The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  Thursday, December 6, was the day of St. Nicholas. In Arles, that always marked the beginning of the Christmas season. A special section of the marketplace was allocated to the merchants of santons. These were a charming product of local folk art: small, brightly colored figures made to people the Christmas crèches which were hugely popular in Provence and in many parts of the Southern Catholic world.

  Made from fired clay, papier mâché, cardboard or some similar material, they represented the gamut of local society—laundresses, shepherds, bakers, grocers—all gathered around the holy family, the baby Jesus and the crib. Most of them were miniature ceramic sculptures, exactly the kind of thing that Gauguin produced in an avant-garde mode. A common santon figurine was a woman at a cradle—la femme au berceau—a contemporary mother-figure equivalent to the Blessed Virgin. Special songs known as berceuses were sung to the crèches, either in French or in Provençal.

  These cribs, sometimes containing many figurines, appeared in churches and also in private houses. Did the secular, republican Roulins have one? In Arles, the Christmas season lasted until the beginning of February. Before it was over, Vincent heard Joseph sing a lullaby to baby Marcelle.

  At that moment, Roulin reminded him half of an old revolutionary, half of a mother:

  When he sang to his child, his voice took on a strange timbre in which one could hear the voice of a woman rocking a cradle or of a sorrowing wet-nurse, and then another trumpet sound like a clarion call to France.

  Was it a Christmas song? There was one suitable for a male voice: the “Berceuse” or, in Provençal, “Bressarello,” composed by Theodore Aubanel in 1865 in which St. Joseph soothed the infant Christ to sleep.

  There were also special Christmas dramas—part farce, part miracle play—like animated versions of the crèches. In January, Vincent went to the local theatre, the Folies Arlésiennes, and saw a play from which he mainly recalled, again, a lullaby. An old woman was led before the mystic crib of the Christ child:

  She began to sing in her quavering voice, and then the voice changed, changed from the voice of a witch to that of an angel, and from an angel’s voice to a child’s, and then the answer came in another voice, strong and warm and vibrant, the voice of a woman behind the scenes.

  By the time he heard that, the great crisis of his life had come. It struck as he was working on a picture he called La Berceuse.

  Saturday the eighth was the night of the most successful and eagerly awaited ball of the Arles winter season so far. It was given by the society of the local mutual assistance fire brigade at the theatre of Arles. Dancing began at ten in the evening and carried on until one in the morning, when there was a pause; then it continued with even more liveliness and animation, especially in the quadrilles.

  According to L’Homme de bronze, an American quadrille executed by two groups—one of young men, the other of young women in ravishing costumes of pale blue, white and mauve—received acclaim. A pretty quadrille in the military mode, danced by the same two groups of dancers, was dedicated to the man of the moment, General Boulanger. This especially attracted the attention of the officers of the garrison, who were present that evening.

  Under the baton of its conductor, the orchestra played until five in the morning. If such evenings occurred more often, L’Homme de bronze reflected, the young people of the town would have less reason to complain of the monotony of the winter in Arles. Jeanne Calment, then a girl of thirteen, remembered such balls over a century later. Her white lace gown was made by one of the best dressmakers in town, Madame Chambourgon. She recalled dancing to waltzes, polkas, mazurkas and quadrilles while the parents sat around the dance floor. “It was fun, great fun,” she recalled. “I can see the faces now!”

  One person who did not carry away entirely pleasant memories of the ball was Vincent. In the next couple of weeks, he painted a picture of a ball at Arles from memory. It showed the theatre, with figures looking down from the balcony above, several of them wearing the distinctive képi of the French army. The room was brightly illuminated by gas lights, whose globes hang from the ceiling like artificial suns.

  The crowd, however, was as much nightmarish as jolly. Vincent’s viewpoint was from immediately behind a row of women in Arlésienne costume, each with a long ribbon of dark blue attached to the little headdress on the crown of her head. This device of placing heads in the extreme foreground of a picture was derived from Japanese art. It had been used by both Gauguin and Bernard.

