When Bernard demurred (claiming an obligation to do military service in North Africa, although he never did), Vincent turned his search closer to home. Either shunning or shunned by the handful of French artists working in Arles at the time, he briefly considered inviting the Dane Mourier-Petersen to share a studio, despite his “spineless” art and his reluctance to join Vincent’s frequent expeditions to the brothel district (or as he called it, “the street of kind girls”). In March, when Mourier-Petersen announced his plan to return home, Vincent’s domestic ambitions turned to Dodge MacKnight, Russell’s boorish American friend who lived in the nearby village of Fontvieille. “He is a Yankee,” Vincent summed up, “and probably paints much better than most Yankees do, but a Yankee all the same.”
Even before seeing MacKnight’s work, Vincent wondered if he might “come to some arrangement” with the younger man to join him in the Yellow House. “Then the cooking could be done in one’s own place,” he imagined. “I think we should both benefit by it.” Within a week, however, after Vincent trekked the five miles to MacKnight’s studio in Fontvieille, that vision, like so many others, collapsed in a cloud of rancor. All summer long, Vincent sniped at his American neighbor: “a dry sort of person,” “heartless,” “dull,” “common,” “stultifying,” “a slacker.” Out of deference to their mutual friend John Peter Russell, the two continued to exchange “frosty” visits in which Vincent had to endure criticisms of his work, which he catalogued bitterly to Theo: “It makes too queer an impression,” “a total abortion,” “utterly repulsive.” In retaliation, Vincent pronounced an even more damning judgment on the American: “[MacKnight] will soon be making little landscapes with sheep for chocolate boxes.”
The match with Paul Gauguin was no more promising. In March, Vincent had faulted Gauguin for “not hav[ing] the kind of temperament that profits from hardships”—an aspersion on both his masculine and his artistic mettle. Vincent made the comment in response to a letter Gauguin had sent out of the blue from Pont-Aven, a small town on the Brittany coast, pleading ill health and penury. “He is on the rocks,” Vincent related the contents to Theo. “He wants to know if you have sold anything for him, but he can’t write to you for fear of bothering you.” Vincent professed to be “deeply sorry for Gauguin’s plight,” and he did petition both Theo and Russell to buy some of his work. He also sent a solicitous reply to Pont-Aven (his first letter to Gauguin) decrying the curse of sickliness shared by all painters (“My God! Shall we ever see a generation of artists with healthy bodies!”). But he pointedly did not invite Gauguin to join him in the reparative South. Known for his prickliness and aloof self-regard, the forty-year-old Frenchman was no match for the attentive young Bernard, on whose companionship Vincent had by now fixed his sights. Nor was the older man’s art, for all its exotic subject matter, as seductive as the younger’s fiery new gospel of color and simplicity—especially after the March Revue Indépendante proclaimed Cloisonnism the crown jewel of avant-garde art.
Of course, Vincent had followed closely and no doubt enviously Gauguin’s meteoric success on the entresol. In December and January alone, Theo had bought almost a thousand francs’ worth of Gauguin’s work, including the Martinique canvas Les négresses that hung proudly over the sofa in the rue Lepic apartment. But the two artists remained barely connected after Gauguin left Paris in early February. When Gauguin wrote from his sickbed in March, he sent the letter to Paris, unaware that Vincent had moved on to Arles. He wrote a second plaintive letter only a week later. “He complains of the bad weather [and] is still ailing,” Vincent summarized. “[He] says that of all the various miseries that afflict humanity, nothing maddens him more than the lack of money, and yet he feels doomed to perpetual beggary.” Vincent forwarded the letter to Theo with a casual suggestion that he offer a Gauguin painting to Tersteeg, but didn’t bother replying to it for a month.
By the end of that month, however, everything had changed. Mourier-Petersen had announced his departure; relations with MacKnight were careening toward a blowup; and the landlord Carrel had seized all Vincent’s possessions. Bernard had ignored his entreaties and taken a house in Brittany, then invited Gauguin to join him there. Theo had returned from his trip to Holland as worrisomely sick as ever and immediately laid plans to visit Claude Monet in Giverny, where he would soon offer the Impressionist eminence the richest deal yet on the entresol. “You will see some lovely things there,” Vincent wrote forlornly, “and you will think what I send very poor stuff in comparison.”
