Van Gogh (113 page)

P
LACE
L
AMARTINE
, A
RLES
(
Illustration credit 31.2
)

But nothing could dim the beacon of the Yellow House. The prospect of a permanent studio had revived the oldest and most potent dream of all: companionship. For Vincent, home always meant an end to loneliness. As early as 1881, he had pleaded with Anthon van Rappard to come to Etten and join in his patriotic pursuit of “Brabant types.” “I am going
in a definite direction,”
he beckoned, “and not being contented with this, I want others to go along with me!” In The Hague, he laid plans to transform the Schenkweg studio into a “house of illustrators” where other black-and-white draftsmen (and a host of models) would join him, as in the glory days of
The Graphic
. In Drenthe, he imagined founding a studio on the heath where “a colony of painters might spring up.” In Nuenen,
he consoled himself with visions of the Kerkstraat studio as a “pied-à-terre” for all the peasant-painting disciples of Millet. Even during his brief, tumultuous stay in Antwerp, he toyed with “founding a studio.” And in Paris, he invited his Antwerp Academy classmate Horace Livens, a virtual stranger, to “share my lodgings and studio so long as I have any.”

The same fantasy of artistic family followed him to Arles. Separated from his brother and from his fellow painters of the Petit Boulevard, Vincent longed more than ever for the companionship—the completion—that had always eluded him. “I should like to get some sort of little retreat,” he wrote Theo soon after his arrival, “where the poor cab horses of Paris—that is you and several of our friends, the poor impressionists—could go out to pasture when they get too beat up.”

Through a spring filled with loneliness, estrangement, and debilitating spasms of nostalgia, his thoughts returned again and again to this dream of domesticity. He fondly recalled previous glimpses of it (with Van Rappard in Brussels) and brooded over his failed attempts at it (“I reminded myself that in The Hague and Nuenen I tried to take a studio, and how badly it turned out!”). On a spring day sometime in mid-April, all these injuries from the past and longings for the future converged on the four rooms to let at 2, place Lamartine.

“I could quite well share the new studio with someone,” he announced the same day he signed the lease, “and I should like to. Perhaps Gauguin will come south?”

PAUL GAUGUIN WAS NOT
Vincent’s first choice of companion. When illness temporarily ruled out his brother, he had turned first to nineteen-year-old Émile Bernard, his most tractable comrade on the rue Lepic. Apparently following up on an invitation he had extended while still in Paris, Vincent plied the young painter with glowing reports of the beauty and healthiness of life in the Midi (“a real advantage for artists who love the sun and color”) and the allure of Arlesian women. He billed the south as a bargain over Brittany, where Bernard had planned to spend the summer again. (“I don’t yearn for the grey sea of the North” was Vincent’s acerbic rebuttal.)

To tantalize his Japanophile friend, Vincent reimagined the dusty Provençal landscape as a gallery of Japanese prints, filled with “blotches of a beautiful emerald,” “rich blue landscapes,” and “splendid yellow suns.” He sent drawings and descriptions of his paintings that boldly advertised the Cloisonnist essence of a countryside “as beautiful as Japan for the limpidity of the atmosphere and gay color effects … such as we see in
crépons
.” He sweetened the invitation with hints of advancement on the
entresol
and offers to sell Bernard’s work in Marseille.

When Bernard demurred (claiming an obligation to do military service in North Africa, although he never did), Vincent turned his search closer to home.
Either shunning or shunned by the handful of French artists working in Arles at the time, he briefly considered inviting the Dane Mourier-Petersen to share a studio, despite his “spineless” art and his reluctance to join Vincent’s frequent expeditions to the brothel district (or as he called it, “the street of kind girls”). In March, when Mourier-Petersen announced his plan to return home, Vincent’s domestic ambitions turned to Dodge MacKnight, Russell’s boorish American friend who lived in the nearby village of Fontvieille. “He is a Yankee,” Vincent summed up, “and probably paints much better than most Yankees do, but a Yankee all the same.”

