Van Gogh (125 page)

In his desperation, Vincent turned again to the most consoling image he knew: Christ in the Garden. He imagined Monticelli “passing through a regular
Gethsemane” and cast himself as the martyr’s resurrected spirit—“a living man arising immediately in the place of the dead man.” He summoned himself to “take up the same cause again, continuing the same work, living the same life, dying the same death.” In late September, he tried again to capture this vision of immortality in paint. “I have the thing in my head,” he wrote, “a starry night; the figure of Christ in blue, all the strongest blues, and the angel blended citron-yellow.” But again he failed. Crushed a second time by the weight of an image too heavily freighted with the past—“too beautiful to dare to paint”—Vincent again took a knife and “mercilessly destroyed” the canvas, offering up only the same timorous excuse: “the form had not been studied beforehand from the model.”

But he immediately began another attempt. This time, he would leave out the fearful, unbearable figures of Christ and the angel, and paint only the starry night sky under which their sublime encounter played out.

IT WAS AN IMAGE
as deeply embedded in the iconography of Vincent’s imagination as sowers or sunflowers. “The lovely evening stars express the care and love of God for us all,” Anna van Gogh had written to her teenage son. To Anna, stars represented God’s promise “to make light out of darkness; and out of problems, good things.” Vincent’s father fondly recalled his late-night walks “under lovely starry skies,” while his sister Lies saw in the stars “all the people I hold dear very near … urging me: ‘Be brave.’ ” Andersen’s magical night skies had beguiled Vincent’s childhood, while Heine’s Romantic starlight had guided his adolescence. The beckoning star of Conscience had called him to Christianity, while Longfellow’s “tender star of love and dreams” had consoled his long exile. In Ramsgate, he looked into the starry night and saw both his family (“I thought of you all and of my own past years and of our home”) and his shame. In Amsterdam, on his evening walks along the riverbank, he “heard God’s voice under the stars,” and he painted in words an elaborate picture of the comfort he felt in the “blessed twilight,” when “the stars alone do speak.”

In Paris, the city lights virtually extinguished the stars, but his imagination took flight on the “miraculous” fantasies of Jules Verne and the astronomical discoveries of Camille Flammarion, who mapped the night sky with new worlds and gave each speck of light its own new mystery, opening up a universe of infinite possibility. Or he could dream upon the starry nights he kept at his bedside in the books of Zola, Daudet, Loti, and especially Maupassant, author of
Bel-Ami
. “I love the night with a passion,” Maupassant wrote in the summer of 1887. “I love it as one loves one’s country or one’s mistress, with a deep, instinctive, invincible love.… And the stars! The stars up there, the unknown stars
thrown randomly into the immensity where they outline those bizarre figures, which make one dream so much, which make one muse so deeply.”

In Arles, Vincent rediscovered the stars. “At night, the town
disappears
and everything is
black,”
he reported with delight, “much
blacker
than in Paris.” He walked the city streets, the riverbanks, the country roads, the orchards, even the open fields, at night, drawn both by the opportunity to “muse deeply” and by the chance to go about unbothered. As much as the famous sun, the starry vault defined Vincent’s experience of the Midi. Soon after arriving, he began to imagine painting it. “I must have a
starry
night,” he wrote Theo in early April. “A starry sky is something I should like to try to do,” he wrote Bernard, “just as in the daytime I am going to try to paint a green meadow spangled with dandelions.” On his trip to the sea in May, a walk along the shore at night brought this ambition to a fever pitch. “It was beautiful,” he wrote Theo.

On that dark shore, where both the inky water and the glittering sky invited reflection, Vincent’s ambition to combine with Gauguin—still more dream than plan—merged with his view of the night sky. Just as he saw the ghosts of his past in the dunes and houses of Saintes-Maries, he saw his future in the stars over the Mediterranean. “To look at the stars always makes me dream,” he wrote, “as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map.” He returned to Arles with the image burning in his imagination. “When shall I ever get round to doing the starry sky,” he wondered in mid-June, “that picture which is always in my mind?” Through all the trials of the summer, the up-and-down negotiations with Gauguin, the death of Uncle Cent, he saw in the nightly spectacle overhead not just a map to an impossibly distant world where life for painters might be easier, but the promise of a future almost within reach. “Hope is in the stars,” he wrote. “But let’s not forget that this earth is a planet too, and consequently a star.”