Meanwhile, the Provençal landscape had turned hot and harsh as the summer mistral scoured it with dust. Flies and mosquitoes tormented every excursion. Color continued to drain from the fields, health from his body, money from his purse, and confidence from his brush. (As of May 1, he had still not sent a single work to Paris.) The Yellow House represented the sole “glimmer of hope” on a bleak horizon. But to bring his vision of an artistic Eden to life he had committed himself to ruinous debt without a word to Theo.
By mid-May 1888, Vincent had convinced himself that only one person could reverse this tide of misfortune: that only by bringing Paul Gauguin to Arles could he salvage his dream of artistic home and family. “We may be able to make up a bit for the past,” he imagined. “I shall have a quiet home of my own [and] I should be a different man.”
To impose that illusion on reality, Vincent mounted the campaign of a lifetime. As a bright new building emerged at 2, place Lamartine, a far grander edifice took shape in his imagination. Through months of elaborate, almost daily, pleading, exhortatory letters, he constructed the greatest of his glittering castle-in-the-air schemes for happiness. Combining the careful calculation of his brief on behalf of Sien and the Schenkweg studio, the breathless “join me” urgency of his pleas from Drenthe, and the evangelical ardor of his Millet conversion on the heaths of Nuenen, Vincent’s campaign in the early summer of 1888 staked everything on a heroic new vision of personal and artistic utopia—a paradise of redemption and rebirth that shone even more brightly than its counterpart in stucco and yellow paint. Subsequent accounts dubbed this final fantasy “the Studio of the South”—a term that Vincent never used.
Vincent argued that Gauguin’s coming would finally put the brothers’ entresol enterprise on a sound financial footing. Presenting his plan as a “plain matter of business,” he concocted elaborate budgets based on the oft-discredited proposition that two could live as cheaply as one and the certainty that works like Gauguin’s Les négresses would “treble or quadruple” in value. If Theo would only settle Gauguin’s debts in Pont-Aven, pay for his travel to Arles, add a hundred francs to the monthly stipend he sent, and demand one Gauguin work each month, he would not only make back his money, Vincent concluded, “wouldn’t it even mean a profit?”
Such an arrangement would pay off in other ways, he promised Theo. An association with Gauguin would attract other avant-garde painters and put the brothers’ venture “in a stronger position as far as reputation goes.” On the updraft of Gauguin’s success, Vincent’s work would begin to sell, too, he reckoned—at the rate of at least one or two, and perhaps as many as four, paintings a month for a hundred francs apiece. “So I tell myself that bit by bit the expenses will be balanced by the work,” he assured Theo, eagerly foreseeing an end to his long, corrosive dependence. Gauguin’s coming might even help secure the commercial backing of that eternal skeptic, H. G. Tersteeg, Vincent dared to imagine. “If we have [Gauguin],” he boldly predicted, “we can’t lose.”
In late May, he penned an invitation:
My dear comrade Gauguin,
I wanted to let you know that I have just rented a four-room house here in Arles. And that it would seem to me that if I could find another painter inclined to work in the South, and who, like myself, would be sufficiently absorbed in his work to be able to resign himself to living like a monk who goes to the brothel once a fortnight … it might be a good job … My brother would send 250 francs a month for both of us whi
ch we would share.… And you would give my brother one picture a month.
In addition to the hints of brothels filled with beautiful Arlésiennes, Vincent sweetened his offer with compliments (“my brother and I greatly appreciate your painting”) and promises of sunnier weather (“working out-of-doors is possible nearly all the year round”) and improved health (“I was ill when I came here, but now I am feeling better”). But, Vincent insisted, “business must come first.” “My brother cannot send you money in Brittany and at the same time send me money in Provence,” he wrote bluntly in response to Gauguin’s pleas for financial support. “But if we combine, there may be enough for both of us. In fact, I am sure of it.” Finally, he warned the wily ex-banker against appealing to Theo directly for a better deal. “We have thought it over carefully,” he emphasized, “and the only means we have found of coming to your aid in a more practical way is this combining.”