Even before seeing MacKnight’s work, Vincent wondered if he might “come to some arrangement” with the younger man to join him in the Yellow House. “Then the cooking could be done in one’s own place,” he imagined. “I think we should both benefit by it.” Within a week, however, after Vincent trekked the five miles to MacKnight’s studio in Fontvieille, that vision, like so many others, collapsed in a cloud of rancor. All summer long, Vincent sniped at his American neighbor: “a dry sort of person,” “heartless,” “dull,” “common,” “stultifying,” “a slacker.” Out of deference to their mutual friend John Peter Russell, the two continued to exchange “frosty” visits in which Vincent had to endure criticisms of his work, which he catalogued bitterly to Theo: “It makes too queer an impression,” “a total abortion,” “utterly repulsive.” In retaliation, Vincent pronounced an even more damning judgment on the American: “[MacKnight] will soon be making little landscapes with sheep for chocolate boxes.”

The match with Paul Gauguin was no more promising. In March, Vincent had faulted Gauguin for “not hav[ing] the kind of temperament that profits from hardships”—an aspersion on both his masculine and his artistic mettle. Vincent made the comment in response to a letter Gauguin had sent out of the blue from Pont-Aven, a small town on the Brittany coast, pleading ill health and penury. “He is on the rocks,” Vincent related the contents to Theo. “He wants to know if you have sold anything for him, but he can’t write to you for fear of bothering you.” Vincent professed to be “deeply sorry for Gauguin’s plight,” and he did petition both Theo and Russell to buy some of his work. He also sent a solicitous reply to Pont-Aven (his first letter to Gauguin) decrying the curse of sickliness shared by all painters (“My God! Shall we ever see a generation of artists with healthy bodies!”). But he pointedly did not invite Gauguin to join him in the reparative South. Known for his prickliness and aloof self-regard, the forty-year-old Frenchman was no match for the attentive young Bernard, on whose companionship Vincent had by now fixed his sights. Nor was the older man’s art, for all its exotic subject matter, as seductive as the younger’s fiery new gospel of color and simplicity—especially after the March
Revue Indépendante
proclaimed Cloisonnism the crown jewel of avant-garde art.

Of course, Vincent had followed closely and no doubt enviously Gauguin’s
meteoric success on the
entresol
. In December and January alone, Theo had bought almost a thousand francs’ worth of Gauguin’s work, including the Martinique canvas
Les négresses
that hung proudly over the sofa in the rue Lepic apartment. But the two artists remained barely connected after Gauguin left Paris in early February. When Gauguin wrote from his sickbed in March, he sent the letter to Paris, unaware that Vincent had moved on to Arles. He wrote a second plaintive letter only a week later. “He complains of the bad weather [and] is still ailing,” Vincent summarized. “[He] says that of all the various miseries that afflict humanity, nothing maddens him more than the lack of money, and yet he feels doomed to perpetual beggary.” Vincent forwarded the letter to Theo with a casual suggestion that he offer a Gauguin painting to Tersteeg, but didn’t bother replying to it for a month.

By the end of that month, however, everything had changed. Mourier-Petersen had announced his departure; relations with MacKnight were careening toward a blowup; and the landlord Carrel had seized all Vincent’s possessions. Bernard had ignored his entreaties and taken a house in Brittany, then invited Gauguin to join him there. Theo had returned from his trip to Holland as worrisomely sick as ever and immediately laid plans to visit Claude Monet in Giverny, where he would soon offer the Impressionist eminence the richest deal yet on the
entresol
. “You will see some lovely things there,” Vincent wrote forlornly, “and you will think what I send very poor stuff in comparison.”

Meanwhile, the Provençal landscape had turned hot and harsh as the summer mistral scoured it with dust. Flies and mosquitoes tormented every excursion. Color continued to drain from the fields, health from his body, money from his purse, and confidence from his brush. (As of May 1, he had still not sent a single work to Paris.) The Yellow House represented the sole “glimmer of hope” on a bleak horizon. But to bring his vision of an artistic Eden to life he had committed himself to ruinous debt without a word to Theo.

By mid-May 1888, Vincent had convinced himself that only one person could reverse this tide of misfortune: that only by bringing Paul Gauguin to Arles could he salvage his dream of artistic home and family. “We may be able to make up a bit for the past,” he imagined. “I shall have a quiet home of my own [and] I should be a different man.”

To impose that illusion on reality, Vincent mounted the campaign of a lifetime. As a bright new building emerged at 2, place Lamartine, a far grander edifice took shape in his imagination. Through months of elaborate, almost daily, pleading, exhortatory letters, he constructed the greatest of his glittering castle-in-the-air schemes for happiness. Combining the careful calculation of his brief on behalf of Sien and the Schenkweg studio, the breathless “join me” urgency of his pleas from Drenthe, and the evangelical ardor of his Millet conversion on the heaths of Nuenen, Vincent’s campaign in the early summer of
1888 staked everything on a heroic new vision of personal and artistic utopia—a paradise of redemption and rebirth that shone even more brightly than its counterpart in stucco and yellow paint. Subsequent accounts dubbed this final fantasy “the Studio of the South”—a term that Vincent never used.

