Breaking van Gogh

by James Grundvig

  There was trouble on another front. Theo was having difficulty selling Vincent’s latest artworks. The Impressionist movement wasn’t really selling in the art market at all. That meant money left Theo’s hands each month to support his brother, but the world had not awakened to van Gogh yet as an artist. Money was going out, but it was not coming in as a return on Theo’s investment in his older brother’s work.

  Theo must have wondered if Vincent’s artwork would ever sell. Since Vincent was an unknown artist outside his circle of Parisian friends, Theo had trouble not only selling his brother’s paintings, but also getting his artwork to be shown in the right venue.

  Not only was Vincent living in a mental hospital 500 miles south of where the Impressionist artists lived, he was part of an art movement that, in his own words, had “no unity.”96

  Regardless of the reception of his work, the artist kept painting. He also managed to provide detailed descriptions that went with the stunning works that he sent to Postmaster Roulin, who then rolled the still-damp canvases with the paint facing out, stacked four or five on top of each other, inserted the rolls into shipping tubes, like architectural drawings, and sent them with Vincent’s letters by postal train north to Paris to art dealer Theo van Gogh. These letters are a great source of information about these works that would prove invaluable in the inquiry into Wheat Field with Cypresses.

  The description of the drawing Reaper, for instance, said: “The latest one begun is the wheatfield where there’s a little reaper and a big sun. The canvas is all yellow with the exception of the wall and the bottom of purplish hills.”97

  That of the painting Wheatfield After a Storm read: “The canvas with almost the same subject differs in coloration, being a greyish green and a white and blue sky.”98

  The description of the ultra-up-close, vertical painting Cypresses read: “I have a canvas of cypresses with a few ears of wheat, poppies, a blue sky, which is like a multicolored Scottish plaid.”99

  And the description of the painting Reaper read: “This one, which is impasted like the Monticellis, and the wheatfield with the sun that represents extreme heat, also thickly impasted, I think that this would explain to him more or less, however, that he couldn’t lose much by being our friend.”100

  Yet none of these four similar studies were Wheat Field with Cypresses, though they certainly shared similar elements of nature.

  Even in his lucid, beautifully written descriptions of four of the ten works he shipped along with the July 2 letter, Vincent hammered away about the intense heat with words like “big sun” and “all yellow” and “extreme heat.” Whatever the combination of triggers he suffered from that summer, one thing was clear: mentally and physically, van Gogh didn’t do well in extreme states.

  On that same Tuesday, July 2, Vincent penned another thousand-word letter, this one to his sister. He confided in her about the state of his life, of the solitary profession of being an artist, writing: “What else can one do, thinking of all the things whose reason one doesn’t understand, but gaze upon the wheatfields. Their story is ours, for we who live on bread, are we not ourselves wheat to a considerable extent, at least ought we not to submit to growing, powerless to move, like a plant, relative to what our imagination sometimes desires, and to be reaped when we are ripe, as it is?”101

  Two paragraphs later, he bluntly stated: “I, who have neither wife nor child, I need to see the wheatfields, and it would be difficult for me to exist in a town for long.”102

  Vincent wrote to Theo on July 5, again to Theo and sister-in-law Jo the next day, and to his mother on July 8. He informed them that he would take a day trip back to Arles, leaving the asylum for the first time since he had arrived.

  In Arles, he learned that the reverend who escorted him to the asylum had left for summer holiday in Marseille by the Mediterranean coast, while Dr. Felix Rey had taken a trip north to Paris. The journey to Arles wasn’t a total loss, however. Van Gogh was able to retrieve paintings he had stored with Joseph Roulin and ship the leftover items from Arles to Theo. But not seeing his two key contacts, who had previously helped him climb out of the black hole of his depression, likely taxed his fragile mental state and primed him to succumb to the midsummer attacks.

