The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  On Tuesday, November 6, the newspapers were full of reports of the sensational murder trial which had begun the previous day in Paris. It was one of those cases, as mentioned earlier, that gripped the attention of the nation, including the two painters in the Yellow House. The accused, who went under the name of Prado, was a fascinating figure, dapper, good-looking, cunning in disguise, multilingual and a ladies’ man. But the crime of which he was accused was nasty. He had, it was said, cut the throat of a prostitute and made off with her jewels.

  This case was of special interest in the Yellow House. Vincent believed that this murder, and another similarly sensational case the previous year featuring a criminal named Pranzini, had been hatched in a place he knew very well: the Café du Tambourin on Boulevard de Clichy.

  A good deal of Vincent’s life in Paris had revolved around this bar. He had organized an exhibition of Japanese prints there, and had had—it seemed—an affair with the owner, a middle-aged Italian woman named Agostina Segatori. In her heyday she had posed for Corot and Manet and, according to Gauguin, she was “still beautiful” at forty-six. Vincent had been “very much in love with her.” Instead of real flowers, according to Bernard, Vincent had presented her with painted bouquets.

  As Gauguin told the story, Agostina Segatori had a man with her to help run the café. This manager wanted to keep Agostina’s favors for himself alone. One day he suddenly threw a glass of beer at Vincent, who was immediately thrown out in the street, where a passing gendarme told him to move along.

  A lot of Vincent’s canvases remained in the café, which moved him to fury. But that was that. The affair, until then one of Vincent’s less disastrous amorous adventures, ended in humiliation. But, evidently, with Agostina Segatori, Vincent had had something he had not otherwise enjoyed—a guiltless physical liaison.

  Before they quarreled, Segatori—or La Siccatori, as Gauguin called her, with his usual inability to get names straight—had apparently told Vincent all sorts of secrets about the Pranzini and Prado cases, which had been plotted in her café, and he passed them on to Gauguin. Unfortunately, Gauguin couldn’t recall any of the details. Indeed, he couldn’t remember Pranzini’s name correctly either (he finally settled for “Pausini”). But of one thing he was sure, both trials had been fixed. Prado and Pranzini were doubtless innocent. But what did that matter? “The police were bound to have the last word.” As always, Gauguin sympathized with the criminal, outcast and victim.

  It was very wet. L’Homme de bronze reported that “tempests and downpours were unleashed all day long over our town on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday.” Even during the day it might have been necessary to light the gas in the studio. The room in which the two men were confined was less than 16 feet across, and its longest wall measured 24 feet. But, because of its irregular shape, it narrowed to 9½ feet on the other side. It was not a tiny space, but neither was it large enough to avoid another occupant.

  There were three windows, two in the front wall facing the public gardens in Place Lamartine and another at the side, looking out into the Avenue de Montmajour. It was a goldfish bowl. These windows were at adult head-height; curious children could climb up and peer in.

  Quite apart from the question of privacy, there was also the matter of light. Vincent loved the sun streaming in through the southwest-facing windows. But most artists preferred a northern aspect, because of the colder, less brilliant illumination that resulted.

  Into the studio was packed all the equipment—brushes, paints, easels, stretchers, half-completed canvases—necessary for two painters working at full stretch. Their completed works hung on the walls alongside the prints by Daumier, Delacroix and Japanese artists. The fug of oil paint and pipe smoke must have been overpowering, especially on cold days when the windows could not be opened. Vincent’s untidiness—the chaos of half-squeezed paint tubes, never properly sealed—was disquieting to Gauguin.

  This was the room in which the two painters were now cooped up for virtually all of their waking hours. Even when they left the studio, it was probably together: to go to the café or the brothel. Now they had given up having their meals in the Restaurant Venissat, so cooking and eating took place in the room next door to the studio. This claustrophobic pattern of life would have put a strain on the most phlegmatic pair of friends. But Vincent and Gauguin were both highly neurotic, in diverse ways.

