Van Gogh (161 page)

T
HE
R
AVOUX FAMILY IN FRONT OF THE
R
AVOUX
I
NN
(
Illustration credit 42.3
)

Vincent’s portraits of the men, women, and children of Auvers sprang from the same invitation as his lavish landscapes of the Oise valley. “I am looking forward to doing the portraits of all of you in the open air,” he wrote Theo in a rapture of anticipation: “yours, Jo’s and the little one’s.” Like the paintings of his mother and father that he was forever imagining he would do, even in the darkest days of Drenthe and Nuenen, but never did, the unpainted portraits of his brother’s family haunted all the images from Auvers with their conspicuous absence. In a letter to Wil, Vincent explained his undying love for portraiture in words that spoke with equal poignance of striving for artistic perfection and longing for human connection:

The portraits that increasingly lined Vincent’s studio also announced his reborn ambitions to commercial success—without which no vision of paradise was complete. “In order to get some clients for portraits,” he wrote in early June, “one must be able to show different ones that one has done. That is the only possibility I see of selling anything.” Over the next month, while he labored relentlessly on his slideshow of rural utopia, he signaled his commercial determination by painting flowers (always sure sellers); planning a café exhibition in Paris; writing sales pitches to critics; imagining forays into new media, like posters and prints; and negotiating complex exchanges of his works (both for other artists’ paintings and for services rendered). But he never stopped clinging to the delusion that had gripped him since Antwerp: that he could make money doing what he loved most—portraits.

Such thoughts drew him irresistibly back to Paul Gauguin, the Bel-Ami of the Midi that he had expected to usher in “a great revolution in portraiture.” Of all Vincent’s paintings the world had seen since January, Gauguin had expressed particular admiration for the
Arlésienne
—Vincent’s portrait of Madame Ginoux based on Gauguin’s own drawing of her. Still convinced that his commercial viability was tied to Gauguin and the “southern” imagery that they had pioneered together, Vincent reached out to his former housemate with groveling praise (“Dear
maître”
), tender affection (“since my return I have thought of you every day”), and urgent pleas for reconciliation. He even offered to join Gauguin in Brittany, where, he solemnly promised, “we will try to do something purposeful and serious, such as our work would probably have become if we had been able to carry on down there”—that is, in Arles.

Daydreams and smoky evenings filled with thoughts of portraits and models and memories of the Yellow House led Vincent inevitably, again, to the search for a studio. The Ravouxs had given him the use of a small room off the back hall of the little inn to spare him the long climb upstairs with his cumbersome kit. They had even set aside a place in the barn where he could dry his paintings. By the time Theo and his family visited in early June, however, Vincent was already talking about renting a house somewhere in the village.

He wrote to the Ginouxs requesting that they send the two beds from the Yellow House, still stored in their café attic, and began to militate for retrieving the paintings stacked so haphazardly both at Tanguy’s and in Theo’s apartment. He had to have a studio to prevent them from going to ruin, he argued, and to retouch those that needed it. “By keeping them in good condition,” he
reminded Theo, pleading for himself as well as his paintings, “there will be a greater chance of getting some profit out of them.” “Neglecting them,” he sputtered, in an accusation that rang with personal grievance, “is one of the causes of our mutual penury.”

By mid-June, only days after Theo’s visit, he had found one particular house (for four hundred francs a year) and begun the long march of persuasion. “This is how it is. Here I pay 1 franc a day for sleeping, so
if I had my furniture
, the difference between 365 francs and 400 would be no great matter, I think.” Somewhere along that road, his old dream of a studio merged with the larger quest for home and family. His search for a studio became a hunt for a house that all could share. He immediately began thinking about how to decorate this combined artist’s studio and family home—the first since the Schenkweg—and fixed it in his imagination with a painting.

But even his biggest canvases proved too small for this double dream. He needed a new, larger size to paint his new, larger-than-life vision of home and family at last. He had seen many big, panoramic pictures over the years, but none more recent or more powerful than Puvis de Chavannes’s magisterial mural at the Salon in Paris,
Between Art and Nature
. To achieve the same enveloping pictorial world—the embrace and escape of pictures like that—Vincent began working on a canvas almost three and a half feet wide and half as tall: as big a painting as he could balance on his easel.

