The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  Was Vincent in fact going mad? He was certainly acting erratically, and his mind was full of strange notions. But until this month of December 1888, judgment on Vincent’s mental balance was still divided. Soon, however, he was to do something that, in everybody’s eyes, including his own, made him seem a genuine and frightening lunatic.

  The crisis in the studio came to a head. As Gauguin later told the story, after Vincent had made his remark about the Painter of Sunflowers—“It’s me, but it’s me gone mad”—they went to the café. Vincent had a “weak absinthe”:

  Suddenly he flung the glass and its contents at my head. I avoided the blow and taking him bodily in my arms, went out of the café across Place Victor Hugo. Not many minutes later Vincent found himself in his bed where, in a few seconds, he was asleep, not to awaken until morning. When he awoke, he said to me very calmly, “My dear Gauguin, I have a vague memory that I offended you last evening.”

  Answer: “I forgive you gladly and with all my heart, but yesterday’s scene might occur again and if I were struck I might lose control of myself and give you a choking. So permit me to write to your brother and tell him I am coming back.”

  Evidently, Gauguin’s story was not to be relied upon entirely. In a triumph of vagueness, he managed to get in a muddle over Place Lamartine, naming it after the wrong romantic poet—and this despite the fact that he had lived in the square for two months and that a poem of Lamartine’s was a particular favorite of his mother’s. Even so, the other details were quite circumstantial. The “weak absinthe” corroborates other hints that Vincent’s tolerance for alcohol was low. He didn’t need to swallow much before his behavior started to become disturbingly agitated.

  Vincent was certainly capable, when excited or disturbed, of mild violence. Months later, in the asylum of St. Rémy, he kicked one of the guards in the backside, under the impression that the man was a member of the police force of Arles, who were after him and wanted to lock him up.

  The quarrel in the café, followed by a deep sleep and confused memories the following day, sounded like one of the three “fainting fits” that Vincent said he suffered that autumn. At all events, Gauguin did write to Theo, abruptly:

  Dear M. van Gogh

  I would be obliged if you would send me part of the money from the sale of the paintings sold. All things considered I am compelled to return to Paris. Vincent and I are absolutely unable to live side by side without trouble caused by incompatibility of temperament and he like I needs tranquility for his work. He is a man of remarkable intelligence whom I esteem greatly and I leave with regret, but I repeat it is necessary. I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your conduct towards me and I beg you to excuse my decision—

  Cordially yours,

  Paul Gauguin

  Probably in the same envelope, sent between Tuesday and Friday of that week, Vincent also sent a terse, disjointed communication:

  My dear Theo,

  Thank you very much for your letter, for the 100 Fr. note enclosed and also for the 50 Fr. money order.

  I think myself that Gauguin was a little out of sorts with the good town of Arles, the little yellow house where we work, and especially with me. As a matter of fact there are bound to be for him as for me further grave difficulties to overcome here.

  But these difficulties are rather within ourselves than outside.

  Altogether I think that either he will definitely go, or else definitely stay.

  Before doing anything I told him to think it over and reckon things up again.

  Gauguin is very powerful, strongly creative, but just because of that he must have peace.

  Will he find it anywhere if he does not find it here?

  I am waiting for him to make a decision with absolute serenity.

  The two painters were writing fewer letters, but they still received considerable correspondence. In the mail from Paris on Wednesday, December 12, there was an extremely pleasing missive for Gauguin from his friend Schuffenecker. As instructed, the latter had been to Theo’s gallery to inspect the new paintings sent from Arles.

  Schuffenecker was “absolutely wild with enthusiasm”; these Arles paintings were even finer than the one from Brittany, “more abstract and more powerful.” He was “stupefied” by Gauguin’s artistic “fecundity and abundance.” His self-deprecation was as cloying as his praise was ecstatic: “Poor unhappy creature that I am, I who grind away at a little canvas for months.”

