent began “interminable discussions which were sparked off by impressionism and in which he touched on all conceivable subjects.” Gauguin would have recognized that description.

  Theo later told his fiancée, Jo, how, when he came home tired from a day at the gallery, Vincent would begin to expound his own views about art and art-dealing, which always led to the conclusion that Theo must leave Boussod et Valadon (still generally known, from its founder, as Goupil’s) and set up on his own. This went on far into the night; sometimes Vincent would sit down on a chair beside Theo’s bed and carry on talking while his brother tried to sleep.

  After a year, even Theo had had enough. “There was a time when I loved Vincent a lot and he was my best friend,” he wrote to their sister Wil:

  but that is over now. It seems to be even worse from his side, for he never loses an opportunity to show me that he despises me and that I revolt him. That makes the situation at home almost unbearable. Nobody wants to come and see me, for that always leads to reproaches and he is also so dirty and untidy that the household looks far from attractive. All I hope is that he will go and live by himself, and he has talked about this for a long time, but if I told him to leave that would only give him a reason to stay on.

  In Theo’s eyes, Vincent was a divided personality:

  It appears as if there are two different beings in him, the one marvelously gifted, fine and delicate, and the other selfish and heartless. They appear alternately so that one hears him talk now this way and then that way and always with arguments to prove pro and contra. It is a pity he is his own enemy, for he makes life difficult not only for others but also for himself.

  Others found the same division between a lovable and an unbearable Vincent. Bonger found him, despite his impossible behavior, “frank, open, alive to possibilities, with a certain humorous edge of malice.” He told his parents that “when Vincent was on form he was gay and jovial, relating jokes and stories, showing himself to be charming and an excellent mimic.” On the other hand, Bernard—much as he loved him—recalled Vincent “vehement in discourse, interminably explaining and developing his ideas.”

  Vincent was neurotically incapable of tolerating disagreement. And the more nervous opposition made him, the more compulsively verbose he became. The same pattern could be traced in his letters. At one especially tense moment he wrote two letters to Theo on one day, the second running to sixteen pages. Sometimes Theo’s response to this sort of bombardment was simply not to reply. Silence drove Vincent to ever more frantic verbosity. Gauguin no doubt found the same.

  There were several reasons why Gauguin may have been getting restive. In Paris his work was making an impact on important people such as Degas; meanwhile, he was cooped up in a remote provincial town with a compulsively articulate, opinionated and tactless companion. And Gauguin, like Vincent, was sensitive to criticism. “He likes my paintings very much, but when I do them he always finds that I’ve gone wrong about this, and that.”

  Vincent’s next letter to Theo contained an example of the kind of thing Gauguin had been hearing. He reported that Gauguin’s canvas Ring of Breton Girls had arrived. This was the picture which was almost sold but needed a slight modification, since when it was put in a frame, one of the dancer’s hands seemed to touch the edge in an awkward fashion.

&
nbsp; It was the first of Gauguin’s pictures from his long stay in Brittany earlier in the year that Vincent had actually seen, and he was not particularly impressed. Gauguin, he informed Theo, “has altered it very well. But though I quite like this canvas, it is all to the good that it is sold.”

  It was completely overshadowed by the best paintings Gauguin had done in Arles: “The two he is about to send you from here are thirty times better. I am speaking of the ‘Women Gathering Grapes’ and the ‘Woman with the Pigs.’ ” Vincent imagined—typically—that the reason for this improvement was that Gauguin’s digestion was improving. Vincent had a tendency to relate any raised quality in his own painting to lack of intestinal troubles (and vice versa).

  Gauguin would have had mixed feelings when he heard this judgment—which he doubtless received from Vincent in person. It was good, of course, to hear that his work had got so much better; but it was not so pleasing that Vincent was dismissive of one of the best pieces from his preceding eight months’ work.

