The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  After a period of tremendously hard work, there was a phase of growing anxiety. At the moment he was painting furiously—the Sower, the Roulins, one masterpiece after another. In the weeks ahead his behavior would become alarmingly agitated. But, for the moment, his mood was relatively steady, as his letter to Theo indicates:

  If we can stand the siege, victory will come to us one day, in spite of our not being among the people who are talked about. It is rather a case that makes you think of the proverb—joy in public, sorrow at home. What can you expect? Supposing that the fight is still before us, we must just try to mature quietly.

  It was true that both artists were maintaining a phenomenal rate of production. Soon, however, and despite Vincent’s protestations that they never did anything but paint, the two artists were about to make a couple of excursions, perhaps in an effort to get away from the studio in which they were constantly on top of one another. Besides, a circus had come to town.

  On Sunday, December 2, the Grand Menagerie of the Indies, under the direction of the brothers Pianet, was installed on the Boulevard de Lices, on the other side of Arles. It was open every day from ten o’clock in the morning, and there was a performance every evening. Among the attractions were “lions, lionesses, lion cubs, tigers, leopards, panthers, cougars, pumas, polar bears, hyenas, lamas, zebras, snakes, elephants and monkeys.”

  The Forum républicain recommended that its readers see the amazing evening shows: “Messieurs Pianet are not content simply to present their animals, they have trained them.” On show were tigers performing at school desks; a lion playing leap-frog; a leopard pretending to be dead while a panther raised it up; and an elephant being served dinner by a monkey.

  Gauguin filled twelve pages of his sketchbook with drawings of lions, lionesses and elephants, presumably during the day, when the animals were not being put through these preposterous routines. But the evening performances also left a deep impression on his memory.

  He wrote of the circus three times—in his memoirs, Avant et après; in a newspaper he produced and wrote in Tahiti in 1899 (it never had more than 309 readers); and in a short story which mingled, as in a dream, all manner of events and people from Gauguin’s life in Arles.

  The first section of this story described the narrator’s triumphant career in the army. Like Second Lieutenant Milliet, he served in Africa, where he hunted lions in the manner of Tartarin de Tarascon and eventually rose to the rank of general. Then, leaving the army, the hero was transformed into a traveling-circus proprietor, just like the brothers Pianet and, after that, into “Monsieur Louis,” the brothel proprietor of Arles.

  Gauguin’s protagonist imagined wielding power over the savage animals in his menagerie, “the most beautiful in the world.” Every evening he entered the lions’ cage:

  Gauguin, Menagerie from Arles Sketchbook

  Cruelly, I harried them with the point of my goad to make them roar and spring, these terrible creatures who are called wild beasts, and I feasted myself on their smell. The beast in me was satiated and the crowd admired me.

  As with the painting of Woman with the Pigs, sexuality and animality seemed linked in Gauguin’s mind. This was, indeed, part of the fantasy life of the age. Art and literature abounded with animal and half-animal creatures—satyrs, fauns, mermaids, sirens—leading a more sensual and free existence than nineteenth-century Europeans. Gauguin’s—and Loti’s—mirage of a tropical Eden full of dusky Eves was a similar daydream of escape.

  In Gauguin’s story, the narrator’s relationship with the lordliest of all the beasts—“the great royal tiger”—was positively erotic:

  Nonchalantly he demands a caress, showing by movements of his beard and claws that he likes caresses. He loves me. I dare not strike him; I am afraid and he abuses my fear. In spite of myself I have to endure his disdain.

  This intimacy was compared to that of the narrator and his spouse:

  At night my wife seeks my caresses. She knows I am afraid of her and she abuses my fear. Both of us, wild creatures ourselves, lead a life full of fear and bravado, joy and grief, strength and weakness. At night, by the light of the oil lamps, half suffocated by the animal stenches, we watch the stupid, cowardly crowd.

  So to Gauguin the menagerie was also “an image of life and society”—the outcasts, wilder and freer, watched by the bovine public.

