The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  They were a pair, designed to be hung together; Vincent had an important position in mind for them. The pictures rhymed in form: a regular palisade of trees divided each one up like beats in a bar of music. In color, the Falling Leaves were an exercise in compare and contrast, built up of complementary, or opposite, colors: green and red, violet and apricot. The bluish poplar trunks in one balanced the expanse of yellowish path in the other. There were certain colors, such as these, he had explained to his sister, “which cause each other to shine brilliantly, which form a couple, which complete each other like man and woman.”

  Falling Leaves

  The insistent weave of Gauguin’s jute came through Vincent’s brush strokes and gave the finished works a texture like tapestry or embroidery. Another link with Gauguin was the steep angle of vision, just like that in his Vision. In the Falling Leaves, Vincent looked down sharply on the yellow and orange of the Alyscamps avenue, just as Gauguin had on the deep-vermilion field where Jacob wrestled with the angel.

  The motif of a landscape seen through tree trunks had been tried out by Émile Bernard. Gauguin told Vincent about one of his latest paintings; it showed the painter’s seventeen-year-old sister reclining in the Bois d’Amour with, behind her, a grove like the one in Botticelli’s Primavera. Gauguin’s description made such an impact that Vincent was able to draw the picture from memory months later.

  Falling Leaves

  Vincent recalled how Gauguin had analyzed the painting in terms of color and construction:

  On a grassy foreground, the figure of a young girl in a blue or whitish dress, lying stretched out full-length; on the second plane the edge of a beech wood, the ground covered with fallen red leaves, vertical gray-green tree trunks across it. Her hair, I think, is in a tint that serves as a complementary color to the white dress: black if that garment is white, orange if it is blue.

  “Well,” Vincent said to himself. “What a simple subject and how well he knows how to create grace from nothing!” Gauguin also described another of Bernard’s works of the weeks before: “Just three trees, the effect of orange foliage against a blue sky, but with very clear outlines, very strictly divided into planes of contrasting, clear colors—splendid!” Vincent’s Falling Leaves aimed to do just the same.

  The third ingredient in the Falling Leaves, however, was Vincent’s contribution: the novel-reader’s touch. In both compositions he included vignettes from everyday life. In one painting, a thin man with an umbrella—elderly and bony, as Vincent ruefully thought of himself—accosted a woman of the “fat hen” type with which he occasionally thought of settling down. Further up the Alyscamps a woman in harlot red approached. In the other, a couple walked between the tombs while a lemon-yellow sunset filled the sky.

  Each of these incidents is of the kind that Vincent admired in Daumier’s lithographs and found in his beloved novels. For example, in La Fille Eliza, by Edmond de Goncourt—a favorite of Vincent’s—the tragic climax occurred in an old cemetery where the heroine, a prostitute, stabs her lover to death.

  The Falling Leaves were considered a success. Technically and conceptually, they were the most assured pieces Vincent had produced since his Bedroom. Creatively and emotionally, he was once more swinging upwards. Vincent described them with pride to Theo and thought that Gauguin liked them. Gauguin believed that Bernard would admire them. They were hung in a position of pride: on the wall of Gauguin’s bedroom. Unless the Sunflowers and the Poet’s Garden had been moved, the walls of that little space were getting very crowded.

  In the evenings, by gaslight in the studio, or with a candle by his bed, Vincent was reading The Dream—the latest work by the celebrated novelist Emile Zola. Zola’s works were among Vincent’s favorite books, and for once he was not alone in his tastes. The recent publication of The Dream had been a national event.

  Over the previous few weeks there had been plenty of articles about it in the newspapers. But The Dream was one of the strangest, as well as the shortest, of Zola’s fictions, and Vincent did not much like it. The setting, an old town with a medieval church covered in carvings of martyred saints, depressed him. Vincent enjoyed the account of the golden-haired heroine stitching embroidery, but her lover didn’t much impress him. Characteristically, he saw the whole book in terms of color contrast, between gloomy blues and the radiant hue of the sun.

