The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  There was one precedent for depicting an empty chair: a drawing of Charles Dickens’s study done after the novelist’s death in 1870 by the English artist Luke Fildes. It showed the room without the great man and spirit that had filled it with energy. Vincent owned and prized this print, which was done for a magazine called the Graphic. He tried to get another copy for Theo. It was more to him than just a memorial to a writer he revered.

  Then, in 1882, Vincent foresaw the death of the artist Fildes himself and his contemporaries—English illustrators whose work he collected: “Empty chairs—there are many of them, there will be even more.” Perhaps now, he envisioned an empty chair in the Yellow House. After nearly a month of harmonious coexistence, the new tensions raised the question of whether Gauguin would stay. There had been a hint of this in Vincent’s most recent letter to Theo:

  I hope we shall always remain friends with Gauguin and doing business with him, and if he could succeed in founding a studio in the tropics, it would be magnificent. However, it requires more money according to my calculations than it does according to him.

  This was another point of friction. Gauguin estimated that he could set off for Martinique with 2,000 francs in hand; Vincent felt it would require more than twice as much. The underlying issue was clear: the more money Gauguin needed, the longer he would have to stay in Arles to accumulate it.

  There were still more feelings embedded in the two chair pictures. They were an encapsulation of all Vincent’s ideas and emotions about the décoration of the Yellow House. The rush-bottomed chair in particular—his own—was exactly the kind of unpretentious object that set the tone of monastic simplicity Vincent had aimed for in the house. It had been all that he could afford: rough and rustic. But it was also a good example of the kind of “crude thing,” like earthenware and the paintings of Monticelli, which he felt Parisians lost out by not appreciating.

  Like the Bedroom, another portrait of furniture, these two pictures were hymns to the Yellow House and also—as the house itself was—manifestos of what Vincent stood for. The painting of his own simple straw-bottomed chair—just the kind of thing you sat on in the Café de la Gare and the local restaurant—is built of straight lines and lozenge shapes as sturdily as a house or the chair itself was made. Its basic color chord of sunny yellow against the blue of the studio door and the bluish plaster of the wall was one of Vincent’s favorite combinations from that year in Arles. It was the same contrast as the fields of wheat against the summer sky.

  Gauguin’s Chair, on the other hand, is mainly made up of shallow curves, in the key (to pursue the musical analogy) of red and green. Its effect is more subdued and mysterious. In the picture of Vincent’s chair one can clearly see the red terracotta tiles of the studio floor. In the other, the whole surface has become a mass of glittering reflections from the gas lamp on the wall.

  Gauguin’s Chair

  Thus the two paintings contrasted the two conditions of light in which Vincent and Gauguin were now working—daylight, when the skies above Arles cleared and the sun shone, and darkness, when the gaslight in the studio was turned on. This was the fundamental division of Vincent and Gauguin’s days, as it would be for any painter, because working by daylight and by artificial light are two very different activities.

  These two sources of illumination differed in their coldness or warmth, the manner in which they made reflections, and their angle of direction. All those factors affected the way the two artists saw what was on their canvases and what was in front of them—and nothing could be more important for a painter than the way he saw.

  Finally, of course, in these two paintings, Vincent symbolized the two ways of painting that were then under such tense discussion in the Yellow House. His own chair has on its seat his pipe and tobacco. In the background, he added—perhaps later in January when he worked again on this picture at a time when he was much in need of solace—a box of sprouting onions, a symbol of new life of the kind that Vincent hoped would grow from his new art.

  On the seat of Gauguin’s chair he placed “two novels” and a candle, which stood for another kind of solace and inspiration—the kind that came from reading and the imagination. The lighted candle was not only necessary upstairs in the Yellow House, where the gas had not been put in, but also showed that books provided spiritual and intellectual light. The two volumes were covered in yellow paper, showing that they were modern French fiction of the sort written by Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola and Daudet.