  Gauguin, he predicted—accurately as it happened—was going to become one of the great “saints” of art; and also one of its martyrs: “The more I look and I think, the more I become convinced that you are going to pole-axe the lot of them, with the exception of Degas.” Gauguin was a giant, he was “scaling heaven”:

  You won’t actually reach it, because that’s the absolute, which is to say God, but you will shake the hands of those who have most nearly approached it.

  Yes, my dear Gauguin, what awaits you is not only success, it’s glory beside the Rembrandts and Delacroixs. And you will have suffered like them. I hope that at least now you will be saved from material sufferings.

  There was only one discouraging note in the letter; evidently the jute combined with the barium sulfate priming had led the paintings to crack, and the paint was coming off “in scales.” Otherwise, it was heady stuff. If Vincent read it, it could only have intensified his gloomy feeling that he personally had far to go.

  Gauguin, on the other hand, could scarcely have hoped for a better response. It must have made him feel even more restless at being stuck in Arles, where Vincent’s behavior was becoming odder and odder. Instead, he should have been in Paris, receiving this acclaim in person.

  The day before, Tuesday, December 11, Second Lieutenant Milliet had penned a letter to Vincent from Algeria. It was a continuation of the conversations of the summer. From Vincent’s letters, one might have concluded that Milliet was mainly interested in the women of Rue du Bout d’Arles. But, as his letter clearly showed, the young man of action had been fired by Vincent: more than that, it contained ideas that can only have come from Vincent’s head: “What is truly beautiful here is nature: the sun, the light, the Arab types, the men with floating garments are superb.” Then he said something remarkable: “Pictures seem to compose themselves in the shadows with the center dark and the corners in the light. It would seem, if I dare to express myself thus, to be Rembrandt in reverse.”

  Now, Rembrandt transposed into the brilliant light of the Mediterranean was one of Vincent’s obsessions. The matter of Rembrandt and southern light was one that Vincent felt he and Gauguin had “broached.” Rembrandt was much on his mind; he felt he was almost the only painter who could evoke “heartbroken tenderness, that glimpse of a super-human infinitude.” To do just that in the colors of Provence was one of Vincent’s most cherished projects.

  The Zouave went on to describe a landscape extremely similar to Vincent’s views of the Crau at harvest time, which had been painted under his eyes in June. It was the view from Milliet’s barracks window:

  My horizon is formed by a line of little mountains running parallel from east to west and lost in the blue. On the other side I have a perfectly flat plain of a debatable color; the closest levels to the eye are yellowish, the receding parts end up in a violet-gray.

  In the far distance there was “an ash-gray line, but so fine that it would need only a single stroke. These colors defined the extent of the landscape.” This tough young officer, brought up in various military establishments, was seeing with an artist’s eye—with Vincent’s, to be precise.

  The efficient Second Lieutenant had prepared his commanding officer’s mind for the expected arrival of Emile Bernard. If the latter did his military service in the 3rd Zouaves, his life would be made as comfortable as possible. Milliet was keen for news of the Yellow House, where things had been going so well when he left on November 1. “How are you my dear friend, and Goguin how does he find the life down there? What does he make of it
?” He sent Theo his regards, and to “Goguin” he extended “a vigorous shake of the hand.”

  Over the weekend of the fifteenth and sixteenth it rained heavily. But inside the Yellow House, the storm blew over. The next week began with an unprecedented event. Gauguin and Vincent went on an excursion to visit an art gallery in another town. It was the first time Vincent had been outside Arles since the early summer.

  10. Looking at Art

  December 16 – 19

  The two painters decided to make a daytrip to Montpellier to visit the Musée Fabre. This was 42 miles to the west of Arles, in a different region—Languedoc. To get there involved a lengthy train journey. Neither Gauguin nor Vincent named the day on which they made this expedition, but it must have been on Sunday, December 16, or Monday the seventeenth as, except for Thursday mornings, the museum was only open on those days of the week. The former was an exceptionally wet day, so it was probably on Monday that the two painters boarded the train at Arles station; the 8:58 would have been the most convenient departure.

