The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

At the heart of the bishop’s system was his new catechism, a series of questions the boys were to ponder inwardly again and again: What is grace? What is death? There were three questions more fundamental than the rest: “Where does humanity come from?” “Where is it going?” “How does humanity proceed?” Once embedded in the youthful mind, Dupanloup believed, this catechism would never be erased.

  In the case of at least one pupil, Dupanloup was correct. Near the end of his life, on the other side of the world, Gauguin painted a huge painting, like a fresco, on jute: his testament. Its title was, “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”

  These were conundrums that tormented not only Gauguin, but his age, and the one that came afterwards. It was a period when, to many thinking people, the certainties of Christian religion seemed to be disintegrating with alarming speed. Matthew Arnold, an English poet who had died that very year, 1888, put the matter well. The Sea of Faith, he wrote, was once at full tide, furled around the globe “like the folds of a bright girdle.” “But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” Humanity now stood on the “naked shingles of the world,” and there was no longer “joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”

  Gauguin, as an adult, was caustically anticlerical. Towards the end of his life, in the South Pacific, he wrote a long essay entitled “Catholicism and the Modern Mind” in which he tore into the “oppressive, debasing, stultifying, theocratic priestly class,” but he still felt that some deep truth could be extracted from Christ’s parables. And, as he put it in some notes written at that low point of his life, when he split from his wife in Copenhagen, he was still looking for an art that would, with a single glance, “engulf the soul in the most profound memories.”

  To Vincent, too, after a period of fervent piety, it came to seem that conventional Christianity was dead. “Within ten or fifteen years,” he wrote to his sister, “the whole edifice of the national religion collapsed.” He continued, however, to believe that art could make up for some of that gap, that it could—to use a favorite word of Vincent’s—console.

  There were many artists, writers and poets who were struggling with this same challenge. Essentially, there were two possible strategies. One was to create an art of new symbols to replace the old. This was a path followed by many French writers. A new movement named Symbolism had been launched by a poet, Jean Moréas, in the newspaper Le Figaro two years before. It was an approach that grew out of the work of Parisian poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé.

  “Poetry,” according to Mallarmé, “endows our stay on earth and constitutes the only spiritual path.” But half the pleasure in poetry lay in its ambiguity. “To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment to be found in a poem… suggestion, that is the dream.”

  Temperamentally, and by Bishop Dupanloup’s training, Gauguin was inclined towards this new movement of Symbolism, which was allegorical, dreamy, poetic, vague and, to use his favored term, “abstract.” In a year or two, he would be taken up by the Symbolists and invited to the Tuesday gatherings at Mallarmé’s apartment. But he had not yet joined; most of his work to date had been a depiction, more or less rearranged, of what he saw before him. Only his Vision, not more than two months old, could be called a Symbolist work. His painting of the vineyard took him a step further in that direction.

  Vincent’s religious training had been the opposite of Gauguin’s. His boyhood in Holland had been spent in the village of Zundert in Southern Brabant, a rustic parish in which his father was pastor to the few local adherents of the Dutch Reformed Church (the neighborhood was predominantly Catholic). Pastor Theodorus van Gogh followed a reforming theological movement known as the Groningen School, which was comparable to the ethos known in Britain as “muscular Christianity.”

  He consequently encouraged an active faith: doing good, not examining the soul. “Dare to live!” exhorted one of his favorite poets, Reverend Petrus A. de Genestet. “Devoted and happy, fresh and early/Awake with the sun, stretch your hands to the plough in the great field!”

  God’s nature was revealed by the beauties of the world: an attitude similar to that of John Ruskin (Vincent’s mother, like the great critic, was a keen watercolorist). “The view of the starry sky,” sang the Reverend Bernard ter Haar, also avidly read by the Revd van Gogh, “reminds the Christian of the dwellings of the house of the father, / The sprouting of the grain of his Resurrection / The rising sun of his immortality.”

