The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  Would you believe it—and I honestly mean what I say—I should be happy to give ten years of my life if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food?

  Vincent’s problem with painting portraits was always persuading, or being able to afford to pay, someone to pose. He had underlined this difficulty again to Theo:

  I regret—as always, how well you know—the scarcity of models and the thousand obstacles in overcoming that difficulty. If I were a different sort of man, and if I were better off, I could force the issue, but as it is I do not give in, but plod on quietly.

  It was by portraits that he wished eventually to be judged: “At the age of forty when I make a picture of figures or portraits in the way I feel it, I think this will be worth more than a more or less serious success at present.” Gauguin, of course, was now forty.

  But, suddenly, Vincent started to paint a stream of pictures of people in rapid succession. He never explained what had changed or how he had managed it. But no fewer than five of the models came from the same family—the Roulins. He had already painted and drawn Joseph Roulin, the postal supervisor at the station, several times. Now he obtained sittings from Roulin’s wife, two children and four-month-old baby.

  One of these was another joint sitting, like the one with Madame Ginoux. Augustine-Alix Roulin came to the studio in the Yellow House and posed for both painters. Like her predecessor, Madame Roulin looked straight at Gauguin but did not make eye contact with Vincent. This was perhaps an indication that—even if Gauguin hadn’t arranged the session—his presence was reassuring to her. She was nervous of Vincent, as her daughter later remembered. If the less alarming Gauguin hadn’t been there too, perhaps she would have been reluctant to come to the studio alone.

  She sat in a corner of the room. To her left was the glazed front door, now fixed shut, that faced Place Lamartine; to her right was the window that looked out on the Avenue de Montmajour. It was an evening sitting, lit by the gas lamp on the wall; Gauguin’s painting reproduces the shadows it threw behind the chair, the one in which Gauguin himself usually sat.

  Both men produced paintings as a result of the sitting, and this time it was Gauguin, not Vincent, who depicted, more or less, what he saw in front of his eyes. His painting shows a stolid, dumpy woman. Behind her, his recently completed sunset picture, Blue Trees, hangs on the wall. But—it was the only modification he made—the canvas was greatly enlarged. The winding path and greenery of Blue Trees completely filled the upper left of Madame Roulin’s portrait. Beside it was the window in the door, black with night.

  Gauguin, Madame Roulin

  Altogether, Vincent’s picture was more thickly executed than Gauguin’s and looked as if it had been more quickly done. He greatly admired the appearance of dashing speed in the portraits of the old Dutch master Frans Hals, in which heads, eyes, nose and mouth were “done with a single stroke of the brush without any retouching whatever.” The yellow strokes indicating the fall of the gaslight on the side of Madame Roulin’s head were slashed on in the manner of his one-hour portrait of Madame Ginoux.

  Vincent’s painting also took more liberties with the facts than Gauguin’s. Unlike Gauguin, he didn’t depict the darkness of the evening, nor Avenue de Montmajour, which lay outside the window. Instead, he pictured the winding paths of the gardens in Place Lamartine and, in front of them, giant pots full of sprouting bulbs. Of course, even in Provence, spring flowers do not grow in late November. Nor, though he had once thought of putting tubs of oleander in front of his door, was it likely that Vincent’s window-boxes were so well ordered. The sprouting bulbs were signs of new life.

  Madame Roulin

  Augustine Roulin had an earthy look that matched the germinating bulbs in the pots outside. She resembled a human tuber. To Vincent, though not apparently to Gauguin, the woman in front of him was above all a mother. The golden and ochre colors that suffuse the picture were the result of the gas flame on the wall, but they also represented the glow of maternity.

  On the evening she posed in the Yellow House, Augustine Roulin was about six weeks past her thirty-seventh birthday. She had been born in Lambesc, a little town between Aix and Marseille, on October 9, 1851 (a year and a half before Vincent, and three years after Gauguin). She and her husband, Joseph, had had three children spread over two decades. The latest addition to the family had arrived only on July 31.

