Van Gogh (151 page)

Before long, he ventured farther still—into the foothills of the Alpilles, where the winter wind already howled. It had been three months since that wind upended his easel and his sanity. “But never mind,” he wrote his sister Wil, “now my health is so good that the physical part of me will gain the victory.” He descended into a “very wild ravine” and somehow secured a huge canvas at the edge of the rocky stream that ran through it. He painted the looming cliffs “all in violet,” with a hardy pair of hikers making their way through the shadowy gorge. Pleased with the result, he imagined himself strong enough to do a whole series of such “stern” alpen scenes, boasting “I am more up to it.”

Next, he trekked to the edge of the quarries, not far from the site of his collapse in July. He anchored his easel with rocks and painted a sumptuous, defiant canvas of color and light. The bright Midi sun plays off the rocks in streaks of pink and blushes of blue. Light reaches to the very back of the cave, filling it with lilac and lavender. Out of its craggy mouth, a figure strides fearlessly forward, unfazed by loneliness or vertigo.

With every successful expedition, every safe return, every new canvas propped outside the studio to dry, the fear of another attack ebbed and his confidence surged. “I have become more master of myself,” he crowed, “my health has steadied.… I have not got soft yet.” His doctors, too, saw light at the end of the tunnel. When Peyron visited Theo in late September, he marveled that his patient seemed “absolutely healthy”—not yet ready to leave the asylum, perhaps, but clearly on that path. The good report to his brother elated Vincent and sent his own thoughts racing into the future. Theo boosted his spirits still higher with a report from Pissarro about a doctor in Auvers, a bucolic town north of Paris, who might take Vincent in when the time came. “What you say of Auvers is a very pleasant prospect,” Vincent shot back, “we must fix on that.”

In the same letter, Theo heaped praise on the latest paintings to arrive from Saint-Rémy, the fruits of Vincent’s rehabilitation. They had, he said, “that unshakable something which nature has, even in her fiercest aspects.” He also announced the arresting news that his friend Jozef Isaäcson planned to write an article about Vincent for a Dutch art review,
De Portefeuille
(
The Portfolio
). But this was only part of a curious pattern, Theo reported. More and more often, people in Paris were approaching him and asking to view Vincent’s work. They had seen it at the fall
Indépendante
show, where both the first
Starry Night
—the one from Arles—and the
Irises
of May shared the walls with works by Seurat, Signac, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Or at Tanguy’s. Or they had heard that Vincent was invited to show in January with the Belgian group Les Vingt (The Twenty)—the premier showcase for avant-garde art outside Paris. Only the year before, Gauguin had been invited to exhibit there, but not Vincent.

The good reports from both Theo and Peyron brought Vincent’s ambitions bounding back. Only a month earlier, still shadowed by the weeks of attacks, he had almost withdrawn from the Vingt show. “I’m conscious of my inferiority,” he had written then, wondering dolefully if the show’s organizers would even remember that they had asked him to participate, and, indeed, if “it might be preferable if they did forget all about me.” After months of shying away from his old comrades, he boldly wrote to both Gauguin and Bernard: chiding and cajoling, patronizing and browbeating, as if the storms of summer had never happened. “I intend to return to the charge,” he told Bernard (whom he had not written in a year). Reasserting his rightful place in the vanguard of the new art, he proposed exchanges and requested updates on both artists’ latest work. He flattered and joked and reaffirmed their shared commitment to the primitive beauty and truth of
japonisme
. Without revealing the demons of the summer, he vehemently warned them against using religious imagery in their work and summoned them instead to brotherly solidarity in the quest for the deeper truth—“something one has a firm faith in”—that he had found in Millet, not the Bible.

