The Yellow House Read online

  “Gayford deftly charts how the differences in temperament quickly became divisive, and his narrative shifts subtly from art history to psychological thriller.”

  —MICHAEL PRODGER, TELEGRAPH ON SUNDAY

  FROM OCTOBER TO DECEMBER OF 1888, Paul Gauguin shared a yellow house in the south of France with Vincent van Gogh. Never before or since have two such towering artists occupied so small a space. They were the Odd Couple of art history—one calm, the other volatile—and the denouement of their living arrangement was explosive. Two months after Gauguin arrived in Provence, Van Gogh suffered a psychological crisis that culminated in his cutting off part of an ear. He was institutionalized for most of the rest of his short life and never saw Gauguin again.

  During the brief, exhilarating period they worked together in Arles, these not-yet-famous artists created a stream of masterpieces within the shared studio—including Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, which decorated Gauguin’s bedroom wall. Making use of new evidence and Van Gogh’s voluminous correspondence, Martin Gayford describes not only how these two hallowed artists painted and exchanged ideas, but also the texture of their everyday lives. He tells us what they cooked and how they budgeted their meager finances and entertained themselves, and he movingly relates their inner fears and dreams. Gayford also makes a persuasive analysis of Van Gogh’s mental illness—the probable bipolar affliction that led him to commit suicide at the age of thirty-seven. The Yellow House is a singular biographical work, as dramatic and vibrant as the artists’ pictures.

  MARTIN GAYFORD was educated at Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute of the University of London. He is the coeditor of The Grove Book of Art Writing. Currently chief art critic for Bloomberg Europe, Gayford lives in Cambridge, England, with his wife and two children.

  ALSO BY MARTIN GAYFORD

  The Grove Book of Art Writing

  (with Karen Wright, eds.)

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2006 by Martin Gayford

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

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  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-316-08720-9

  To Josephine

  Contents

  ALSO BY MARTIN GAYFORD

  Copyright

  Illustrations

  1. The Arrival

  2. Beginning and Carrying On

  3. Lessons among the Tombs

  4. Collaboration

  5. Perilous Memories

  6. Divisions

  7. Musicians in Color

  8. Painting a Family

  9. Portrait of the Artist

  10. Looking at Art

  11. The Crisis

  12. Aftermath

  Notes on Sources

  Selected Bibliography

  Picture Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Illustrations

  Unless otherwise stated, works are by Van Gogh.

  p. 4 Gauguin, Self-Portrait “Les Misérables”—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 6 Self-Portrait dedicated to Paul Gauguin—Fogg Art Museum, Harvard

  p. 15 Sunflowers—National Gallery, London

  p. 17 Sketch of Still Life with Coffeepot—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 18 The Yellow House—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 20 Night Café—Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

  p. 30 Sketch of the Sower and the Old Yew Tree in letter 558b—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 32 Photograph of Theo—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 35 Gauguin, Vision of the Sermon—National Galleries of Scotland

  p. 55 Photograph of Gauguin—Musée Gauguin, Papeari, Tahiti

  p. 60 Gauguin, Les Alyscamps—Musée d’Orsay, Paris

  p. 64 Allée des Tombeaux (Les Alyscamps)—Private Collection

  p. 73 Falling Leaves—Private Collection

  p. 74 Falling Leaves—Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

  p. 85 Gauguin, Drawing of Madame Ginoux—Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

  p. 88 L’Arlésienne—Musée d’Orsay, Paris

  p. 101 Red Vineyard—Pushkin Museum, Moscow

  p. 104 Gauguin, Human Miseries—Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen

  p. 112 Gauguin, Night Café—Pushkin Museum, Moscow

  p. 116 Brothel Scene—The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania

  p. 124 A Memory of the Garden, letter sketch—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 130 Gauguin, In the Heat—Private Collection

  p. 139 Reader, letter sketch—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 144 Spectators at the Arena—Hermitage, St. Petersburg

  p. 148 Gauguin, Washerwomen—Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao

  p. 150 Photograph of Gauguin in studio—Musée Gauguin, Papeari, Tahiti

  p. 160 Van Gogh’s Chair—National Gallery, London

  p. 163 Gauguin’s Chair—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 176 Drawing: Reclining Nude, 1887—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 180 Road with Cypress and Star, letter sketch—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 185 Drawing: the Sower (June)—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 186: The Sower, letter sketch—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 192 Gauguin, drawings of Police Commissioner from Arles Sketchbook—The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

  p. 197 Gauguin, Madame Roulin—Saint Louis Art Museum

  p. 198 Madame Roulin—Collection Oskar Reinhardt, Winterthur, Switzerland

  p. 201 Drawing of Roulin—Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles

  p. 205 Madame Roulin with Her Baby Marcelle—Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

  p. 209 Gauguin, drawings of Menagerie from Arles Sketchbook—The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

  p. 213 Armand Roulin—Museum Folkwang, Essen

  p. 214 Camille Roulin—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 216 Photographs: Armand, Camille, Augustine and Marcelle Roulin—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 219 Sorrow, lithograph—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 224 The Dance Hall—Musée d’Orsay, Paris