  It was likely that the four-month-old baby accompanied her mother to the sitting. The Roulins’ house at 10 Rue de la Montagne des Cordes was a few minutes’ walk from the Yellow House—the first turning on the right down Avenue de Montmajour. Gauguin made a couple of drawings of the infant, perhaps at this sitting. In one she was on her mother’s knee, nestling against her left hand.

  Even if Augustine had left the infant at home while she posed, it was obviously her motherhood that was uppermost in Vincent’s mind while he painted her. Perhaps that gave him the idea for the brand-new painting project on which he now embarked with frantic energy. In the following days he painted all the Roulins, some more than once.

  He gave an excited account of this unprecedented series to Theo when he next wrote, the following week:

  I have made portraits of a whole family, that of the postman whose head I had done previously—the man, his wife, the baby, the young boy, and the son of sixteen, all of them real characters and very French, though they look like Russians. Size 15 canvases. You know how I feel about this, how I feel in my element, and that it consoles me up to a certain point for not being a doctor. I hope to get on with this and to be able to get more careful posing, paid for by portraits. And if I manage to do this whole family better still, at least I shall have done something to my liking and something individual.

  This was a highly coded utterance, dependant on the fact that the brothers had talked and written to each other so much over the years that a single word was enough to sketch in a whole set of associations. Thus, when Vincent remarked that the Roulins “look like Russians,” he wished to remind Theo of a newspaper clipping from L’Intransigeant which Vincent had sent to him a couple of months before. It was from an article on the Russian novelist Dostoyevsky, published on September 10, shortly after Vincent had moved into the Yellow House.

  The author had described the great man: “Dostoyevsky’s face was that of a Russian peasant: flat nose, small flashing eyes, a broad forehead furrowed by scars and pimples, the temples dented as if shaped by a hammer.” He quoted a contemporary as saying, “Never have I seen a similar expression of suffering on a human face.” That last statement in itself would have been enough to attract Vincent’s attention.

  The rest of this written description—the flat nose, the broad forehead—was reminiscent of the features of Joseph Roulin as painted and drawn by Vincent. Indeed, photographs of Dostoyevsky did resemble Roulin, down to the shape of the beard. And the great novelist himself, according to the newspaper piece, looked like a “Russian peasant.”

  That was part of the fascination of the Roulins as sitters: they were working class; not dirt poor, because Joseph had attained the rank of a minor functionary, but poor enough. The whole Roulin family lived on 135 francs a month, while Gauguin and Vincent in a miracle of economy were scraping by on 150 each. Previously, Vincent had been spending 250 on his own and still ran out of cash.

  Thus, in painting the Roulins, Vincent was studying an entire clan of ordinary people. That would have helped Theo to unpack the meanings compressed into the emphasis on painting a “whole family” and the apparently baffling statement that “it consoles me up to a certain point for not being a doctor.” Vincent had not up to now expressed the slightest interest in a medical career, on paper at any rate. What he meant by this strange remark was complicated.

  Roulin

  He wanted to help suffering mankind but also analyze those sufferers as Emile Zola did in his sequence of novels about the dynasty of the Rougon-Macquarts. The first of these
had been published in 1871, and the series was not yet complete. The Dream, which Vincent had been reading at the end of October, was the eighteenth in the sequence.

  Zola’s fundamental notion was to follow the fortunes of the various members of this extended family through the years of the Second Empire. They were all descended from a woman named Adelaide Fouque, who came from a Provençal town called Plassans—Zola’s name for his own native city of Aix—just as the Roulins both came from Lambesc, a few miles to the southwest of Aix.

  In the novels, one of the characters Vincent found most sympathetic was Doctor Pascal Rougon:

  He really proves that no matter how degenerate a race may be, it is always possible for energy and will-power to conquer fate. In his profession he found a force stronger than the temperament he had inherited from his family; instead of surrendering to his natural instincts, he followed a clear, straight path.