  But in Vincent’s picture the viewer felt jammed up against the bodies of these strangers, nose almost buried in the luxuriant black hair of the nearest Arlésienne. Beyond this row of women, there is a sea of faces, almost all female and almost all looking down or away. Madame Roulin, on the right of the picture, who glances over a little anxiously, is the only person in this dense mass of individuals who makes eye contact.

  Just behind her is a man in a red Zouave képi. To her left, a woman in red smiles to herself; otherwise, in all the faces Vincent painted—some strangely distorted—there is no sign of enjoyment. The picture gives two contradictory impressions—of painful exclusion and equally painful, indeed claustrophobic, proximity. Both foreshadowed Vincent’s looming crisis.

  In the first weeks of December, Gauguin composed his own equivalent to Vincent’s paintings of the gardens in the Place Lamartine, several of which hung on Gauguin’s bedroom wall. Gauguin’s picture was, more or less, of the view from his window. When he opened the shutters, he looked down on the central garden of the three in the square, the one that had an oval pond in it. At the entrance to the little park there was a gate and, behind that, a path that curved around the water’s edge.

  This picture was very different from Vincent’s paintings of late summer and early autumn, which had flowering oleander, women carrying parasols, pairs of lovers, strollers and idlers reading the newspaper in the open air. Gauguin painted a winter garden. The trees were now wrapped in their protective cones of bamboo against the frost—which returned on Sunday, December 9, the day after the ball. Gauguin made a number of drawings in his sketchbook for different features in the painting—the wrapped trees, the park bench, the Arlésiennes who are standing in the park, the little fountain, the pond which reflected blue sky and white cloud. A few dry leaves still fluttered on the trees.

  There were four Arlésiennes in the final picture—two standing in the middle distance like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and two close to the gate, muffling their faces against the biting wind. The one in front, looking towards the Yellow House, is Madame Ginoux. But the most extraordinary aspect of this picture is the bush which she is standing behind.

  The Dance Hall

  If the haystack in Gauguin’s painting of pigs took on unmistakably female curves and bulges, the bush in this picture was even more improbably masculine. From its green, bristling center there looked out a male face—two eyes, a nose and a moustache. But was it accidental or intentional? And who was it supposed to be?

  Gauguin never discussed or described this picture, nor did Vincent. They were sending far fewer letters. Vincent especially, who had sometimes sent Theo more than one letter a day, was strangely silent. Often, when Vincent did not communicate, it was because there was something he did not want to discuss.

  Gauguin, Arlésiennes

  Once again, for the third and last time, Vincent and Gauguin shared a sitting. A middle-aged man with black hair and a white face posed for the two artists. But, this time, it was Vincent who sat directly in front of the sitter and made eye contact, Gauguin who sat to the side.

  The sitter peers at the painters, his eyes half-closed, his head tilted back, apparently appraising, perhaps a little suspicious. Behind his head, in Vincent’s portraits, there is an aura of radiance on the wall which suggests that once more the gaslight in the studio was on during the sitting. It also recalled one of Vincent’s ambitions for his portraits: “I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to
symbolize, and which we seek to confer by the actual radiance and vibration of our colorings.”

  Who was he? He was not, as was later thought, Joseph Ginoux, since Ginoux had gray hair and a moustache. There was one clue: in Gauguin’s strange short story, the brothel-keeper, Monsieur Louis, posed for his portrait. Most other incidents in the story were vaguely based on reality—the arrival of the circus in Arles, for example. So, perhaps, “Louis” really did sit in the Yellow House. The irony of Gauguin’s picture suggested it might be him.

  In Gauguin’s portrait, the man is seen slightly from above—pale, sickly and sleazy-looking; he is wearing a frock coat and cravat, which were signs of prosperity. And Gauguin too gave him a saintly attribute: an ironic halo in the form of a big yellow sun-disc from a canvas on the wall behind.

