The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  In a way, Gauguin got him wrong. Vincent wasn’t only an inspired, mad artist; he was a great painter desperately trying to remain sane. He saw the world with a rare intensity which gave great power to his work. And it was while looking and painting that he knew the greatest pleasure of which his tormented nature was capable.

  Yellow House as café

  After Vincent’s departure, the Yellow House itself was used in many ways, finally serving as one half of a bar named La Civette Arlésienne.

  On June 25, 1944, the little building was hit in a bombing raid. The explosion reduced Vincent’s bedroom to rubble, but part of the old studio and Gauguin’s bedroom survived for a while longer.

  After the war, the site of the Gendarmerie became a supermarket; the gardens of Place Lamartine were replaced by a parking lot and a roundabout. The brothel at No. 1 Rue du Bout d’Arles was demolished. Little remained of the scruffy, marginal quarter of the town that Vincent and Gauguin had inhabited. The Café de la Gare was no more, but in somewhat similar bars, not quite shaven men drank at tables around a billiard table. At night, no doubt, a prostitute or two came out. Only the atmosphere lingers—that, and the pictures.

  Notes on Sources

  I felt it would be cumbersome to footnote every point in a book of this kind. This is a subject which has been studied by generations of scholars, to many of whom I am indebted. In particular, I owe a great deal to Douglas Druick and Peter Zegers and their brilliant catalogue for the Studio of the South exhibition in 2002—especially to the technical examination which enabled them to sort out decisively which paintings had been done in the period from October to December 1888.

  I accept, as they do, and it is believed the forthcoming new edition of Van Gogh’s letters will do, that letter LT 565 was sent around December 1 , not December 23, as previously believed. All my quotations from Van Gogh letters are from the excellent searchable edition to be found on www.webexhibits.com. The quotations from Gauguin’s Avant et après are from Van Wyck Brooks’s translation (entitled in English Paul Gauguin’s Intimate Journals), revised by me. The translations of his letters are in some cases by me; others are taken from Writings of a Savage (ed. Guérin), Gauguin: A Retrospective (ed. Prather & Stuckey) and Gauguin by Himself (ed. Thomson). The translations of “The Blue Sow” and Gauguin’s story in Diverses choses are mine, as is that of the letter from Milliet.

  My discussion of Gauguin’s and Vincent’s religious background in Chapter 4 and of the Arles Christmas festivities in Chapter 8 is largely based on the work of Debora Silverman in her book Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (though the notion that the Roulins might have had a crèche is my own).

  There are several other works which I would like in particular to acknowledge. I found Victor Merlhès’s Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, 1887–1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées of great use, especially for its inclusion of several Gauguin letters not available elsewhere. I have depended on Jan Hulsker’s Vincent and Theo van Gogh: A Dual Biography for many points concerning Vincent’s earlier life. Ronald Pickvance’s catalogue for the exhibition Van Gogh in Arles at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1984 was frequently highly useful.

  I found Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire completely convincing regarding Vincent’s medical condition, and Martin Bailey’s excellent re-examination of the facts surrounding the drama of the severed ear appeared in Apollo in September 2005, just as I was finalizing this text, so I was able to incorporate several of his points.

  The details of Wilhelmina van Gogh’s illness are culled from an article by Dr. Erik van Faasen, of Veldwijk psychiatric hospital in Ermelo, where she was a patient (this was translated for me by Dr. Murray Pearson). Much of my information about the Roulins comes from J.-N. Priou’s article in the Revue des PTT de France, 1955; but my information about Camille Pelletan comes from Stone’s Sons of the Revolution. The suggestion that Roulin was probably an admirer of the fiery Camille rather than his father, Eugène—dead for some years in 1888—is my own, as is the idea that he might have named his second son after the Republican politician.

  I believe I am the first writer who has noted the names of the neighbors who signed the petition against Vincent and gave evidence to the police about him. Ginoux’s name is clearly legible on the petition; so, too, are several others on the police investigation report. Both are published in facsimile in Arles (2003). I discussed this discovery at more length in a piece for the Daily Telegraph arts section, June 25, 2005.

