The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  These excursions were not, however, only “hygienic.” They also had an artistic purpose. Gauguin and Vincent felt that they would probably often go to the brothels to work. That project, however, was not entirely their own. They were both taking their cue from the absent Bernard.

  Up to now, Vincent had had little luck in finding sitters to pose for him. In eight months in Arles he had recruited only six: an old lady; Milliet; another Zouave (probably courtesy of Milliet); Roulin the postal supervisor; an adolescent girl he imagined as a little Japanese whore, a Mousmé; and a handsome woman who had taken his money and then not turned up.

  Vincent’s unsettling personality was not the only reason for this difficulty. There was a superstition among the people of Arles, Vincent was told, that having one’s likeness taken was unlucky. It would attract the evil eye. In 1888 many people around the world felt the same: the inhabitants of rural Somerset firmly believed that being “a-lookt” by an artist might result in illness and death. In Arles, they thought the same.

  But that weekend, Vincent got his wish. On Saturday the third or Sunday, November 4, a model—a female model at that, and one dressed in full traditional costume—gave a sitting in the studio of the Yellow House. Vincent had hinted before that Gauguin had “almost got his Arlésienne.” But the model so triumphantly lured into the Yellow House was far from being the youthful southern femme fatale of Daudet’s play and Bizet’s music. She turned out to be none other than Marie, wife of Joseph Ginoux, proprietor of the Café de la Gare.

  At forty, Marie Ginoux was a little younger than her husband, who was forty-five. She was a mature Arlésienne, but then, the distinctive costume was already falling out of fashion among younger women. The teenage Jeanne Calment preferred modern, colorful clothes. And Vincent also—with his distaste for the past and affinity for the modern—liked the look of the girls in town who wore violet, lemon or pink dresses rather than the traditional black and white.

  There was a simple reason why Madame Ginoux was suddenly posing in the Yellow House after all these months. Gauguin, not Vincent, had asked her. He wanted to draw her in preparation for a painting of the Ginouxs’ bar, with, as Vincent put it, “figures seen in the brothels.” This café was a place where streetwalkers—women not regularly attached to a maison de tolérance such as No. 1 or Louis Farce’s establishment—would go for a drink and a chat with a client. If not actually a brothel, this was a similarly lowlife subject. In the two Falling Leaves, Vincent had used ideas of Gauguin’s and Bernard’s. In this project, Gauguin was going to borrow from Vincent and Bernard. Collaboration was proceeding according to plan.

  This was Gauguin’s sitting, as was clear from the way that Madame Ginoux sat facing him. Vincent’s less dominant role was obvious from his position. His easel was to her left, so he viewed Madame Ginoux from an angle. In his painting, she appeared to be staring into space in a thoughtful fashion. Actually, she was looking Gauguin straight in the eye. But Vincent’s junior position—as an intruder, almost, in his own studio—was belied by the results.

  During the sitting, Gauguin systematically and methodically produced a drawing. First, he sketched the outline of Madame Ginoux’s head and torso in gray chalk. Then he went over this in stronger black conté chalk and charcoal, creating a firm, decisive outline. Then he put in highlights here and there in white chalk to bring out the forms. Finally, he considered the study and noted a few modifications to be made when he incorporated it in the finished painting he was planning: “The eye less to the side of the nose. Stop sharply at the nostril.” This was the first stage in the evolution of a tableau, a proper picture.

  Gauguin, Madame Ginoux

  In the same amount of time, Vincent turned out a whole completed canvas, a big one on the scale generally reserved for important exhibited works. It was a remarkable feat, of which he was proud. He claimed at first that the picture had been completed in an hour. A couple of months later he reduced the estimated painting time to forty-five minutes.

  However long it actually took, the picture was painted at a tremendous pace; there are many areas—particularly on the white blouse over her bosom—where the coarse jute of the canvas shows clearly through the rapid thrusts of Vincent’s brush, or palette knife. So the phrase he used to describe the process—“slashed on,” “sabré,” or applied with a sword—might have been close to the literal truth.