In early September, he considered returning to the seashore to confirm and record the image in his head. “I absolutely want to paint a starry sky,” he told his sister Wil. With a vehemence that betrayed months of looking and planning, he explained to her how the night was “more richly colored than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens,” and instructed her in the rainbow of starlight: “If only you pay attention you will see that certain stars
are citron-yellow, others have a pink glow, or a green blue and forget-me-not brilliance.” To fix this vision in the firmament of Symbolist imagery, he invoked the poetry of Walt Whitman, whose embracing summons to a future filled with love and sex and work and friendship “under the great starlit vault of heaven” perfectly matched the image Vincent saw when he stared and squinted into the night sky.

He practiced this vision again and again throughout the summer and fall. He completed the portrait of Eugène Boch in early September by dabbing a constellation of multicolored “sparkling stars” onto the painting’s deep blue background. At the same time, he gave the portrait its new title,
The Poet
—a designation that connected Boch’s star-lighted visage with the new Petrarch of the Midi, Gauguin.

But just painting the stars wasn’t enough; he longed to paint
under
the stars. “The problem of painting night scenes and effects on the spot and actually by night interests me enormously,” he wrote. To satisfy that yen, he dragged his equipment to the Place du Forum and painted his nocturnal view of the café terrace with its gaslit awning and its plunging streetscape “stretching away under a blue sky spangled with stars.” Unlike the seemingly random dots of the Boch portrait, the wedge of night sky in the
Café Terrace on the Place du Forum
reveals a universe of stars and planets arranged in solar systems of color. “Here you have a night picture without any black in it,” he boasted, “done with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green, and citron-yellow color.” He compared it to a description from Maupassant’s
Bel-Ami
, another touchstone of his dream for the Midi. He laid plans to paint a series of “starry night” paintings to rival the sunflowers of summer, including a plowed field under the night sky and, especially, the Yellow House, home to all his dreams. “Someday or other you shall have a picture of the little house itself,” he promised Theo, “with the window lit up, and a starry sky.”

When his similar attempt to depict Christ under a starry sky failed so miserably in late September, Vincent shouldered his equipment in the middle of the night and sought his subject directly under the stars. He picked a spot only a few blocks away, on a seawall overlooking the Rhône. To provide light, he set his easel under one of the gas lamps that lined the wall along the riverbank. Experience had shown him that its golden light was inadequate, even deceptive. “In the dark I may mistake a blue for a green,” he admitted, “a blue-lilac for a pink-lilac, for you cannot rightly distinguish the quality of a hue.” But the immediacy of the image mattered more than the accuracy, he insisted. And there was no other way to avoid “the poor sallow whitish light” of conventional night scenes.

Once set up, he turned his gaze south, looking downriver at the dark town. It stretched out along the great bend of the Rhône, curving and receding from
left to right, visible only by its necklace of gas lamps and its jagged dark profile on the horizon: the tower of the Carmelite convent at one side, the dome of St. Trophime in the middle, the spires of St. Pierre on the opposite shore. Only a handful of windows are lighted. Boats are moored in the black water below him. It is late.

But when he looked up, he saw a different sky than he had seen three months before on another shore. Or, rather, he saw it with different eyes. In June, his rocketing dreams for the combination with Gauguin had found inspiration in Daudet-inspired fantasies of train trips to distant stars and galaxies of better worlds. Now, as the prospect of Gauguin’s coming receded like the sunset, Vincent searched the night sky for an older, deeper consolation. “I have a terrible need of—shall I say the word?—religion,” he wrote, shuddering at the confession. “Then I go out at night to paint the stars.”