  Later, after he lost his faith, Vincent retained a passionate love of what he actually saw. This was the second possible response to the painful disappearance of supernatural belief. It was a northern and Protestant answer. Ruskin, like some Dutch theologians, found the signs of God in the wonderful structure of nature: the leaves of a flower, the strata in a rock. Vincent believed that you could find the infinite in a blade of grass.

  The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle went one further and propounded a creed he dubbed “natural supernaturalism.” What existed, he argued, was itself miraculous, with or without religious sanction. In his book Sartor Resartus (or The Tailor Reclothed), Carlyle proposed that all beliefs and symbols, like old clothes, wore out and must be discarded. But the new beliefs for the new world should be derived from the real world, not from the outworn iconography of Madonnas and martyrdoms. Vincent read Carlyle’s works with enthusiasm.

  Temperamentally, and by his upbringing, Vincent inclined towards Carlyle’s natural supernaturalism. Eventually, he was to declare that, “If I am at all capable of spiritual ecstasy, then I feel exalted in the face of truth, of what is possible.” The night sky put Vincent in mind of eternity. Sunset, too, was a moment of the day that filled him with feeling and which he had often painted.

  But, for the time being, Vincent was eager to paint symbolic paintings—such as the Sower—and to attempt biblical scenes such as Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, which he had twice attempted in Arles and twice abandoned. His next picture was a compromise. It looked real but was full of hidden symbolism.

  “We are working hard,” Vincent told Theo, “and our life together goes very well.” The work in the studio was intense. For the moment, though the rain had let up, both painters had indoor projects to pursue. Contrary to his prediction that it would take him a long time to settle down in Arles, Gauguin had two major paintings in hand. One was the Night Café, with Madame Ginoux in the foreground, the other a new painting inspired by the sight of the sunset in the vineyard.

  Vincent thought this picture, done “altogether from memory,” would be “very fine and very unusual” if Gauguin did not spoil it or leave it unfinished (as he presumably had that first Arles picture of the Negress). Vincent himself was also working, from memory, on a painting of the field of vines, “all purple and yellow” in the dying sun. The two artists responded to this revelatory spectacle in entirely different ways.

  Vincent painted the Red Vineyard over the next few days, peopling the field with figures from his memory and imagination (for instance the woman on the right looks like Madame Ginoux, unsuitably dressed for grape-picking in her Arlésienne costume). He was working in the way that Gauguin called de tête—from memory and imagination—or peintre de chic.

  That he should do this had always been part of Vincent’s plan for the time after Gauguin arrived, just like the shared expenses and the communal cooking. It was another aspect of the sharing of ideas: collaboration. But the question of working from memory was vexed for him. On the one hand, his natural tendency was to paint from what he saw in front of him, often very rapidly in one exhilarating rush. As he was well aware, that was often how he produced his best work. On the other hand, he also knew that it was not the way that painting should be produced.

  The accepted academic procedure was as follows. First, one should produce a sketch, or esquisse—possibly preceded by an even rougher preliminary sketch, or ébauche. Studies, or études, of particular aspects of the intended picture would pr
obably be required. Only then was it possible to attempt the final work, the painting itself, or tableau. The evolution of a picture, then, was an orderly, highly intellectual affair. In fact, even when he painted at the highest speed, Vincent generally followed a carefully thought-out strategy. But he did not follow the “proper” stages.

  It was true that these rules had been breached frequently by avant-garde painters. Much of the rage that poured down on the Impressionists was provoked by the fact that they exhibited as finished tableaux works that had the informal air and rough lack of finish appropriate to études. But some, even among the radicals, still preferred this methodical manner of working. Georges Seurat, for example, the most successful of the experimental young painters in Paris and Gauguin’s enemy and rival, always set about things in this way. He developed his works from beginning to end with intellectual rigor.

  Vincent was unsettled by the issue. In his letters to Theo he constantly classified his paintings into studies and pictures—the Bedroom, for example, he counted as a tableau, and also the Night Café—but there were always far more of the former than the latter. Most of what he did, he sadly concluded, were only études—at best, stepping stones towards the proper, finished works that he might achieve in a few years’ time, if his health held up. The problem, obviously, was that it was what he actually saw before his eyes that Vincent found most inspiring and exciting.