Vincent argued that Gauguin’s coming would finally put the brothers’
entresol
enterprise on a sound financial footing. Presenting his plan as a “plain matter of business,” he concocted elaborate budgets based on the oft-discredited proposition that two could live as cheaply as one and the certainty that works like Gauguin’s
Les négresses
would “treble or quadruple” in value. If Theo would only settle Gauguin’s debts in Pont-Aven, pay for his travel to Arles, add a hundred francs to the monthly stipend he sent, and demand one Gauguin work each month, he would not only make back his money, Vincent concluded, “wouldn’t it even mean a profit?”

Such an arrangement would pay off in other ways, he promised Theo. An association with Gauguin would attract other avant-garde painters and put the brothers’ venture “in a stronger position as far as reputation goes.” On the updraft of Gauguin’s success, Vincent’s work would begin to sell, too, he reckoned—at the rate of at least one or two, and perhaps as many as four, paintings a month for a hundred francs apiece. “So I tell myself that bit by bit the expenses will be balanced by the work,” he assured Theo, eagerly foreseeing an end to his long, corrosive dependence. Gauguin’s coming might even help secure the commercial backing of that eternal skeptic, H. G. Tersteeg, Vincent dared to imagine. “If we have [Gauguin],” he boldly predicted, “we can’t lose.”

In late May, he penned an invitation:

In addition to the hints of brothels filled with beautiful Arlésiennes, Vincent sweetened his offer with compliments (“my brother and I greatly appreciate your painting”) and promises of sunnier weather (“working out-of-doors is possible nearly all the year round”) and improved health (“I was ill when I came here, but now I am feeling better”). But, Vincent insisted, “business must come first.” “My brother cannot send you money in Brittany and at the same time
send me money in Provence,” he wrote bluntly in response to Gauguin’s pleas for financial support. “But if we combine, there may be enough for both of us. In fact, I am sure of it.” Finally, he warned the wily ex-banker against appealing to Theo directly for a better deal. “We have thought it over carefully,” he emphasized, “and the
only
means we have found of coming to your aid in a more practical way is this combining.”

In an unusual show of restraint, Vincent sent the drafted letter to Paris, presumably for Theo’s approval. But his arguments never paused for a reply. In flights of yearning that soared past the dreary logic of business, he envisioned Gauguin’s coming as not just a commercial coup but a boon to both their art. In the South, he claimed, “one’s senses get keener, one’s hand becomes more agile, one’s eye more alert, one’s brain clearer.” He portrayed the Midi as the inevitable destination of
all
true Impressionists: a land bursting with the prismatic color and limpid light of Japanese art—the new grail of every vanguard artist—just waiting to be captured on canvas by a painter of faith, ambition, and “daring.” In a crescendo of fervor, he broadened his invitation into a L’oeuvre-like challenge to all artists who loved
japonisme
and felt its influence: “Why not come to Japan, that is to say to the equivalent of Japan, the South?” Summoning the apocalyptic ardor of his days as a preacher, he prophesied the birth of a new religion in the Midi. “There is an art of the future,” he imagined, “and it is going to be so lovely and so young … I feel it so strongly.” He clothed this prophetic reverie in the rhetoric of revolution, with its calls for shared sacrifice, greater good, and utopian triumph.

And its promise of messianic return. Someday soon, he assured Theo, an artist from the “coming generation” would “rise up in this lovely country and do for it what the Japanese have done for theirs.” This artist would lead the revolution for which Vincent saw himself merely “clearing the way.” “I am not sufficiently ambitious for that fame to set a match to the powder,” he insisted, “but such a one
will
come.” Vincent dubbed this Messiah of the new art “the Bel-Ami of the Midi”—“a kind of Guy de Maupassant in painting” who would “paint the beautiful people and things here lightheartedly.” He would rival Monticelli in color, Monet in landscape, and Rodin in sculpture (all stars of the
entresol
). He would be, Vincent declared in bold underline,
“a colorist such as has never yet existed
.”