The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  What did it all mean? Some of these references were so enigmatic—the Fly on the Dog, for example—that it is doubtful that anyone but Gauguin could have made them out. There were too many black lions around to know which one he meant—several on the soot-encrusted façade of Saint-Trophîme alone. Other clues were a little easier to guess. “Incas” was a reference to Gauguin’s own myth of himself as a “savage from Peru.” The Inca emperor came from the sun and returned to the sun, as Gauguin himself intended to go back to the tropics.

  One set of jottings centered on Gauguin’s name. He wrote “Saul Paul.” St. Paul was of course his patron saint. Before Paul became a holy man, he had been a persecutor of the Christians, under the name of Saul. In the doodled signatures below, Gauguin seemed to hint at the same ambivalence: a flip from sinful to sacred. Because he formed his “G” like an “s” and his “p” with a huge flourish behind the upward stroke, “SGo” was just like “PGo”—with the first two letters transposed. “SGo” suggested “Saint” or “Saül” Gauguin, and “PGo” sounded like French naval slang for penis, remember, so by changing the position of one letter, he transformed himself from prick to apostle.

  The word “snake” fitted the pattern. The following year, Gauguin painted himself as the most notorious of snakes—the tempting serpent in the Garden of Eden. In the self-portrait he is wearing a halo and casually holding a snake or serpent between his fingers like a cigarette: saint and Satan.

  In the background, apples dangle; in the foreground, there are leaves like those in a medieval painting. But, despite his halo, simultaneously, Gauguin himself is a satanic serpent, his head growing from a long, jutting, reptilian neck (much like that of the snake in the scene of the Fall carved on Saint-Trophîme). Gauguin gave this portrait various titles over the years: “Portrait-indictment of the Artist,” “Unkind Character Sketch,” “The Alpha and the Omega.” This was in accord with Gauguin’s final view of himself, recorded near the end of his life:

  No one is good, no one is evil; everyone is both, in the same way and in different ways.

  I wish to love, and I cannot. I wish not to love, and I cannot. You drag your double along with you, and yet the two contrive to get on together. I have been good sometimes; I do not congratulate myself because of it. I have been evil often; I do not repent it.

  Next to “Saül Paul” came the strange word “Ictus,” which was repeated inside the oval bubble on the opposite page. Now, “ictus” was derived from ichthys, the Greek word for “fish.” It was used, together with a fish-shaped drawing, by the Early Christians as a symbol for Christ, the fisher of men, several of whose apostles were fishermen.

  Gauguin and Vincent seemed to use it as a symbol for themselves: suffering evangelists for a new art. Vincent thought his socialist friend Tanguy had much in common, “in resignation and long suffering,” with the ancient Christian slaves and martyrs. Later, a little drawing of a fish with the word “Ictus” appeared at the end of one of Vincent’s letters to Gauguin—like a password exchanged between secret agents—next to a reference to painting La Berceuse.

  One of Vincent’s largely unfulfilled ambitions was to paint “portraits of saints and holy women from life which would have seemed to belong to another age.” These would be “drawn from the bourgeoisie of today and yet would have had something in common with the very earliest Christians.” In other words, he wanted to make pictures of ordinary people with the spiritual force of religious art. That was precisely what he was about to attempt with that very painting, La Berceuse.

  Gauguin had this same aim—to paint modern people as saints, martyrs, angels and demons—and found it easier to achieve. He had already done something of the sort that September with his Vision, in which Breton women watched Jacob wrestle with the angel. In the future, he was to produce many works filled with biblical imagery—Eve, Eden, the Fall, the Nativity, the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion. Ultimately, Vincent, with his Protestant devotion to facts he saw before him, found it impossible to paint such subjects. Gauguin, educated in a seminary, found it much easier.

  The words—“Sain d’esprit, Saint Esprit”—that Gauguin wrote above his signatures PGo and SGo made up a French pun: “healthy in spirit, Holy Spirit.” According to Gauguin, Vincent wrote those lines on the wall of the Yellow House. And it is probable that he did, or at least spoke them, because they echoed Wagner’s credo, which had greatly struck Vincent in the summer.

