The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  He wrote to Theo, confessing that:

  Aurier’s article would encourage me if I dared to let myself go, and venture even further, dropping reality and making a kind of music of tones with color, like some Monticellis. But it is so dear to me, this truth, trying to make it true, after all I think, I think, that I would still rather be a shoemaker than a musician in colors.

  In any case he felt that remaining faithful to what he saw before him was “perhaps a remedy in fighting the disease which still continues to disquiet me.”

  Of the first four months of 1890, Vincent spent all but a few weeks in a state of insanity or withdrawal. Vincent regarded the most prolonged of these attacks as a punishment for his success. It did not lift until the very end of April. Before he departed from the South, he did one more picture de tête: the one of two walkers—he and Gauguin—strolling down a Provençal road at evening.

  On May 16 he finally left St. Rémy to live under the supervision of Doctor Paul Gachet—a medical man with an interest in advanced art—in the quiet village of Auvers-sur-Oise north of Paris.

  When Vincent arrived en route at Theo’s apartment on May 17, 1890, he impressed his sister-in-law, Jo—who had never met him—with his robust healthiness. Rested after a year in St. Rémy, he looked sturdy in comparison with Theo, whose constitution was weakening rapidly. Vincent also met a young nephew—named “Vincent Willem” after him—who had been born in February. He renewed some old acquaintances and saw again his own paintings, gathered in Theo’s flat. But he found Paris too agitating. After three days, he moved on to Auvers.

  There he enjoyed again, for the last time, an astonishing burst of productivity. In a little over two months he painted seventy-six pictures; sometimes he must have turned out two canvases a day. Dr. Gachet pronounced him cured. On June 8 there was a happy reunion with Theo and his family, who took the train from Paris and lunched with Vincent and Gachet. Vincent gave his baby nephew a bird’s nest as a toy.

  The Ginouxs dispatched Vincent’s furniture from Arles to Auvers, where Vincent thought of renting a cottage and establishing another studio. He wrote to thank them, adding that he regretted not having said goodbye to Arles:

  I often think of you all, one cannot do what one wants in life. The more you feel attached to a spot, the more ruthlessly you are compelled to leave it, but the memories remain, and one remembers—as in a looking glass, darkly—one’s absent friends.

  At the beginning of July, the shadows started to close in again. Jo was ill, the baby was ill, and Theo appeared to be in a terminal dispute with Boussod et Valadon, raising the specter once more that Vincent might lose his allowance. All of this caused Vincent great anxiety. On the evening of Sunday July 27 he walked out into the fields and—either in depression, or fearing another attack, or in the throes of a crisis—he shot himself through the chest.

  Typically, he made a mess of his suicide. The bullet missed his heart. After a while, he got up and staggered back to his lodgings, where his landlord found him lying wounded in bed. Vincent asked for his pipe, always a source of comfort, and lay in bed silently smoking.

  Theo, who initially had hopes his brother might recover, was summoned, as he had been to Arles. Dr. Gachet told Vincent he, too, was positive about his chances, but Vincent replied that then he would have the work of killing himself once more. Theo wrote to Jo that Vincent asked after her and the baby and had said to him, “You could not imagine there was so much sorrow in life.” The suffering, he said to Theo, goes on forever. And towards the end, “I wish I could pass away like this.” Vincent died at the age of thirty-seven at 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, July 29, 1890.

  Emile Bernard described the funeral which took place the following day to Aurier. On the walls around the coffin, Vincent’s paintings were nailed up:

  On the coffin, a simple white linen, masses of flowers, the sunflowers which he loved so much, yellow dahlias, yellow flowers everywhere. It was his favorite color, as you will remember, a symbol of the light he dreamt of in hearts as well as in paintings.

  Gauguin’s reaction was calm:

  Sad though this death may be, I am not very grieved, for I knew it was coming and I knew how this poor fellow suffered in his struggles with madness. To die at this time is a great happiness for him, for it puts an end to his sufferings and if he returns in another life he will harvest the fruit of his fine conduct in this world (according to the law of the Buddha).