Vincent’s new confidence also revived other, older aspirations. “If I again start trying to sell, to show, to make exchanges,” he wrote Theo, empowered by the news of exhibitions and outreach to old comrades, “perhaps I shall succeed a little in being less of a burden to you.” To prove his commercial bona fides, he immediately began a series of “autumn-effect” paintings: conventional scenes of shadowy forest canopies and tree-lined, leaf-strewn paths, all colored in muted tones and brushed with a schooled restraint. These overhead versions of the ivy-laced garden corners that Theo loved so much showed little of the imaginative freedom, extravagant brush, or spontaneous form of his Alpilles horizons or midnight visions of the summer sky. But they
were
salable, according to his dealer brother. “You are stronger when you paint
true
things,” Theo wrote in late October, singling out the “the underbrush with ivy” as a particular favorite.

Vincent’s new pursuit of sales eventually forced him to renounce the great visions of summer. Theo’s advice also singled out the more recent
Starry Night
, the one painted in June, for special criticism. “The search for some style is prejudicial to the true sentiment of things,” he wrote, dismissing all such “forced” images as the product of an errant “preoccupation.” Gauguin’s recent works had shown a similar trend toward abstraction, Theo lamented, using the word to refer to any image that had no basis in reality. As a result, the
entresol
storeroom was filling up with Gauguin paintings “less saleable than those of last year.” Theo’s disapproval extended not just to the biblical scenes that frightened Vincent, but to all the pretentious exertions of Symbolism. “Those things that satisfy one most,” he said, “are the wholesome, true things without all that business of schools and abstract ideas.”

Vincent not only agreed in principle (“it is better to attack things with simplicity than to seek after abstractions”), he confessed to having erred in the past with images like
La berceuse
and the second
Starry Night
, both of which he dismissed as “failures.” “I allowed myself to be led astray into reaching for stars that are too big,” he wrote, “and I have had my fill of that.” To prove to Theo his determination to do better, he immediately followed the autumn scenes with a project of far grander commercial ambitions. What Monet had done in Antibes and Gauguin in Brittany, he would now do in the South. In a vast projected series of paintings he dubbed “Impressions of Provence,” he would capture the primitive essence—“the true soil”—of the country.

The series would include images of sunrises and sunsets; of “the olive and the fig trees, the vineyards and the cypresses”; of “the scorched fields with their delicate aroma of thyme”; and of the Alpilles set against “the sun and the blue sky”—all painted with “their full force and brilliance.” With images such as these, he imagined, he could “disentangle the inner character” of the place using not abstraction but simplicity, not “vaguely apprehended” symbols but “feeling and love.” The scale and promise of the plan for success so possessed
him that he wrote Theo’s friend Isaäcson urging him to delay his article until the new series was complete. Only then could he “feel the whole of the country,” Vincent insisted, invoking the godfather of the new art: “isn’t that what distinguishes a Cézanne from anything else?”

He began his grand new project with another round of paintings in the olive groves. Theo had already approved the subject, and in late September Vincent had announced his intention to “do a personal impression of them, like what the sunflowers were.” Here amid the storied trees with their gnarled trunks and silvery leaves, he could both prove his strength against the demons of the past and demonstrate his allegiance to Theo’s commercial imperatives of “wholesomeness” and “true sentiment”—of art without affectation.

Olive Grove
, J
UNE
1889,
OIL ON CANVAS, 28⅜ × 36⅛ IN
. (
Illustration credit 40.2
)

One after another, Vincent painted four big canvases in the first weeks of November, each one showing the ancient groves from a different angle, at a different time of day, in a different mood: against a rising sun and a setting sun; under a yellow sky, a green sky, and a pale blue sky. He painted them with a red-and-green ground, with a blue-and-orange ground, and against a lavender-and-yellow mountain vista. He painted them with their emerald foliage flaming like the cypresses, and with their silvery underleaves sparkling like stars. He painted not with the loaded brush of Arles (Theo disapproved of his
heavy impasto), but with a loose fabric of short strokes evoking the atmosphere of Seurat and the brushwork of Gauguin. In his descriptions to Theo, he stressed the roots of these images in “hard and coarse reality”—“[they] smell of the earth,” he said—not in studio calculations.