  p. 225 Gauguin, Arlésiennes—The Art Institute of Chicago

  p. 227 Portrait of a Man—Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

  p. 227 Gauguin, Portrait of a Man—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 231 Self-Portrait—Private Collection

  p. 232 Gauguin, Self-Portrait—National Gallery of Art, Washington

  p. 233 Gauguin, Jottings from Arles Sketchbook—The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

  p. 239 Gauguin, Painter of Sunflowers—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 243 Portrait of Gauguin—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  p. 253 Delacroix, Aline, The Mulatto Woman (also known as Aspasie)—Musée Fabre, Montpellier

  p. 256 Delacroix, Portrait of Alfred Bruyas—Musée Fabre, Montpellier

  p. 258 Courbet, Meeting—Musée Fabre, Montpellier

  p. 264 Gauguin, Artist’s Mother—Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart

  p. 269 La Berceuse—Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

  p. 291 Gauguin, Self-Portrait Jug—Museum of Decorative Arts, Copenhagen

  p. 294 Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear—Courtauld Gallery, London

  p. 313 Photograph of Yellow House as café—Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  1. The Arrival

  October 23, 1
888

  While it was still dark, shortly after five o’clock in the morning, a train clanked into the station at Arles and a solitary, exhausted passenger got out. He had been traveling for nearly two days. His journey had begun the previous Sunday in Pont-Aven, near the Atlantic coast of Brittany, almost seven hundred miles away. Since then he had moved by stages from a damp, green region on the Atlantic coast to a flat plain near the point where the Rhône River met the Mediterranean.

  The route had taken him right across France, via Nantes and Tours, Clermont Ferrand and Lyon. Although he was now in the sunny south, the night air was chilly—only 40°F. He stepped out of the station, turned left and walked under the railway bridge, then along the street until he came to a large open square. On his right was the embankment of a wide river—the Rhône. To the left was the house he was heading for, its shutters still closed. But just at the junction of the street and the square there were signs of animation in an all-night café. He opened the door.

  It was bright inside because of the lamps hanging from the ceiling. The walls were red, the floorboards bare. Around the sides of the room were tables topped with marble; in the center was a big billiard table; and at the back of the room a small bar covered with assorted bottles. On the wall above, over the entrance to an inner room, hung a handsome clock, still showing not much after five o’clock. The owner looked at the newcomer, then exclaimed, “You’re the pal. I recognize you!”

  The speaker, Joseph Ginoux, was proprietor of the café—a new establishment that had opened only at the beginning of the year. He was talking to an artist with some reputation in the circles of the avant-garde. Ginoux had identified him by means that—even in the 1880s—were old-fashioned. Earlier, he had been shown a painted portrait and been told to look out for its subject, who would soon be arriving.

  Paul Gauguin settled down in the Café de la Gare to wait for dawn. When the sun finally rose, he went out, crossed over to number 2 Place Lamartine, whose yellow walls and green-painted woodwork could now be clearly seen, and knocked on the door. It was opened by Vincent van Gogh.

  Gauguin’s arrival was, it was safe to say, among the most exhilarating but also the most anxious moments of Vincent’s life. No sooner had he signed the lease for the Yellow House, almost six months before, than Vincent had started to evolve a plan. He didn’t want to live in the house alone; he desperately yearned for company. Right from the start, Gauguin had come to mind as the ideal companion. On that very day he had written to his younger brother, Theo, describing the house and floating a suggestion: “Perhaps Gauguin would come south?”

  The notion rapidly grew into an obsession. From the end of May for the following five months, by letter, Vincent plotted, cajoled, argued, pleaded and insisted that Gauguin journey to Arles and join him. He persuaded Theo—who was already supporting Vincent himself—to offer the penurious painter a deal: free board and lodging in exchange for pictures provided he agreed to live in 2 Place Lamartine, the Yellow House. Theo was working as an art dealer in Paris—one of the few who supported experimental painting—so he was in a position to help Gauguin a great deal.

  In reply, Gauguin accepted, then—time and again—postponed his departure. A correspondence developed between the two painters, far more intense than their actual, physical acquaintance in Paris the previous winter. Ideas were exchanged and adopted, new paintings described. Vincent was euphoric with the hope that Gauguin would soon appear and cast down by the fear that he would not.

  Recently—since Gauguin’s departure had definitely been announced—Vincent had been consumed by the anxiety that, when the other actually arrived, he would not think much of Arles. Gauguin, Vincent feared, would find the area unsatisfactory in comparison to Brittany. He might find the scenery lacking in the rich possibilities he had discovered in the north. Instead of joining in Vincent’s project and offering his companionship, there was the tormenting possibility that Gauguin would be angry and disdainful. Vincent’s nervous tension had reached such a point that he feared he would become ill. Some explosion threatened. And now here Gauguin was, actually at the door. He entered.