  On July 14, van Gogh mailed the artwork he created during his stay in Arles. It included five paintings: View of Arles, Orchards in Blossom, The Ivy, The Lilacs, and Pink Chestnut Trees in the Botanical Gardens in Arles. He also “enclosed another seven studies.”103 Those studies covered subjects he had drawn and created in both Arles and Saint-Rémy—works he would temporarily abandon until September; one of these was Wheat Field with Cypresses.

  He also wrote a second, longer letter to Theo to pass on to “his pal” Paul Gauguin, saying, “Above all, dear fellow, I beg of you, don’t fret or worry or be melancholy on my account, the idea that you would do so, certainly in this necessary and salutary quarantine, would have little justification when we need a slow and patient recovery.”104

  Vincent understood what it would take for him to recover—time and patience. But when the attacks finally arrived with the apex of summer heat, those words, “slow and patient,” and other sayings were rendered meaningless. The two July 14 letters were the last that Vincent wrote until the third week of August. They sounded pragmatic and stable enough. We can see from Theo’s practical reply that there seemed to be no cause for concern just yet:

  As from the 15th of this month I no longer have the rue Lepic apartment, and as it was absolutely impossible to store all the canvases at our place, I’ve rented a small room in Père Tanguy’s house where I’ve put quite a few of them. I’ve made a choice of those which are to be taken off the stretching frames and then we’ll put others on them. Père Tanguy has already given me a lot of help, and it’s going to be very easy to let him continually have new things to show. You can imagine how enthusiastic he is about colored things like the “Vineyards,” the “Night effect,” etc.105

  If there was any information in Theo’s reply letter that Vincent took in, it was that the growing volume of artwork needed additional storage, stretching, and display space, which were offered by Père Tanguy, who was the go-to art supplier for Vincent’s special paint colors, pigments, fine canvases, and variety of paintbrushes. That must have given the artist some hope. Tanguy would likely display his artwork, so Theo could sell a couple of them.

  13

  Lasting Impressions

  With Vincent ready to move beyond the healing process of the summer attacks with the three self-portraits he painted in August, it would soon be time for more meaningful artwork. He strolled next door to the storage room, picked up the Wheat Field with Cypresses study he had drawn, and recalled his wandering in the woods outside the asylum walls in late June.

  For Vincent to paint such a magnificent scene, he had to walk halfway between where his room stood in the corner east wing of the asylum and a large overhang at the top of the Alpilles crag. It was a distance of about 8,800 feet, or over a mile and a half.106

  Of the weather that month and that year, D. W. Olson’s Texas State research group found the following:

  Meteorological observations from 1889, preserved at the Météo-France archives, show that favorable conditions prevailed on both of these evenings. Very heavy rain fell on May 14th and 15th, but skies cleared on May 16th. No rainfall at all occurred during the entire first 2 weeks of July, and the fraction of the sky covered by clouds decreased on July 13th from 50% to 30%. The weather records provided a good consistency check but did not help us to establish a unique date.107

  The wet May contributed to two of van Gogh’s other wheat field studies, Green Wheat Field (green because of the rain) and After the Storm. (The unique date was for van Gogh’s Evening Landscape with Rising Moon, which Olson, with his team and astronomers from Arles, confirmed in 2002.)

  With days getting hotter in late June, turning the wheat incandescent yellow, Vincent walked from the asylum wall to a place called Ha
ute Galline—“high” or “raised hen”—near Eygalieres. The pitch overlooked a wheat field with cypresses standing tall in the corner, with foothills rolling to the mounds and shoulders and peaks of the Alpilles and a big windswept sky of roiling clouds rising high above.

  In order to paint the Wheat Field with Cypresses as a study, Vincent first drew a copy of the landscape using black chalk, a reed pen, and ink on graphite on woven paper.108

  Before Van Gogh treated cypress as the principal subject of his canvases (ca. June 25), he included them in two landscape paintings with wheat fields, of which one served as the model for this sheet (drawing) … The artist executed two other paintings of the same composition, which has led to differences of opinion about which was the first version, that is, the one after which this drawing was made.109

  The drawing technique allowed him to experiment with the colors, using “long thin lines, small dots and areas left blank.” Like Sunflowers before it, Wheat Field with Cypresses became a passion for Vincent to perfect, to tinker with and refine. Along with the study, one of the three painted versions was allegedly completed in June, the First version (the one that would eventually end up at the Met). After sunstroke and another “attack” forcing van Gogh to take the summer off, the artist returned to the study and, in September, painted the Small and Final versions that he instructed Theo to send to his sister and mother in Holland, respectively.