In an unusual show of restraint, Vincent sent the drafted letter to Paris, presumably for Theo’s approval. But his arguments never paused for a reply. In flights of yearning that soared past the dreary logic of business, he envisioned Gauguin’s coming as not just a commercial coup but a boon to both their art. In the South, he claimed, “one’s senses get keener, one’s hand becomes more agile, one’s eye more alert, one’s brain clearer.” He portrayed the Midi as the inevitable destination of all true Impressionists: a land bursting with the prismatic color and limpid light of Japanese art—the new grail of every vanguard artist—just waiting to be captured on canvas by a painter of faith, ambition, and “daring.” In a crescendo of fervor, he broadened his invitation into a L’oeuvre-like challenge to all artists who loved japonisme and felt its influence: “Why not come to Japan, that is to say to the equivalent of Japan, the South?” Summoning the apocalyptic ardor of his days as a preacher, he prophesied the birth of a new religion in the Midi. “There is an art of the future,” he imagined, “and it is going to be so lovely and so young … I feel it so strongly.” He clothed this prophetic reverie in the rhetoric of revolution, with its calls for shared sacrifice, greater good, and utopian triumph.
And its promise of messianic return. Someday soon, he assured Theo, an artist from the “coming generation” would “rise up in this lovely country and do for it what the Japanese have done for theirs.” This artist would lead the revolution for which Vincent saw himself merely “clearing the way.” “I am not sufficiently ambitious for that fame to set a match to the powder,” he insisted, “but such a one will come.” Vincent dubbed this Messiah of the new art “the Bel-Ami of the Midi”—“a kind of Guy de Maupassant in painting” who would “paint the beautiful people and things here lightheartedly.” He would rival Monticelli in color, Monet in landscape, and Rodin in sculpture (all stars of the entresol). He would be, Vincent declared in bold underline, “a colorist such as has never yet existed.”
He refused to name this coming savior, but the comparison to Maupassant’s Georges Duroy, a sly, sophisticated, sexual predator like Zola’s Octave Mouret, spoke to Theo in deep fraternal code. It not only invoked the great French realist writers who had revolutionized literature, it promised the charming imagery that spelled commercial success on the entresol, and hinted at sexual wonders to be performed on the beautiful Arlésiennes. And it pointed the finger of destiny unmistakably at the worldly, ambitious, predatory painter who lay sick and broke on a bed in Pont-Aven.
Like all Vincent’s utopian visions, this one looked simultaneously backward and forward. By combining, he and Gauguin would be following in the footsteps of previous artistic “brotherhoods”: from the medieval guilds of artists who “loved one another like friends,” to the Dutchmen of the Golden Age who “complemented one another”; from the writers and draftsmen of The Graphic who worked in their studios, shoulder to shoulder, creating together “something holy, something noble, something sublime,” to the painters of the Barbizon who formed not just a colony of artists, but a noble community of kindred spirits sharing “their warmth, their fire, and their enthusiasm” in the Fontainebleau Forest.
Onto this dream of lost Edens, he layered the latest fashionable myth of artistic fraternité: Japanese Buddhist monks, known as bonzes. Vincent had read about these exotic religious brotherhoods in sources both serious (Gonse’s L’art japonais) and sensational, especially Pierre Loti’s wildly fictionalized travel account, Madame Chrysanthème. Now he cast his kinship with Gauguin in the image of these simple, self-abnegating priests of the primitive sublime, who “liked and upheld each other,” according to Vincent, living together in “fraternal communities [where] harmony reigned.” Comparing the bonzes’ mystical union to the “fraternal marriage” (unitas fratrum) of the Moravian Brothers, whose eroticized communes dotted the Dutch heaths, Vincent summoned Gauguin to a monastic life of “cold water, fresh air, simple good food, decent clothes, [and] a decent bed”—the same spartan discipleship he had briefly shared with Harry Gladwell in a Montmartre garret more than a decade earlier.