On this vast horizontal blank, and others like it, Vincent made his last and most vehement pleas for Auvers.

No scene lent itself more perfectly to the new format than the fields above the rim of the river valley. Both Theo and Jo admired the view of the Crau that Vincent had painted in Arles—so much that they hung it in the living room of the Paris apartment. What better subject for his first beckoning panorama than this boundless vista of neatly tended plots in a receding puzzle of ripe yellow wheat and green potato plants, stacks of mown hay and furrows of freshly turned soil? He filled the broad foreground with a profusion of flowers, mostly poppies, painted in an ardor of pigment and brushstroke that grows freer, looser, and more fervent as it sweeps toward the viewer like a flood. The narrow strip of sky at the top he dispatched with a wide brush and a cloudless blue.

Next, he turned his wide-angle lens to the forest floor. Not the forest primeval, with its wild variation and untamed undergrowth, but a grove of mature poplar trees planted in neat rows—probably a formal
bois
on the grounds of the local château. He focused his eye on the carpet of wildflowers beneath: a
sous-bois
of “grass with flowers, pink, yellow, white and various greens.” A golden light filters down through a canopy of leaves that hovers just above the painting but is nowhere visible. The ranks of trees show only their trunks—row after row of
violet stripes in plunging perspective, disappearing into a high, dark horizon of deeper and deeper woods. In the middle of this cultivated Elysian grove, as tame and touching as a stage set, Vincent placed a well-dressed couple on an intimate stroll. Such were the glowing moments of communion with nature that awaited Theo and Jo in the valley of the Oise.

And when they returned from their outings, they came home to the scene he painted on another big canvas. A dirt road winds toward a distant country house, standing half-hidden by trees on the far side of a parklike glen and fields of green wheat. Behind it, the setting sun fills the sky with brilliant color. The fading light etches a pair of nearby pear trees in dramatic silhouettes of Prussian blue, creating the kind of picturesque vignette, the surprise of beauty, that would always stop Dorus and Anna van Gogh on their walks around Zundert for a moment of silent appreciation. In the distance, he painted Auvers’s famous château, nestled in greenery. But in Vincent’s dreamlike vision, the elaborate castle—a vast amalgam of two centuries of building and planting, parterres and terraces—was reduced to a simple silhouette of forget-me-not blue: an image of home on the horizon, rest at journey’s end, that summoned his brother to the best of both bourgeois comfort and rustic sublime.

If Theo’s young family appeared nowhere in these visionary vistas of country life, they didn’t have to. Theo, like Vincent, had seen Puvis’s big painting at the Salon, and Vincent’s mural-shaped invitations invoked that image wordlessly. In a letter to Wil, Vincent described Puvis’s friezelike tableau of family life in Arcadia:

In early July, Vincent made this vision of family and art his own with another inviting panorama. He chose as his subject not the Michel-like vista of the plateau, or the Gauguin-like mystery of the woods, or the Corot-like magic of a country sunset. Instead, he took his easel and paints and ungainly canvas to a house just a few steps from the Ravoux Inn: the house of Charles Daubigny.

Other than Millet, no painter of Vincent’s lifetime had touched his heart or shaped his art more than Daubigny: hero of the Barbizon; champion of plein air painting; liberator of the brush from Salon rectitude; godfather of Impressionism; friend and mentor to generations of painters of nature, from Dupré and Corot to Cézanne and Pissarro. He had brought many of them to Auvers: first to his studio barge,
Le Botin
, then to a succession of houses that he built on the
verdant riverbank. The last and grandest of these was a long, narrow structure of pink stucco and blue roof tiles overlooking the river and a beautiful, parklike garden.

Daubigny died before he could enjoy this hillside paradise of fruit trees and flower beds, lilac hedges and rose-bordered paths. The tragedy of it reached as far as Amsterdam, where a twenty-four-year-old parson’s son and failing pastoral candidate anxiously awaited the next turn of his fate. “I was downcast when I heard the news,” Vincent wrote when he heard of Daubigny’s death in 1878. “It must be good to die in the knowledge that one has done some truthful work and to know that, as a result, one will live on in the memory of at least a few.”