  This portrait was one of Gauguin’s best done in a naturalistic manner, but he himself did not seem interested by it. He did not bother to finish it, nor sign it, and it was still in the Yellow House, along with his fencing masks, when Vincent came to clear the place out in the spring.

  Vincent’s portrait was part of another series. After carrying out his long-nurtured plan to paint the baby Marcelle Roulin, Vincent was apparently putting into action another project from the summer. When he first painted Marcelle’s father, Joseph Roulin, he had had the idea of doing a series of similar portraits of ordinary working men—the kind of people to be found in Joseph Ginoux’s bar, the Café de la Gare (Monsieur Louis, in Gauguin’s story, was greeted respectfully in the local café).

  Vincent had laid out the project to Theo:

  That’s what I’m good at, doing a fellow roughly in one sitting. If I wanted to show off, my boy, I’d always do it, drink with the first comer, paint him, and that not in water colors but in oils, on the spot, in the manner of Daumier.

  If I did a hundred like that, there would be some good ones among them. And I’d be more of a Frenchman and more myself, and more of a drinker. It does tempt me so—not drinking, but painting tramps. What I gained by it as an artist, should I lose that as a man? If I had the faith to do it, I’d be a notable madman; now I am an insignificant one.

  Portrait of a Man

  Gauguin, Portrait of a Man

  In the weeks leading up to Christmas, it seemed Vincent did just that. It is not obvious why he had waited so long, nor how he overcame the problems that had previously prevented him from painting these people. One answer might have been that, with Gauguin contributing to the finances of the Yellow House and also imposing a little order on them, there was more cash about. These sitters don’t seem to have been paid in pictures—there was only one version of each work—so they must have been rewarded for their time with money, or—conceivably—drinks.

  Vincent painted a couple of fellows who looked exactly as one would imagine Ginoux’s customers might look: down-at-heel and far from wealthy. One of them was wearing a swept-back hat and smoking a pipe; another was a young lad who might have been Armand Roulin after a shave and wearing his everyday clothes. The lines of the nose and the jaw were the same. It was one of Vincent’s contentions about painting people that, “one and the same person may furnish motifs for very different portraits.” That was certainly true of the other two pictures of the eldest Roulin boy; maybe this was a third.

  Vincent had long pondered the question of portraits. His stated ambition the previous year was to do “a really good one.” He meant, it appeared from a letter to Theo written at the beginning of September, “portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it.”

  Throughout the history of painting, most portraits had been produced because someone had paid for them—generally the sitter or the sitter’s spouse or parents, or subjects if the patron was a ruler. At any rate, a portrait served a practical purpose—to preserve a record of a certain person’s appearance. Vincent was concerned with something different: “the thought, the soul of the model.” Of course, the greatest artists—Rembrandt, Goya, Titian—had always dealt with those elements. But Vincent was entirely focused on character and what one might call the spiritual aspects of portraiture.

  Much later, not long before he died, Vincent put the same point in a different way:

  I should like—mind you, far be it for me to say that I shall be able to do it, although this is what I am aiming at—I should like to paint portraits which would appear after a century to people living then as apparitions. By which I mean that I do not endeavour to achieve this by a photographic resemblance, but by means of our impassioned expressions.

  This was a thought Vincent perhaps derived from Carlyle: all living people are no more than ghosts, “shaped into a body, an appearance, and that fade away again into air and invisibility. This is no metaphor, this is simple scientific fact.”

  Vincent dreamed of an artist who would paint portraits the way a writer such as Guy de Maupassant described his characters or as Monet painted any landscape, however humble, that took his fancy. Similarly, Vincent wanted to paint any person who interested him—no matter who they were or who they were related to. His attitude to portraiture recalled his previous ambitions to become a pastor and—later, surprisingly—a doctor. It was diagnostic, but also priestly.

  Gauguin heard a great deal of Vincent’s views about portraiture, as about everything else. The topic was discussed, Vincent recalled, “until our nerves were strained to the point of stifling all human warmth.” The odd thing was that Gauguin went along, for a while, with Vincent’s obsession.