  Vincent never described a visit to the menagerie but there are hints that he went there, too. As had the obelisk and the sculptures of St. Trophime, the image of wild animals roaring in their cages got into his mind. His neighbors peered through his windows as if he were a “curious beast,” he wrote; when he entered an asylum, the noise of the other inmates struck him as “terrible cries and howls like beasts in a menagerie.” Like Gauguin, he plainly identified with the captive creatures. But far from finding the spectacle erotic, Vincent seemed to have found the Grand Menagerie of the Indies horrifying.

  It was now becoming uncharacteristically cold for Provence. On Tuesday, December 4, there was a frost, and a much heavier one on Wednesday and Thursday. Gauguin got a message from Theo reporting that his package of work had arrived safely in Paris. He replied, remarking that he had been a bit worried the canvases might crack. Gauguin asked for Degas’s address, which he had lost, so that he could write a letter in person thanking him for having been kind enough to buy a painting.

  Meanwhile, Theo was extolling Gauguin’s work to Wil. He felt that it was a good “opportunity” for his brother to spend time in the company of such an artist as Gauguin. Degas himself “greatly appreciated” Gauguin’s new work and was even tempted to go down to see him at Arles. “They’re the lucky ones!” Degas had exclaimed to Theo, speaking of Vincent and Gauguin. “That’s the life!”

  Of course, Degas was very wide of the mark in imagining that Gauguin and Vincent were living a rustic idyll. But if he had left his dusty studio on the slopes of Montmartre and gone south, it would have been intriguing. What would that crabby and caustic man, known for displays of acerbic wit at Parisian dinner parties, have made of the Yellow House?

  Theo told Wil that it was in the “depiction of the human figure” that Vincent found “the best expression of his art” and that he seemed particularly pleased with the portraits he was currently doing. And well he might be. Vincent was in the middle of the most ambitious portrait-cycle of his career.

  In a period of a week or two, he painted multiple images of all the Roulins except the father, Joseph, whose appearance he had already thoroughly explored. It seemed that he had at least two sittings each from the boys, Armand and Camille, as they appear in differing poses and clothes in several pictures. In the end there were two paintings of Armand and three of Camille. Madame Roulin appears in three and baby Marcelle in no fewer than five, two with her mother and three on her own.

  The reason for this multiplication was partly to provide an extra picture to give to the Roulins. Giving the Roulins an oil painting in exchange for a few hours’ work saved everybody’s honor and was cheaper and easier for Vincent. In all, they ended up with six of Vincent’s pictures—one of Joseph, one of his wife, one of each of their children and one of a magnificent bouquet of pink oleander. This had been painted in the summer, set in a majolica pot on the table in the Yellow House. Beside the flowers—the blooms that, to Vincent, “spoke of love”—he had placed a couple of books, the uppermost being Zola’s La joie de vivre.

  These pictures—and others, a whole museum of modern art—decorated the Roulins’ bedroom when they retired to Lambesc eight years later. But Joseph soon accepted an offer from the Parisian dealer Ambroise Vollard for 450 francs a canvas. Had they waited a little longer, the Roulins would have got much more.

  Vincent painted Armand Roulin on two large canvases—size 15, or 65 by 54cm—and, as with all the Roulin pictures, he reverted to ordinary canvas, not Gauguin’s jute. For one thing, the jute was running out and, for another, in this special series of portraits, Vincent wanted to achieve delica
cy and precision. The jute had never suited him as well as it did Gauguin.

  The painting of Armand that his parents were given shows the seventeen-year-old in a smart get-up, probably his best clothes: a yellow jacket, black waistcoat, necktie, and hat at a jaunty angle. His features, however, are melancholy (or perhaps, as often with portrait sitters, just bored). A moustache grows with touching sparseness on his upper lip. This mood is stronger in the other picture, the one that Vincent kept. In this version, Armand seems younger. The green background is darker; his jacket and hat are black. Though the hat looks the same—how many hats would a teenage Provençal blacksmith’s apprentice possess?—it was worn at a more sober angle.