  A good deal of what I have written consists of straightforward deductions from the letters, pictures and the plan of the house (for example, that there must have been a smell of tobacco smoke in a smallish room in which two keen pipe-smokers worked all day), but there are some new conjectures and pieces of evidence in The Yellow House on which more detail might be useful.

  1. Gauguin, Vincent and the Brothels

  The brothels of Arles play a prominent part in the story, but little information has been available on them. This is for several reasons. The Arles police files for the relevant period are missing and the files concerning the administration of the brothels closed for 150 years. Furthermore, Vincent, though he made repeated references to the subject of brothels and prostitution, did not go into much detail (the more one reads the letters, the more one suspects that there were aspects of his life he was shielding).

  Recently, a few new points have been established, however. The closed brothel dossier has been examined by the archivist for Martin Bailey, so we now know that the brothel at No. 1 Rue du Bout d’Arles was run by a certain Virginie Chabaud.

  There are passages that concern the brothel in Arles in a short story by Gauguin to be found at the end of his manuscript Diverses choses (pp. 269–73 in the manuscript). This is an extremely odd narrative, which begins with a reverie, after which the narrator adopts various personae. First, he is a soldier—resembling Generals MacMahon and Boulanger and Second Lieutenant Milliet—then he is the owner of a circus-cum-menagerie and, finally, Monsieur Louis, who is married to the madame of a brothel in Arles. In this guise he sits for a painter—Manet, since the story is set in the 1870s.

  The story has not been transcribed in full—probably because the ink is badly faded in places. The point that has not been appreciated is that “Monsieur Louis” also appears in a passage in Gauguin’s Avant et après, in which he describes being shown the smart salon in an Arles brothel by a man he describes as père Louis—or Old Louis—and ironically praises as a “très splendide maquereau”—or magnificent pimp (p. 192, Merlhès, 1989). Louis showed off his prints of a Madonna and a Venus by the academic painter Bouguereau. The Arles census of 1886 shows that there were two brothels in Rue du Bout d’Arles, Virginie Chabaud’s No. 1, and apparently next door the smarter establishment of one Louis Farce, which had six prostitutes, two male servants and a cook. Gauguin and Vincent were presumably on social terms with Louis Farce. I go into more detail about the suggestion that the brothel owner Louis Farce might have sat for Vincent and Gauguin in my article “Gauguin and a Brothel in Arles,” Apollo (March 2006): 64–71. And I will expand on the effect that the sculptures of Saint-Trophîme I believe had on Gauguin—mentioned briefly in Chapter 4—in an article scheduled to appear in Apollo in Fall 2006.

  Hence my very tentative suggestion that he may be the individual painted by the two in December, previously identified as Joseph Ginoux. It is intriguing that Van Gogh seems here identified with Manet, since Degas’s etched portrait of Manet (c. 1861) looks like a partial template for Gauguin’s portrait of Vincent, the Painter of Sunflowers. It may well have been one of the Degas prints he asked Schuffenecker to send to Arles.

  2. Gauguin and “The Blue Sow”

  The title of this story from Le Courrier français was mis-transcribed in many editions of Van Gogh’s letters—as “La trace bleue” not “La Truie bleue” (though Pickvance has it correctly [New York, 1984]). Apart from the rather startling implications
as to Vincent’s feelings for Agostina Segatori—this story about a pig dressed up as a woman reminds him of her, according to letter 538a—it seems to me that it throws a lot of light on Gauguin’s hitherto mysterious painting In the Heat.

  My hypothesis—not an extravagant one—is that the magazine was still lying around in the Yellow House six weeks after Vincent had read it and that he recommended the story to Gauguin as he had to Theo. If Gauguin read it and it made an impression, it would help to explain not only the subject of this strange picture but also why Gauguin took pains to cultivate its author when they met, probably the following spring.

  The second literary connection I suggest, with The Sin of Father Mouret, by one of Vincent’s favored authors, Émile Zola, is more conjectural. But the reiteration of the word “chaleur” in the farmyard scene is highly suggestive in view of Gauguin’s title, En Pleine Chaleur (In the Heat). There is more below about this novel (the fact that a farm near Montmajour was named Le Paradou is in Allard, Michel, et al., Jeanne Calment: From Van Gogh’s Time to Ours: 122 Extraordinary Years).

