Van Gogh (114 page)

He refused to name this coming savior, but the comparison to Maupassant’s Georges Duroy, a sly, sophisticated, sexual predator like Zola’s Octave Mouret, spoke to Theo in deep fraternal code. It not only invoked the great French realist writers who had revolutionized literature, it promised the charming imagery that spelled commercial success on the
entresol
, and hinted at sexual wonders to be performed on the beautiful Arlésiennes. And it pointed the finger of destiny unmistakably at the worldly, ambitious, predatory painter who lay sick and broke on a bed in Pont-Aven.

Like all Vincent’s utopian visions, this one looked simultaneously backward and forward. By combining, he and Gauguin would be following in the footsteps of previous artistic “brotherhoods”: from the medieval guilds of artists who “loved one another like friends,” to the Dutchmen of the Golden Age who “complemented one another”; from the writers and draftsmen of
The Graphic
who worked in their studios, shoulder to shoulder, creating together “something holy, something noble, something sublime,” to the painters of the Barbizon who formed not just a colony of artists, but a noble community of kindred spirits sharing “their warmth, their fire, and their enthusiasm” in the Fontainebleau Forest.

Onto this dream of lost Edens, he layered the latest fashionable myth of artistic
fraternité:
Japanese Buddhist monks, known as
bonzes
. Vincent had read about these exotic religious brotherhoods in sources both serious (Gonse’s
L’art japonais
) and sensational, especially Pierre Loti’s wildly fictionalized travel account,
Madame Chrysanthème
. Now he cast his kinship with Gauguin in the image of these simple, self-abnegating priests of the primitive sublime, who “liked and upheld each other,” according to Vincent, living together in “fraternal communities [where] harmony reigned.” Comparing the
bonzes’
mystical union to the “fraternal marriage” (
unitas fratrum
) of the Moravian Brothers, whose eroticized communes dotted the Dutch heaths, Vincent summoned Gauguin to a monastic life of “cold water, fresh air, simple good food, decent clothes, [and] a decent bed”—the same spartan discipleship he had briefly shared with Harry Gladwell in a Montmartre garret more than a decade earlier.

He reached out to include not just Gauguin, but all the beleaguered artists of the avant-garde in his ambitions for the Yellow House—all those “poor devils, whose homes are cafés, who lodge in cheap inns and live from hand to mouth, from day to day.” On behalf of all those painters “leading lives approximately comparable to the lives of street dogs,” Vincent preached a great new shared mission. If Theo truly cared about “this vigorous attempt by the impressionists,” Vincent wrote, he had a duty to “care about their shelter and daily bread.” Reprising the soup-kitchen fantasy of the Schenkweg, he imagined offering succor to all the homeless cab horses of Paris who, like him, suffered for their art:

Inevitably, this vision of offering pasturage to neglected painters everywhere merged with Vincent’s longtime ambition to create a “combination” of artists in
which the successful few would support the destitute many. Why should painters be “chained to the opportunity of earning their own bread,” he demanded, projecting his own sense of imprisonment onto all the painters of the Petit Boulevard, “which means that in fact one is far from free.” He rallied Theo to lead the fight against this great “injustice” by heading a new “Impressionist Society”—a partnership in which “the dealer will join hands with the artist, the one to take care of the housekeeping side, to provide the studio, food, paint, etc.; the other to create.” In these sweeping exhortations to take up the cause of his suffering comrades, Vincent found the comfort he most needed. By transforming his long dependence on his brother into a moral right shared by
all
struggling artists, and Theo’s years of support into a utopian mandate imposed on
all
successful dealers (and artists), this paradisiacal vision of the Yellow House promised to release him from his deepest guilt.

So powerful was this vision of redemption that the possibility of failure drove Vincent’s thoughts into all the darkest places: sickness, madness, even death—intimations that foretold the future in ways he could not have intended. But for now, his feverish anticipation of Gauguin’s companionship carried his imagination past these doubts into a future sun-washed with dreams. “The dreams, ah! the dreams!” Bernard wrote, recalling the rush of visionary letters he, too, received that spring, “giant exhibitions, philanthropic phalansteries of artists, foundations of colonies in the Midi.”

In June, those dreams burst onto canvas. Taking his arguments where words could not go, Vincent launched the most productive, most persuasive, and, ultimately, most fateful campaign of imagery he would ever wage. From Drenthe, he had accompanied his fierce invitations with magazine illustrations of life in the peatland. From Nuenen, he had defended his home among the peasants with dark incantations of Millet and Israëls. From Provence, with two years of the new color in his eye and the new brushwork in his hand, he championed his plans for the Yellow House with some of the glories of Western art.

WITH THE SALTY SPRAY
of the Mediterranean in his face, Vincent made a drawing of four fishing boats beached at the water’s edge. He had come to the ancient village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer at the end of May, traveling thirty rough miles in a high-wheeled diligence “to have a look at the
blue
sea and the
blue
sky.” “At last I have seen the Mediterranean,” he exulted. Fighting a wild wind from Africa, he had tried painting the little one-man boats as they battled their own ways through the surf. But he ended up spending most of his five days in Saintes-Maries wandering around the bright, bony village, sketching the crustaceous cottages, called
cabanes
(“whitewashed all over—the roof too”), in neat rows and in splendid isolation.