  He must have been thinking of Vincent’s Self-Portrait as a bonze.

  Theo did not long outlive him. In September he suffered hallucinations and nightmares. After a violent dispute with his employers, he abruptly left the gallery. Then he sent Gauguin a telegram reading, “Departure for tropics assured, money follows.” The offer was an empty one: Theo had gone mad.

  He was taken to a Parisian hospital, then to a clinic run by a Dr. Blanche in Passy. There was a diagnosis: general paralysis of the insane, one of the most horrible symptoms of tertiary syphilis. At the end of November, Theo was transferred to a clinic near Utrecht, where he died on January 25, 1891, speechless and paralyzed, at the age of thirty-three.

  Naturally, Gauguin never received the money for his tropical exploration from Theo. But he remained determined to go. Since Bernard had reread Pierre Loti’s book about Tahiti, that had become the destination. In February 1891 Gauguin held a successful sale of paintings in Paris to raise money for the trip. With the help of Charles Morice, author of The Blue Sow and now a firm supporter of Gauguin’s art, he was sent on an official government mission to paint in the South Pacific.

  After a last visit to Mette and the children in Copenhagen, whom he would never see again, he set sail in April. He was alone. De Haan had returned to Holland; Bernard and Laval did not go with him. As he had always predicted, the dark figure of solitude was his only companion.

  Gauguin returned to France two years later in 1893 but was disenchanted with his native land. Again he set sail for Tahiti in July 1895, alone despite plans that others would accompany him. By this time he and Bernard had quarreled bitterly, the latter accusing Gauguin of stealing his ideas in Pont-Aven at the time that the Vision was painted.

  In 1901 he moved on from Tahiti to Atuona, on the island of Hivaoa in the remote group of islands called the Marquesas. By that stage he was chronically ill, with unhealed sores on his legs. Later, phials of morphine and broken bottles of absinthe were excavated from the well behind his house. The problem, almost certainly, was syphilis.

  In those last years, Vincent was often in Gauguin’s mind. In 1901 he painted his pictures of sunflowers in which some of the blooms have eyes—just as he had imagined the painted decorations in his bedroom at Arles had. Towards the end of his life he wrote a manuscript entitled Diverses choses, or “Various Topics.” It included meditations on color, religion and, at the end, the short story into which the circus, the brothel and other memories of Arles had been fused.

  On the title page he wrote a description of his manuscript: “Scattered notes, without sequel, like dreams, and like life itself made up entirely of fragments.” Under that, he wrote that several people had collaborated in “the love of beautiful things glimpsed in the house of the future.” He must have been thinking of the Yellow House and his erstwhile companion in Arles because, as an afterthought, he pasted a drawing by Vincent where he had originally written the title. It was of the teenage girl Vincent called La Mousmé, after the Japanese courtesans in Madame Chrysanthème. Beside this, Gauguin wrote “du regretté Vincent van Gogh”—“by the much-missed Vincent van Gogh.”

  He was perhaps also thinking of Vincent and himself when he wrote in the manuscript of his memoirs, Avant et après, that “it is so small a thing, the life of a man, and yet there is time to do great things, fragments of a common task.” Gauguin died on May 8, 1903, a month short of his fifty-fifth birthday. By that time he had become, like Vincent, almost a figure of myth among the artists of Paris: the painter who rejected civilization and went to live o
n the other side of the world in a primitive Eden.

  As the years went by, Emile Bernard became increasingly religious and reclusive. He died in Paris in 1941, but by far the best work of his career had been done in the brief years when he was very young and in contact with Vincent and Gauguin. The longest-surviving person who had had any role in the events of autumn 1888 in Arles was Second Lieutenant Milliet, who had risen to become a lieutenant-colonel and a Commander of the Légion d’honneur (though not, as Vincent had predicted, a general). Milliet died in retirement during the Second World War.