  The divergence was psychological and also physiological—one could almost have said chemical. They worked, thought and created at dissimilar rates; as a result, Gauguin produced over a painting career of thirty years roughly as many pictures as Vincent did in the space of less than ten. This was reflected in the amazing speed with which Vincent sometimes turned out a picture—gathering up the paint “as if with a shovel,” as a witness described it, so that “the globs of paint, covering the length of the paintbrush, stuck to his fingers.” He must have displayed just such a bravura, if messy style of execution when slashing paint on L’Arlésienne in an hour or less: a creative frenzy which might well be distracting in a room 15 feet across.

  Vincent did not always proceed at that frantic rate, and all his work—no matter how rapidly flung on the canvas—was carefully thought out. But even Vincent in more measured mode might be off-putting. He would get up, a witness recalled, pace three steps one way, then three another. He would stare at the canvas, hands folded on chest, for a long time. “Suddenly he would leap up as if to attack the canvas, paint two or three strokes quickly, then scramble back to his chair, narrow his eyes, wipe his forehead and rub his hands.”

  Vincent’s whole bodily rhythm was like that; Gauguin recalled his “short, quick, irregular” steps. Vincent himself admitted he was sometimes “nervous and flurried in speech and manner.” He found talking while he worked helped him to concentrate; it may not, however, have helped his companion.

  Gauguin was much more contained. According to Judith Molard, a teenage girl who observed him in his studio, Gauguin “did not appear to be in the throes of inspiration when he was painting. His mouth would be slightly open, his eyes steadily focused as he applied his paint quietly and steadily.”

  According to another acquaintance, “his slow gait, his sober gestures, his severe facial gestures gave him much natural dignity.” That demeanor kept people at a distance, but “behind this mask of impassive coldness were concealed ardent senses and a sensuous temperament always in search of new sensations.”

  As Gauguin saw, looking back on those days in Arles, a conflict was inevitable in that studio: “Between two such beings as he and I, the one a perfect volcano, the other boiling inwardly, some sort of struggle was preparing.” On the other hand, what they were producing was prodigious. “Though the public had no suspicion of it, two men were performing there a colossal labor that was useful to them both. Perhaps to others? There are some things that bear fruit.”

  Vincent’s disorderly habits were mitigated to some extent by his devoted cleaning lady. It had been part of his original invitation to Gauguin at the end of May that they should engage a sort of housekeeper to come in for a few hours a day. During the summer, when he was only using the house as a studio, he found a suitable person, a woman whose husband worked around the corner at the station (probably she was recommended by Roulin, who worked there too).

  She was middle-aged or elderly and had, as Vincent put it, “many and varied offspring.” Rapidly she became devoted to Vincent and he dependent on her. He would not have had the confidence to move into the Yellow House properly in September if he had not had her to make his bed and keep his floor tiles clean and red.

  At first she had come in twice a week, charging one franc a time, but by the late autumn, after Gauguin’s arrival, she was coming in five days a week. Presumably it was she who did the washing up after they started eating at home. Poor and unconventional though he might be, Vincent still required a servant, at least a part-time one, to live. She, with Roulin, was the most faithful of his friends in Arles. Later, after th
e crisis, his behavior grew so strange it made her nervous. But even then she offered to take a message to Theo in Paris if she could get a free rail pass. Vincent never mentioned her name.

  It was probably also the cleaning lady who washed and looked after Vincent and Gauguin’s clothes. In both cases, their attire needed a good deal of attention. Gauguin’s smart Paris business attire, now at least five years old, was rapidly wearing out.

  Vincent, too, mentioned several times to Theo that his clothes were becoming worn, although not long after arriving in Arles he had bought “two pairs of shoes, which cost me 26 Frs., and three shirts, which cost 27 Frs.” Towards the end of August he had bought a black velvet jacket and new hat with the idea of going to Marseille with Gauguin—when he arrived—and strolling down the boulevard dressed as his hero, the eccentric Provençal painter Monticelli, was dressed in a portrait, “with an enormous yellow hat, a black velvet jacket, white trousers, yellow gloves, a bamboo cane, and with a grand southern air.”