  The two men were a little disconcerted by each other. Both had built up their expectations, based on the evidence of recent paintings. In advance of Gauguin’s arrival, Vincent had proposed an exchange of portraits. Gauguin had dispatched one south—the picture that had been shown to the café owner, Ginoux—and Vincent had in turn sent a painting of himself north to Brittany. But those self-portraits were not simply evidence of how the two men actually looked or who they actually were. One was a forty-year-old Frenchman with an estranged family and a background in financial trading, the other a thirty-five-year-old Dutchman who had tried his hand at various tasks. Both had come to painting relatively late in life. But the pictures were indices of how Gauguin and Van Gogh imagined themselves. Each had presented his image in character, as a figure from literature. One thing they had in common was an intense fantasy life in which their own real lives merged with their reading.

  Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait “Les Misérables”

  In the corner of his picture, Gauguin had painted above his signature the words “Les Misérables”—a reference to the best-known of all French novels, Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. This was an easy clue, as such things go. Gauguin meant to present himself as an artistic equivalent to the hero of that novel, Jean Valjean—convicted criminal, outcast, martyr and saint. Despite his having written the name of the novel on the picture, Gauguin still doubted whether all the nuances of his meaning would be understood.

  So, ahead of the arrival of the portrait itself, Vincent had received a letter of explanation from Brittany in which Gauguin described the crucial aspects of the self-portrait: “The face of a bandit like Jean Valjean, strong and badly dressed, who has a nobleness and gentleness hidden within. Passionate blood suffuses the face as it does a creature in rut, and the eyes are enveloped by tones as red as the fire of a forge, which indicate the inspiration like molten lava which fills the soul of painters such as us.”

  The yellow wallpaper behind, with its bouquets of flowers, “like that of a young girl’s bedroom,” symbolized—he went on—“our artistic virginity.” As he saw it, Jean Valjean—oppressed by society but full of love and power—was just like an Impressionist artist of the day.

  And so, Gauguin concluded, in giving Valjean his own features, he was also painting a collective portrait of the tiny band of rebellious modern painters, who were poverty-stricken for the most part, victims of society. They remained artistically as pure as virgins and were victims who responded to suffering—in a Christ-like manner—by doing good. They were creating the art of the future.

  On reading Gauguin’s description of his self-portrait, Vincent had concluded that the picture must be a masterpiece. But when it arrived he found it worryingly dark and sad. It was too close an echo of the anxious, harried feelings he had himself.

  Vincent’s self-portrait was even harder to decode. He had written no clue to its meaning on the canvas. He had simply presented his head and shoulders—his hair and beard unusually short—against a jade-green background. Of all the self-portraits he painted, this was the oddest.

  Characteristically, when he described it to Gauguin, it was the color that came first to mind. “I have a portrait of myself, all ash-gray,” he had written three weeks before. This effect was the result of mixing emerald green and orange on a pale jade background, all harmonized with his reddish-brown clothes—a difficult combination for Vincent, which had given him trouble.

  In the flesh of Vincent’s neck and face, delicate strokes of light green and pale rose mingled with the ginger of his hair and its reflections. From a distance, these marks of the brush fused into a unity that vibrated with life. The touches of paint followed the contours of his face. And those features themselves were gaunt, the cheekbones strongly projecting.

  Self-Portrait dedicated to Paul Gauguin

  An opalescent green seemed to radiate f
rom the head, forming an icy halo. Vincent’s eyes—yellow-brown, not blue-green as in his other portraits—were pulled up on either side in catlike fashion, brush strokes radiating around them like lines of magnetic force. Their look was elusive. Was it nervous? Or timid? Or determined? It was an enigmatic self-depiction, with a touch of the convict or some other kind of institutional inmate about it.

  He signed it, as he always did those pictures with which he was particularly pleased, and those he presented as gifts, “Vincent”; the signature was later partially erased. Partly because no French tongue could negotiate his surname, and perhaps also partly because he felt disconnected from his pious, bourgeois Dutch family, he was always simply Vincent.

  Few observers would have guessed the guise that the painter took on in this picture. Vincent had, he wrote to Gauguin, “aimed at the character of a simple bonze worshipping the eternal Buddha.” That is, he had painted himself as a Japanese monk. No persona, on the face of it, might seem less probable for Vincent, an avant-garde Dutch painter living in the South of France. The idea had come from a book—then newly published and widely read—by the best-selling author Pierre Loti: Madame Chrysanthème.

  This book purported to be the memoirs of a French naval officer whose ship was temporarily stationed in Tokyo and who took a Japanese mistress in a purely financial arrangement. She became fond of him, and he almost developed a fondness for her; then he departed. The story was later to serve as the basis for Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly.

  Buddhist monks were not the heroes of Madame Chrysanthème; they merely had walk-on parts. They appear in a procession and in a later visit to a monastery. The life of such a Buddhist monk, the book revealed, did not exclude a little indulgence. The monks were fond of French liqueurs, and pictures of women. But the essential message of Vincent’s self-portrait was that the sitter was leading a calm contemplative life. He was a member of a spiritual order, under the discipline of a superior.