  Officially speaking, Gauguin was the head of the studio, older, more experienced and more distinguished as a painter. Vincent reiterated as much in the same letter: “It does me a tremendous amount of good to have such intelligent company as Gauguin’s, and to see him work.” But, in practice, the hierarchy was much more complicated and unstable.

  Each was learning from the other but had inner doubts as to whether the lessons were truly useful. Gauguin had tried out Vincent’s yellow-on-yellow color harmony and had been experimenting with thicker paint in Vincent’s manner, especially in the grape harvest picture and that of the woman with the pigs. Vincent particularly approved of these pictures, partly because of their piled-on paint, as he told Theo:

  His last two canvases, which you will soon be seeing, are very firm in the impasto, there is even some work with the palette knife. And they will throw his Breton canvases a little in the shade—not all, but some.

  Gauguin, for his part, continued to hand out technical tips to Vincent. The latest was a method for reducing the thick, oily look of Vincent’s troweled-on paint surface. The answer was, Gauguin suggested, to rinse the pictures in water and leave them to dry. Eventually a more pleasingly matte surface would result.

  This suggestion was one reason why, although Gauguin had an impressive batch of work to send off to Theo after his first month in Arles, Vincent wasn’t sending anything, despite having his room “full of canvases.” They were still drying; also, none seemed quite finished. When they were dry he would retouch them again.

  As Gauguin’s star rose, Vincent’s spirits plunged. He was undergoing a crisis of confidence in his work. The paintings from earlier in the year consisted almost entirely of visual responses to what he had seen in front of him. But Gauguin’s arrival had temporarily persuaded Vincent that he had been on the wrong track. His excitement in September and early October, when he was producing his décorations for the Yellow House, had evaporated.

  Now, he felt, it would be years before he became a mature artist such as Gauguin. Vincent was more than a little averse to success; he generally reacted to praise with anguished self-deprecation. In a novel by Daudet, he found a line he liked: “to achieve fame is something like ramming the lighted end of your cigar into your mouth when you are smoking.” As Vincent now saw it, most of his work from the first eight months in Arles was valuable mainly as raw material. It constituted a series of studies for proper, carefully planned pictures he might do in the future:

  Gauguin, in spite of himself and in spite of me, has more or less proved to me that it is time I was varying my work a little. I am beginning to compose from memory, and all my studies will still be useful for that sort of work recalling to me things I have seen.

  But that formulation, “in spite of himself and in spite of me,” broadly hints at doubts on Vincent’s part. And Gauguin, after all, had just awarded the Sunflowers the highest praise.

  This conflict helped make Vincent anxious, and that, in turn, made him go on and on, repeating the points he wanted to establish. In a letter, Theo had suggested that Vincent frame one of the series of orchards in blossom that he had painted in the spring. Brooding on this suggestion, Vincent had concluded that Theo intended then to show the picture to his senior colleagues at Boussod et Valadon. This imagined possibility made Vincent nervous in several ways at once.

  For one thing he had extremely sore feelings about Theo’s employers. After all, he had once worked for the firm himself and had been sacked, leaving on March 31, 1876, the day after his twenty-third birthday, to become an unpaid junior master at a seedy private school in Ramsgate. It was the second in the series of career disasters that had punctuated his life before he became a painter. Habitually, he referred to the senior partners in Boussod et Valadon as “ces messieurs”—those gentlemen.

  Now that he himself was having doubts about the quality of all those studies he had sent from Arles, he did not want ces messieurs to have the chance to administer another humiliating rejection. He suggested Theo keep what paintings he wanted for the apartment in Paris; the rest should be sent back so that Vincent could rework them or use them as the basis for further, more thoroughly conceived paintings. Success lay years in the future: “But be sure of this, if we can stand the siege, my time will come.” Meanwhile, he would work quietly in obscurity.