  So, the two chairs hint at two opposed methods of making art—the first spontaneous and from life, the other from imagination and memory, de tête. One approach was more instinctive with Vincent, and the other suited Gauguin. But both were employed by each artist: they were the two methods used for making pictures in the Yellow House, complementary like night and day. The slightly more comfortable chair was Gauguin’s, as befitted his position as head of the studio—it was also generally used by sitters when they came to the studio to pose for their portraits—and the modest, simple, four-square one was Vincent’s. That humble chair of Vincent’s, though, made the better picture, so vigorously and directly painted you felt you could reach out and pick it up, so simple that anyone could comprehend it.

  In these two strange studies of cheap furniture, Vincent had summarized a great deal that was being debated in the Yellow House and in his own mind. In doing so—on the evidence of the letter to Theo—he had made himself feel better. Dangerously worked up though he was becoming, Vincent had just hit his top form again—for the second time since Gauguin had knocked on his door. In the next few weeks he would produce a stream of masterpieces, though none better than the two chairs. As far as anyone outside the Yellow House could see, however, it was Gauguin who was forging ahead.

  On Thursday, November 22, Gauguin dispatched his first month’s work to Theo in Paris. He didn’t send everything—the Washerwomen was probably still too wet; the first landscape of the farm and the Alyscamps picture with the falling leaves he evidently thought of as just trial pieces. Apart from the Ring of Breton Girls, which he had retouched, there were four new pictures in his consignment, which Gauguin listed by title: first, Night Café; second, Landscape or Three Graces at the Temple of Venus (this was his first Alyscamps picture); third, Pigs; fourth, Human Misery. The last two, especially, he thought “quite bold.”

  Gauguin’s accompanying letter was businesslike but filled with understated self-satisfaction: he was pleased with his work. Gauguin’s only doubts concerned not the quality of the pictures but the experimental jute canvas. It was more awkward to handle, and he was worried about the paint flaking off when the pictures were unrolled in Paris and stretched again on wooden frames. At this point, probably because of this concern, he and Vincent stopped priming their canvases with the highly unusual barium sulfate and began using lead white instead. After all, Theo was paying 300 francs a month for these pictures, and the jute was Gauguin’s own idea. It would be unfortunate if, as a result, the paint fell off when they got to his gallery.

  Tactfully, Gauguin went through the proper procedure with Theo, explaining the advantages of the new support. If it proved difficult to tighten them on their stretchers, Gauguin advised wetting them all over, allowing them to dry and trying again. He was anxious to know if they arrived in good condition. A lot of his hopes were resting on these four new pictures from Arles.

  Vincent had received a letter from his friend Eugène Boch. A Belgian painter, Boch had been one of Vincent’s best friends in Arles during the summer. His portrait hung, with that of Milliet, in Vincent’s bedroom. Vincent had said farewell to him on the morning of September 4, when he departed, on Vincent’s suggestion, for the coalfields of southern Belgium, an area known as the Borinage.

  This landscape was the opposite of Provence in many ways—somber, northern, industrial; “dismal,” as Vincent put it—yet it was dear to his heart. He toyed with the idea of traveling north to work there when he returned to Paris the following y
ear, then alternating between painting in the coal mines and Arles—“the land of the oleander and the sulfur sun.” This was, he explained to Boch, the place where he had first begun to work from nature. In 1878, after giving up the attempt to qualify for university entrance so that he could become a pastor like his father, Vincent had gone south to Brussels.

  His parents were in despair about his career, or lack of one. Their eldest son was now twenty-five. Vincent hoped to find some kind of lowly ecclesiastical post for which a degree was not necessary. Eventually, it was arranged that he would be provisionally accepted in a training course for evangelists in Belgium. But after the initial three months he was not given a grant. So, not wanting to be a burden on his father any longer, Vincent found a temporary job as a preacher in the Borinage.

  This coalmining area—south of the city of Mons and just north of the French border—was one of the grimmest in Europe. Its misery and bleakness gave a foretaste of the First World War, fought a few decades later across this same landscape.