  Gauguin, with his Breton fisherman’s get-up, was not the only one who was dressed in costume as an artist. But Vincent never got to Marseille. His hat hung on one of the hooks at the end of his bed, with his work clothes. The rest of his outfit was stored in his chest of drawers.

  In addition to the painting inspired by the sunset over the vineyard, Gauguin was continuing with his Night Café. It was a familiar scene to the painters. This, a few seconds’ walk away, was the first calling point if the two painters wanted to get out of the house in the evening.

  Unlike Vincent, who had painted his Night Café on the spot, Gauguin carefully assembled his in the studio from sketches, memory and imagination. In the picture, his viewpoint was different from the one that Vincent had taken up. While Vincent had positioned his easel near the door, looking down the length of the oblong room, Gauguin took up an imaginary seat at one of the marble-topped tables that lined the walls. On the other side of the table he placed Madame Ginoux, posed as in his drawing of the previous weekend.

  But Gauguin’s Madame Ginoux was almost unrecognizably different from L’Arlésienne whom Vincent had painted with such amazing brio. In Gauguin’s drawing, she was almost blank in expression. But in the painting, through a few small adjustments—an increased twist of the lips which stops just short of a leer, a more sidelong look of the eyes—she had become slyly knowing. In front of her on the table are a soda siphon, a glass of absinthe and the invariable accompaniment of that bitter drink, a couple of sugar lumps on a plate.

  Gauguin, Night Café

  The practice of absinthe drinkers was to dribble the absinthe, a liqueur including wormwood, through a sugar lump into a glass of water. The sugar was placed on a spoon such as the one protruding from the glass in Gauguin’s picture. When the absinthe reached the water, minute particles of vegetable matter within it became suspended, and the drink turned from clear to a beautiful, cloudy green. When Toulouse-Lautrec had drawn a pastel portrait of Vincent in Paris he placed just such an opalescent aperitif before him.

  Absinthe was the preferred drink of the poor, particularly in Southern France. It was also popular with writers and artists, who were positively attracted by its sinister reputation. Medical researchers had become convinced that absinthe contained a hallucinogen—so, quite apart from its alcoholic content, it might cause convulsions, madness and death. Creative people believed, or imagined, that this same property might give them wonderful new ideas. Absinthe was the natural drink for a lowlife picture such as this, intended not exactly as a brothel scene but with “figures seen in the brothels,” as Vincent noted.

  In preparation Gauguin had done drawings in his sketchbook of brutish-looking women, two of whom appear in the background. One, unseductively, has curling-papers in her hair. They were accompanied by Roulin.

  Since this was not a legally tolerated brothel, the whores must be insoumises or streetwalkers—a different category of the profession—who did indeed use the café, as Vincent assured Bernard. It is not clear whether Madame Ginoux was intended to be another of these streetwalkers herself, making an arrangement with the spectator across that marble table, but her expression suggests that she is.

  At another sits a man who has fallen asleep or passed out cold, and the Zouave—a model Vincent had painted and drawn in the summer. Gauguin had obviously borrowed, or been lent, the figure—a perfect example of collaboration. In fact, here was a scene from Vincent’s life, populated with figures from his raggle-taggle circle. The whole effect is far more sardonic than erotic.

  Gauguin had attempted, or nearly, a subject—the brothels—which obsessed Bernard. He had included those incidents from contemporary life, in the manner of Daumier and Zola, which Vincent had included so successfully in the Falling Leaves diptych. This Night Café was an admirable example of collaboration—except that Gauguin didn’t like it.

  Around the end of the week or the beginning of the next, he told Bernard he had done:

  a café that Vincent likes a lot and that I like less. At bottom it’s not my sort of thing and local low life doesn’t work for me. I like it well enough when others do it but it always makes me uneasy. It’s a matter of education and one can’t remake oneself.

  He put his finger on the main weakness of his picture: the fact that Madame Ginoux didn’t seem integrated with the rest of the composition. She seems to have been cut out and pasted in, which in a way she was. “The main figure,” Gauguin concluded, “is much too stiff and formal.” Vincent’s picture of the Night Café was real, and hellish. This one was more of an amiable caricature and, as Gauguin noted, that wasn’t really him.

