“Do a great deal or drop dead,” said Vincent van Gogh, and he was a man who lived up to his own aphorism. In February 1888 he moved from Paris to Arles and over the course of the next 15 months produced no fewer than 188 paintings and innumerable drawings. The city, on the eastern bank of the Rhône, had been an important Roman administrative centre and was littered with ancient ruins, including an amphitheatre that could hold 20,000 spectators. The grandeur of history, however, held no interest for him: he painted the amphitheatre just once, as the setting for one of the bullfights that were still held there. Instead, the paintings that poured forth showed the people he got to know in the unprepossessing Cavalerie quarter near the station – café scenes, landscapes and, of course, sunflowers. However, for him, all these seemingly mundane subjects were matter for transformation.
Arles was supposed to be the place where it all came right for Van Gogh. He had so far lived a peripatetic life, with spells in The Hague, London, Paris and Amsterdam, and had failed everywhere. He had tried teaching, preaching and art dealing, and all had ended badly. He had disappointed as an artist too and cursed his own “draftsman’s fist” that “does not quite obey my will”. A sense of victimhood, self-loathing and bitterness ensued. “When we look at others who have done more than we, and are better than we,” he wrote, “we very soon begin to hate our own life because it is not as good as others’.” “Better” is a telling word.
Van Gogh was not, however, an unknown artist. Largely as a result of his art-dealer brother Theo, he was familiar with – and to – the Parisian avant-garde. His paintings had piqued the interest of Pissarro, Seurat and Signac; Toulouse-Lautrec had made his portrait, and Gauguin was a friendly acquaintance. When he arrived in Arles he had a clear idea of what he wanted to achieve. He was seeking his own place in the contemporary art world; he wanted to be at the centre of a mutually supportive artistic community; he intended to create a body of work for an exhibition that would finally establish his reputation; and he was on the lookout for a motif that would distinguish him and that could stand as his signature.
Unfortunately, Van Gogh had a gift for alienating people; as his relative, Anton Mauve, a successful painter, had told him, “You have a vicious temper,” and even Theo, his greatest supporter – both financial and psychological – thought he was “his own worst enemy – he makes life difficult not only for others but also for himself”. Van Gogh sensed all this and, as a result perhaps, had a horror of “that particular torture” – loneliness. “Is being alone really living?” he once asked, and felt that if he could attract fellow forward-thinking painters to the city he could banish that fear.
So the man who arrived in Arles was full of optimism, which only increased when Theo managed to convince Gauguin to head south. The arrangement was transactional: in return for a regular allowance, Gauguin would not just paint with Van Gogh and keep him company, they would share expenses (Theo sent his brother a monthly remittance of 150 francs, at a time when a teacher earned 75 francs) and he would keep an eye on the unstable younger man and report back.
The home studio they would share, known as the Yellow House, sat just outside the city walls. It was to be a semi-monastic place: “An artists’ house, but not affected, on the contrary, nothing affected,” said Van Gogh. In his excitement at Gauguin’s arrival, he spruced it up and set about filling it with paintings: “I want to make decorations for the studio. Nothing but large sunflowers.” Sunny pictures and a sunny mood would greet the man he greatly admired.
Van Gogh had chosen the house because it abutted a small park that he called “the Poet’s Garden”. Both have long gone: the house was destroyed by an American bomb during the Second World War, and the gardens are now a car park and a roundabout overlooked by a Monoprix supermarket. The atmosphere inside the Yellow House was similarly ill-starred.
The two men painted together in a room just 24 feet long and 15 feet wide; Van Gogh was filled with manic energy and he drank: “If the storm within gets too loud,” he noted, “I take a glass too much to stun myself.” Over the course of nine weeks, existing in a fug of tobacco smoke, alcohol and paint, tensions rose. Relations between them, wrote Van Gogh, were “terribly electric” and left their heads “as exhausted as an electric battery after it has run down”. Gauguin had a truer perspective; he likened the situation to a train “hurtling along at top speed… I can foresee the end of the line.”
It was reached rapidly. Spooked by the threat of physical violence, Gauguin decamped to a hotel and made plans to return to Paris. The idea of abandonment triggered a breakdown in Van Gogh, and on 23 December, following an argument, he sliced off part of his left ear, wrapped it in newspaper, delivered it to a girl who worked as a cleaner at the brothel the painters frequented and went home to bed: on opening the parcel, she fainted. When Gauguin returned to their house there were police at the door and he was briefly arrested for murder but released when it was found that for all the blood, Van Gogh was alive. Gauguin left Arles on Christmas Day and never saw Van Gogh again.
After his discharge from hospital, Van Gogh returned to the Yellow House but shortly afterwards a petition by local Arlesians demanding the removal of the “red-headed madman” forced him out. In May 1889, he admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in nearby Saint-Rémy, where he would remain for the next year. Two months after leaving the asylum, he took his own life.
This critical Arles and Saint-Rémy period is the subject of the National Gallery’s major new exhibition “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers”, the gallery’s first ever show devoted to Van Gogh. The curious title – Van Gogh was neither consorting with poets nor did he have a significant lover – refers to the way, at this febrile moment in his life, both people and places were transmuted in his imagination.
So, he named the small municipal park in front of the Yellow House “the Poet’s Garden” because he fancied Petrarch and Boccaccio strolling there. He called
his portrait of the local postman’s wife La Berceuse (“Lullaby”) rather than “Portrait of Augustine Roulin” because he saw this woman holding a cord to rock
a baby’s cradle as both symbolic and universal. As he wrote to Theo, he envisaged, in an extraordinary flight of the imagination, the painting hanging “in the cabin of a boat” where fishermen in “their melancholy isolation, exposed to all the dangers, alone on the sad sea… would experience a feeling of being rocked, reminding them of their own lullabies”. He painted lovers strolling beneath the starry night sky at the edge of the Rhône or among the tombs of Les Alyscamps, Arles’s Roman necropolis, not because he saw them there but because the mood of these places demanded their presence – and perhaps too because he wanted to be one of them. Even one of the paths through the garden at the Saint-Rémy asylum appeared to him as “nests of greenery for lovers”: his fear of being alone was here mixed up with the primacy and insistence of love as an emotion.
