The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  Vincent had painted and drawn sowers again and again in the years when he was working in Holland. But even when he drew them from life, these laborers casting seed on the turned ground were all derived from one original: the Sower painted by Jean-François Millet in 1850. This heroic figure strode across a darkening field, with a gleam of perhaps transcendental illumination on the horizon.

  The idea had returned to him while he was painting the harvests in June. He had, he wrote then to Bernard, “a hankering after the eternal, of which the sower and the sheaf of corn are the symbols.” (As, he added, was the starry sky above, which he dreamed of one day painting.)

  The extra element Vincent could now add, he felt, to the masterpiece of his hero Millet was his own new, exaggerated, intense color: a visual vocabulary he hoped and believed would communicate to the heart as music does. “Millet’s Sower,” he noted “is a colorless gray.” Now, could you paint the Sower in color, with a simultaneous contrast of, for instance, yellow and violet? He presented himself with this challenge: was it possible, yes or no? “Well, do it then.” And, thus psyching himself up, he did.

  He made a sketch for the Sower, then yearned to turn it into a real picture, a masterpiece, a tableau. “My lord, I do want to do it. But I keep asking myself if I have vigor enough to carry it through.” It had been a terrific struggle, which made him feel like “a sleepwalker.” He had started it outdoors in the fields and carried on with it indoors in the studio of the Yellow House. He changed the figure, altered the colors, painted and overpainted.

  As it finally emerged, the Sower was a vision more than an everyday landscape. A huge yellow sun in the background fills the sky with radiance; in front, there is a turned field, purple and orange. The sower himself, violet in the low sun, throws his grain on the earth. Some is eaten by the black birds behind him, but some would grow a hundredfold.

  This picture was one of Vincent’s greatest efforts of the year. But in the end, he deemed it a failure (even so, he didn’t destroy it as he had another big, difficult project he had attempted in July and again in early autumn, Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane). The idea of painting a second, more successful Sower continued to excite him.

  The Sower (June)

  Now, the sunset he and Gauguin had seen together, combined with the lessons he had learned from watching Gauguin at work, suggested a new approach. The summer Sower had been gloriously filled with hope—expressed by the yellow and violet. But the figure was striding in the middle distance. As a composition, therefore, it lacked force—which might have been why Vincent judged it less than successful.

  His next attempt was more dramatic than his last. Very near to us, a sower walks past: a dark figure, silhouetted against the orb of the sun. Beside him, a tree juts diagonally across the painting, its branches bearing a few dead leaves. (A similar curving tree was also prominent in a print by the Japanese artist Hiroshige, of which Vincent had painted a copy the previous year.)

  This was more crepuscular than the June Sower; the light is dying, not dawning. A massive sun is dipping down low in the extraordinary yellow-green sky—just as Vincent had described it—with a few streaks of pink cloud.

  The Sower, letter sketch

  To create this image, Vincent drew on Gauguin’s habits of composition. Gauguin liked to place figures close to the viewer: there was just such a tree as this one twisting across his masterpiece of the early autumn, the Vision of the Sermon. Gauguin was fond of diagonals cutting across his compositions: he had used one in the Washerwomen, where the river bank runs from bottom left to upper right.

  Vincent’s summer Sower was ecstatic; this one was almost melancholic, with a mood of late autumn moving into winter. The earth was bare, the light was fading, but still there was hope. Seeds were being planted which would germinate in time.

  Vincent was so pleased by this new Sower that he immediately made a second version on a smaller piece of jute in which the figure was even larger and closer, the sun yet lower. After that, Vincent never made another effort to paint his Sower. He was content.

  In his sunset picture, Gauguin placed dark blue-violet trunks against the yellow sky. There are two small figures half-obscured behind one of the trees—a woman in Arlésienne costume and a man. They have turned away from each other. When he exhibited it the next year, Gauguin added a line of conversation to the title, Blue Trees. “Your turn will come, pretty one.” Was this a variation on the age-old memento mori—a reminder of death? Was it a promise—or a threat? As so often with Gauguin, the message was ambiguous. But the sickly yellow sky and the gathering dusk gave the picture a sinister air.