  Plagued by financial insecurity and guilt though he was, one thing on which Vincent never economized was reading matter. The Yellow House was full of it.

  No doubt, Gauguin was also dipping into Vincent’s hoard of books and magazines. Their tastes were different. For example, Gauguin later expressed distaste for Zola, whose style he found false. But it was difficult to have much contact with Vincent without being bombarded with literary recommendations.

  Vincent told his sister Wil that he had got into the habit of reading for a few hours every night (though he felt it was his duty as an artist to be looking at the world around him and thinking about it): “Driven by a certain mental voracity, I even read the newspapers with fury.” Indeed, old newspapers lay around in his house, eventually to be used to wrap up pictures whose paint was coming off.

  There were the local papers, L’Homme de bronze and Forum républicain, which both appeared on Sundays at 5 centimes each, and also the national press from Paris, easily available at the station. Vincent read newspapers of varied editorial leanings—Le Figaro, which was right of center, the radically republican organ L’Intransigeant, and La justice, which supported another radical politician, Georges Clemenceau. Gauguin favored yet another paper, L’événement.

  Politically, both men were unhappy with the current dispensation. Vincent was an admirer of the leaders of the movement for reform of the Republic, General Boulanger and Henri Rochefort, founder of L’Intransigeant. But, characteristically, he thought of them not as practical politicians but as suffering, would-be “martyrs.”

  Vincent dreamed, it seemed to Bernard, of “a future filled with goodness and love, when all human beings would embrace one another, and personal struggles, always so bitter and bloody, would come to an end.” But he wasn’t really a socialist—indeed he stated that he wasn’t in a letter to his sister Wil. In his mind, art became a substitute for Christian salvation. Or, as Bernard put it, “his artistic nature sought to make a religion and aesthetic credo out of the notion of social harmony.”

  Gauguin had divided feelings about the French Republic, too. His father had been a supporter of the failed Revolution of 1848 (that was why the family had fled to Peru). But the new Third Republic—which had been founded only after the defeat in the Franco-Prussian war and was only seventeen years old—seemed to him a shabby trick, like a cheaply illusionistic picture. “Philosophically speaking, I think the Republic is a trompe l’oeil (to borrow a term in painting), and I hate trompe l’oeil.”

  In some notes he wrote for his daughter four years later, Gauguin expressed disdain for the vulgar rulers of modern France, a country in which there was no place for an artist such as him. “The democrats, bankers, ministers and art critics masquerade as protectors and don’t protect anything; they haggle like fish buyers at the market.” So, he explained, “instinctively and without knowing why,” he was a snob—as an artist. “Art is only for the minority, therefore it has to be noble itself.” As usual, Gauguin had ended up in a party of one.

  In the newspapers, Vincent noted items of all kinds, particularly those with a bearing on the art world. Reading the literary supplement published by Le Figaro on Saturday, September 15 (around the time he moved properly into the Yellow House), he was amazed to learn of an Impressionist building of violet glass:

  With the sunshine reflected in it, and the yellow refractions, the effect was incredible. To support these walls of glass bricks, shaped like violet-colored eggs, they had invented a support of black and gilt iron representing the weird branches of Virginia creeper and other climbing plants. This violet house was right in the middle of a garden where al
l the paths were of bright yellow sand.

  This gave him food for thought about his own, simpler artist’s house. But he also noted the weather and political events connected with the man of the hour, General Boulanger. Gauguin, with his experience of “banking in Paris,” noted, as the autumn wore on, that the financial state of the country was ominous. The French company founded to dig a canal through Panama, the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique, was slowly foundering. It finally collapsed in December. Gauguin feared this would have a bad effect on the art market.

  The other topic in the newspapers that autumn was murder. In France, an infamous murderer, Prado, was about to come to trial for the vicious slaying of a prostitute. Meanwhile, across the Channel, an even more sensational series of murders was taking place: the violent dismemberment of prostitutes by a man who signed himself “Jack the Ripper.” This made international news and was extensively covered in France.