  Over the century that followed Vincent’s death, the paintings which had once hung on the white walls of the Yellow House became familiar around the world. The story of Vincent’s life was transformed into the fable of a mad artist painting under the raging southern sun, obsessed by massive, drooping sunflowers. This was the portrait of Vincent as crazy saint and martyr that had first appeared in Gauguin’s mind that autumn in Arles.

  But what had really been the matter with Vincent? That was a question that embarrassed the world of art. Here was one of the greatest painters who had ever lived—as everyone now agreed—but he had gone mad and sliced off his ear. On the other hand, the unscholarly reveled in this gory episode. There were many who knew nothing much of art at all except that an artist once had done this crazy thing.

  Vincent has been posthumously diagnosed with innumerable conditions. An overdose of digitalis, lead poisoning (from paint), absinthe-induced hallucinations, a condition of the inner ear named Ménière’s disease, severe sun-stroke and glaucoma have all been put forward. So, too, have schizophrenia, syphilis, epilepsy, acute intermittent porphyria—a metabolic imbalance once believed to have caused the madness of George III—and borderline personality disorder (a controversial term for all those who were irritable, impulsive, drunken and had difficulty in getting on with their fellow men).

  The most puzzling feature of Vincent’s case was its intermittent nature. He would be utterly out of his mind for a spell, then quite shortly afterwards paint great pictures and write letters of heartbreaking eloquence. All the explanations listed above might illuminate some parts of his problem but not the depth of his derangement and the suddenness with which it could disappear.

  Syphilis, for example, might have caused mania, but it is a progressive condition caused by the destruction of the brain and nervous system by the bacterium Treponema pallidum. Vincent may well have been harboring these creatures, as would anyone who visited prostitutes in 1888. But tertiary syphilis would not descend and rise like fog. If Vincent had it, the condition was still latent—hence, not the problem. Similarly, it couldn’t have been absinthe that gave him his hallucinations, partly because he gave up drinking in St. Rémy and his problems didn’t go away; partly because absinthe was not a hallucinogen anyway. And so on down the list.

  Something had obviously been ailing Vincent, and other members of his family seemed to be afflicted by it. Vincent’s younger brother, Cornelius, migrated to South Africa and killed himself in a “fever” in 1900. That same year, Wil—Vincent’s beloved younger sister, who was still living with her aged mother—started behaving oddly and expressing “bizarre ideas.”

  She was admitted to a hospital in The Hague, then, in 1902, into another at Veldwijk in the area of Ermelo. There she stayed for the rest of her long life, at first angry and suicidal, later almost catatonic. She died on May 17, 1941, the last of Vincent’s siblings to survive. Theo also suffered—apart from the syphilis that killed him—from “melancholy,” or, as it was to be described in later years, depression.

  Depression is one of the commonest ailments of Western man and tends to run in families. Closely allied is another condition not properly analyzed until long after Vincent died: manic depression, or bipolar disorder. This is, essentially, a disturbance of moods. What is known as sanity, it seems, is in part a biochemical affair: an ability to keep happiness and sadness within limits. Most of us go up and down in spirits. But in some individuals, for reasons that are still not known, the swing from one to the other is extremely violent. They are plunged into black and icy despair and rocket up into a frenzy of energy and exhilaration.

  In the second stage they need little sleep; they can work at an inspired speed; their thoughts are supercharged with speed and audacity; they make connections that seem to counter common sense (as Vincent did in his letter about the trip to Montpellier). The bipolar person may talk and talk, uncontrolled and uncontrollably, driving others away—as Vincent had Gauguin.

  At the extreme top end of the mood curve, a manic depressive may shift into a shadowy world of unreality—as did Vincent when he saw things and heard voices that weren’t there. They may develop paranoid delusions, such as that their neighbors are poisoning them.

  One word much used of that manic mood did not often fit Vincent: “euphoria.” At times he did have a feeling he described as “exaltation” when he was working—in September in the sunny gardens of the Place Lamartine, for example. Some bipolar sufferers, however, enter a “mixed” state in which they are neither exactly manic nor depressed: combining the rushing mind of mania with the fears and frantic anxiety of depression. That sounds very like Vincent, especially in November and December 1888.