  Armand’s younger brother, the eleven-year-old Camille, is also lost in thought—or terrible tedium—in the biggest of the paintings Vincent produced of him. He is sitting on one of the rush-bottomed chairs, his arm over the back, his mouth gaping open, staring into space.

  Camille looks much more alert in the other pose that Vincent documented, producing two versions. This was on a smaller canvas and shows only the boy’s head and shoulders. He is wearing a large blue cap and looking intently past the painter. Behind him, yellow brush strokes radiate, as from the sun. The sense of potential—the same quality symbolized by those sprouting bulbs—is intense.

  Armand Roulin

  It was implicit in Vincent’s idea of painting a whole family that he might portray the Roulins and their progeny at intervals through time. If he had lived out a full term, Vincent could have depicted Armand’s transformation from a handsome if callow young fellow starting out in life to a heavy-jowled police officer in colonial Tunisia. Armand died at the end of the Second World War. Camille’s destiny was to become a shipping clerk for the Service des Messageries Maritimes, dying young, in 1922, as a result of war wounds. Madame Roulin lived until 1930, outliving her husband, Joseph, by twenty-eight years. She became a white-haired matriarch, still slightly resembling her portraits. But even if Vincent had had a normal lifespan, he could scarcely have chronicled the entire life of the baby, Marcelle, who lived to be ninety-two, not dying until 1980.

  Camille Roulin

  Vincent’s pictures of this robust infant were even more packed with a sense of future possibilities than those of her older brothers. He had planned to paint her as a newborn, close to July 31: “If I can get the mother and father to allow me to do a picture of it,” he had written to Wil, “I am going to paint a baby in a cradle one of these days.”

  The sight of this baby—and babies generally—moved Vincent greatly. It brought him up against the mystery of existence. “A child in the cradle if you watch it at leisure,” he wrote after Marcelle was born, “has the infinite in its eyes.” That was in August, but it was not until now, at the onset of winter, that Vincent finally made his first painting of the youngest Roulin.

  Once he started, he could hardly stop. First he painted, from life, little Marcelle—so ebullient she was almost springing out of Augustine’s arms: a tiny parcel of compacted energy, just like a bud. From that he made another, larger painting of the mother and child, tracing the face of each from the first paintings.

  Tracing was a technique used by Gauguin—for instance, to transfer his drawing of Madame Ginoux on to canvas for his Night Café. It was frequently used by Degas to construct his own paintings and pastels: “People borrow a great deal from Degas,” Gauguin observed, “and he does not complain. There is so much in his bag of tricks that one pebble more or less doesn’t matter to him.” This particular device, it seemed, was passed from Degas to Gauguin to Vincent.

  The result was a painting which was broader, less closely observed than either of the two studies from life on which it was based. But it was not, on the other hand, really done from memory. The subject matter was hallowed—and hackneyed—in Western art: mother and baby, which had blended over the centuries into the sacred theme of Madonna and Child.

  Clockwise from top left: Armand, Augustine, Marcelle and Camille Roulin

  Vincent then went on to paint three more pictures of Marcelle, head and shoulders only, documenting her solemn baby’s stare and her admirably chubby cheeks and arms against a light-green backdrop. If her mother, Augustine, resembled a human tuber, here was the equivalent in flesh and blood of a seed. “Young corn,” Vincent had reflected long before, “has something inexpressibly pure and tender about it, which awakens the same emotion as the expression of a sleeping baby, for instance.”

  When Vincent wrote those words, he had a humble home of his own with a woman and children for company. That was precisely what made the subject of the Roulins and baby Marcelle so emotionally perilous for him.

  This family life had lasted for one and three-quarter years, from the day Vincent—shortly after his father had thrown him out of the family house in Etten—moved in with the prostitute Cristina or “Sien” Hoornik in January 1882. They lived together in a small studio in The Hague.

  Sien already had a four-year-old daughter named Maria, and from July 2 there was a fourth member of the household. On that day, Sien gave birth to a son after a difficult delivery which required forceps. He was named Willem. Vincent saw the infinite in his eyes, too. (Willem grew up to become a railway employee, unpopular with his colleagues in the 1930s because of his fascist views.)