  That was no doubt what Vincent hoped to achieve with his painting: to find in art a force stronger than his neurotic temperament. In a way, Zola’s idea in his sequence of novels was diagnostic: he aimed to follow all the physical and mental permutations of an inherited flaw through several generations. “Degeneration” was a fashionable term. There were theories circulating about the degeneration of nations and races. An Italian theorist held that criminals were marked out by a certain physical type. Vincent was attracted by such ideas but frustrated by Gauguin’s failure to fit into the schema: “One thing that angered him,” the latter remembered, “was to have to admit that I had plenty of intelligence, although my forehead was too small, a sign of imbecility.”

  The ancestress of Zola’s fictional clan, Adelaide Fouque, became deranged. In her descendants, mental instability took many forms—alcoholism in L’Assommoir; the self-destructive devotion to painting of Claude Lantier in L’Oeuvre; in The Sin of Father Mouret, religious fanaticism.

  Vincent might well have felt a personal interest in all of these fictional disorders. He had read all the Rougon-Macquart novels and knew their contents intimately. They were often in his mind when he was working, in ways one might not guess unless he revealed what he was thinking.

  Sketching at the Abbey of Montmajour in the summer with Milliet, Vincent saw an “old, overgrown garden” and it made him think of the garden called Le Paradou in The Sin of Father Mouret. As it happened, one of the farms up there was also called Le Paradou—“paradise,” in Provençal.

  There were four other sitters in the Roulin family. Joseph was forty-seven, a decade older than his wife. Armand, the elder son, was seventeen and training as a blacksmith’s apprentice in his parents’ native town of Lambesc. The younger son, Camille, was eleven. And Marcelle, the baby, was just four months old. For the portraits of Joseph and the children, Vincent used an upright format, unlike the horizontal one that both he and Gauguin used for their pictures of Madame Roulin, which suggests that her sitting had come first.

  The setting of her portrait was more specific, with the window frame and the symbolic bulbs outside. All the others were shown against a plain color. Behind Joseph was a lemon yellow, the complementary color to the handsome dark blue of his administration des postes uniform. Armand was backed by mossy bluish-green. In the larger version of his portrait, Camille, whose shirt was a light blue, was backed by orange and red, divided by a line across the canvas. The backdrop to baby Marcelle, held up by her mother, was golden yellow. Thus, if the portraits had been hung together, they would have looked like a unified sequence—different color chords, diverse personalities, but all harmonizing with each other.

  It was hard to guess from their appearance at what time of day these portraits had been painted. But late afternoons, evenings or Sundays would have suited most of the Roulins best. During the day, Joseph was at work and Armand was in Lambesc, a train journey away. In the morning, Camille was at school (in France education was free and compulsory). The posing of the baby can only have been a rapid affair. The first picture that resulted—Madame Roulin holding the infant in her arms—looked like an action photograph, with little Marcelle vigorously waving her arms.

  For the painting of Joseph, Vincent might not have needed a sitting at all, since he had given several sittings in the summer. Roulin, moreover, was bad at posing, awkward and self-conscious. “He often has to carry loads you would call too heavy,” Vincent reported, with Roulin’s family responsibilities in mind, “but it doesn’t prevent him, as he has the strong constitution of the peasant, from always looking well and even jolly.” The Roulins had been in financial straits when the baby was born.

  Joseph must have agreed to have his family transformed into a cycle of paintings. That he did so, and accepted paintings in return, was testament to his friendship with Vincent. It also suggested that—like Second Lieutenant Milliet, Vincent’s other improbable friend—he had become fired by his strange companion’s passion for art.

  Their bond, however, had other roots. Vincent’s relationship with his father had been tense and several times had exploded into violent conflict. But Vincent had two of the most harmonious relationships of his life with older men of proletarian origin—Roulin, and the elderly Parisian dealer in paintings and artist’s materials, Julien Tanguy, a simple man and ardent republican who had risen from humble origins and was still far from well-off.