  This excursion to Montpellier was Gauguin’s idea; he had been to the Musée Fabre before, in 1884. Then, he had been in the town, bizarrely, while helping a group of Spanish republican revolutionaries. Nothing had come of their attempts to foment a rising across the border but, while Gauguin was trying to arrange transport for his luckless friends, he discovered the museum. It was generally regarded as the finest art gallery in the South of France: rich in French painting from earlier in the century and with some old masters as well.

  There, Gauguin discovered a picture by Delacroix—a painter he, like Vincent, revered. It depicted a black woman, her clothes slipping from her shoulders, one breast revealed. The extraordinary thing about it, for nineteenth-century Europe, was that she was both black and beautiful—not in the manner of a classical Venus but nonetheless presented both sensuously and seriously. It must also have struck Gauguin that the woman in the picture had the same name as his mother and daughter: Aline.

  The picture affected Gauguin so much that—unusually for him—he copied it. The sight of Aline was perhaps one of the reasons he had begun to think about working in the tropics, and to appreciate a novel, non-Western style of beauty. So, eventually, this image may have given rise to his numerous pictures of similarly sensual, bare-breasted Polynesian women.

  To Gauguin’s mind, there was only one blot in this admirable gallery at Montpellier: a self-portrait by the elderly academic star Alexandre Cabanel. Gauguin could not stand his slick and glossy work. “Cabanel!” he snorted. “Stupidity and fatuity!”

  Delacroix, Aline, The Mulatto Woman

  (also known as Aspasie)

  The two painters probably did not arrive at the Musée Fabre until one o’clock. They would have had to return on the 4:09 train, but there was time for a leisurely visit, since the Musée Fabre was not far from the station. Vincent—as ever, sensitive to the cold—found the building “chilly,” but his reaction to what he saw was passionate. So, apparently, was Gauguin’s. To Theo, Vincent described the intensity with which the two painters clashed: “Our arguments are terribly electric, we come out of them sometimes with our heads as exhausted as an electric battery after it has run down.”

  The generalization, “sometimes we come out of them…,” suggests, as was plainly the case, that he and Gauguin had argued much more than once and not only about the pictures in the Musée Fabre. “Electricity” was Vincent’s term for manic energy; evidently his tussles with Gauguin were exhausting them both.

  There on the walls in Montpellier were works by several of the painters about whom they had already disagreed. Weeks before, Gauguin had replied, “Corporal, you’re right,” when Vincent expressed controversial views on art—just to get some peace. Now, it seemed, he didn’t.

  Gauguin had complained about Vincent’s reverence for mid-nineteenth-century landscape painters such as Théodore Rousseau. Now, there before them was a characteristic Rousseau, the Pond, with at its center a heroic, almost human tree—such as Vincent liked to paint himself. Predictably, Vincent was enthusiastic.

  On the other hand, Gauguin expressed his bafflement that Vincent “hated” Ingres and Raphael. And there at Montpellier was an Ingres of exactly the kind that Gauguin loved and Vincent didn’t. Typically, but for once understandably, Gauguin couldn’t remember its name—it was called Stratonice and Antiochus—but he much admired this picture, with its clear outlines and complex composition, “a logical and beautiful language” of painting. Vincent, however, though he didn’t exactly “hate” Ingres, only appreciated that painter’s portraits, with their “modern aspect.” The neo-classicism of this kind of picture struck him as “pedantry.”

  But there was much at Montpellier they could agree upon. A little panel there was attributed to the Florentine master Giotto: the Death of the Virgin. This “tiny little” picture whose subject was irrelevant to him—“the death of some holy woman or other”—made a huge impression on Vincent: “In it, the expression of pain and ecstasy is so human that, even though we are in the middle of the nineteenth century, one could think and feel one was there, so much does one share the emotion,” he wrote later. Giotto was another artist in whom Vincent saw himself; he imagined the medieval painter, poor in health, “always suffering and always full of ardor and ideas.”