  Probably Vincent read some of these reports. It was just the kind of lowlife subject that his literary tastes encouraged (Guy de Maupassant, one of his heroes, was moved to write a story about the Ripper). Also, Vincent had actually been to Whitechapel, where the crimes took place, during a brief period as a spare-time evangelist near London.

  His eye may have fallen on a macabre detail concerning one of the victims, Catherine Eddowes, killed on September 30. The corpse was extensively hacked about and one ear cut right off. On October 3, in one of several lengthy reports about these sensationally horrible crimes, Le Figaro had published a full translation of one of the letters to the police purporting to come from the Ripper himself. It contained a macabre and badly punctuated threat: “The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you.”

  Reading was one constant occupation in the Yellow House; writing was another. Bernard was receiving such a frequent correspondence from Arles that he almost counted as a third inhabitant of 2 Place Lamartine. And, as a sign of how well things were going, on Friday the second or Saturday the third, the two painters collaborated on his next letter. Vincent wrote a great deal and Gauguin added a little at the end.

  Vincent was still meditating on the personality of his guest. He confided some startling conclusions to Bernard:

  Gauguin interests me very much as a man—very much. For a long time now it has seemed to me that in our nasty profession of painting we are most sorely in need of men with the hands and the stomachs of workmen; men who have more natural tastes—more loving and more charitable temperaments—than the decadent dandies of the Parisian boulevards. Well, here we are without the slightest doubt in the presence of a virgin creature with savage instincts. With Gauguin blood and sex prevail over ambition.

  From a factual point of view, this characterization of Gauguin was bizarre. It revealed Vincent’s capacity—especially when in an excited mood—to run together all manner of disparate associations in his mind, connecting real people with books and images. Thus, in this case, the middle-class Gauguin had the hands and stomach of a workman (unlike Vincent himself, whose weak stomach was a sign of poor health).

  In Vincent’s eyes, Gauguin—failed businessman/tarpaulin-salesman—was as robust as the proletarian heroes of Zola and Loti’s fishermen. Simultaneously—though the real Gauguin had spent much of his life in Paris—he was a rustic sage, not a decadent metropolitan. He was a “savage” from Peru (where his great-great-uncle had been governor-general). The scheming Gauguin was a noble primitive, in whom “sex and blood” prevailed over ambition. He also had “a more loving and more charitable temperament” than corrupt dandies of the big city. And Gauguin, the married father of five children, was a “virgin creature.” No doubt, Vincent meant “undefiled by European civilization,” but it was an odd choice of word.

  Of course, Gauguin himself had come up with much of this farrago—emphasizing his “primitive” persona like that of a Breton fisherman, and his “artistic virginity” symbolized by the wallpaper “like that of a young girl’s bedroom,” in his portrait Les Misérables. But he commented modestly in his postscript on Vincent’s effusion, “Don’t listen to Vincent; he is as you know easily roused to admiration and indulgence.” But he didn’t entirely disagree.

  One of the main topics of conversation between the two painters was the scheme, which they both imagined they had originally invented, for a cooperative community of painters. “The terrible subject of an association of certain painters,” as Vincent described it. Vincent favored a pooling of resources in which more established artists subsidized poorer ones; Gauguin wanted to bring in investors: “This association must or may have, yes or no, a commercial character.” Vincent summarized these discussions: “We haven’t arrived at any conclusion yet.”

  Vincent’s vision of a peaceful monastery of artists, cooperating at the birth of a new art, merged easily with another hobby-horse: that the new art would come into being in hot, new-found lands. This, too, was a fantasy the painters in the Yellow House had in common. Of course, Gauguin had actually worked in tropical Martinique whereas Vincent’s ideas were entirely speculative—Provence was as close as he ever got to the equator. But there was a sweeping, evangelical ring to Vincent’s theories. The project of the Studio in the Tropics blended into a biblical land where the lion would lie down with the lamb:

  As for me, with my presentiment of a new world, I firmly believe in the possibility of an immense renaissance of art. Whoever believes in this new art will have the tropics for a home. I have the impression that we ourselves serve as no more than intermediaries. And that only the next generation will succeed in living in peace.