  One of the drawings of Wheat Field with Cypresses resides today in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Of the three Wheat Field with Cypresses paintings, not one is hanging anywhere in Holland. Two of the landscapes are in America (the First and the Small versions); the Final version is in London. So instead of a painting valued at around $100 million today, the Van Gogh Museum owns the drawing of the study, which is worth a great deal less.

  That September, van Gogh emerged from his summer stupor with his mind clouded, as though waking from a weeklong absinthe bender. Although he eventually regained some of his equilibrium, he had to be feeling at a loss. A loss of confidence. A loss of hope. His dream of a studio in the South of France and his optimism died that summer. Like his mental health, they would never fully return.

  The cornucopia of emotions that Vincent experienced can be found in the paintings he created when he first came to Saint-Rémy that May. They can be found in the bright colors, the passionate iconic swirls of objects, like the sun, stars, and clouds, and in the thick impasto brushstrokes that separated his skill as a master with the brush from his Impressionist peers. No one in France painted like the Dutchman.

  Van Gogh’s deepest feelings and emotions, twisted in the throes of his ailments, have become a joy to us as museum visitors, art lovers, art collectors, art curators, and art historians more than a century after his premature death.

  Deep inside, Vincent wanted to get back to the May–June zenith of creativity, but he knew it would take time to get there. He couldn’t just come out of his misery, pull away from the insufferable heat, the sunstroke, the fear of the next attack—the toxic mix was still there for him in late summer—and wish that the reoccurrence of the next psychotic break would somehow be forestalled all on its own. Like a wounded animal, he needed time to heal.

  The artwork that he created during this period wouldn’t be on par with the starburst paintings he made a season before, with the intense colors and epic strokes and swirls. It would be more refined, with tighter strokes, and on subjects that wouldn’t require being en plein air. Van Gogh had enough studies to work from to keep busy, to see if he could recapture that initial zest and artistry without leaving the asylum.

  For Vincent, these paintings were baby steps. But underneath he had to cleanse, expel the layers of pain and doubt from a lost summer. The first three paintings he created coming out of sunstroke depression were self-portraits. Straightforward. Easy. Light on the fingers, second nature, but emotionally necessary. Use the mirror, look at his face, see his own reflection, study his expression at that moment in time, even capture an intense, predatory wolf-like stare, and yet paint with quicker brushstrokes influenced by the staccato taps and touches of Pointillism.

  British art teacher Ashlee Farraina captured van Gogh’s state by examining all of the artist’s dozen and a half self-portraits on her art and photography blog; writing about self-portrait No. 12, the third of such paintings from summer 1889, she holds that it:

  brings together all the elements of Van Gogh’s later work: a choice of color that reflects his emotional state and a style of drawing that pulsates with energy. It was painted shortly after he left the St. Rémy asylum in July 1889 and shows that he was still fighting his demons. It is arguably the most intense self portrait in the history of art.110

  That intensity can be gleaned from his August 22, 1889, letter to his brother Theo, in which he was conflicted. In the second paragraph of his letter to his brother, Vincent wrote, “You can imagine that I’m very deeply distressed that the attacks have recurred when I was already beginning to hope that it wouldn’t recur.”111 As before, he also continued to write about how painting was quite necessary for his recovery.112

  He went on to share his summer of pain with his brother:

  For many days I’ve been absolutely distraught, as in Arles, just as much if not worse, and it’s to be presumed that these crises will recur in the future, it is ABOMINABLE. I haven’t been able to eat for 4 days, as my throat is swollen. It’s not in order to complain too much, I hope, if I tell you these details, but to prove to you that I’m not yet in a fit state to go to Paris or to Pont-Aven unless it were to Charenton.