  That word was also a challenging reference to Gauguin and his fencing. The other painter, sitting a few feet away from Vincent, believed that both his favorite sport and his chosen art were best advanced by a cool mind, “de tête.” Well, then, here was a different sort of painterly swordsmanship—a dazzling feat of intuitive and intellectual brilliance, carried out at a speed that was almost unbelievable. Vincent’s L’Arlésienne was achieved by methods the absolute opposite of those that Gauguin advocated.

  This was a work that by all conventional criteria should have been just a study, an étude, a stepping stone to something more considered. But, instead, Vincent executed, at an almost magical rate, a painting on the scale and with the authority of a fully pondered portrait. It was built with tremendous logic. The orange chair and green table were built with the solidity of a house, brush stroke by brush stroke against the light yellow background, which perhaps resulted from the newly installed gaslight shining on the studio wall.

  Marie Ginoux herself appeared a figure of nobility and also of melancholy, with a hint of a smile and shadow of pain, wearing the traditional costume. The Arlésienne cap—capello in Provençal—crowned the wearer’s head, with ribbons fluttering behind, and a white shawl or gazo covers her front. One ribbon, fluttering backwards, was a crucial part of Vincent’s pictorial architecture. Without it, the painting would have lost energy. It was dashed in with a few decisive passes of a heavily laden brush.

  On the table in front of Madame Ginoux, Vincent placed the rest of her Arlésienne accessories—a jolly red parasol and green gloves. On her front he placed a single oleander—the flower that spoke to Vincent of southern love. Though no longer young, Madame Ginoux was of an age and type to which Vincent was susceptible. The mistress of his Paris period, Agostina Segatori, owner of the Café du Tambourin in Montmartre, had been in her late forties.

  Vincent made Marie Ginoux much more than a figure of local folklore. She was a relatively humble person—the wife of the owner of a rough sort of café with a dubious clientele. But even these people—dregs, bar-flies, riff-raff—are treated with full seriousness in the books of Zola and the Goncourts.

  This was what Vincent wanted to achieve in his portraits: to portray ordinary modern people in all their suffering and individuality, as souls. The picture of Marie Ginoux was weighted with her thoughts and feelings. When he repeated this portrait the following month, perhaps as a gift for Marie Ginoux herself, he replaced the parasol and gloves with books, thus connecting her with his private literary world.

  Vincent had always been a great—even an astonishing—walker. In his youth he had walked from Ramsgate to London, and from Isleworth to Welwyn, where one of his sisters was living. In Arles, he walked incessantly—perhaps its situation on the outskirts of town, almost in the fields, was one of the attractions of the Yellow House.

  L’Arlésienne

  Vincent hated big cities and had ambivalent feelings about Paris. “When I saw it for the first time,” he told his sister Wil, “I felt above all the dreary misery, which one cannot wave away, as little as one can wave away the tainted air in a hospital, however clean it may be kept.” Later, he realized that it was also a hugely stimulating place, a seedbed of new ideas. “Other cities become small in comparison with it, and it seems as big as the sea.” But, still, he found the crowding and the tension of Parisian life unbearable. That had been one reason, he felt, for his breakdown the previous year: “one thing is certain, nothing is fresh there.” He craved the space and ease of the countryside. Gauguin also liked to emphasize his dislike of Paris, where he had lived for many
years, and his love of Brittany—“Give me the country.”

  By midsummer Vincent had already walked out the mile or two to Montmajour at least fifty times, to explore the ruins and—even more—to look back across the plain of the Crau, which reminded him, like the sea and the starry sky, of infinity. He did this walk several times with his friend Second Lieutenant Milliet, and also with Gauguin.

  On that Sunday, in the late afternoon, Gauguin and Vincent took that very road towards Montmajour and the Alpilles. As the sun was setting they looked back over the vineyards that were sited on the lower slopes, the very place that Vincent had painted at the height of the grape harvest a month before.