  Vincent had traveled into the world of Dickens’s Hard Times and Zola’s Germinal. As it happened, Zola was at work on the latter novel—set in the French mining district a little further south—at the exact time that Vincent was in the Borinage.

  “It is a gloomy spot,” he wrote of Marcasse, a mine near which he lived for a while:

  and at first everything around looks dreary and desolate. Most of the miners are thin and pale from fever; they looked tired and emaciated, weatherbeaten and aged before their time. On the whole the women are faded and worn. Around the mine are the poor miners’ huts, a few dead leaves black from smoke, thorn hedges, dunghills, ash dumps, heaps of useless coal, etc.

  But Vincent looked back on the place with an artist’s eye, telling Boch about subjects—including the mine of Marcasse—which he would have liked to paint. “The tip girls in their pit rags especially are superb.”

  He still dreamed of painting such subjects: the shift going to the pits, and the factories, “their red roofs and their black chimneys against a delicate gray sky.” All of this had not yet been done but should be painted: “One ought to go down into the mine and paint the light effects.”

  These mines were extraordinarily dangerous places. During the winter, gas built up and would explode in the spring and summer. Miners were continually dying as a result, in tens, even in hundreds. One such explosion took place in the area in which Vincent was preaching on April 16, 1879. It was powerful enough to reach up the shaft, demolish the buildings around and set the pit wheel alight. Vincent did his best to help the wounded after this disaster.

  However, while some members of the mining community appreciated Vincent’s efforts to help them, others thought he was a lunatic. Children threw things at him as he walked down the street. Added to his odd behavior, Vincent did not have the most essential skill for a preacher—he could not speak in public. This seemed strange in view of his compelling eloquence on paper, but it was his fate to be able to project his thoughts only at a distance—through painting and writing. It was suspected at the Protestant church in Petit-Wasmes that he was “losing his mind and becoming a burden.”

  Therefore, reasonably enough from their point of view, his superiors did not reappoint him after the probationary six months. Once again, Vincent had failed. But he remained in the Borinage. It was at this low point—in the summer of 1879—that Vincent transformed himself from a would-be preacher into an artist. He began to draw more and more; how he lived is not clear. A meeting with Theo was acrimonious. Not only his parents but also his siblings were now thoroughly alarmed that Vincent would never find employment and instead become a layabout.

  Their job suggestions, relayed by Theo, only infuriated Vincent. Theo’s own idea was that Vincent might become “an engraver of bill headings and visiting cards, or a book-keeper or a carpenter’s apprentice.” His sister Anna suggested baking. Then, Vincent embarked on a strange artistic pilgrimage. In the early spring of 1880 he went to Courrières in northern France to visit Jules Breton, a painter of heroic peasants whose work he much admired at the time.

  It was a typically impractical project. He had not bothered to check that the artist was in residence; probably, Breton was in Paris at the time. But it did not matter because, discouraged by the sight of Breton’s high, regular “Methodist” wall, Vincent returned without finding out whether he was there or not. He walked eighty-five miles with only 10 francs in his pocket, sleeping in a haystack and an abandoned coach which was covered in frost and bartering drawings for food. He returned from this apparently disastrous expedition strangely encouraged.

  He was starting to find his own direction in life. Up to now, all his suppressed talents, sympathies and tastes for art and literature had been struggling to sprout like bulbs in darkness. The psychic discomfort this caused explained some—though perhaps not all—of his odd behavior. Now the first green shoots of his life as an artist started to appear.

  His relations with his parents became more and more tense. On a previous visit home, Vincent had spent all day reading Dickens and would only answer when spoken to, sometimes giving “correct” answers, according to his mother, sometimes “strange ones.” He then sent his parents a copy of Les Misérables, which again caused outrage. Victor Hugo, complained his mother, “takes the side of criminals and doesn’t call bad what is really bad. What would the world look like if one called the evil good? Even with the best of intentions that cannot be accepted.” Vincent was on a collision course—no doubt deliberately—with everything his father and mother believed. It was an extremely thorough, if belated, act of rebellion.