  After Vincent’s death, Gauguin wrote two stories about him, including one called “Pink Shrimps.” It was set in Paris, near Christmas time. The snow was falling hard. Among the pedestrians hurrying along a street in Montmartre was “a shivering man, bizarrely outfitted.” This lowly figure was wearing a goatskin coat, rabbit-skin hat, his red beard “bristling,” but he showed signs of inward nobility in his “white and harmonious hand” and “blue eyes so clear, so childlike.” It was Vincent van Gogh.

  Vincent enters a shop dealing—like Tanguy’s—in cheap pictures, where he manages to sell a small still life of pink shrimps. The dealer grudgingly gives him a little money so he can pay his rent. As he makes his way home, a starving prostitute, just released from prison, begs for help. “The beautiful white hand emerged from the overcoat.” And, like Saint Francis, Vincent gave her all he had, then, rapidly, as if ashamed, he fled, “his stomach empty.”

  This never happened. In Paris, Vincent did not have to pay rent, because he lived with Theo. For the same reason, that was one period of his adult life when Vincent would not have gone hungry. It was a fable.

  Another of Gauguin’s stories related Vincent’s experiences in the Borinage, his family’s attempts to put him in an asylum and his preaching. In the story, Vincent nurses back to life a miner who had been left for dead after an explosion—a conscious echo of Christ’s miraculous resurrection of Lazarus.

  Vincent would have been horrified by these myths. Far from seeing himself as a saint or Christ, he was alarmed even by high praise of his work, when it came. His view of his role was humble, “altogether secondary.” He was too truthful, too wedded to the facts, too Dutch to imagine himself a saint. “Pictures and writings,” Gauguin pointed out, “are portraits of their authors.” And, of course, the author of these poetic, factually vague, mythologizing stories was Gauguin himself.

  Around the beginning of December, Gauguin had begun a portrait of Vincent in paint, not words. Vincent reported its start in a curiously indirect fashion. He did not count it, he told Theo, among Gauguin’s “useless undertakings” (raising the question of which of Gauguin’s projects he did think useless). This portrait turned out to be a strange piece of work.

  Not only was it unlike Vincent’s paintings of himself—naturally, one’s image of oneself might differ from the view of others—but it was also quite dissimilar to the way that other painters had depicted him. Vincent had been portrayed before—by his Australian friend John Russell, and by Toulouse-Lautrec, who showed him in a café with a glass of absinthe before him.

  There were no photographs of him after the age of eighteen, perhaps because he strongly disliked photography. When, at the beginning of October, he was sent a photograph of his mother, he made a painting from it, as he could not stand its gray and black monotony. Only one snap of the adult Vincent survived, from the back, hunched over a table next to the Seine at Asnières talking to Émile Bernard.

  The other portraits show Vincent with a high, slightly sloping forehead and light ginger to blond hair, his beard of a darker reddish tinge. But in Gauguin’s painting, Vincent’s hair is brownish, his forehead low, his eyes, normally his most dominating feature, half-closed and sunken into his head, and his prominent, hooked nose seems flattened like a boxer’s. He is seen from above, as if by someone standing over him at work in the studio. The most attractive aspect of his image is his hand—“beautiful” and “harmonious,” as Gauguin described it—holding a brush.

  Gauguin, Painter of Sunflowers

  On the wall behind V
incent is one of Gauguin’s own works, greatly enlarged. It was Gauguin’s habit to put his own paintings in the background of these studio interiors, perhaps to suggest that this was a place for the production of images and dreams. In this case it is a landscape, not one that Gauguin actually painted—or that survived if he did but quite similar to the lower part of Blue Trees.

  Vincent is painting a bouquet of sunflowers in a majolica vase. That in itself suggests this was not a work of realism. Even in Arles, sunflowers were not in season in December. On the other hand, Vincent did do some replicas of his August sunflower pictures in these winter months, perhaps to please his friend, who admired them so. The more Gauguin looked at the Sunflowers, Vincent remembered, the more he liked them.