  Even though he had first-hand experience of the problems of working on tropical islands—the fevers, the isolation, the danger of running out of cash—Gauguin found Vincent’s preaching infectious. He told Bernard as much. “His idea of a new generation of painters in the tropics seems absolutely right to me and I still have the intention of returning there when I have the means. Who knows—with a little luck?” Gauguin’s great project for the future was taking firmer shape in his imagination as he listened to Vincent.

  Vincent’s description of Gauguin as “virgin” was strictly metaphorical: another evening occupation of the two painters, apart from reading, writing and talking, was brothel-visiting. They had already, as Vincent reported to Bernard, made “several excursions.”

  The brothel at No. 1 Rue du Bout d’Arles, one of the six establishments in Arles, was run by the not very aptly named madame, Virginie Chabaud. Vincent gave Bernard an account of a Spartan reception room—perhaps on her premises—which reminded him of a village school, with its plain bluish-white walls, and a smarter salon for the bourgeoisie. There was a cash desk at the door. Inside, drinks were available. The clientele was color-coded, as Vincent noted with his painter’s acumen: there were military men in red and citizens of Arles in black.

  Gauguin described a different brothel in the same street run by a fifty-two-year-old man, Louis Farce, with his wife, cook, servants and six prostitutes.

  Gauguin found the decor and entertainment there suitably tawdry—“paneling with false gilt, rowdy songs, incoherence, art for the mob.” The bedrooms upstairs were functional, with their “washbasins, bidets, vinaigre de Bully” (a fragrant substitute for eau de Cologne).

  “Old Louis” himself proudly showed Gauguin, a favored customer, the “special” red drawing-room with its highbrow decorations. These were prints reproducing famous paintings (marketed by Theo’s firm, Goupil’s) by the sugary academic painter, Bouguereau. One depicted the Madonna, the other, Venus—suitably contrasted female ideals for a Provençal knocking-shop.

  Gauguin especially despised the work of Bouguereau. He waxed ironic on the subject of the Bouguereaus in the brothel: “In this instance old Louis had shown himself a man of genius. Like the magnificent brothel keeper he was, he had understood the far from revolutionary art of Bouguereau and just where it belonged.” It was intriguing, however
, in view of the disaster that was soon to overtake Vincent, that there was a picture of the Madonna on the wall at Farce’s brothel.

  Despite the low opinion he had of the decor, Gauguin was enjoying himself at the brothels. He had been apart from his wife for two and a half years and had apparently had little sexual life in the interim. Now he had money in his pocket and regular access to the women of the Rue du Bout d’Arles.

  In a semi-fictionalized account of a brothel in Arles which he wrote years later when he was dying on the other side of the world, he described his visits in animal terms: “I was strong as a bull and lazy as a snake.” It was a sentence that evoked real sensual pleasure.

  When he first arrived in Arles, Vincent had been inclined to consider abstention from women as well as from alcohol to be healthy. It was a couple of weeks before he even peeped inside a brothel. Thereafter, his references to these places became more frequent. He noted that fate was as inexorable as the doorman at these places: “The brothel keeper, when he kicks anyone out, has similar logic, argues as well, and is always right, I know.” Had Vincent been thrown out?

  He wondered whether prostitutes, apparently so degraded, might still be capable of love: “She is seeking, seeking, seeking—does she herself know what? Might she be transformed one day like a grub into a butterfly?” (This was one of Vincent’s favorite metaphors.) For that matter, he would have liked to know what he was the larva of himself.

  The idea of regular brothel-visits had always been part of Vincent’s plan for his studio. It was part and parcel of the “monastic” nature of his fantasy. The artists would be bachelors, dedicated to their art, sharing Spartan lives, but still, he believed—as he had found in his own life—there was a need for a sexual outlet. Hence the emphasis he laid on a visit to the brothel at least once a fortnight. An inhabitant of Arles remembered, perhaps unfairly, that he was “always hanging round the brothels.”