Street in Saintes-Maries
, J
UNE
1888,
REED PEN AND INK ON PAPER, 12 × 18½ IN
. (
Illustration credit 31.3
)

His thoughts were borne ceaselessly into the past. The sea reminded him of his sailor uncle Jan; the dunes, of Scheveningen; and the cottages, of the hovels in Drenthe. The same ghosts apparently kept him away from the battlements of the pilgrimage church from which the town derived its name. It was here, according to Provençal legend, that the Three Marys, including Mary Magdalene, had come ashore after their miraculous voyage from the Holy Land. Every year in late May, hundreds of pilgrims made the arduous journey across the salty marshland of the Camargue to celebrate the Festival of Saint Sarah, the servant girl who accompanied the Marys on their magical boat. Most were gypsies who had taken the dark-skinned Sarah as their patron saint. Vincent’s trip to the sea at Saintes-Maries—rather than Marseille, where he had often promised to go—may have been inspired by the annual transit through Arles, only days earlier, of these ardent
gitans
in their colorful caravans.

But once he arrived, his eye returned again and again to the little boats on the beach. Every morning, he went to the shore and saw them there: “little green, red, blue boats, so pretty in shape and color that they made one think of flowers,” he said. But every morning they put to sea before he could set up his equipment. “They dash off when there is no wind,” he explained to Bernard, “and make for the shore when there’s a bit too much of it.” On the fifth morning,
he rose early and hurried to the beach with only a sketchpad and a pen. He caught the group of four shallow-drafted barks still resting in the sand, awaiting the day’s buffeting as serenely as the cab horses of Paris. Working without his perspective frame, he sketched them in all their neglected nobility: the one in front almost filling the sheet with its broad beam and sweeping prow, the other three arranged behind in the ragged row where their owners had left them: their masts leaning to and fro like the pollard birches of Nuenen, their long booms and fishing poles crisscrossing at crazy angles. Before their masters arrived to drag them to their duties, he made notes of their colors directly on his drawing.

That same day, Vincent, too, set off, abruptly cutting short his visit to the seashore after an unexplained intervention by the parish priest and a local gendarme. He returned over the wild Camargue, leaving behind all three of the canvases he had painted in Saintes-Maries because, he explained, “they are not dry enough to be submitted with safety to five hours’ jolting in the carriage.” He never did return to fetch them.

He did take his drawings, however. As soon as he arrived at the Yellow House, he sent a batch of them to Theo and took the others, including the “moored boats,” to his studio, where he set to work transposing them into paintings. First, he rehearsed the colors he had annotated by testing them out in a watercolor exactly the same size as the sketch (15½ by 21 inches). Ignoring everything Mauve had taught him about drawing with color, he traced the boats’ bold outlines in black with a broad reed pen, then filled between the lines with even daubs of bright, watery color: complementary red and green for the boats, orange and blue for the beach and beyond. Finally, he copied his drawing of brave little boats onto the left side of a larger canvas (25½ by 32 inches), leaving space on the right and at the top for more sea and sky. He broke the drawing into smaller and smaller pieces of pure, clear color: a maroon-and-cobalt hull with celadon railing; a moss-green prow with orange railing; an avocado cockpit with white ribbing; a yellow mast, lapis-lazuli rudder, robin’s-egg-blue oars; and a rainbow of fishing poles.

But when he painted the sky and sea, his vision changed entirely. Instead of setting his bejeweled boats on the watercolor’s contrasting plates of blue and orange, he transported them to a soft and dreamy world—a world of glowing sky and silvery light that Mauve or Monet would have recognized. White clouds dissolve into brushstrokes of soft blues and greens, arching over the spiky masts in a luminous vault. The beach shades from a gold-stippled taupe in the foreground, where the boats rest, to a sunny tan in the distance. White-tipped waves wet the sand in lavender. At the horizon, sea meets sky in a pastel kiss of powder blue and aquamarine. Against this gauzy dawn, the crystalline colors of the little boats leap off the canvas.

Vincent claimed that
Fishing Boats on the Beach
and the other paintings based on the sketches he brought back from Saintes-Maries—a virtual coloring book of imagery—proved that he had found “absolute Japan” in the South of France. “I am always telling myself
that I’m in Japan here
,” he exclaimed. “I have only to open my eyes and paint what is right in front of me.” He wrote Bernard and Gauguin boasting of the seashore’s “amusing motifs,” “naïve” landscapes, and “primitive” coloration. He professed his devotion to the new gospel of Cloisonnism, which he summarized as “simplification of color in the Japanese manner” and “put[ting] flat tones side by side, with characteristic lines marking off the movements and the forms.”

To Theo, he trumpeted the salability of
Boats
and other works like it, comparing them to Japanese prints in their desirability as “decorations for middle-class houses.” In terms that probably echoed Monet’s pitch for his Antibes paintings (just then showing on the
entresol
), Vincent claimed that his brief time in the South had given him a new vision: “One sees things with a more Japanese eye,” he wrote; “one feel colors differently.” Indeed, hadn’t Monet himself painted a scene of four brightly colored boats on a beach? With all these arguments and more, he pushed his brother to urge other dealers “to join in sending people who would work down here. In that case I think Gauguin would be
sure
to come.”

He sent similar pleadings to Bernard and Gauguin, brushing past the former’s demurrals and the latter’s indecision. “Do you realize that we have been very stupid, Gauguin, you and I, in not going to the same place?” he scolded Bernard in mid-June. A few letters later, he pointed his friend to the same message hidden in the simple image of four medieval barks. “Life carries us along so fast that we haven’t the time to talk and to work as well. That is the reason why, with unity still a long way off, we are now sailing the trackless deep in our frail little boats, all alone on the high seas of our time.”

But the ultimate invitation was always directed at Theo. “I wish you could spend some time here,” he wrote after returning from Saintes-Maries. “I think that once again you should steep yourself more and more in nature and in the world of artists.” Echoing his pleas from Drenthe, he urged Theo to quit Goupil, or at least demand “a year’s leave (on full pay)” during which he could recover his health, promote the brothers’ enterprise, and “steep himself” in the serenity of the South. “I keep thinking of you and Gauguin and Bernard all the time wherever I go,” he wrote. “It is so beautiful, and I so wish you were here.”