  In this picture of the Red Vineyard, though, he worked de tête; he kept close to what he and Gauguin had actually seen on Sunday evening. The place was one that he knew well; it was the same field that he had depicted for the picture at the end of September—the most intense point of the grape harvest—which now hung in the Yellow House. This earlier picture was now renamed the Green Vineyard to distinguish it from the new Red Vineyard. Yet there was still more collaboration hidden here. One of Emile Bernard’s best pictures of the early autumn, which Vincent had not seen but had surely heard about, showed the buckwheat harvest, with workers laboring in a field of deep red and gold.

  In his imagination Vincent populated the scene with workers who were no longer actually there (the grape harvest had ended weeks ago) and gave it the red and gold of the sunset. The waterlogged road down which he and Gauguin had tramped back to Arles became a river of light. A traveler stands upon it, gazing at the distant towers of the city of Arles.

  Although it might pass for a work from nature, the Red Vineyard had a visionary mood about it. It could be read as a post-Protestant parable. The workers in the vineyard toil virtuously; all around them pours down the glory of the light. One among them, a traveler on the road, stares up at the transfigured sky: eternity.

  Red Vineyard

  The painting recalled a sermon Vincent had preached twelve years before. When he rejected his first career as a trainee art dealer—and his employers rejected him—Vincent at first did not know what to do. He was grateful to get an unpaid post as assistant master at a miserable boys’ school in Ramsgate (he had lived in London while he worked for Goupil’s and his English was good). After a term, he got a better job at another school in Isleworth, west of London, run by the Reverend T. Slade Jones. Vincent also helped the Reverend Jones as a lay preacher, and preached his first sermon on October 29, 1876, in the Wesleyan Chapel, Richmond.

  Vincent had told the congregation of a pilgrim who met a woman dressed in black. The pilgrim asked this woman—an angel—how far it was to the city of the distant hill bathed in the golden rays of the setting sun. It was far, she replied. The journey took from morn to night. And the pilgrim carried on, “sorrowful yet always rejoicing”—a favorite saying of Vincent’s. It summed up his whole life—blighted, bedeviled, but touched with glory.

  But in the Red Vineyard this meaning was only hinted at, almost hidden in a real sunset landscape outside Arles. It was very difficult for Vincent to violate the truth of what he saw. That was at the root of his difficulty with his imagined figure, the Sower. But that sober truthfulness was also very Dutch, and very Protestant.

  He labored slowly and carefully on his Red Vineyard, smoothing the thick paint over the coarse fabric. He spent days on it—he who could paint a portrait in an hour. When he finished it, he was satisfied. “I think,” he boasted to Theo, “that you will be able to put this canvas beside some of Monticelli’s landscapes.”

  Monticelli was an eccentric painter from Marseille—dead since the year before last—whom Vincent revered and with whom he closely identified. Many others thought the man had been a crazed alcoholic who daubed canvases with absurdly thick layers of pigment. There was indeed a resemblance between some of Monticelli’s later work and the Red Vineyard, but Vincent’s color—in fact, everything about his painting—was far richer and stronger.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the studio, Gauguin was at work on a picture that departed much more radically from the view they had both seen. From the actual sight of the vineyard, Gauguin took little more than rich color harmony—the gold of the setting sun, the purple-red, “like wine,” of the autumnal leaves, the gray-white chalk of the earth turned pinkish in the dying light. The background of his picture was solid gold, like the burnished setting of a medieval altarpiece. Against this rose a pyramid of dark bluish-red, divided by a lower curved mound.

  Vincent had cautiously placed some small figures, half remembered, half invented, in his picture. Gauguin was much more daring. In the background he placed two women dressed as Breton peasants (and Brittany is not even a wine-growing region). Gauguin was highly pleased with this cavalier treatment of the facts. “It’s an effect of vines that I saw at Arles,” he chortled to Bernard, “but I’ve put Breton women in it—so much the worse for exactitude.”