Van Gogh increased the potency of everything he painted during this period by his use of colour. Indeed he likened his heightened perceptions to an erotic state: “Let us crazy ones feel orgasm… through our eyes,” he said, and “pour out all our creative sap” into art. After all, he believed that “the enjoyment of any beautiful thing is like coitus, a moment of infinity”, and so to capture that beauty was to experience that petite mort time and time again. He even wanted the paint on his palette to couple and selected tones, such as red and green, “complete each other like man and woman”. This highly charged approach startled one of his sitters, a soldier and would-be painter named Paul-Eugène Milliet, who asserted that: “A canvas needs to be seduced, but Van Gogh, he, he raped it.”
If colour was the most important technique he used to infuse poetry and symbolism into the observable world, he had others too. Both his drawings from the period and his paintings display an extraordinary array of different marks. Familiar with the impressionists’ tache, Signac and Seurat’s pointillism, and the black outlines of Émile Bernard’s cloisonnism, he adapted his own way of handling paint, working in dashes, dabs and strokes and almost never with flat, unmodulated surfaces. It unified all his motifs – trees, sky, people, buildings – and made his pictures flicker.
Here is the borderline between the seen and the felt, a liminality he heightened with his compositional method. He would frequently work outdoors but rarely complete pictures there. Almost all would be finished in the studio to allow memory and imagination to act on the real. Some of his landscapes were painted entirely in the studio while for others he would place his canvas so that it faced the view, then, having looked at the scene he would turn his back on it to put his paint on the canvas – a physical repudiation of literalness.
As he made clear in a letter to Theo, Van Gogh saw the visual and the emotional-symbolic as inseparable: “To express the thought of a forehead through the radiance of a light tone on a dark background. To express hope through some star. The ardour of a living being through the rays of a setting sun. That’s certainly not trompe-l’œil realism, but isn’t it something that really exists?”
To facilitate this expression, he would also conceive of paintings as “decorations” – initially as parts of an ensemble that filled the rooms of the Yellow House. The pictures, which included The Bedroom, The Night Café and Starry Night over the Rhône, were meant for an exhibition that would finally launch him. The idea started as an ad hoc gathering but Van Gogh quickly saw that the interrelations between the paintings, either thematic or colouristic, meant that different genres could be hung together and so increase their impact.
For example, he wanted to make a triptych with two of his sunflower paintings flanking La Berceuse (at the exhibition, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Sunflowers, 1889, will join the National Gallery’s own picture, the first time they have been together since hanging in Van Gogh’s studio); and he hung four of his lush and verdant images of “the Poet’s Garden” in Gauguin’s bedroom. He also stipulated that a group of six large pen-and-ink landscape drawings made from the ruined abbey at Montmajour, an hour’s walk from Arles and a place he visited some 50 times but almost never drew directly – blaming the wind – were to be exhibited together. He repeatedly painted olive trees in the foothills of the Alpilles near Saint-Rémy; some he endowed with serenity, some with despair, all carrying the retinal memory of Christ on the Mount of Olives.
If these multiples were part of Van Gogh’s attempt to find a distinctive artistic identity, there are also parallels to be drawn with Monet’s repeated treatments of individual motifs. However, not only did Van Gogh’s pictures predate Monet’s series of haystacks and Rouen Cathedral, but they are studies of emotional timbres rather than investigations of light effects.
The same applied to his portraits, which he saw not just as depictions of people but as archetypes. He paired The Lover, his portrait of Paul-Eugène Milliet (who “makes love so easily”, wrote Van Gogh enviously, “that he almost has contempt for love”), with that of his friend Eugène Boch (The Poet), a designation he gave to the Belgian painter because of his “Dante-like face”: he hung the two pictures above his bed. As well as Augustine Roulin (La Berceuse), he also painted her husband, Joseph, as The Father or The Postman, and their three sons too – the ideal family he never had. He portrayed Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux, wife of the proprietor of his favourite night café, as L’Arlésienne – a representative of the women of Arles, famed for their beauty (even though Madame Ginoux is not noticeably beautiful). He often made several versions of these portraits, changing clothes and backgrounds as he sought their essential form. As he said: “I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolise.”
Van Gogh wrote: “I have moments when I am twisted with enthusiasm or madness or prophecy” – and at Saint-Rémy the pictures continued to stream out of him. He made as many as 143 oils at the asylum and when he left it in May 1890 and moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, just outside Paris, he produced a painting a day. Nevertheless, on 27 July he shot himself in the chest – the wound below his ribs was, said his doctor, “about the size of a large pea” – though the bullet pierced no vital organs, he died two days later.
If the paintings of 1888-90 are those most closely associated with Vincent van Gogh’s wrenching story, they have another legacy too. Part of the Saint-Rémy asylum is now a museum; the other half, separated by a high wall, remains a psychiatric facility. The medical director, Jean-Marc Boulon, offers current patients art lessons and believes that as they walk in the hospital’s private gardens they draw consolation from the knowledge that Van Gogh trod in the very same places – and painted them so often and so indelibly.
“Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” is showing at the National Gallery from 14 September until 19 January 2025
[See also: Bonfire of the humanities]
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This article appears in the 04 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Starmer under fire