Twelve years later, Daubigny’s widow still lived in the big pink house near the station—an image of abandoned womanhood and faithful grief that transfixed Vincent’s imagination. He had planned on painting the garden of her vigil from the moment he arrived in Auvers and heard the touching story. The public was admitted from time to time and still caught glimpses of the black-clad Sophie Daubigny-Garnier. Vincent had already made one study of the garden—so intent on doing so that he used a linen towel when he couldn’t find a canvas.

This time he brought his big double-square canvas and filled it with all the gardens of a lifetime: the wandering paths of the Etten parsonage, as he had painted it for Gauguin; the shimmering leaves of the olive groves outside Arles; the swirling vortices of the night sky over the garden of Gethsemane. In Vincent’s reverie, it was blooming season for every plant. Every leaf on every tree trembled with light. The yellow wildflowers of spring still dotted the grass, and manured flowerbeds radiated vivid lavender. Dull bushes came alive with swirls of color and vibrations of shade. Lime trees marched toward the distant house on impossibly thin trunks with wavy crowns of foliage in cloudlike formations.

Like the “poet’s garden” outside the Yellow House, this garden had its ghosts, too, its Petrarch and Boccaccio. Not just the spectral figure of Madame Daubigny, which Vincent added in the background, wearing widow’s weeds and standing forlornly next to an empty table and chairs—another echo of parsonage gardens past—but the dead artist himself, as “seen” in the empty lawn chair and in the mysterious cat that skitters across the foreground, but mostly in the great effusion of life all around: the rapture of nature that Daubigny had painted so often, and that even now resurrected him in memory.

But this beckoning image of the “lush country” and “lovely greenery in abundance” that Vincent promised in Auvers, of “the quiet like that of Puvis de Chavannes,” spoke to Theo in a code deeper still. Daubigny had spent his final years not just with his wife and children, but also with a fellow artist, Honoré Daumier, the painter and immortal caricaturist, grown blind in old age. The
three
of them had sat together at a garden table under a vine arbor and filled
Daubigny’s house with both great art and laughter. In this dream landscape, they had lived out their lives together—husband, wife, and afflicted confrère: a model for the home and studio, family and brotherhood, that Vincent imagined for himself and Theo and Jo in the Edenic valley of the Oise.

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL
, alluring vision—as much as paint and words could make it. But real life for Vincent in Auvers was anything but idyllic. He had arrived in May holding on by the thinnest thread: terrified by the possibility of another attack, still racked with guilt over the money diverted from Theo’s new family, haunted by the stacks of unsold paintings in Paris. He poured his despair into a letter so bleak that he didn’t dare to mail it: “I am far from having reached any kind of tranquility … I feel a failure … a lot that I accept and that will not change.… The prospect grows darker, I see no happy future at all.”

The past never stayed in the past. The simple task of extracting his furniture from Arles turned into a torment of memory. Despite his repeated requests, and offers to pay the shipping charges, the Ginouxs prevaricated with absurd Tartarin tales (that Mr. Ginoux had been gored by a bull) and sheer disregard (“the traditional laziness,” Vincent grumbled), threatening with each delay to resurrect the demons he had struggled to leave behind (what he called “that business which has been talked about so much in Arles”).

Gauguin would not let him forget, either. He dismissed Vincent’s offer to come to Britanny as “unrealizable” because his studio lay “quite some distance from the town,” he explained, “and for a person who is ill and sometimes in need of a doctor, it could be risky.” Besides, Gauguin had again set his sights on exotic climes—Madagascar, this time (“the savage will return to the wild,” he explained). Bernard planned to accompany him there. Vincent briefly let himself dream of joining his comrades (“for you
must
go there in twos or threes”), but soon submitted to the truth. “Certainly the future of painting is in the tropics,” he wrote Theo, “but I am not convinced that you, Gauguin or I are the men of that future.”