  Later that spring of 1880, Vincent’s father suggested that he be sent to a well-known mental hospital at Gheel, in Belgium. And, probably at the same time, Vincent’s parents urged him to consult Doctor Johannes Nicolas Ramaer, a respected psychiatrist in The Hague. Vincent agreed to see him and ask for medicine but, at the last moment, he refused to leave. His father went anyway and was told that his son evidently had a malfunctioning cerebellum.

  “What will become of him?” wailed Pastor van Gogh. “Isn’t it insane to choose a life of poverty and let time pass by without looking for an occasion of earning one’s bread?” But the plan to send Vincent to Gheel was fiercely resisted, by Vincent himself and, according to Gauguin, by Theo. (The name “Gheel,” coincidentally, sounded exactly the same as the Dutch word for “yellow,” Vincent’s favorite color of that summer and autumn in Arles. For all that time, looking back, he felt he had maintained a “high yellow note.”)

  Rather than going to Gheel, Vincent returned to his new study of drawing in Belgium. By July, his religious beliefs had started to merge into a faith in art. “I think,” he wrote to Theo, “that everything which is really good and beautiful—of inner spiritual and sublime beauty—in men and their works comes from God.” If, he continued, “someone loves Rembrandt, and seriously”—meaning he, Vincent, loved Rembrandt seriously—“that man will know there is a God.”

  At the end of the next year, 1881, at the height of the row about his love for his cousin Kee Vos-Stricker, he went further in an argument with his father:

  I had such a temper, one I cannot remember having had in all my life, and I bluntly told Pa that I thought this whole religious thing horrible, and that exactly because I had studied these things closely during a most miserable episode in my life, I wanted no more to do with it at all and will have to avoid it like a fatal thing.

  His faith in the Christianity of his father had been transformed into a belief in the religion of art.

  Very likely, it was when Boch’s most recent letter arrived that Vincent told Gauguin about his time in the Borinage, his father’s plan to send him to Gheel and the explosion in the mine. Gauguin stored those stories up, turned them over in his mind and later transformed them into a poetic parable: a portrait of Vincent in words.

  Gauguin received an extremely exciting communication, forwarded by Theo, from a man called Octave
Maus. A Belgian lawyer, critic and writer, Maus had been one of the founders five years before of a society called Les XX—the Twenty. Like the Impressionists and Independents in Paris, Les XX were dissatisfied with the official art of the Salon. From 1884 they had organized annual exhibitions in Brussels of work by forward-looking Belgian artists. Selected foreigners were also invited to show.

  Whistler, Monet, Cézanne and Seurat had all received this accolade, and so had such junior pointillists as Signac. But, until now, Gauguin had not. This invitation was, therefore, like his sale to Degas, an exhilarating sign that he was suddenly gaining acceptance.

  He wrote in triumph to tell his friend Schuffenecker. Poor old Schuff’s hopes to exhibit with La revue indépendante, on the other hand, had been rebuffed. So Gauguin’s glee was tempered with commiseration and laced with thanks. He had at last received the ceramics, linen and Degas prints he had asked Schuffenecker to send.

  Gauguin wanted Schuff’s opinion about his new work, especially the two pictures he believed were the most successful, Pigsand Human Miseries. He asked him to take a look at them in Theo’s gallery and, if he had a spare moment, to send his critical impressions to Arles. Gauguin was highly conscious that he had tried for something new—paintings “simply painted on coarse canvas thickly with imperceptible divisions of color seeking for a broad sense of form.” He felt he was moving so fast he couldn’t assess the results himself. Life was whirling past as if seen from a fast-moving train, “and like the driver I’m looking forward towards the destination—but there’s rather a risk of being derailed…”

  He then went on to expound how hopeful he felt. This was just the beginning. Gauguin felt full of artistic power and optimism—though not, he emphasized, necessarily about his financial prospects. He wanted to rush forward into the unknown future of his art: to “attack.” “I sense untapped forces in myself and I say proudly: We shall see!” He signed this euphoric missive, “from a great big madman who loves you all,” and added, “P. Go.”