  The prospect was spectacular. The gold and green of the sky contrasted richly with the purple hue of the autumnal vine leaves. The slanting rays of light caught the puddles of water still lying around from the heavy rain of Thursday and Friday. In Vincent’s eyes, “It was all red like red wine.” In the distance the wet earth turned yellow with violet shadows, “sparking here and there where it caught the reflection of the setting sun.” Vincent believed that the colors of the sunsets in the South were more varied and clearer than in the North.

  The sight gave both painters ideas—quite different ones—for new pictures. At the moment the sun dipped beneath the horizon it was just before five-thirty. They walked back to Arles through the gathering night. Vincent and Gauguin had been living together for thirteen days. So far, everything was going well.

  4. Collaboration

  November 5–10

  For the time being, the urgent financial problems of the Yellow House were over. Gauguin had nearly 200 francs left over from the 500 he had got from his sale, so there was even some extra money to hand. Over the previous week, he had been buying various things for the house.

  This was part of Gauguin’s plan to improve the domestic arrangements—as was his simple system for regulating the finances with the box of money, list of expenses and pencil. In addition to the 20 yards of jute, Gauguin had bought a chest of drawers, “and various household utensils.”

  In other words, as Vincent reflected slightly dubiously to Theo, “a lot of things that we needed” or “that at any rate it was more convenient to have.” Vincent felt that in due course—at New Year or perhaps Easter—Gauguin should be repaid for this expenditure on the house. That would help him save up for his second voyage to Martinique, and the Van Gogh brothers would own the chest of drawers and cooking implements.

  Gauguin was assembling his kitchen equipment because the day was approaching when he was going to cook his first meal in the house. Vincent announced this development to Theo with jubilation in a letter which was probably written on Monday, November 5: “Gauguin and I are going to have our dinner at home today, and we feel as sure and certain that it will turn out well as that it will seem to us better or cheaper.”

  Gauguin had given the same news a day before to Bernard. If the latter didn’t have to go to Africa to do military service, he could come to Arles and enjoy “a fairly easy existence.” He had looked into the “question of money,” he added, and concluded that “we can get by cheaply by doing what I shall be doing from tomorrow, cooking at home.” Clearly, he was content in Arles—and taking on Vincent’s projects as his own.

  The notion of eating at home had been part of Vincent’s plan since the idea of forming a community of artists in the Yellow House first came into his head. Eating in restaurants was extravagant, he felt. But, he poignantly noted, it was hard to cook at home for just one.

  In Vincent’s mind, the job of chief cook in the Yellow House had always been allocated to Gauguin, who had done naval service and knocked around the world a bit. So from that day on they gave up going to the Restaurant Venissat. Instead, Gauguin made their supper on the gas stove which Vincent had had installed at the same time as the lighting.

  The kitchen and dining room was behind the studio, a smaller space, which Vincent had briefly used to work in. He had drawn one of Milliet’s Zouave soldiers in it, hunkered down on a little chair in front of the old oven and chimney. It contained a table—useful for writing letters—and chairs. But the bits and pieces which Vincent had bought for making coffee and soup were not sufficient, Gauguin clearly felt, for serious cooking. The chest of drawers, since there already was one in both bedrooms, was perhaps to store the cutlery, crockery and the rest of Gauguin’s batterie de cuisine. A big frying pan was one of the requirements Vincent had noted before his guest arrived.

  Gauguin had not only served in the navy for years, he had also kept house for himself and his six-year-old son Clovis when the two of them had returned from Copenhagen in 1885 (subsequently, Clovis had been farmed out with relatives, and then gone back to Denmark). Skill in the kitchen was not unknown in male artists of the period. Vincent’s friend Toulouse-Lautrec was a renowned amateur chef. Moreover, Gauguin had a genuine feeling for food.

  In Denmark, he noted, the best thing was—assuredly—not his mother-in-law, but “the game she cooked so admirably.” The Nordic fish he also found “excellent.” In his mind, good food implied liberality, jollity, feasting—“No mean woman,” he declared, “can cook well. It calls for a generous spirit, a light hand, and a large heart.”—whereas Vincent thought of what he ate medicinally, as a health tonic, or the reverse. At best, it was the fuel that kept him in condition to paint.

