The Yellow House Read online

  Courbet, Meeting

  It was a long, tiring day. The train got into Arles at 7:20 in the evening—just in time for supper. For Vincent, the journey had been extraordinarily exciting; for Gauguin—as may happen to those who revisit a place which they have greatly enjoyed—it was a disappointment. He felt that too many academic pictures had appeared at Montpellier in the intervening four years: “I returned in Vincent’s company,” he remembered, “and visited this museum again. What a change! Most of the old pictures had vanished, and everywhere their place was filled with—‘Acquired by the state, 3rd Medal.’ Cabanel and his whole school had invaded the museum.”

  Vincent’s excitement, on the other hand, was almost alarming. The very next day he wrote to Theo to tell him about the amazing discovery he had made: the brothers Van Gogh had had a forerunner, and his name was Alfred Bruyas.

  After telling Theo about the museum visit, Vincent went straight to the point: “Brias was a benefactor of artists, I shall say no more to you than that.” But he did say a great deal more. There were, in Vincent’s view, extraordinary parallels between himself, his brother and Bruyas (or Brias, as he spelled the name). To begin with, he had the same color hair.

  Noticing this, Vincent’s mind had rapidly made other connections; he deduced that there was a noble brotherhood of redheaded patrons of art, not unlike the Red-Headed League that Arthur Conan Doyle posited in a Sherlock Holmes story a few years later. But Vincent’s red-headed league was dedicated to protecting boldly experimental painters and bringing them to the South—just as Bruyas had Courbet and Vincent had Gauguin. In short, in the seventeen portraits of Bruyas’s sensitive, suffering features, Vincent saw himself.

  Once he had made that connection, in a flash of intuition he leaped to further connections: to a picture by Delacroix, in which he had long seen an image of his own predicament, and a poem by Alfred de Musset. This was all conveyed to Theo with telegraphic speed:

  In the portrait by Delacroix he is a gentleman with red beard and hair, confoundedly like you or me, and made me think of that poem by de Musset—“Wherever I touched the earth, a wretch clad in black came and sat by us, looking at us like a brother.” It would have the same effect on you. I am sure.

  It was the same poem, “December Night,” from which Gauguin had adopted the woman in black in his Human Miseries.

  Vincent was saying that Bruyas was a suffering pilgrim such as he and Theo were. Then Vincent’s mind flashed to yet another image:

  Please do go to that bookshop where they sell the lithographs by past and present artists, and see if you could get, not too dear, the lithograph after Delacroix’s Tasso in the Madhouse, since I think the figure there must have some affinity with this fine portrait of Brias.

  The relevance of Delacroix’s picture of Tasso to Vincent was obvious. The Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso lost his reason as a result of political machinations. He committed an act of violence and was confined to a cell for the rest of his life. Thus, Tasso represented the artist, unhinged and driven out by an uncaring society. In the picture by Delacroix, he looked quite like Bruyas—and also Vincent in his most recent self-portrait, bearded and with unruly hair.

  As Delacroix represented it, the inhabitants of Ferrara could mock him through the bars. If the locals were not yet peering through the ground-floor windows of the Yellow House to mock the inmate, they soon would be—especially the children, with their taunt of “fou rou” (mad redhead).

  Later, looking back on his days in the Yellow House, Vincent regretted not taking a revolver to his persecutors. “Had one killed gawking idiots like that,” he believed, most implausibly, “as an artist one would certainly have been acquitted.” He wished he had defended his studio more vigorously: “It would have been better had I done that, but I was cowardly and drunk—ill too, but I wasn’t brave.”

  The letter to Theo about the Musée Fabre whirled from subject to subject even more than was normal in Vincent’s correspondence. As it went on, it became quite worryingly odd. First Vincent quoted a beautiful saying from the novelist and art critic Eugène Fromentin, but one that was strange in this context, because it suggested that Vincent and Gauguin were bewitched: “We were in the midst of magic, for as Fromentin well says: Rembrandt is above all else a magician.”