  The easel Vincent is using—seen side on and almost invisible—is a portable, folding one for outdoor work. Probably Gauguin painted it because a heavy studio easel would have overbalanced the composition. On one point, however, the picture reflects the reality of Arles in December: Vincent is muffled up against the cold in a thick jacket.

  The flowers in their blue vase are placed on a rush chair, similar to the one Vincent has just painted. But the painter seems to have sunk into the floor, since the seat of the chair comes up to his waist. Gauguin did some preparatory drawings for the portrait in his sketchbook: a couple of details of Vincent’s features, the way his thumb stuck through his palette. These might have been jotted down while Vincent worked on the other side of the studio. He also did a compositional study of the whole picture, in which Vincent was grinning—as if amused at this new project—talking in an animated, possibly maddening, fashion.

  The final painting, however, was quite different. Vincent looks half asleep, somnolent. Was Gauguin depicting Vincent’s deteriorating mental state? Both men later interpreted the portrait in that way. Nine months later, Vincent mentioned it in a letter from the asylum in St. Rémy. “Have you seen that portrait that he did of me painting sunflowers? Afterwards my face got much brighter, but that was really me, very tired and charged with electricity as I was then.”

  Gauguin, writing his unreliable memoirs many years later, recalled Vincent exclaiming, “It’s me, but it’s me gone mad,” as he examined the painting. But Theo, who knew and loved Vincent better than anyone else, didn’t see it like that at all. While Vincent was still recovering from the crisis, in January 1889, Theo praised Gauguin’s portrait highly: “It is a great work of art & the best portrait that’s been made of him in terms of capturing his inner being.”

  When the picture was finished, Gauguin offered it to Theo—his valued dealer—as a gift:

  I’ve recently completed a portrait of your brother as a subject for a picture the Painter of Sunflowers on a size 30 canvas. From a geographical point of view perhaps it isn’t a very close likeness, but I think there is something of his inner character in it and if it’s not a nuisance keep it, at least if you like it.

  Probably, that had been Gauguin’s purpose all along: to make an elegant gesture of thanks to the most important person in his professional life. Gauguin would scarcely have intentionally depicted Theo’s brother as a madman if this were the case. If Vincent really saw madness in the picture, perhaps it was because madness was what he feared.

  So what was the truth? To Gauguin, a portrait was a depiction of someone’s inner self, not their outer skin. That was why he had painted himself as a haggard and hunted-looking outcast in the character of Jean Valjean, the heroic convict of Les Misérables. So his picture shows Vincent as Gauguin felt his companion could be and should be rather than as he looked. The picture wasn’t supposed to be accurate “from a geographical point of view”; it was a symbolic portrait depicting not the outer but the inner reality.

  The title was significant. The Sunflowers were, as far as Gauguin was concerned, the best things that Vincent had done. In those pictures he had outdone and moved beyond Impressionism; Vincent had made visible the true, hidden significance of the blooms. One day, looking at the sunflower pictures, Gauguin exclaimed, “It’s… it’s the flower itself.” Vincent stored this tribute away in his memory.

  So Gauguin painted Vincent dreaming, as a visionary. There may have been something else. That low forehead, the brownish hair, the small eyes—they belonged not to Van Gogh but to Gauguin himself. Indeed, Gauguin wasn’t much of a portraitist except when it came to painting himself. His pictures of other people tended to slip towards caricature. When shortly he came to paint Schuffenecker and his family, he caused offense by depicting his friend as cringingly obsequious.

  In the Painter of Sunflowers, consciously or unconsciously, Gauguin had done what painters quite often do—given his subject some of his own features. As a result, the portrait was a perfect metaphor for the intermingling—the exchanging of ideas and methods, the blurring of identities—taking place in the Yellow House.

  Meanwhile, on a small piece of jute, Vincent painted Gauguin. The latter was depicted at work on his still life of a pumpkin and apples against a yellow background. The result was not successful; it was indeed so unimpressive that it was over a century before it was generally accepted as Vincent’s work at all. Gauguin is wearing his red Breton beret and also, apparently, through an odd use by Vincent of a complementary violet against the yellow picture on his easel, a false nose. The reason it doesn’t work is no doubt that it was—like Gauguin’s picture of him—done de tête. Vincent needed a model in front of him to produce a good portrait.