  These women, so arbitrarily transplanted from the northwest, were bent over, picking grapes. In the foreground was seated the brooding figure of a young woman, head in hands; she had long red hair and slanting, catlike eyes. To the left was a woman in black wearing enormous Breton clogs, a figure from Vincent’s imagination transferred to a painting by Gauguin. She had come from Vincent’s reading of a poem by the romantic poet Alfred de Musset, “La Nuit de décembre” or “December Night.”

  In it the writer complained that, from childhood, wherever he had wandered on the face of the earth, he had been accompanied by a figure clad in black. “Who are you?” he at last demands. “Our fathers were the same,” the figure replies. “I am your brother. I am neither god nor demon. When you are suffering, come to me without fear. I am solitude.”

  Gauguin, Human Miseries

  The young Vincent had been taken by this poem and copied it into a scrapbook he kept, perhaps because it dramatized the lonely course his life was already taking. But as he did so he made some unconscious changes. The poet had written of a figure dressed in black who resembled—“ressemblait”—him like a brother; Vincent altered that to “regardait,” “looked at.”

  Obviously, he quoted the poem to Gauguin—it was one of his favorite texts—because Gauguin later wrote of a man dressed in black who looked at him in this way. The change in wording was like a tracer dye revealing Vincent as the source. Gauguin, too, found the poem a poignant metaphor for the state of the outcast. But in his picture, as Vincent often did, Gauguin changed the sex of the silent companion. The figure became a woman in black.

  The coarse jute, combined, as Vincent noted, with much thicker paint than usual, gave the image a texture like rich medieval embroideries such as the ones described in Zola’s The Dream. And the encrustations of pigment were more like Vincent’s technique than Gauguin’s, so here was more collaboration—Vincent’s paintwork on Gauguin’s jute. As a painting it was a bold step—like Gauguin’s Vision—into the realm of abstraction.

  The whole effect was of symbolism, an allegory, but an elusive one. Gauguin later gave the picture various titles, as he often did: first, Grape Harvest, Poverty or Human Miseries—perhaps a memory of Bishop Dupanloup and his catechism. Later, Gauguin called it Human Splendors and Miseries, echo
ing the name of a Balzac novel, Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans.

  So this was some sort of allegory of humanity. There was also an archaic, ecclesiastical feeling about the painting. Was there a slight resemblance in the arch of the purple vineyard to a Romanesque portal, like the one of Saint-Trophîme at Arles, with a standing saint to one side and angels bending over above?

  And what was the meaning of this strange image? Gauguin preferred not to spell it out. His favorite method of concocting a painting was “following my fancy, following the moon, and finding the title long afterwards.” Eventually he gave an explanation of sorts to Schuffenecker: The seated woman was “a poor desolate person” (Gauguin described her to Theo as “bewitched”). She was not “privileged with intelligence, grace and all the gifts of nature.” She was thinking “of little” but felt “the consolation of this earth (nothing but the earth).” The sun flooded down on the red triangle of the vineyard, and a woman dressed in black looked at her “like a sister.”

  So—one might gloss this characteristically obscure interpretation—the seated woman stands for poor, suffering humanity. Her own satisfactions come from the physical world, the earth and the sun. She sat, to quote Matthew Arnold, on the “naked shingles of the world.” Her only companion is solitude. This was a religious painting for the irreligious, an altarpiece by a lapsed Catholic.

  Both Vincent and Gauguin were highly pleased with this new picture. When Gauguin had only just begun it, Vincent was already hopeful that it was going to be an important work. Later, he thought the brothers Van Gogh—that is, Theo—should buy it: “It is as beautiful as the Negresses, and if you paid say the same price as for the Negresses (400, I think) it would be well worth it.” Gauguin himself was extremely satisfied. This was, he reported to Bernard, his best painting of the year—better even than the Vision of the Sermon. As soon as it was dry he would send it to Paris.