  I have not mentioned in the text that the pose of the woman in the picture seems partly based on an etching of a brothel scene by Degas that Gauguin certainly owned (and associated with Arles, since it appears in the background of one of his late sunflower paintings [see Druick & Zegers, 2001–2, p. 353]). I go into more detail about this and also the effect I believe that the sculptures of Saint-Trophîme had on Gauguin—mentioned briefly in Chapter 4—in two articles scheduled to appear in Apollo in spring 2006.

  3. The Drama of the Ear and Vincent’s Madness

  Here I am offering not so much new fact as a new hypothesis. Vincent’s mad action—not just cutting off the ear, or part of it, but also taking it to a brothel—was too carefully structured to be haphazard. It was highly irrational, to be sure, but there was some hidden pattern.

  I rejected the notion that he cut off the ear because he was bothered by auditory hallucinations because it does not explain the sequel—the delivery of the ear. The theory that he was mimicking the removal of the bull’s ears at the climax of a corrida seems very dubious for the same reasons—all the more so because it is unclear whether Vincent saw such a bullfight in Arles. The event described in the letters is a Course Camarguaise, in which the animal does not die.

  We are therefore left with three possibilities. The close connections between Van Gogh’s life and work and Zola’s The Sin of Father Mouret were first pointed out in Tsukasa Kodera’s book Vincent van Gogh: Christianity versus Nature (pp. 79–92). Kodera, however, regarded the fact that this book also contained an ear amputation (and multiple ear-pullings of a character named Vincent) as coincidence. That seems highly unlikely to me; Professor W. N. Arnold (1992) also noted the Zola novel as a possible cause of Vincent’s self-mutilation. But why repeat the injury suffered by Brother Archangias?

  The association with Christ’s Agony in the Garden—the picture which Vincent repeatedly tried to paint but could not—has long been noted. But the ear amputation is suffered by a minor character—the armed man attacked by St. Peter. So why did Vincent inflict it on himself? The answer seems to be self-punishment. He associated the Agony in the Garden with his decision to leave Sien Hoornik. The basic conflict in the Zola novel is the same: a choice between a sexual partnership and a vocation.

  After the failure of his surrogate family with Gauguin, Vincent’s anger must have turned on himself. But to explain his subsequent actions, it is necessary to recall the details of the Ripper case. Again, the link between the ear amputation perpetrated on his victims by the Ripper and Vincent’s has been seen before. But not how it fitted in. The connection between ear-cutting and punishment was already in his mind. The Ripper case, like that of Prado, was big news that autumn.

  These sensational murder cases, and murder in general, were clearly on Vincent’s mind—hence the newspaper clipping with the words “The murderer took flight” pressed into Gauguin’s hand. Vincent’s characteristically oblique response was to reverse the Ripper’s horrible threats. The Ripper said he hated prostitutes and cut off their ears as a sign of his hostility. Vincent thought of them as “sisters of mercy” and gave one his own ear as a proof of his self-punishment. The fact that the Ripper’s “Dear Boss” letter, with its threat of ear-cutting, was printed in full in a newspaper Van Gogh often read has not been previously noted (Le Figaro, October 3, 1888, p. 3).

  I suggest there need not be any one reason why Vincent mutilated himself. All three above, I believe, were interacting in his mind. Indeed, I suggest it was characteristic of Vincent’s thought when agitated that he constantly connected very disparate things—often via his reading, as in the riff about Petrarch, Gauguin and the public gardens in Place Lamartine. This vertiginous thought-association is symptomatic of sufferers of bipolar affective disorder at certain points in their cycle.

  Selected Bibliography

  The literature on Van Gogh and Gauguin is vast. Below are listed the works I found most useful in writing this book.

  Allard, Michel, et al. Jeanne Calment: From Van Gogh’s Time to Ours: 122 Extraordinary Years, trans. Beth Coupland. New York and Basingstoke: W. H. Freeman, 1998.

  Arlésienne: Le Mythe? Arles: Musée Arlatan, 2000. An exhibition catalogue.

  Arnold, W. N. Vincent van Gogh: Chemicals, Crises and Creativity. Boston: Birkhauser, 1992.

  Bailey, Martin. “Drama at Arles: New Light on Van Gogh’s Self-Mutilation.” Apollo (September 2005): 30–41.

  Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. London: Saunders & Otley, 1838.

  Cate, Phillip Dennis, and Bogmila Welsh-Ovcharov. Émile Bernard: Bordellos and Prostitutes in Turn-of-the-Century French Art. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Zimmerli Art Museum, 1988. An exhibition catalogue.

  Crimpen, H. van, ed. Brief Happiness: The Correspondence of Theo van Gogh and Jo Bonger. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum / Waanders, 1999.

  Dorn, Roland. Décoration: Vincent van Goghs Werkreihe für das Gelbe Haus in Arles. Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: G. Olms, 1990.

  Dorn, Roland, et al. Van Gogh Face to Face: The Portraits. Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia: Detroit Institute of Arts, 2000–2001. An exhibition catalogue.

  Druick, Douglas W., and Peter Cort Zegers. Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South. Chicago and Amsterdam: Art Institute of Chicago, 2001–2002. An exhibition catalogue.

  Gauguin, Paul. Avant et après. Taravao, Tahiti: Éditions Avant et Après, 1989.

  ———. Gauguin écrivain (Noa Noa, Diverses choses, Ancien culte Mahorie) on DVD. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2003.

  ———. Paul Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, trans. Van Wyck Brooks. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921. (An English translation of Avant et Après.)

  ———. Paul Gauguin: 45 Lettres à Vincent, Théo et Jo Van Gogh, ed. Douglas Cooper. Lausanne: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1983.

  Gayford, Martin. “Gauguin and a Brothel in Arles.” Apollo (March 2006): 64–71.

  Guérin, Daniel, ed. Paul Gauguin: The Writings of a Savage. New York: Viking, 1978.

  Hartrick, Archibald. A Painter’s Pilgrimage Through Fifty Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939.

  Hulsker, Jan. Vincent and Theo Van Gogh: A Dual Biography. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Fuller Publications, 1993.

  ———. “Vincent’s Stay in the Hospitals at Arles and St Rémy.” Vincent 2 (1971): 21–39.

  Huyghe, René. Le Carnet de Paul Gauguin. Paris: Quatre Chemins-Editart, 1952. (Facsimile of sketchbook from Brittany and Arles, 1888–1891, Israel Museum, Jerusalem.)

  James, Henry. A Little Tour of France. Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1885.

  Jamison, Kay Redfield. Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. New York and London: Free Press, 1993.

  Janson, Leo, Hans Luijten, and Eric Fokke. “The Illness of Vincent van Gogh: A Previously Unknown Diagnosis.” Van Gogh MuseumJournal (2003): 113–119.

  Kodera, Tsukasa. Vincent van Gogh: Chris
tianity versus Nature. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1990.

  Lees, Sara, ed. Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet!: The Bruyas Collection from the Musée Fabre, Montpellier. Richmond, Williamstown, Dallas, San Francisco: Clark Institute, 2004. An exhibition catalogue.

  Merlhès, Victor. Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, 1887–1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées. Taravao, Tahiti: Editions Avant et Après, 1989.

  Morice, Charles. “La Truie bleue.” Le Courrier français (5e année, no. 38, 16th September 1888): 5–8.

  Pickvance, Ronald. Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986. An exhibition catalogue.

  ———. Van Gogh in Arles. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1984. An exhibition catalogue.

  Prather, Marla, and Charles Stuckey, eds. Gauguin: A Retrospective. New York: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 1987.

  Priou, J.-N. “Van Gogh et la Famille Roulin.” Revue des PTT de France (May-June 1955): 26–32.

  Rewald, John. Post-Impressionism from Van Gogh to Gauguin. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1962.

  Silverman, Debora. Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.

  Stein, Susan Alyson, ed. Van Gogh: A Retrospective. New York: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 1986.

  Stolwijk, Chris, and Richard Thomson. Theo van Gogh, 1857–1891: Art Dealer, Collector and Brother of Vincent. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum; Zwolle: Waanders, 1999. An exhibition catalogue.

  Stolwijk, Chris, et al. Vincent’s Choice: The Musée Imaginaire of Van Gogh. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum; Amsterdam University Press, 2003. An exhibition catalogue.

  Judith F. Stone. Sons of the Revolution: Radical Democrats in France, 1862–1914. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996.