As best he could, he deployed the palette of greens and blues with “citron” highlights that he had used in the failed Gethsemane—colors he had long connected to Christ—from Scheffer’s
Christus Consolator
to Delacroix’s
Bark
—and to those of his own paintings, from
The Potato Eaters
to
The Poet’s Garden
, that portrayed “a different world from ours.” He plunged the town itself into the blackest blue he could contrive. To make it even darker, he painted the string of streetlamps in bursts of “harsh gold.” The ultimate subject may have been above him, but the river, too, drew his dreamy eye. The play of light on water—on rivers, on ponds or puddles—had always led Vincent to deep meditation on the mysteries of the infinite. Looking at the receding line of lanterns, he tracked their “ruthless reflections” in the choppy river water with hundreds of short, brooding strokes. For the small jetty at his feet, where the black boats bobbed in silence, he used yellow-green to show the reach of his own lantern, but he unsettled the foreground with highlights of mauve, a red-blue mix that added a mysterious other light.

In the sky, he started by dutifully laying out the stars of the Ursa Major constellation in the southern quadrant at the center of his big canvas—the seven stars of the Big Dipper most prominent of all. But the longer he looked, the more he saw and the more his brush wandered. He saw dots and smudges, perfect circles and misshapen fragments. He imagined some stars in the palest shades of pink and green, “sparkling” like hued gems in the dark void. He compared himself to a jeweler arranging precious stones “in order to enhance their value.” To some, he added coronas of radiating strokes, like flower petals or distant fireworks, creating for each a citron aura like the nimbus that encircled the head of Delacroix’s Christ. He rendered the Milky Way with the lightest touch of his brush—an impossible blush of pale blue on the cobalt vastness. With exquisite care, he laid the brushstrokes on the night sky in a rhythm of broad dashes, “firm and interwoven with feeling.”

If he could achieve with his gentle brush and “harmonious” color the same consolation as the unapproachable image of Christ, if he could capture in paint “the feeling of the stars and the infinite high and clear above you,” perhaps his loneliness might end—or at least be comforted. The never-dark night café provided its own kind of consolation, of course, to those like him “without native land or family.” But for Vincent the transient balms of absinthe and gaslight could never suffice. Nor could he accept his own furtive argument that “the Arts, like everything else, are only dreams; that one’s self is nothing at all.” Inevitably his eyes returned to the starry night sky, where he saw another, truer, deeper consummation, however distant. With his plans for the Yellow House slipping toward failure, his yearning for that future poured onto the canvas as he labored more tenderly than ever before to express a transcendent truth through color and brushstroke: to capture the one human emotion shut out of the Café de la Gare, the most important one: the hope—no matter how faint or how far—of redemption. “Is this all,” he asked despairingly, “or is there more besides?”

At the end, perhaps back in the studio, he added to the painting a shadowy couple standing on the shore: lovers arm in arm, wandered in from a distant star.

IN EARLY OCTOBER
, Gauguin wrote Theo: “I will soon be joining [Vincent]…I shall leave for Arles toward the end of the month.” At the same time, he sent to Arles the portrait that Vincent had requested as a token of brotherhood. “We have fulfilled your wish,” he grandly announced. The news dropped Vincent to his knees. “Now at last,” he wrote Theo the same day, “something is beginning to show on the horizon: Hope.”

Even more thrilling than the news itself was Gauguin’s description of the painting on its way. In a self-portrait, Gauguin had imagined himself as Hugo’s famous outcast, Jean Valjean, with “the mask of a bandit” hiding an “inner nobility and gentleness.” In this way, Gauguin explained, he meant to show not just his own features, but a portrait of all painters everywhere who felt “oppressed and outlawed by society.” It was a vision of artistic ostracism and shared suffering that could have come from Vincent’s own pen. “His description of himself moves me to the depths of my soul,” Vincent wrote.

After months of torturous advances and retreats, all his expectations for the Yellow House burst forth at once in a flood of ecstatic, adulatory letters. He pledged himself to work tirelessly to provide the “very great master” Gauguin with “peace and quiet in which to produce, and to be able to breathe freely as an artist.” Flinging aside all his previous reservations, he welcomed Bernard to join them, and Laval, too—and even two of Gauguin’s other Pont-Aven protégés
whom Vincent had never met. All were welcome to the brotherhood of the Midi. “Union is strength,” he cried.