  Another letter arrived from Theo, containing, as so often, a 100-franc note. Vincent thanked him, then immediately broached once again a subject that was on his mind, namely, how large a bankroll Gauguin would require to set off for Martinique. Always the financier, as Theo had gently mocked him—Vincent had decided on a figure of 5,000 francs. That meant, assuming Gauguin continued to sell a couple of paintings a month and saved almost everything, he would still have to stay in Arles for a year. Gauguin himself felt 2,000 francs would be enough—in which case he might be off much sooner.

  Vincent did not want that. He hoped Gauguin would wait for at least twelve months, then go with “another man or with other men, and would found a studio there for good and all.” Perhaps he secretly imagined the other man might be him. In any case, a year was a long time, “a lot of water will flow under the bridge before then.”

  There was therefore something a little unconvincing about Vincent’s declaration, “I am very glad of Gauguin’s success in the matter of the continuous sales.” It would, in fact, have suited Vincent well if Gauguin had sold a little less. This was evidently a matter that was causing Vincent anxiety; Gauguin no doubt heard that figure of 5,000 francs over and over again.

  Vincent, his own isolation relieved, rejoiced again that Theo was not alone in Paris:

  You cannot imagine how much it pleases me that you have painters staying with you, and that you are not living all alone in your apartment, just as it pleases me very much to have such good company as Gauguin’s.

  From having been suspicious of Isaacson and de Haan, Vincent had come to see them as artistic pilgrims treading the same path as he himself had. De Haan, as it happened—though Vincent probably did not know it—was uncannily similar to him in many ways. He was almost exactly a year older than Vincent, short, red-haired, in poor health, well-read in English literature and in revolt against his bourgeois family in Amsterdam who bankrolled him.

  In the future, the parallels would multiply: de Haan became the companion of Gauguin, collaborated with him in the decoration of their lodgings in Brittany and planned to depart with him to found a studio in the tropics. Either because of this wild scheme, or because of an unsuitable love affair with a Breton landlady, his family threatened to cut off his allowance and recalled him to Holland, where he died. De Haan was as close to being Vincent’s doppel-gänger as anyone could be. The two men were never to meet.

  Vincent had been impressed by the drawings de Haan had sent him. Here was another painter and draftsman who had looked hard at the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century, Rembrandt in particular, and was now faced with the startling revelation of Impressionist color. So, too, was Isaacson.

  Vincent wanted to know if they had read two of his favorite texts on color, Silvestre’s book on Delacroix and the article on the subject in the Grammaire des arts du dessin by Charles Blanc. “And if they have not read them, let them do so now.” By making this proposal, Vincent was giving Isaacson and de Haan the clue that had led him to understand the language of shade and hue.

  Four years before, Vincent had already turned himself into one of the most forceful draftsmen alive, though few had seen or admired his drawings. But he had only been painting for two years, and he still struggled with color. Then, he discovered a map of that mysterious world. It was provided by Blanc’s Grammaire of 1867, which had a ne
at diagram that presented the entire complicated realm of color as a six-pointed star. It was a triumph of rational French analysis. The points of the star represented the three primary colors—red, blue and yellow—and three mixtures of them: orange, green and violet.

  The mixed shades were placed between the primary from which they were derived; so orange had yellow on one side and red on the other. Opposite each primary, indicated by a dotted line on the diagram, was its complement—which was, in turn, the result of mixing the other two primaries. So the complement to yellow was violet. To red it was green, and to orange, blue.

  It was a wonderfully orderly system. Any painter of course knew that the real world of color was much more complicated than this. There was an infinite range of possible combinations, just as there was an endless array of possible musical sounds. But the star was like the musical scale; starting from it, you could plan harmonic effects resembling musical chords.