He reached out to include not just Gauguin, but all the beleaguered artists of the avant-garde in his ambitions for the Yellow House—all those “poor devils, whose homes are cafés, who lodge in cheap inns and live from hand to mouth, from day to day.” On behalf of all those painters “leading lives approximately comparable to the lives of street dogs,” Vincent preached a great new shared mission. If Theo truly cared about “this vigorous attempt by the impressionists,” Vincent wrote, he had a duty to “care about their shelter and daily bread.” Reprising the soup-kitchen fantasy of the Schenkweg, he imagined offering succor to all the homeless cab horses of Paris who, like him, suffered for their art:
We are paying a hard price to be a link in the chain of artists, in health, in youth, in liberty, none of which we enjoy, any more than the cab horse that hauls a coachful of people out to enjoy the spring.… You know you are a cab horse and that it’s the same old cab you’ll be hitched up to again: that you’d rather live in a meadow with the sun, a river and other horses for company, likewise free, and the act of procreation.
Inevitably, this vision of offering pasturage to neglected painters everywhere merged with Vincent’s longtime ambition to create a “combination” of artists in which the successful few would support the destitute many. Why should painters be “chained to the opportunity of earning their own bread,” he demanded, projecting his own sense of imprisonment onto all the painters of the Petit Boulevard, “which means that in fact one is far from free.” He rallied Theo to lead the fight against this great “injustice” by heading a new “Impressionist Society”—a partnership in which “the dealer will join hands with the artist, the one to take care of the housekeeping side, to provide the studio, food, paint, etc.; the other to create.” In these sweeping exhortations to take up the cause of his suffering comrades, Vincent found the comfort he most needed. By transforming his long dependence on his brother into a moral right shared by all struggling artists, and Theo’s years of support into a utopian mandate imposed on all successful dealers (and artists), this paradisiacal vision of the Yellow House promised to release him from his deepest guilt.
So powerful was this vision of redemption that the possibility of failure drove Vincent’s thoughts into all the darkest places: sickness, madness, even death—intimations that foretold the future in ways he could not have intended. But for now, his feverish anticipation of Gauguin’s companionship carried his imagination past these doubts into a future sun-washed with dreams. “The dreams, ah! the dreams!” Bernard wrote, recalling the rush of visionary letters he, too, received that spring, “giant exhibitions, philanthropic phalansteries of artists, foundations of colonies in the Midi.”
In June, those dreams burst onto canvas. Taking his arguments where words could not go, Vincent launched the most productive, most persuasive, and, ultimately, most fateful campaign of imagery he would ever wage. From Drenthe, he had accompanied his fierce invitations with magazine illustrations of life in the peatland. From Nuenen,
he had defended his home among the peasants with dark incantations of Millet and Israëls. From Provence, with two years of the new color in his eye and the new brushwork in his hand, he championed his plans for the Yellow House with some of the glories of Western art.
WITH THE SALTY SPRAY of the Mediterranean in his face, Vincent made a drawing of four fishing boats beached at the water’s edge. He had come to the ancient village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer at the end of May, traveling thirty rough miles in a high-wheeled diligence “to have a look at the blue sea and the blue sky.” “At last I have seen the Mediterranean,” he exulted. Fighting a wild wind from Africa, he had tried painting the little one-man boats as they battled their own ways through the surf. But he ended up spending most of his five days in Saintes-Maries wandering around the bright, bony village, sketching the crustaceous cottages, called cabanes (“whitewashed all over—the roof too”), in neat rows and in splendid isolation.
Street in Saintes-Maries, JUNE 1888, REED PEN AND INK ON PAPER, 12 × 18½ IN. (Illustration credit 31.3)
His thoughts were borne ceaselessly into the past. The sea reminded him of his sailor uncle Jan; the dunes, of Scheveningen; and the cottages, of the hovels in Drenthe. The same ghosts apparently kept him away from the battlements of the pilgrimage church from which the town derived its name. It was here, according to Provençal legend, that the Three Marys, including Mary Magdalene, had come ashore after their miraculous voyage from the Holy Land. Every year in late May, hundreds of pilgrims made the arduous journey across the salty marshland of the Camargue to celebrate the Festival of Saint Sarah, the servant girl who accompanied the Marys on their magical boat. Most were gypsies who had taken the dark-skinned Sarah as their patron saint. Vincent’s trip to the sea at Saintes-Maries—rather than Marseille, where he had often promised to go—may have been inspired by the annual transit through Arles, only days earlier, of these ardent gitans in their colorful caravans.
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