  Then, after these words, Vincent later inserted another startling line in smaller handwriting: “and Delacroix a man of God spreading fire and brimstone in the name of God who didn’t give a bloody damn.” This bizarre exclamation was without parallel in Vincent’s letters. It was as if for a moment he had lost the control he normally maintained, at least while writing, and revealed the wild and angry thoughts swirling within his mind. Delacroix was, of course—like Bruyas, Monticelli and others—another predecessor in whom Vincent saw himself.

  After this, the letter continued calmly, though somewhat weirdly: “I tell you this in connection with our Dutch friends de Haan and Isaacson, who have so sought after and loved Rembrandt, so as to encourage you all to pursue your researches. You must not be discouraged in them.”

  This was peculiar, because there were no works by Rembrandt in the Musée Fabre. But there was a hidden link in Vincent’s mind between Courbet’s Meeting, Gauguin, Rembrandt and Delacroix: a “strange and magnificent ‘Portrait of a Man,’ by Rembrandt” in the Lacaze collection at the Louvre (in fact, scholars later decided, not by Rembrandt at all).

  This painting depicted a man with a distant look in his eye and, like Courbet in his picture, a pilgrim’s staff. The sight of Meetingwas presumably what brought it to Vincent’s mind. He had pointed out to Gauguin that he saw in this Rembrandt a family resemblance to Delacroix and to Gauguin himself.

  “I do not know why,” he added, “but I always call this portrait ‘The Traveler,’ or ‘The Man Come from Far.’” The connections that whirled about within Vincent’s head were becoming looser and looser; with bewildering speed, pictures he had seen, people he knew and texts he had read were blurring together. Vincent, Gauguin and Delacroix merged into one solitary outsider.

  This image of the “man come from far” had been in Vincent’s imagination for twelve years—since he had preached his first sermon in Richmond, England. That had been a meditation on the theme of pilgrimage, ending with these words: “We are pilgrims on the earth and strangers—we come from afar and we are going far.” So, to summarize Vincent’s sequence of thought: Bruyas= Vincent (and Theo); Courbet=Gauguin=Delacroix=Rembrandt’s portrait=pilgrim=Vincent. It was the logic of delirium.

  Vincent wanted Theo to pass on an important message to the most eminent artist in Paris:

  Say to Degas that Gauguin and I have been to see the portrait of Brias by Delacroix at Montpellier, for we must make bold to believe that what is, is, and the portrait of Brias by Delacroix is as like you and me as a new brother.

  It was most improbable Theo did so but, if he had, Degas might have had second thoughts about coming to Arles.

  Vincent would have written to Isaacson and de Haan, the Dutch painters Theo had befriended, as well, to tell them about everything he had seen and thought in Montpellier, if he had felt “the necessary electric force.” Later, looking back on these days, he thought of himself as “extremely tired and charged with electricity.” This surging force was fighting exhaustion within him. Sometimes he bristled with sparks, sometimes not.

  Strangely, after that contentious trip to the Musée Fabre, Gauguin was feeling better. The next morning Vincent asked him how he was, and Gauguin replied “that he felt his old self coming back.” This pleased Vincent greatly. Instantly he saw Gauguin’s rise in morale in terms of his own experience: “When I came here myself last winter, tired out and almost stunned in mind, before ever being able to begin to recover I had a strain of inward suffering too.”

  Vincent hoped that everything might still turn out well, but he was far from confident. “As for founding a way of life for artists chumming it together,” he remarked darkly to Theo, “you see such
queer things, and I will wind up with what you are always saying—time will show.”

  Before Vincent sent his disquieting missive, Gauguin had composed a much more prosaic letter to Theo. He withdrew his previous announcement that he was leaving Arles for Paris immediately and would therefore now like all the money owing to him. “Please consider,” he began, “my journey to Paris as a figment of the imagination and thus the letter I wrote to you as a bad dream.”

  Gauguin went on to discuss a number of mundane business matters: he thought Theo had forgotten to deduct the price of the picture frame from a statement of account he had been sent. If the Human Miseries picture was developing cracks, it was doubtless because of the priming: “If necessary send the picture back to me and I will put it in good order.”

  At this point, Gauguin revealed that his departure from Arles was postponed, not cancelled. “I am increasingly nostalgic for the Antilles and naturally as soon as I’ve sold a few things I’ll go over there.”