  Gauguin received another 300 francs from Theo for work that had been sold. Money was raining down on him in a way it hadn’t since he had been in the financial markets. From this new remittance, he decided to send two-thirds to his wife, Mette, in Copenhagen; again, this was something that he had not done for quite a while. With the banknotes he sent a brief, stiff, self-justifying letter.

  Dear Mette,

  Enclosed is 200 fr.

  I would ask you to acknowledge receipt so I can be sure the money has not gone astray. So long as it would not tire you too much, you might take that opportunity to give me some news of the children. It’s a long time now since I had any!

  I’m beginning to re-establish myself, but not without setbacks. The state of my affairs is improving, but very slowly. In any case, my reputation is solidly established in both Paris and Brussels.

  I’m sending you a letter from Schuffenecker which will explain better than I can what people are saying about my painting. I’m working fit to bust but I hope to see the benefit from it in the future.

  Your husband

  Paul Gauguin

  2 Place Lamartine (Arles)

  Portrait of Gauguin

  He did not sign this missive “PGo” (the cock).

  Vincent was aware of the tension between Gauguin and Mette and was sympathetic, seeing it as another source of suffering in the via crucis of the artist’s life. Gauguin, Vincent reflected:

  is a father, he has a wife and children in Denmark, and at the same time he wants to go to the other end of the earth, to Martinique. It is frightful, all the welter of incompatible desires and needs which this must cause them.

  But he also used Gauguin’s marital problems as yet another argument to put pressure on him to stay in Arles. Mette, he “took the liberty” of assuring Gauguin, would certainly support his staying in the Yellow House, “working here at Arles without wasting money, and earning”; Mette, Vincent was sure, would approve of such “stability.” Tact was not among Vincent’s virtues.

  The most sinister of the notes on Gauguin’s cryptic list was “Orla (Maupassant)”—by which he meant Guy de Maupassant’s short story of madness, hypnotism and the supernatural, “Horla.” It had been published the year before. Was Gauguin beginning to fear his housemate was unhinged? After the catastrophe, Gauguin claimed that Vincent had indeed gone mad and that he had lived in fear of some terrible accident. But perhaps it had not been so clear in advance. The horror of “Horla” lay in the uncertainty as to whether the narrator was deranged or n
ot. Both Gauguin and Vincent read this story; Vincent later used it as a comparison for his delirium.

  Writing to Gauguin towards the end of the next month, after he had temporarily recovered, Vincent noted that:

  In my mental or nervous fever, or madness—I am not too sure how to put it or what to call it—my thoughts sailed over many seas. My dreams voyaged as far as the phantom ship of the Flying Dutchman, and the Horla.

  Gauguin later recalled a disturbing habit Vincent developed during December:

  In the latter days of my stay, Vincent would become excessively rough and noisy, and then silent. On several nights I surprised him in the act of getting up and coming over to my bed. To what can I attribute my awakening at just that moment? At all events, it was enough for me to say, quite sternly, “What’s the matter with you, Vincent?” for him to go back to bed and fall into a heavy sleep.

  Gauguin’s bedroom, remember, was divided from Vincent’s by a single door.

  This memory—if it was a real event and not one of Gauguin’s literary embroideries—was indeed close to the nightmare world of Maupassant’s fiction. “Horla” described the experiences of a man convinced that he is being haunted by an invisible being.

  This creature, the Horla, enters his bedroom and drinks his carafe of water at night. Slowly, it takes control over its victim’s will: an unseen and powerful doppelgänger. In attempting to destroy it, the man sets fire to his house, murdering his servants. The implication is that this mysterious double came from within, that the man was mad.

  Of course, like the narrator and the phantom in the story, Vincent and Gauguin were alter egos, similar in many ways—sharing the same space, dreams and ideas—but also different beings and rival wills. The silent watcher in Gauguin’s bedroom—Vincent—resembled the menacing intruder of the story. What would have happened if Gauguin had not awoken and ordered Vincent to return to his bed? The narrator in Maupassant’s story feared the Horla would climb on his bed, take his neck in his hands and squeeze with all his strength.