  It appears that I pick up filthy things and eat them, although my memories of these bad moments are vague, and it appears to me that there’s something shady about it, still for the same reason that they have I don’t know what prejudice against painters here. I no longer see any possibility for courage or good hope, but anyway it wasn’t yesterday that we found out that this profession isn’t a happy one.113

  Self-confined to his bedroom and studio rooms at the start of September, van Gogh used the iron-bar window as a portal to his studies from early June. As he wrote to Theo:

  I have two landscapes on the go (no. 30 canvases) of views taken in the hills. One is the countryside that I glimpse from the window of my bedroom. In the foreground a field of wheat, ravaged and knocked to the ground after a storm. A boundary wall and beyond, grey foliage of a few olive trees, huts and hills.114

  One day, after having gazed long enough at the wheat fields at the foothills of the Alpilles range from his room, van Gogh went back to his studio next door. There, he picked up the preliminary sketch of Wheat Field with Cypresses, drawn in charcoal, and studied the majestic landscape, then turning to the drawing in reed pen, examining the swirls.

  As with all his studies—compositions that often had several permutations, like the fourteen still-life Sunflowers paintings—Vincent started with a sketch and then later a drawing to flesh out the details of the work. Using the drawing (he usually also made an initial painting version, which in this case either did not exist or does not survive) as a model, he took out a carpenter’s pencil and, beginning at the center of a blank canvas, marked the location of three boulders, the bushes to the left, and then the tall and shorter cypress trees on the right side of the painting. He outlined the foothills in the middle background and then traced the shape of the Alpilles mountains in the background.

  Before painting the study, he would prime the canvas and then pencil in the outline of the figures or the elements of nature, from trees to villas, and work from the center of the canvas out to the edges, mapping locations of tree lines, rooftops, walls, boundaries of fields, the horizon, and sky above to capture the backgrounds. After doing the sketches and drawings first, by the time he painted on canvas he could do it with the eye of his brain—from memory—as it would be intimately familiar territory for him.

  That Wheat Fields with Cypresses drawing, which hangs today in the Van Gogh Museum in Amst
erdam, was drawn with pen and ink. He executed it first using a thick carpenter’s pencil. He then inked over the pencil’s marks once he was happy with what he had drawn. (When he first arrived in Arles in 1888, van Gogh “discovered the pen (made from local hollow-barreled grass, sharpened with a penknife). It changed his drawing style. He created some extraordinary drawings of the Provençal landscape, including a series of drawings of and from Montmajour (east of Arles), in reed pen and aniline ink on laid paper. The ink has now faded to a dull brown.”)115

  Wheat Field with Cypresses was one of those “extraordinary drawings”—several of them in fact—that turned into an extraordinary masterpiece. It is believed there are three of these masterpieces in existence. The First, thought to have been painted in June 1889, hangs today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Small one was sent to Vincent’s sister “Wil” and is now in a private collection of the late Greek shipping magnate Stavros S. Niarchos; the Final version made its way from the South of France to the Tate in London and eventually to the National Gallery in the early 1960s, where it remains to this day.

  In 1987, the National Gallery’s Impressionism and technical experts, John Leighton, Anthony Reeve, and Raymond White, conducted a deep analysis of the Final version, A Wheatfield, with Cypresses. Why did this technical examination occur in that year? Technology had a new way of performing a CSI-like deep-dive investigation to home in on all of the subtle techniques that Vincent van Gogh used. X-ray machines, high-powered microscopes, chemical analysis of paints, and infrared radiation allowed scientists, researchers, and art experts a new glimpse into how the artist worked and with what materials. That included, but was not limited to, paint types that were unique to van Gogh, pigment colors, the pencil lines underneath, the lead white primer, weave counts of the canvas, hidden signatures, “do overs” or scratch outs, thin and thick impasto brushstrokes. All of that and more was condensed into a twenty-page technical report, which was above and beyond a painting’s condition report, as it offered a much more detailed and multifaceted analysis.