  Normally, portraits were not an important part of his art. The subject was not suited to a painter such as Gauguin, who could exclaim with satisfaction, “So much for exactitude!” He painted himself frequently, and with brilliance, but even there he was aiming often not at truth but at drama—for example, himself in a role as Jean Valjean.

  During this period in early December, however, Gauguin turned out portraits which fitted Vincent’s prescription: such as an old chap, with white hair, beard and stick, who could well have been another of Ginoux’s customers, perhaps an elderly peasant named Patience Escalier whom Vincent had painted before, except now his beard was longer. Vincent had painted him in August and it was now December; the man might well have become somewhat shaggier.

  9. Portrait of the Artist

  December 4–15

  Around this time, the two painters in the Yellow House each produced a self-portrait to send to Charles Laval in the north. Laval’s own portrait of himself—impatiently anticipated by Vincent—had arrived in mid November. Vincent thought it “extremely good,” “very bold, very distinguished.” He admired the sitter’s gaze through his glasses—“such a frank gaze.”

  The portrait Vincent produced in reciprocation was dedicated “à l’ami Laval,” to his friend Laval. It said something for the seriousness with which Vincent took his views about the brotherhood of artists that he deemed this man, whom he had never met, a friend. The self-portrait was only the second Vincent had done since he came to Arles (not counting a study of himself walking down the road to Tarascon, carrying his painting equipment). In the portrait he had sent to Gauguin in September, he had presented himself in character, as a monk, a bonze.

  The new painting was a more straightforward representation of Vincent as he looked three months later. His hair and beard had grown considerably in the interval and were a little unruly. Otherwise, Vincent presents an unexpectedly elegant appearance, his collar and jacket taking on an almost stylish turn. A stray lock juts out oddly across his right ear.

  Here, Vincent seemed, as he put it later, “charged with electricity.” This was Vincent as he looked in the weeks before Christmas: nervy, thin, quite youthful, his eyes glittering, their gaze intense. He fairly bristled.

  Self-Portrait

  In his new self-portrait, Gauguin looks quite unlike his earlier presentation of himself as a hunted criminal. He now appears younger, fitter, sleek, almost placid and pleased with himself. (Vincent attributed this evident improvement in Gauguin’s w
ell-being to his sojourn in the Yellow House.)

  Against the winter chill of Arles, Gauguin is wearing not only a jacket but also one of his Breton pullovers. He sits in front of the window, but the view outside doesn’t much resemble the Place Lamartine; there seem to be blue mountains in the distance. Was it a prospect of distant Martinique, where Laval and Gauguin had suffered before, and Gauguin intended to go again?

  Gauguin, Self-Portrait

  Gauguin made a series of cryptic notes to himself on a double page of his sketchbook. They seem to date either from those wintry December days in Arles or from January, when he had returned to Paris. In either case, these jottings referred to those days with Vincent, and to Gauguin’s own most intimate thoughts, in a code so terse as to be almost unbreakable.

  A painter, he had come to think, was much more than simply someone who made pictures. An artist might take on a series of interlocking and opposing roles: saint and demon, savior and criminal, madman and martyr. Several of these thoughts came from observing Vincent, but something else was going on: Gauguin was in the process of transforming Vincent into a mythic figure in his own imaginative world.

  Gauguin, Jottings from Arles Sketchbook

  At the top of a right-hand page in his sketchbook, Gauguin wrote the following in a column:

  Incas

  Snake [“serpent”]

  Fly on the Dog

  Black Lion

  The Murderer in Flight

  Saül Paul. Ictus

  Save your honor (money canvas)

  Orla (Maupassant)

  Underneath that list he added in a different, larger and fainter script—perhaps at a different time—the words “Sain d’esprit, Saint Esprit.” Below that, in the same, lighter pen, he wrote his signature, “PGo,” and then three others letters, “SGo.” On the other page, in darker ink, he wrote “Ictus” again, enclosed by a ballooning oval shape. Above were some indecipherable squiggles.