  Vincent continued on about this for some time, hinting at the kind of verbal onslaught that Gauguin was withstanding in person, before ending the letter on a workmanlike note—“A handshake—we need some more paints.” Then he must have put the paper down and taken it up again some hours—or days—later to add disjointed snippets of news and observation. When he did so, his tone had changed: the whole document now vibrated with suppressed competitiveness. Vincent’s mood had swung, his spirits had rallied.

  Despite being smitten with self-doubt, Vincent felt the strength of his abilities. This came out as a vague prediction that in the future he would rival any artist alive. “If, by the time I am forty, I have done a picture of figures like the flowers Gauguin was speaking of, I shall have a position in art equal to that of anyone, no matter who. So, perseverance.” He would be forty in five years; Gauguin was forty now. So, decoded, this passage was a claim that, in time, he would be the equal of his new friend and housemate.

  When he had asked Theo to return his studies to Arles, he now emphasized, he meant only “the bad ones.” He acknowledged that an unspecific “they” “all think what I have sent too hastily done. I do not contradict it, and I will make some alterations.” Who were “they”? Painters who had seen the pictures at Theo’s apartment? De Haan and Isaacson? Bernard and Gauguin? Degas, Seurat, Signac?

  In the past, Vincent had alternated between defending his velocity of execution and admitting that, since everybody thought it was wrong, it might be a fault. There were times when he thought that speed was a positive virtue, allowing an artist to seize the essence of a subject in an instant, as he imagined the Japanese did. And he was inclined to be defiant now: “Fortunately for me, I know well enough what I want, and am basically utterly indifferent to the criticism that I work too hurriedly. In answer to that, I have done some things even more hurriedly these last few days.”

  Perhaps it was the excitement of producing those paintings “even more hurriedly” that had lifted his morale. They seemed to have been finished between the two halves of the letter. Out of a mixture of modesty and insecurity, Vincent wasn’t prepared to say how good he thought these paintings were. Instead, he edged towards the subject. First, he related Gauguin’s flattering remark about the Sunflowers; next he added that perhaps in five years’ time he might have produced a picture of those flowers truly good enough to deserve that praise. Only then did he slip in a self-deprecating description of the two new pictures:

  Meanwhile I can at all events tell you that the last two studies are odd enough. Size 30 canvases, a wooden rush-bottomed chair all yellow on red tiles against a wall (daytime). Then Gauguin’s armchair
, red and green night effect, wall and floor red and green again, on the seat two novels and a candle, on thin canvas with a thick impasto.

  What he didn’t say in this almost telegraphic account was that the first chair he had painted was his own. Of course he couldn’t know that these two paintings he had just turned out so rapidly were to become among the most celebrated in the whole of art. But, deep down, he must have felt that they were powerful; enough, at any rate, to cause a rise in morale. The pictures were not just remarkable, they were almost unprecedented.

  From Wednesday on, the skies outside the Yellow House had cleared and light levels increased in the studio. It had stopped raining. But it was sufficiently chilly to deter someone who hated winter, such as Vincent, from venturing out to paint. Instead, he had remained indoors and painted a radically novel type of still life: he had had the idea of painting his furniture. While paintings of foodstuffs—such as Gauguin’s Pumpkin and Apples—had been a staple of western art since the days of the Ancient Greeks, depictions of empty seats had not. Vincent, however, had long had intense feelings about chairs.

  Van Gogh’s Chair

  In February 1878, while he was in Amsterdam, unsuccessfully attempting to improve his classical languages to the point where he could enter university and study to become a clergyman, his father had visited him. The two of them went on many walks together. For once, father and son were in harmony. After Pastor Theodorus departed, Vincent was deeply moved by the sight of his father’s unoccupied chair. He cried “like a child.”

  Furniture was part of having a home—a nest like the bird’s nests he painted and drew many times while he was working at Nuenen. A domestic nest was something which Vincent strove to attain, and had finally achieved in the Yellow House. On the other hand, empty chairs suggested absent companionship, the loneliness that had often been his lot.