  Willem was another man’s child, but that did not stop Vincent from being ecstatically excited by his birth. He sat next to Sien’s hospital bed and thought of “that eternal poetry of Christmas night with the infant in the stable, as the old Dutch painters conceived it.” Vincent thought of the child as radiance, like the sun, “a light in the darkness, a brightness in the middle of a dark night.”

  The family moved to a slightly larger apartment next door. This was in many ways the predecessor of the Yellow House—lovingly furnished with simple furniture and proudly described to Theo: “The studio looks so much like the real thing, or so it seems to me, plain gray-brown wallpaper, scrubbed floorboards, muslin stretched on slats across the windows, everything bright.” Vincent’s studies, prints and books lay all around.

  There was “a little living room with a table, a few kitchen chairs, an oil stove, a large wicker armchair for the woman in the corner by the window.” Next to the mother’s chair was placed a small iron cradle with a green cover—an object Vincent could not look at “without emotion.”

  This earlier studio in The Hague seemed “a young home in full swing.” Vincent summed it up in a phrase: “a studio with a cradle.” A baby’s potty was on the floor—there was no sense of “stagnation”; everything seemed to bustle and stir with life. The Yellow House, obviously, was a studio without a cradle.

  So it was then that Vincent experienced a life with a woman and children: what he had most yearned for:

  I don’t know if you’ve ever had that feeling which sometimes forces a sort of sigh or groan from one when one is alone: oh God, where is my wife, oh God, where is my child? Is being alone really living?

  Fifteen months after writing those words, Vincent left Sien and her children and departed to work in the dismal northern Dutch heathland of Drenthe, where he again suffered “that loneliness that a painter has to bear, whom everybody in such isolated areas regards as a lunatic, a murderer, a tramp, etc., etc.” Leaving Sien and the children was perhaps the hardest decision he had ever had to make. Such choices, he thought, made the heart “shrivel with pain.”

  From the beginning, all the forces of respectable society had been opposed to Vincent’s liaison with Sien. When he had first arrived in The Hague, Vincent had had some useful lessons from his cousin by marriage, the painter Anton Mauve. As soon as he discovered Vincent’s relationship with Sien, Mauve cut his ties with Vincent and his old employer, Tersteeg, and denounced Vincent violently in front of Sien and the children.

  Theo and their father, Theodorus, were appalled by Vincent’s intention to marry her. As far as Theo was concerned, a relationship with a woman from the lower orders was one thing—he
had one himself at this time—but marriage was a step too far. That, to Vincent, was an immoral point of view.

  Sorrow, lithograph

  Prostitution, Vincent felt, would have been bad if society were “pure and well-regulated.” As it was, materialism and sanctimonious morality ruled; prostitutes seemed more like “sisters of mercy” to an outcast such as Vincent. He felt no scruple about associating with them; he liked their company. There was something “human” about them. But he did not marry Sien.

  The partnership between Vincent and Sien was under attack on several fronts. If Vincent alienated Theo, there was a danger that his allowance would be cut off; on the other hand, the money was not enough for a family of four, with the expense of Vincent’s materials. Sien’s family suggested she should leave this poor provider and live with someone better off—or perhaps, as Vincent put it, “fall back into her former errors.”

  Under these pressures, Sien’s mood deteriorated: “At times her temper is such that it is almost unbearable for me—violent, mischievous—I am sometimes in despair.” Sien’s view was not recorded, but it is likely she had to put up with tirades from Vincent. By the middle of 1883, the household was in disarray.

  He said goodbye to Sien and the children at the railway station of The Hague on September 11, 1883, and took the train north. It was a decision that Vincent saw quite explicitly in terms of Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. “There is no anguish greater than the soul’s struggle between duty and love.” On the other hand, his own future—his vocation as an artist—was “a cup that will not pass away from me unless I drink it. So fiat voluntas”—Thy will be done. Vincent, of course, went on to become a painter.