  Then there was the question of simultaneous contrast: a color could look quite different according to the other hues and tones around it. The quantity mattered too. Gauguin was fond of telling the story of Cézanne saying, “in his accent of the Midi—‘A kilo of green is greener than half a kilo.’ ” Everyone laughed. “He’s crazy.” But, Gauguin pointed out, the crazy one was not Cézanne: “Because your canvas is smaller than nature, you have to use a greener green. That is the truth of falsehood.”

  Once, Vincent broke off a letter to his sister Wil to repaint a red, orange and yellow sky. While he was writing, it had struck him that it was not quite right. “Then I took a color that was there on the palette, a dull dirty white, which you get by mixing white, green and a little carmine. I daubed this greenish tone all over the sky.” And behold! The picture was in harmony. There was a lot of experimentation involved in using color.

  Few people alive cared as much about color as Vincent and Gauguin. “Me,” Gauguin recalled, “I loved the color red. Where to find a perfect vermilion?” When Vincent touched his yellow brush on the white wall, the plaster seemed to turn violet: an example of simultaneous contrast.

  Gauguin later claimed that, in the matter of color, he had been the teacher and Vincent the pupil. “When I arrived in Arles, Vincent was trying to find himself, while I who was a good deal older, was a mature man.” But from the day of Gauguin’s arrival, Vincent—he felt—had made “astonishing progress”: “I undertook the task of enlightening him—an easy matter, for I found a rich and fertile soil.”

  “Every day,” according to Gauguin, “he thanked me for it.” Very probably, Vincent did thank him for hints and tips. But Gauguin was muddled about what lessons he had imparted. Looking back, he recalled that Vincent was mired in Seurat’s pointillism, which, Gauguin felt, “did not correspond to his nature, which was so far from patient and so independent.” Under his tutelage Vincent had quickly progressed to do the yellow-on-yellow masterpieces that Gauguin so admired.

  But this was nonsense. Vincent had painted the Sunflowers in August, months before Gauguin had arrived.

  When Vincent went to Paris in 1886 he had encountered the full brilliance of Impressionist color. In the two years he spent there, he found ways to incorporate those shockingly bright hues into the direct Dutch drawing that had come naturally to him. Then he became fascinated by the idea of color as a “symbolic language.” Vincent imagined that this might be a communication of the heart: “I am always in hope of making a discovery there, to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones.” He hoped “to express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance.”

  There was a fundamental problem with this project of Vincent’s. There was no such language of color. It was not possible to express the complex emotions Vincent had in mind—the affinity of lovers, the thoughts within a head—through reds, blues, yellows or their myriad derivatives. Colors remained just colors, though his researches led Vincent to create new and beautiful combinations.

  Vincent’s use of color was carefully worked out. The viewer, he explained to Theo, should “understand that I am in the midst of a complicated calculation long beforehand. So now, when anyone says that such and such is done too quickly, you can reply that they have looked at it too quickly.”

  Indeed, it was just this calculation that often put him in “a feverish condition” which he had to soothe with tobacco and drink. As so often, he imagined that his predecessor in the South, Monticelli, had been just the same: “the logical colorist, able to pursue the most complicated calculations, subdivided according to the scales of tones that he was balancing, certainly over-strained his brain at this work.” That was what had driven Monticelli to the bottle.

  Vincent—as usual connecting everything in his mental world—added Wagner to Monticelli, Delacroix, the Dutch painter Jongkind and himself in a list of crazy drunks and heavy smokers. These had all hit the bottle or lit their pipes, Vincent presumed, because of the mental exhaustion of devising complex harmonies of notes or colors.

  Among the most prominent of Vincent and Gauguin’s neighbors were the police. The Gendarmerie was the largest building on Place Lamartine, and the officers of the law were always active. The previous Saturday, November 17, a shepherd had been waylaid in the square, lured to the Alyscamps and robbed. The following Monday there was a nasty fight between two carpenters in the Rue du Bout d’Arles. Numerous streetwalkers were sentenced at the monthly tribunal on Wednesday.