  Gauguin kept a photograph of one of Giotto’s frescoes with him in the South Pacific. “What does it matter whether the conception is natural or unlike nature? In it I see a tenderness and love that are altogether divine.” Giotto was a marvelous example of the stylized, non-naturalistic art that Gauguin admired as “primitive”—just like the sculpture of Saint-Trophîme.

  The heart of the museum at Montpellier was the collection of one man: Alfred Bruyas. This was displayed apart from the rest of the museum exhibits in what Gauguin described as “a very large room, a third of which was raised several steps above the rest.” Bruyas, a wealthy local man, had been an enthusiastic patron of several artists in the 1850s and 1860s—notably Cabanel, Delacroix and Courbet. He had also been markedly eccentric.

  A genuine invalid and also a hypochondriac, he had obsessively commissioned portraits of himself. So, from the walls at Montpellier, his image stared down again and again—red-bearded, melancholy and, in one bizarre instance, crowned with thorns in the guise of the martyred Christ. It was possible to take two views of Bruyas—either as an enlightened patron or as a monster of self-pitying vanity.

  Delacroix, Portrait of Alfred Bruyas

  Vincent and Gauguin praised the Delacroixs, including “the study of a ‘Mulatto Woman,’” which Gauguin had copied. They were both much struck by Delacroix’s portrait of Bruyas. To Gauguin, the sensitivity and anxiety of the man was conveyed by one detail—the way he clutched at a handkerchief with his hand.

  As he remarked to Schuffenecker the following week, “in painting, a hand touching a handkerchief is able to express the consciousness of a soul.” Therefore, Gauguin went on, why couldn’t painters “create different harmonies” of color corresponding to the sitter’s spiritual state? This was exactly Vincent’s ambition—to express feelings and thoughts through color.

  Afterwards, it was Delacroix’s paintings that remained in Vincent’s mind most of all. The Women in Algiers at Montpellier, for example, was very different from the version in Paris. These Delacroixs struck him as “faded” with age. The memory eventually led him to paint in muted tones himself, rather than “striking color effects.”

  Vincent also commended the Courbets to Theo. Vincent regarded Courbet as one of those rare, robust painters such as Rubens—and Gauguin—who could make love to women, father children and create pictures without exhausting their life-force.

  One picture Vincent particularly singled out—the Bathers—was certainly fleshy. The massive buttocks of the nude seen from behind obviously appealed to Vincent. When, at art school, his copy of the Venus de Milo was criticized for having the wide hips of a Flemish matron, Vincent flew into
a rage and shouted at the horrified professor: “You clearly don’t know what a young woman is like, God damn it! A woman must have hips, buttocks, a pelvis in which she can carry a baby!” No one could fault Courbet’s woman for width of pelvis or lack of buttocks. But there was another Courbet—a famous painting—which Vincent strangely failed to mention: the Meeting, otherwise known as Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet. Painted in 1854 when Courbet had stayed with Bruyas in Montpellier, this depicts an encounter between the artist and his patron in the countryside. Bruyas, accompanied by a servant, extends his arms in greeting. Courbet, who paints himself as a great, robust fellow—much as he featured in Vincent’s mind—has his painting equipment in a knapsack on his back and a staff in his hand.

  Looked at through the eyes of compulsive dread, the picture could be read not as a greeting but as a farewell—a sensitive, troubled, red-bearded man bids goodbye to a more vigorous, black-bearded figure. It probably brought to mind what Vincent feared most and what underlay the other disputes: the threat that Gauguin would leave.

  This painting also made a deep impression on Gauguin, because a few months later he produced a painting entitled Bonjour, Monsieur Gauguin. In this, the figure meeting Gauguin at a Breton country gate was none other than a woman in black. Like the other black-clad woman in his Human Misery, she stood for Solitude.