  Finally, he made the offer of the portrait of Vincent, the Painterof Sunflowers, as a gift, which kept the whole tone “cordial,” as he signed himself after noting that, “We have been to Montpellier and Vincent will write you his impressions.”

  Theo would have received both of these letters on Wednesday, December 19, but for once his attention was entirely distracted from events in Arles by the drama of his own life. Theo was going to be married.

  For years, since before Vincent arrived in Paris, he had been secretly in love with Johanna Bonger, sister of his Dutch friend in Paris, Andries Bonger. In July of the previous year he had declared his feelings to her, but to Johanna, or Jo, they had come as a complete surprise. She felt she could scarcely say yes to his proposal that she share his life of intellectual stimulation, working for the good cause of the new art. Furthermore, at that time, she was in love with somebody else.

  At the beginning of November, unknown to Theo, Jo—who had been nursing a secret infatuation for him in the Netherlands—moved to Paris. That week, when madness was threatening in the Yellow House, the two of them met once more. Johanna, it turned out, had engineered the meeting. One thing rapidly led to another, as Theo wrote euphorically to his mother on Friday the twenty-first.

  Gauguin, Artist’s Mother

  Johanna had said she loved him and would take him as he was. “I am actually very worried,” Theo added with characteristic self-deprecation, “that she is making a mistake & that she will be disappointed in me, but I am so very happy, & I will try my best to understand her and make her happy.” That day Jo and Theo wrote to her parents asking permission to marry.

  Meanwhile, in Arles, relations were once more fraying. Gauguin wrote to Schuffenecker, asking whether he could put him up at his house in Paris if it became necessary to leave Arles in a hurry. But, work continued.

  Perhaps it was at this time that Gauguin painted a portrait of his mother, Aline. He did this—very unusually for him—from a photograph; just as Vincent, also extremely uncharacteristically, had earlier painted his own mother.

  Gauguin’s painting was based on a photograph of his mother as a young woman, around 1840, before he had even been born. At that date Aline Gauguin née Chazal had been only fifteen. She had a traumatic life. Her father, André Chazal, was a figure of fear, having kidnapped and attempted to rape her. He almost murdered her mother, who never entirely recovered from having been shot in the chest and died when Aline was nineteen years old. Her husband, Clovis Gauguin, a republican journalist, died on the family’s voyage to Peru in 1849, when Paul was one year old.

  In the painting Aline looks very young and distinctly exotic. There is a hint of Goya about the image, in accordance with Gauguin’s memory of his mother as “a very noble Spanish lady.” The period in Peru was the time at which they were closest. On the family’s return to France in 1855, the fatherless, Spanish-speaking Paul began to prove difficult. He was sent away to the seminary in Orléans when he was eleven and went to sea at seventeen.

  While he was on a voyage, his mother died, in 1867. Later, during the Franco-Prussian war, her house at St. Cloud had been destroyed in a fire. Perhaps, therefore, this photograph was the only image of his mother that Gauguin had.

  That didn’t explain, however, why he exaggerated her exotic look, giving her the nose and lips of Delacroix’s black Aline. He also altered his mother’s costume so that it had a somewhat Arlési-enne appearance, her headdress and gaze close to Vincent’s summer picture of a teenage girl, La Mousmé. During the process of painting, he changed the background from red to yellow.

  Odder still was the next picture in which he included his mother. Eighteen months later, anticipating his departure to the South Pacific, Gauguin painted an Exotic Eve. Her naked body was derived from a Buddhist sculpture, but her face—down to details of the hair, including the little curl in front of the ear—came from his painting of Aline Gauguin.

  11. The Crisis

  December 22–25

  Vincent had had an idea for a new picture featuring Madame Roulin. It had come to him while he was talking to Gauguin about Pierre Loti’s book Icelandic Fisherman. They discussed the Breton fishermen and “their mournful isolation, exposed to all dangers, alone on the sad sea.” Vincent frequently compared life—especially his own life—to a frail vessel at sea, tossed by every storm. During that week in Arles, he must have felt that the waves were mounting ominously.

  “Following those intimate talks of ours,” he recalled to Gauguin:

  the idea came to me to paint a picture in such a way that sailors, who are at once children and martyrs, seeing it in the cabin of their Icelandic fishing boat, would feel the old sense of being rocked come over them and remember their own lullabies.

  A passage at the start of Loti’s book did indeed describe the snugness of the sailor’s cabin—a warm refuge not unlike the studio in the Yellow House. Even when the night was cold and wet, inside the cabin, there was a comfortable fug of tobacco smoke. The men’s merry conversation, over their wine and cider, was of love, sex and marriage. Above them there was a holy figure: a china statuette of the Virgin Mary—painted “with very simple art” in red and blue—was fastened to a bracket, in the place of honor. “She must have listened to many an ardent prayer in deadly hours,” Loti wrote.

  But the picture Vincent actually painted depicted not a cabin in a fishing boat but Augustine Roulin sitting in the best chair in the Yellow House—Gauguin’s chair—and holding in her hands the string which rocked her baby’s cradle. The cradle itself was outside the picture—indeed, anyone not familiar with the mechanics of cradle-rocking would not guess it was there.

  In Vincent’s mind, the occupants of this little cot were Breton fishermen. “I’m sure,” he later explained to Gauguin, “that if one were to put this canvas just as it is in a fishing boat, even one from Iceland, there would be some among the fishermen who would feel they were there, inside the cradle.” No doubt Vincent imagined himself being thus soothed and comforted.

  Behind Madame Roulin, however, was not the wall of a cabin, nor the icy waves of the North Atlantic, but stridently patterned French wallpaper. The people of Arles were fond of loud wallpaper, but Vincent’s use of this background may also have been linked with yet another book.

  It was a Dutch novel, De Kleine Johannes by Frederik van Eeden, the first volume of which had come out in 1885, the year before Vincent moved to Paris. It dealt with the pilgrimage through life of the eponymous central character, who grew up—like Vincent—in idyllic countryside. During his happy, rural childhood, Johannes slept in a bedroom decorated with huge flowers in “gaudy” colors. That was what Vincent painted now, which implied it was Johannes in the cradle, as well as the fishermen, or could have meant, again, that it was really Vincent.

  Augustine Roulin sat again for this picture. No real wallpaper, however garish, was quite as extreme as the background of this painting. Behind Madame Roulin a luxuriant garden rears up. Huge white blossoms—dahlias, according
to Vincent—sway on long thin stalks, tendrils and leaves twine against a background of thousands of small blue-green forms, each with a red dot in the middle, like a bud, or a pod, or a breast.

  La Berceuse

  Nor does this exhaust the references that Vincent poured into this picture. There was an echo of the santon figures in the crèches lit with candles all over Arles. He compared the picture with a cheap religious print, a chromolithograph and barrel-organ music.

  It also suggested the ex-voto figures of female saints giving blessing from a boat that he had seen in the church of Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer on the coast of the Camargue. Then there was a memory of a stained-glass window—Mary, Star of the Sea—he had admired in Antwerp three years before, and a suggestion of Flemish Madonnas he had also seen there by painters such as Van Eyck. Perhaps there was an echo, in this densely woven picture, of the embroideries described in Zola’s The Dream.

  He imagined hanging several versions of La Berceuse, his portrait of Madame Roulin, with his Sunflowers in between, so the whole would amount to an altarpiece of seven or nine canvases. By and by, he demonstrated this arrangement to M. Roulin. The Sunflowers, those radiant southern blooms, would act as “candelabras” between the multiple mothers—just as the Christmas crèches were displayed with candles on either side.

  Vincent wanted the picture to be equivalent to a holy image of the early Christian era, yet modern. He thought perhaps it should be displayed on the wall of a sailors’ tavern in a fishing village such as Stes-Maries. He hoped it would comfort the suffering. “Ah!” he exclaimed to Gauguin a fortnight later, “my dear friend, to achieve in painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner has already done… an art that offers consolation for the broken-hearted! There are still just a few who feel it as you and I do!!!”

  The strange aspect of it was that all these tumbling associations which evoked such powerful feelings in the artist were virtually invisible. All that could be seen on the canvas was a boldly stylized, audaciously colored portrait of a woman sitting in a chair.