  Vincent’s job was to buy the food. And to do that, as Gauguin commented, “he did not have to go far.” Indeed, he only had to step next door, to the other half of the building that contained the Yellow House. There, a thirty-two-year-old woman, Marguerite Favier, kept a grocer’s shop in premises that were almost, but not quite, a mirror image of the Yellow House.

  Marguerite Favier’s half of the structure had duller yellow paintwork than Vincent’s newly decorated part, plus pink shutters and a pink awning at the front, above which was written the word “Comestibles,” or “Provisions.” In sunny weather, there was a chair outside, on which the proprietor could sit while she chatted with passersby. Inside, because of the irregular plot on which it was built, the ground-floor room was much deeper than its equivalent on the other side: Vincent and Gauguin’s studio. So, for the first time, Vincent went to this shop to buy the ingredients for a meal for two. Afterwards, in theory at least, he should have noted down the amount he had spent on the piece of paper beside the money box.

  From now on, every evening Gauguin would stand at the stove boiling and frying, then eat with Vincent at the kitchen table. Neither painter recorded any of the recipes that Gauguin cooked, but they may well have eaten some fish when they could get it, since Vincent thought the fish at Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer, at the mouth of the Rhône, was outstanding, and some of it came upriver to Arles. Vincent bought such things as crabs to pose for his pictures. He had also acquired a taste for that Mediterranean staple, the olive.

  Throughout Vincent’s life, eating had been a difficult issue, for reasons which it was hard to untangle—part ascetic zeal, part genuine penury, part illness, part incompetence, part neurosis. During his phase of religious exaltation, he had eschewed all but the simplest meals. Later, having gone back to live with his elderly parents and sister, he would insist on eating separately from the rest of the family, consuming nothing but dry bread and cheese. Either because he had wrecked his stomach through semi-starvation or because there was something else wrong with him, Vincent complained frequently about the state of his digestion.

  Soon Vincent was sending Theo enthusiastic reports about Gauguin’s food: “He knows how to cook perfectly, I think I shall learn from him, it is very convenient.” But that last plan did not work out well. According to Gauguin, Vincent made only one attempt to produce a meal himself. He decided to make soup. “How he mixed it I don’t know; as he mixed his colors in his pictures I dare say. At any rate, we couldn’t eat it. And Vincent burst out laughing and exclaimed: ‘Tarascon! The cap of Father Daudet!’”

  This was a reference to the comic novel Tar
tarin de Tarascon, by Alphonse Daudet, the book that had been one of the reasons Vincent had wanted to come to Provence in the first place. The book related how the men of Tarascon had wiped out all game in the vicinity, so, instead of hunting, they went out into the country and took pot shots at their headgear. “Every man plucks off his cap, ‘shies’ it up with all his might, and pops it on the fly with a No. 5, 6 or 2 shot, according to what he is loaded for.” Vincent was saying that his culinary disaster was a similar piece of happy-go-lucky southern craziness. Looked at objectively, however, the connections he made—between soup and hunting, Tartarin and himself—were extremely far-fetched.

  There was one profound and obvious difference between Vincent and Gauguin, which was reflected in their two paintings of the sunset over the vineyard. One of them had been brought up a devout Protestant, the other a pious Catholic.

  Gauguin said little later of the “theological studies” of his youth, but they were doubtless intense. He had studied from the ages of eleven to sixteen at the Petit Séminaire de La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin outside Orléans. There, he applied himself, among other subjects, to Catholic liturgy, the latter subject being taught by the Bishop of Orléans himself, Félix-Antoine-Philibert Dupanloup.

  This man was a big wheel in French religious education. A charismatic teacher, he devised new methods of inculcating faith in the young. He wanted his pupils to develop “supernaturally-infused” powers of imagination, to focus within, on otherworldly truths. A favorite analogy of his was the spiritual harvest: an inner light that came from the planting of God in the soul.