  Madame Roulin with Her Baby Marcelle

  Vincent painted Tanguy’s portrait and compared him to Socrates—ugly but wise—and his wife to the Greek philosopher’s shrewish spouse, Xanthippe. Madame Tanguy regarded Vincent as a bad influence who took her husband off to the louche Café du Tambourin with its blousy and promiscuous patronne, Agostina Segatori.

  With Roulin it was much the same: Vincent also compared this sitter repeatedly to Socrates—ugly as a satyr “but such a good soul and so wise and so full of feeling and so trustful.” Vincent painted him and drank with him. Vincent reflected that Roulin was not quite old enough to be a father to him but nevertheless had “a tenderness for me such as an old soldier might have for a younger one.”

  Like Tanguy, Roulin had risen from working-class roots to a slightly more elevated position. As entreposeur des postes, he was in charge of unloading the sacks of mail at the station. It was a position of some authority and one of which Roulin was proud, carefully adding it to his name when he wrote a letter.

  Vincent sometimes visited Roulin at his house, where the latter would invite him to share the family’s soup, but they more often met elsewhere, because they had one other thing in common—Roulin, like Vincent, liked to drink. Roulin had refused payment for his sittings in the summer, but it cost Vincent more to provide Roulin with food and drink while he sat (in one of the drawings he has a glass of beer to hand and looks more relaxed). Vincent imagined that lingering and holding forth in cafés was more natural in the South. He believed Roulin was “the reverse of a sot, his exaltation is so natural, so intelligent, and he argues with such sweep, in the style of Garibaldi.”

  Roulin was one of those who believed that the present order favored the bourgeoisie; the republic needed reform. Therefore, he would have encountered Camille Pelletan, the leader of the Radical Republican Party (whose program was reform) and representative in the Chamber of Deputies for an area around Aix-en-Provence (his constituency included Roulin’s hometown, Lambesc).

  Pelletan was a man after Roulin’s heart, a believer in equality, fraternity and liberty. He even looked a little like the postal supervisor, with a wide face and spade-shaped thicket of beard. Pelletan loved bars and cafés and was never to be seen without his “pipe prolétarienne” (just like Roulin, Gauguin and Vincent). It seems likely that young Camille Roulin was named after Pelletan.

  But, by 1888, Roulin was attracted by another political movement. He had become a supporter of General Georges Boulanger (the one whom Gauguin was later mistaken for). Boulanger appeared for the moment to be a new Napoleon: a military strongman and a reforming revolutionary. In retrospect, he looked like a potential fascist dictat
or; in 1888, he seemed the man of the hour.

  In July, when the Roulins’ new child was born, “to the great indignation of this innocent baby’s grandmother and some other members of the family,” he named her after Boulanger’s daughter, Marcelle. Moreover, anticlerical as he was republican, Roulin refused to have the child baptized and, when the family grumbled, held a feast anyway and performed the naming ceremony himself.

  When Vincent received a letter with another 100 francs from Theo, he sent thanks. “It’s rather more than time,” he began, “for me to write you a collected letter for once.” Actually, it wasn’t much more than a week since Vincent had written to his brother, but it was true that his letters of late had been far from collected.

  “Our days pass in working,” he informed Theo:

  working all the time, in the evening we are dead beat and go off to the café, and after that, early to bed! Such is our life.

  I think that we shall end up spending our evenings drawing and writing, there is more work than we can manage. Of course it is winter here with us too, though it’s still very fine from time to time. But I do not dislike trying to work from imagination, since that allows me to stay in. It does not worry me to work in the heat of a stove, but cold does not suit me, as you know.

  Vincent’s tone was calmer than it had been the week before. Perhaps his luck in four new portrait models had steadied him, temporarily at least. But anyone reading Vincent’s letters closely—as Theo did—would have noticed a regular alternation of periods of despondency, in which his previous efforts seemed worthless to him, with great activity and confidence.