But how could he capture the true essence of Provence without figures? Gauguin wrote alluringly about his studies of Breton peasant women working in the hemp fields and gathering seaweed. He boasted of his plan to paint fifty pictures that would “instill in these desolate figures a wild quality I perceive in them and also within me.” Without figures, how could Vincent aspire to the primitive truth, fraternal approval, and inevitable commercial success of images like these? And how could he paint figures without models? What could be more real—less abstract—than flesh and blood? The Millet peasants that lined his studio mocked the ambitions of the Impressionists, he said. “ ‘But look here,’ ” he imagined them taunting him, “ ‘when shall we see these country men and women of yours?’ ” “As for myself,” he replied abjectly. “I feel a disgrace and a failure.”

Driven by thoughts like these, and bursting with new confidence, Vincent departed on a journey unthinkable only two months before: to Arles.

Securing permission to go had not been easy. Peyron still blamed the last trip to Arles in July for “provoking” the crisis that summer. He had told Theo in October that Vincent would have to “pass many tests” before he could be trusted to travel so far again. But as the days without a relapse accumulated, it became harder and harder to resist Vincent’s pleas. In late October, Theo sent extra money for the journey. A few days later, Peyron gave his final approval. “[He] said that there is considerable improvement,” Vincent reported, “and that he has good hopes for me.” The trip that began two weeks later, in mid-November, seemed to confirm Peyron’s optimism. This time, everything went according to plan. Vincent saw Pastor Salles and collected the money he had been holding for Theo. He boldly bought “a stock of paints” for the great venture that lay ahead.

But, most important, he saw Madame Ginoux.

Ever since he missed seeing her in July, Vincent had been fantasizing about his reunion with the proprietress of the Café de la Gare, who had posed for him and Gauguin exactly one year earlier. Theo’s friend Isaäcson had seen Vincent’s portrait of her and complimented it. “I am glad to hear that someone else saw something in that woman’s figure,” Vincent had written in June, “though I think that the merit is in the model and not in my painting.” Since then, he had thought often about the statuesque Arlésienne with the raven ringlets and Mediterranean temperament. In October, he wrote Theo vaguely about “some people” in Arles “whom I felt, and again feel, the need for seeing”—the vagueness required to hide either a sudden spasm of desire or a long-simmering infatuation with a woman he barely knew.

It had happened before, as Theo knew too well: a friendly female face exaggerated by loneliness and maternal longing into a fantasy of fondness, and even intimacy—a delusion that could only lead to overreach and heartbreak. Just two years earlier, in Paris, when Theo first abandoned the rue Lepic apartment to woo Jo Bonger, Vincent had wandered into these dangerous waters with Agostina Segatori, another sensuous, sloe-eyed café proprietress. That episode had ended in disaster. To avoid those memories, Vincent cloaked his ardor, as he had so many times before, in artistic imperative. “I despair of ever finding models,” he complained when he heard of Isaäcson’s compliment. “Ah, if now and then I had someone like [Madame Ginoux]…I’d do something very different yet.”

On his trip in November, Vincent not only found his model, but apparently persuaded her to pose for him. She may have stood for his pencil, or merely allowed him to sketch her as she went about her chores. But when Vincent returned to the asylum two days later, he immediately sat down and memorialized his visit by painting another olive grove and inserting his Dulcinea at the foremost tree, arms upstretched, plucking the ancient fruit. He dared not share his triumph with Theo, but only hinted at it between the lines of his report: “It is a good thing to show yourself there from time to time,” he wrote about Arles, “they were very friendly, and even welcomed me.”

In the days after his return, anything seemed possible. To Theo, Vincent couched his optimism in caution. “We will wait a little first to see if this journey will provoke another attack,” he wrote. “I almost dare to hope it won’t.” But the long streak of good health capped by the successful trip was already steeling his confidence and catapulting his thoughts into the future. He imagined leaving the asylum and returning to Arles where, he claimed, “at present no one has any antipathy toward me.” He talked of being “cured” and coming north in the spring when, he predicted, “we shall not even need the doctor at Auvers or the Pissarros.” His mind even drifted to the images he would make when he returned to Paris and could focus his newfound strength, his truth-telling brush, and his clear southern color on the gray city that gave birth to the new art.