  Around this time, Vincent, with the example of Gauguin’s Night Café in front of him, also made an effort to produce an elaborate brothel picture. This also showed that collaboration had its limits.

  Brothel-painting was something that he and Bernard had been discussing by mail for months. Prostitution was part of Vincent’s life, and long had been. The only women he ever went with, he remarked rather bitterly to Theo, were whores at 2 francs intended for the Zouaves. At one time Vincent had lived with a reformed prostitute; now in Arles his only sexual relations were bought with small sums of money. His feelings on the subject were deep and raw.

  By contrast, brothels were a subject with which the pious, twenty-year-old Bernard had developed a literary, artistic and probably entirely theoretical obsession. Throughout the summer and autumn he had bombarded Vincent with bundles of drawings of brothel scenes done from imagination, and also poems in the manner of Baudelaire on the squalor and shame of prostitution. Some of the drawings and most of the poems were extremely bad—as Vincent bluntly pointed out. Typically, he only admired those which seemed to have some reality.

  Bernard was insistent that when and if he came to Arles they should all work in the brothel and that in the meantime Vincent should make a start. It was an idea which was half-appealing to him. The subject of brothels was in the air. Toulouse-Lautrec—friend and fellow student of Vincent and Bernard—later made it his own. In Paris, Vincent had done some nude paintings of startlingly animal sensuality. According to Bernard, the model was a prostitute of the lowest grade—dubbed pierreuse, or gritty (though others believed she was Agostina Segatori).

  When it came down to it, however, Vincent shied away from the brothel project. One problem was that he only really liked to paint people from life. He felt he was too unattractive to persuade the loose women of the Rue du Bout d’Arles to pose for free, and he could not afford to pay them. To please Bernard, he did a little picture from memory of a whore quarreling with her pimp in the Café de la Gare, but it disappeared (or he destroyed it, as he felt it was not real enough).

  Perhaps Vincent also had an unexpressed reservation: this was really Bernard’s dream, not his. What he really wanted to do was portraits. Now he attempted the brothel theme one more time. Quite clearly, this time he portrayed not the Café de la Gare, but a maison de tolérance such as the one he had described to Bernard. In t
he foreground a woman in yellow sits alone at a round table, a glass of absinthe in front of her. Behind, two of her companions play cards with a man wearing a bowler hat—more absinthe glasses at their sides. In the distance, a Zouave sits alone, and to the right a man and a woman in a red dress are dancing.

  The mood is quiet, almost domestic—very different from the satire and squalor of Bernard’s drawings or the ironic humor of Gauguin’s. Only the erotic pictures on the walls—suggested by a few quick squiggles—reveal the character of the place. This painting was very small, not even a study but a pochade—no more than a first idea jotted down in paint. But, though tiny, the sketch that Vincent produced was a work of remarkable ambition. The arrangement he had worked out involved eight figures, some large, some small, in different interlocking positions.

  Brothel Scene

  By then Vincent had looked hard and long at Bernard’s painting Breton Women in the Meadow, which Gauguin had brought with him and was hanging on the wall of the Yellow House. Evidently, he wanted to see what he could learn from it. This, too, was a complicated arrangement of numerous figures ranging from the foreground into the middle distance. At some point Vincent made a careful watercolor copy of this painting. There are similarities with some of Bernard’s drawings too.

  The only previous occasion on which he had attempted a large, complicated figure composition of this kind was over three years before at Nuenen in the Netherlands. He had worked there on the Potato Eaters, in the orthodox manner, producing first studies of individual figures from live sitters, next a rough sketch of the composition, then a more detailed one and finally the finished picture. Although it was entirely painted in gloomy shades of blue-gray and dun, the Potato Eaters was still an achievement of which he was proud. His current pochade was intended as the start of something similar.

  “I have done a rough sketch of the brothel,” Vincent reported to Theo, “and I quite intend to do a brothel picture.” But for some reason—perhaps because of the difficulty of finding models, perhaps because other ideas distracted him and in the last resort it was not his scheme but Bernard’s—the Brothel by Vincent van Gogh remained an unrealized masterpiece.