  All in all, the gendarmes were a noticeable presence in the neighborhood. At some point, Gauguin made two caricatures of their chief, Joseph d’Ornano, the Central Commissioner of Police. In the first, d’Ornano is shown as a short, pompous man in a bowler hat, bearded and with his hands in his pockets. Behind him, in Gauguin’s caricature, lounges a tall gendarme. The commissioner looks down at a nervous-looking turkey bearing a resemblance to Gauguin. “Je suis le Commissioner Central!!!” the commissioner announces in his southern accent.

  In the second caricature, he is inspecting a painting on an easel. “Vous faites de la peinture!” he exclaims—“You’re doing a painting!” On the canvas was an indecipherable squiggle. Gauguin was inclined to have bizarre brushes with authority: the following year, in Brittany, he was mistaken for the fleeing conspirator General Boulanger and arrested. While in Arles, he was to be accused by d’Ornano of murdering Vincent, but that was surely not the occasion recorded in this pair of humorous drawings. More likely, the policeman came upon the painter at work outside.

  Gauguin, Police Commissioner from Arles Sketchbook

  Unlike Vincent, Gauguin was braving the autumn chill. Despite his disappointment with the Arles countryside, he now produced a series of landscapes. Perhaps it was a way of escaping the studio.

  Gauguin still focused on the area around the washing-place on the Roubine du Roi Canal. Having already painted a strange, stylized, almost nightmarish version of the subject, he now produced a much more normal everyday one. In the earlier picture the canal harbored alarming whirlpools and was flanked by bushes of fire; in this new work it shrank to its real—very modest—dimensions.

  Four Arlésiennes are shown kneeling at their laundry, one of whom—wearing an orange skirt and yellow scarf—has Madame Ginoux’s profile. The sky is overcast. Some of it could have been done outside, but it wasn’t an exact depiction of what Gauguin could have seen in front of his eyes. The trees in the field across the canal were in full, light green leaf, and in late November they were certainly not. Gauguin did not have much regard for verisimilitude.

  A second painting concentrated on the nondescript track on the other side of the canal. This more accurately records the sparse vegetation and bright wintry weather of that time in Arles. The sky is partly covered by white cloud, partly a light blue. A dog lounges on the path next to a long shadow thrown by a tree indicating the sun is low in the sky. In the background a little girl skips and a woman stands behind her. Lau
ndry from the washing-place, invisible behind the bank, lies in the hedgerow.

  A third Arles landscape depicts a farmhouse, with a medieval arch from the Alyscamps visible behind and a trio of cypresses. The soil in the foreground is the pinkish white of the chalky Crau; two dogs are wandering across it, one sniffing under the other one’s tail. A couple of heads look over a hedge on the left, one of them that of an Arlésienne.

  The composition is similar to a Breton landscape from earlier in the year which Theo especially admired. He compared it, following Vincent and Gauguin’s musical analogies, to “a beautiful symphony.” He rhapsodized over the rich harmonies of russet, red and green. There was nothing rich about this Arles landscape though. It was so thinly painted that it looked scratchy; the jute showed through in many places.

  Gauguin was doing what Vincent had done in the months before he arrived—painting the scruffy urban fringe of Arles. But there was little suggestion that he loved this place as Vincent did. These pictures had an oddly desolate mood. As he had written to Bernard, he now found everything in Arles—the landscape, the people—“small and mean.”

  8. Painting a Family

  November 23–December 4 (continued)

  Vincent, who could not bear the cold, stayed in the studio, where he started to work from life. His last few letters to Theo had been full of hints that he desperately wanted to paint people rather than landscapes. “As for me,” he dropped into the last one, “I am thinking more of Rembrandt than might appear from my studies.” And Rembrandt, to Vincent, was above all the master of the human face. He passionately admired the Dutch master’s Jewish Bride. When he had gone to visit the museum in Amsterdam with his friend Anton Kerssemakers, he sat down in front of this picture and told his friend, “You will find me here when you come back.” When Kerssemakers returned, Vincent looked up and declared: