The Yellow House Page 27

  On Saturday the fifth, Vincent’s doctor, Félix Rey, came with a couple of medical friends to view Vincent’s paintings. They were, Vincent reported, “uncommonly quick at understanding at least what complementaries are.” Vincent was beginning to take a strong interest in Dr. Rey. He was planning to paint his portrait.

  Forty years later a journalist caught up with the now elderly doctor, who had a slightly different recollection of his visits with his former patient:

  He often complained that he was the only painter in town and therefore could not talk to anyone about his art. For lack of such a colleague, he would talk to me about complementary colors. But I really could not understand why red should not be red, and green not green!

  A couple of days later, on Monday the seventh, Vincent was discharged from the hospital and back living in the Yellow House. He celebrated by having dinner with Roulin at the Restaurant Venissat. Altogether, it seemed that Vincent had been positively refreshed by his stay in the hospital; he embarked on painting again, beginning with some still lifes and two self-portraits, in which he was bandaged, shaken and muffled against the January chill.

  He also painted Roulin again, and young Dr. Rey. The latter portrait had a strange feature: the young doctor’s ear was almost entirely blood-red.

  However, Vincent’s return to the Yellow House was not to last. By the third week in January his mood had begun to slump. The old financial anxieties were back. He itemized his expenditures since he had come out of the hospital at length—so much for paying for the blood to be washed out of the linen, so much to pay the attendants who changed his dressings, and so on. As a result, he had run out of money and gone without food for days. There was more bad news: Roulin had been promoted, and would leave to take up a new post in Marseille.

  Vincent brooded on Gauguin’s departure, his sending of the telegram summoning Theo. In a letter, he hinted at grave flaws in his ex-housemate’s character:

  On various occasions I have seen him do things which you and I would not let ourselves do, because we have consciences that feel differently about things. I have heard one or two things said of him, but having seen him at very, very close quarters, I think that he is carried away by his imagination, perhaps by pride, but… practically irresponsible.

  Then Vincent’s anger faded. He reflected that all artists were a little unbalanced. “Old Gauguin and I understand each other basically, and if we are a bit mad, what of it?” They would be vindicated—he thought, entirely correctly—by their pictures. Vincent wrote to Gauguin advising that he should consult a doctor, as he too was doubtless a little cracked.

  Towards the end of the month Vincent finally completed La Berceuse, the hands of which had been left unfinished at the time of the attack. Then he started to produce replicas of the composition. It was at this point that Vincent went to see the Provençal Christmas play and described hearing Roulin singing to his baby. He thought of himself as being like a santon figure from a crèche, made out of cardboard with a papier-mâché ear, too flimsy to go traveling about the world any longer. He had lullabies on his mind again.

  Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear

  Again La Berceuse seemed perilous to his sanity; it called forth emotions that were “too strong.” He had completed two more versions of the portrait and was working on a third on Sunday, February 3, when he wrote a sad letter to Theo. His hopes of recovery had drained away. Evidently, Vincent felt the same old agitation rising in him again. Waves of mania passed over him, but he tried to disguise them:

  I have moments when I am twisted with enthusiasm or madness or prophecy, like a Greek oracle on his tripod. I display great presence of mind then in my words, and speak like the Arlésiennes, but in spite of all that, my spirits are very low.

  Four days later, he was back in the hospital. This was effectively the end of his free life in Arles.

  Another doctor, Deloy, wrote a short report on February 7. His patient, he said, was suffering from a state of complete over-excitement, a veritable frenzy in which he spoke incoherent words and failed to recognize the people around him. Vincent was prey to auditory hallucinations in which he heard reproachful voices; he was in the grip of a fixed idea that the people around him were trying to poison him.

  Ten days later he was once again pronounced recovered and released, but this time his neighbors were horrified. A petition of protest was organized and delivered to the Mayor, Monsieur Tardieu. “We the undersigned, inhabitants of the city of Arles,” it began:

  have the honour of informing you that a certain Vood [Vincent], a Dutch citizen, landscape painter, and inhabitant of the said place, has for some time and on several occasions given sundry proofs that he is not in possession of his mental faculties.

  Essentially, they protested that Vincent was just too alarming as a neighbor:

  He indulges in excessive drinking after which he finds himself in such a state of over-excitement that he knows neither what he is doing nor what he is saying. His instability frightens all the inhabitants of that quarter, and above all the women and the children.

  The petition suggested that he should either return to his family, who would look after him, or he should be sent to an asylum. It was signed by thirty people, a large proportion of the little community around Place Lamartine. Prominently legible in the middle column was the name of Joseph Ginoux. When this was received, Vincent was again locked up, after a week of independent life, and there was an investigation by the police into the accusations that had been made.

  On March 3, central police Commissioner Joseph d’Ornano presented his conclusions. Five witnesses had been questioned. Bernard Soulé, who lived at No. 53, the hotel on Avenue de Montmajour, and was the manager of the Yellow House on behalf of the landlord, testified that Vincent’s reasoning was impaired and his speech incoherent. He also said he touched the local women and wandered into their houses. Marguerite Favier, who ran the grocer’s shop in the other half of the same building as the Yellow House and from whom Vincent had bought the ingredients for Gauguin to cook, had similar complaints. Jeanne Conial, a forty-two-year-old dressmaker living at 24 Place Lamartine added that Vincent had grabbed her on the pavement outside the Yellow House and lifted her into the air. The final witness simply supported what all the others had said. He was Joseph Ginoux, the café owner. Vincent never found out about this betrayal; he remained on good terms with the Ginouxs until the day he died. They looked after his furniture, whose fate continued to concern him.

  As a result of the petition and the police investigation, Vincent was locked up in a private cell in the hospital without tobacco, books or paints. Once again, after a couple of weeks, he regained some semblance of lucidity. This time, however, there was to be no rapid return to normal life.

  On Saturday, March 23, he had a visitor from another world. His old friend Paul Signac, the Pointillist painter, was passing through Arles on his way to work on the Mediterranean coast at Cassis. This was a sign that Vincent, all along, had been right to think the South of France was the new land of art. From now on, with increasing frequency, the painters of Paris would take flight like migratory birds for Provence and Languedoc. The Fauves, the Cubists, Matisse, Picasso: all of them would follow Vincent to the South.

  He and Signac went to the Yellow House, which had been sealed by the police. After a negotiation with the authorities, Signac made a forcible entry and was able to inspect the treasures of painting that were lying within. Signac did not quite know what to make of what he saw. Many, he reported to Theo, were “very good,” and all “very curious.” Much later, he remembered only the “splendor” of the whitewashed walls, on which Vincent’s paintings “flowered in their full freshness.” The next day, the two men went for a walk. Signac suggested that Vincent might join him in Cassis.

  There it was: a chance once again to set up a studio in the South with a new companion, another gifted painter fascinated by color. But Vincent did not take it. His confidence had gone. He no longer felt u
p to living with another person, nor to living alone. He began to see himself as a person with chronic mental problems: “Now and then,” he recorded, “there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head.”

  Vincent now lived in fear of another attack. He decided that he would prefer to spend the next few months in a nursing home. On his behalf, the Protestant clergyman in Arles, Rev. Salles—who was looking after his interests—made contact with an institution a few miles away, outside St. Rémy.

  Before he departed, Vincent paid a visit to Place Lamartine, where the “real neighbors”—presumably the Ginouxs and Marguerite Favier at the grocer’s shop—assured him that they had not signed the petition nor cooperated with the police investigation. But Vincent was beginning to feel that the petitioners had had a point. Part of his anxiety about living outside an institution was that he might act oddly and make scenes.

  Since Christmas, he told his sister Wil, “I have had in all four great crises, during which I didn’t in the least know what I said, what I wanted and what I did.” Sometimes he had “moods of indescribable mental anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time and the fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instant.”

  But the problems, he now saw, had been going on for longer than just the previous few months. “I have been ‘in a hole’ ‘all my life,’” he told Theo. “And my mental condition is not only vague now, but has always been so, so that whatever is done for me, I cannot think things out so as to balance my life.”

  On Wednesday, May 1, the anniversary of that exciting day when he had signed the contract for the Yellow House, he was back there, packing up his pictures. While he had been in the hospital the Rhône had flooded—as it almost had in November—to within a stone’s throw of the house, which was uninhabited and unheated. When Vincent returned, “water and saltpeter were oozing from the walls.”

  Some of the paintings had been damaged by the damp and, over those, Vincent stuck newspaper before putting them in a packing case together with Gauguin’s fencing masks and gloves and the pictures his friend had left behind.

  Vincent felt terrible sadness, since:

  not only the studio had come to grief, but even the studies that would have been reminders of it. It is all so final, and my urge to found something very simple but lasting was so strong. I was fighting a losing battle, or rather it was weakness of character on my part, for I am left with feelings of deep remorse about it, difficult to describe. I think that was the reason I cried out so much during the attacks—I wanted to defend myself and couldn’t do it.

  Two days later, he left for St. Rémy, in the company of Rev. Salles.

  In all, Vincent had four more attacks while he was at St. Rémy. The first did not come until July 16, after a long remission during which Vincent once more hoped he was cured. But when it came, it did not lift for a month and a half. The attacks, Vincent reported, “tend to take an absurdly religious turn.”

  Then, close to the anniversary of his ear amputation, he became deranged again on December 24, 1889. This lasted only for a week, as did a second crisis commencing on January 21. There was a short interval before another wave of madness hit him on February 23, which for a while looked as if it would never recede. It was more than two months before he recovered, a long period, during which, according to Dr. Théophile Peyron, he would seem about to rally, then fall back into silence and suspicion.

  At St. Rémy, the first attempt was made to diagnose what the matter was with Vincent. Dr. Peyron believed he had a form of epilepsy. It was not a bad diagnosis. Evidently, Vincent did not have full epileptic fits, but a variety of attack known as a partial seizure might indeed explain many of his symptoms. It would account for the sudden onset of the attacks—one came on while he was painting a picture of the mouth of a quarry at St. Rémy, which he managed to complete before succumbing. These partial seizures could be associated with depression, hallucinations and delusions.

  Dr. Peyron, however, had not had an opportunity to chart Vincent’s moods and behavior from day to day over a period of years. Nobody, except Theo, ever did. Strangely, that was an examination that could be carried out—to some extent at least—posthumously and at a distance, through the medium of Vincent’s letters, which were slowly piling up in Theo’s desk. Few people have left a fuller self-portrait in words than Vincent did.

  Despite the interruptions of his attacks, at the hospital Vincent had long intervals of steady and productive work. He painted again with great power and intensity, but by and large he avoided the complementary colors and brilliant palette of the previous year in Arles. He associated this “high yellow note” with the life he had then led—keyed up by alcohol and coffee, and without regular meals.

  At St. Rémy his regime was sober. He and the other inmates consumed large quantities of dull food, mainly lentils, beans and peas (Vincent made a joke of the farting this caused). He took long, cold, therapeutic baths and worked either in the hospital itself or its garden. For periods he was intensely nervous of encountering strangers. And, when alone in the fields, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of loneliness, “to such a horrible extent that I shy away from going out.”

  Rather than working from memory or imagination, Vincent developed a method of making copies from other artists’ works—or as he preferred to describe them, with reason, “translations.” Among the sources he used were prints after paintings by Delacroix, Rembrandt and Millet, and prints by Daumier and Gustave Doré. Vincent also made a series of paintings from Gauguin’s drawing of Madame Ginoux, which had been left in the Yellow House and which he had brought with him to the hospital. Borrowing ready-made compositions was a way of solving his eternal problem: how to invent a composition, without a subject in front of him that he could see.

  Vincent achieved some notable paintings de tête while he was at St. Rémy. Of these, the most extraordinary depicted a starry sky, the sight he had once written would soothe him when he felt himself becoming agitated. But this was a most unsoothing starry sky, in which the heavenly bodies swirl through the night rather than hanging motionless and far away. In the foreground, a huge cypress tree rears up and, in the center, almost overwhelmed by the humming power of natural forces, is the sharp steeple of a church—not a Provençal church but a northern one such as might be found in Holland.

  But Vincent remained unable to paint a Gethsemane. When both Bernard and Gauguin painted exactly that subject in the autumn of 1889, Vincent reacted with rage. Gauguin’s Christ had his own features but Vincent’s red hair. The mingling of roles that had gone on in the Yellow House continued still.

  Vincent denounced Gauguin’s painting, in which he felt nothing was “really observed.” About Bernard’s effort, he was savage—“roaring my loudest, and calling you all sorts of names with the full power of my lungs,” he implored Bernard to become himself again.

  Vincent had finally tired, he claimed to Bernard, of working de tête:

  When Gauguin was in Arles, I once or twice allowed myself to be led astray into abstraction, as you know, for instance in the Berceuse, in the Woman Reading a Novel, black against a yellow bookcase. At the time, I considered abstraction an attractive method. But that was delusion, dear friend, and one soon comes up against a brick wall.

  I don’t say one might not try one’s hand at it after a whole life long of experimentation, of hand-to-hand struggle with nature, but personally, I don’t want to trouble my head with such things.

  He even regretted his Starry Night: “once again I allowed myself to be led astray into reaching for stars that are too big—another failure—and I have had my fill of that.”

  After a month in Paris in 1880, Gauguin returned to Pont-Aven; at the same time his paintings were exhibited, as planned, with Les XX in Brussels. In May he was back in Paris making preparations for an exhibition of work by himself and his friends for the Universal Exhibition (the Eiffel Tower was now finished and do
minating the skyline of the city). Then he returned to Brittany and settled in Le Pouldu—a more primitive spot than Pont-Aven—with Theo’s Dutch protégé de Haan.

  Gauguin had not given up his plan to move to the tropics, and applied to the Colonial Office for an appointment in Tonkin, where Second Lieutenant Milliet had served. When this was turned down, he decided to go to Madagascar instead, with—perhaps—de Haan, Vincent, Bernard and Schuffenecker.

  At the beginning of 1890, there were signs that Vincent was about to become a success. On January 18, the exhibition of Les XX opened in Brussels; this year it included six paintings by him. And the January issue of Le Mercure de France contained a long and laudatory piece on Vincent by the critic Albert Aurier. Even better, a painting of his was sold for a decent price: 400 francs.

  The article by Aurier was essentially Vincent as seen by Gauguin and Bernard, a friend of Aurier’s. He presented Vincent, eloquently, as a realist, but also as a visionary and a symbolist.

  “The fixed idea that haunts [Vincent’s brain],” thought Aurier, was of the “coming of a man, a messiah, a sower of truth, who will regenerate our decadent and perhaps imbecilic industrial society.” He had an obsessive passion for the “solar disc” and, at the same time, “for this vegetal star, the sumptuous sunflower.” The critic hailed his “brilliant and dazzling symphonies of color and lines” and evoked the painter’s delight in imagining an “art of the tropical regions.” The legend was born of Vincent van Gogh, the mad, inspired artist.

  Vincent himself was flattered, but also appalled. He wrote to Aurier, offering a picture in gratitude, thanking him for his praise but pointing out that there were others, especially Monticelli and Gauguin, who were more worthy to receive it, particularly in the matter of color and the art of the tropics: “For the role attaching to me, or that will be attached to me, will remain, I assure you, of very secondary importance.” Vincent was a little hurt that Aurier was rude about Meissonier, whom he admired.