  At all times he had a see-sawing flux of morale dropping and rising constantly. That was how Second Lieutenant Milliet—grown old and transformed into a retired lieutenant-colonel—remembered Vincent when questioned decades later:

  He didn’t have an easygoing personality, and when he was angry he seemed crazy.

  Was he, then, irascible?

  Yes and no. Rather agreeable, on the whole, but quite changeable from day to day. Very nervous. Furious when I offered a criticism of his painting. But that didn’t last. We always ended up reconciling.

  Irascibility is characteristic of manic moods, especially mixed ones. Another indication is recourse to drugs or alcohol to deaden the agony of the down swings and quiet the ferment of the highs. That is precisely what Vincent said he did: “if the storm within gets too loud, I take a glass too much to stun myself.” It was also the reason why Edgar Allan Poe, almost certainly bipolar, drank so much; so Gauguin was closer to the truth than he realized when he compared the two.

  Vincent’s case, in fact, was almost a textbook one. Many details of his behavior tally: the gloomy religious thoughts that came on him, much to his surprise, during his attacks; the loss of sexual inhibition that led him, if only mildly, to molest the women of Place Lamartine: lifting a middle-aged dressmaker clean off the pavement. Both are typical.

  The puzzling feature was the speed at which his attacks came on and then receded, but this is explained by another phenomenon connected with manic depression: rapid cycling. A patient is undergoing rapid cycling if they have more than four major episodes per year—Vincent’s exact rate in 1889. It is relatively common among those who are afflicted by mixed states.

  So, had Vincent been examined by Doctors Rey or Peyron a century or so later they would probably have found a ready diagnosis. They would also have had a cure to prescribe. In the mid twentieth century it was discovered that violent mood swings could be controlled by drugs such as lithium. But would Vincent have accepted the prescription?

  The question is not empty. Taking the medicine would have reduced his mental pain, but a number of bipolar writers and artists, given the drug, gave it up. They miss the excitement of the highs when—as the composer Hugo Wolf, another sufferer, put it—“blood becomes changed into streams of fire.” Sane life feels flat to them.

  The last surprise about Vincent—apparently such a unique individual—is that he was not alone. Bipolar affective disorder occurs in about 1 per cent of modern Western populations, but its incidence among creative people—poets and writers in particular—appears to be much higher. Thus Vincent had many distant companions—the composer Schumann, Byron, Poe, the architect Borromini—who shared some or all of his distress and exaltation. He was right in a way
when he suggested he just suffered from “an artist’s fit.”

  Bipolar disorder is a terrible and often, as in Vincent’s case, fatal disease. Around two-thirds of suicides are either depressive or manic depressive, so the manner of Vincent’s death was also characteristic. But living so near the edge may allow a person to see further. The rushing thoughts, the connections seen where no one in a normal mental state might see them, the keenness of feeling and suffering—all these might fuel a creative voyage. The madness of artists is not entirely mythic.

  Art historians have been inclined to ignore Vincent’s problems as unrelated to their investigations. And it is true that bipolar patients are demented, if at all, for limited periods and otherwise may be capable, like Vincent, of brilliant, disciplined and deeply pondered work.

  But Vincent’s condition was not irrelevant: it permeated his mind and personality, making him, in part, the “crazy martyr and seer” Gauguin referred to. Given a mood-stabilizing medicine in 1889, he would have retained remarkable skills of hand and eye, but he would have been a different—and probably a duller—artist.

  In part, his painting was therapeutic: it kept him steady. He said this over and over again. But this was the case only when he was depicting something that was in front of him—a chair, a person, a flower. Even when he did that, his mind was apt to swarm with associations, as it did in painting La Berceuse. For him to work from memory or imagination was perilous: he might be overwhelmed by teeming thoughts, some of them dark. That was part of his inner story that autumn in Arles. Vincent feared to work de tête, yet risked it in Gauguin’s company. The danger remained.