Van Gogh (115 page)

With such reveries in his head, Vincent returned to the painting and inscribed a word in big letters on one boat: AMITIÉ—friendship. Then, on the empty expanse of aquamarine water, he painted four frail little boats, side by side, headed out to the trackless deep, the wind filling their sails, and nothing but glassy sea in front of them.

—

ONLY A WEEK LATER
, Vincent traveled north toward Tarascon, home of Daudet’s mythical clown, Tartarin. The road passed near the fabled ruins of the abbey church at Montmajour, a dizzying limestone escarpment rising a hundred and fifty feet straight up from the edge of the Rhône delta. For most of history, Montmajour had stood as a rocky island redoubt lapped by the waters of the Mediterranean. Sixth-century Christians sought safety on its forbidding heights, and gave thanks by hewing a sanctuary from the solid rock at its peak. Subsequent generations of monks had topped that first rough church with layer after layer of devotion in stone, from a Byzantine chapel to a medieval
donjon
to a Renaissance cloister to an eighteenth-century fortified palace and gardens. After the Revolution, all were left to crumble.

Using the road that ran up the less precipitous back slope, Vincent had climbed to Montmajour’s rocky summit many times by midsummer 1888. A lifelong lowlander, he had marveled at the spectacular view from the abbey tower, looking south toward Arles across a plain known as the Crau. Here, at the foot of the high country, the Rhône had dropped its most fertile detritus, while washing the sea’s salty deposits farther south to the Camargue. Early in the nineteenth century, a Dutch-style drainage project had reclaimed the Crau’s rocky but arable soil for cultivation, especially vineyards. The result was a picturesque vista studded with limestone islands and tiny villages set amid fields and groves. In mid-May, when Theo invited Vincent to submit some drawings for an exhibition in Amsterdam, Vincent’s imagination naturally returned to this aerial view. Over the course of a week, he made seven elaborate purple-ink drawings at Montmajour, including four sweeping panoramas of the Crau. But only days after completing the last one, his enthusiasm for them was replaced by the fervor for “Japanese” color that propelled him to Saintes-Maries at the end of May.

By the time he revisited the Crau in mid-June, however, the argument for the Yellow House had, like the Rhône, shifted course; and Vincent’s eager eye had shifted with it. His return from Saintes-Maries was greeted with news that his old Cormon classmate Louis Anquetin had been crowned by the
Revue Indépendante
as “the leader of a new trend, in which the Japanese influence is even more apparent.” Not long after that, Vincent learned of an even more enviable milestone: Anquetin had sold a painting. The buyer was the dealer Georges Thomas, a longtime target of Vincent’s commercial ambitions, and the painting was a study called
The Peasant
.

Although Vincent disputed Anquetin’s primacy in the new movement known as Cloisonnism (he thought his young protégé Bernard had “gone further in the Japanese style than Anquetin”), he could not argue with a sale—something neither he nor Bernard could boast. As the movement’s anointed
leader, Anquetin now set the agenda. Within a few weeks, Gauguin announced his plan to paint a large scene of Breton peasants doing a harvest dance. Before the end of the summer, Bernard would join Gauguin in Pont-Aven and also undertake to paint the natives of that exotic, rocky province at the opposite end of France. Around the same time, Theo returned from Giverny with glowing reports of the shimmering landscapes he had seen in Monet’s studio documenting the evanescent effects of light and season on the Île-de-France countryside.

Also in June, Vincent read a review of the exhibition of Monet’s Antibes paintings then on view at Theo’s gallery. In florid descriptions, the critic celebrated Monet’s “intimacy” with nature and praised him for documenting with his sensitive, light-filled brush the elemental beauty of France’s southern coast at Antibes, just as he had done earlier for the northern coast at Belle-Île. Proclaiming Monet the “poet and historian of the Midi” and the successor to Millet and Corot in elevating rural life to its rightful place in art, he urged his countrymen to embrace once again the sublime poetry of their own homeland. Why look to Pacific islands or ancient civilizations to find “primitive” imagery when such untouched Edens could still be found in France itself?

While Vincent was in Saintes-Maries, the author of that review, Gustave Geffroy, wrote Theo a letter expressing an interest in buying some of Vincent’s work.

In Geffroy’s article and overture; in Anquetin’s choice of subject matter; and in the reports of new imagery from Paris, Pont-Aven, and Giverny, Vincent saw new opportunities to plead the cause of the Yellow House. His letters and art erupted with arguments. No one had a more “intimate knowledge” of nature or “loved the countryside” more than he did, he protested; no one was more deeply schooled in the simple life of peasants and their primitive bond to the land than he was; and no place was better suited than Arles for artists to reconnect with the uncontaminated poetry of nature. “[I] look round and see so many things in nature that I hardly have time to think of anything else,” he wrote in direct response to Geffroy’s challenge, “for just now it is harvest time.” Abruptly canceling a return trip to Saintes-Maries, he loaded his painting equipment on his back and set off into the blazing sun and swirling mistral of the Crau.

In the next two weeks, he painted almost a dozen images in support of his Arcadian claims. He painted view after view of the Crau’s golden wheat fields, raising the horizon higher and higher to focus his obsessive brush on the summer bounty of color. “The wheat has all the hues of old gold,” he wrote as he painted, “copper, green-gold or red-gold, yellow-gold, yellow-bronze, red-green [and] flashing orange colors like a red-hot fire.” He modulated the light from a blinding midday yellow to the russet tones of sunset, when the wheat shone “luminous in the gloom.” He adjusted the sky, too, from cobalt to lavender to turquoise and finally to a yellow as unrelenting as the sun itself “in the full furnace
of the harvest at high noon.” He painted unmowed fields churning in the wind awaiting the scythe; a thresher making his slow way through the high stalks, leaving sheaves of reaped wheat in his wake; and the huge mangy haystacks that filled the barnyards, offering impromptu beds to their exhausted builders.

Egged on by his own arguments and hounded by the fierce heat and furious wind, he raced from painting to painting, sometimes completing two in a single day, chasing his vision of a “painters’ paradise” in Provence. “I have
seven studies of wheat fields,”
he boasted to Bernard, “done quickly, quickly, quickly and in a hurry, just like the harvester who is silent under the blazing sun, intent only on his reaping.”

One of these images in particular summed up Vincent’s new view of an alluring rural utopia, simultaneously familiar and exotic, that beckoned all true artists to the Midi. On a spot of high ground just east of Arles, he set his perspective frame facing north, toward the Alpilles, and captured a spectacular panorama of the golden Crau. “I am working on a new subject,” he reported to Theo, “fields green and yellow as far as the eye can reach.” On a canvas more than two by three feet—bigger than any he had used previously in Arles—Vincent’s imagination transformed the stony, sun-baked checkerboard of cultivation into a lush Shangri-La. The sunlight falls softly and evenly, leaving not a single shadow, burnishing the new-mown fields and saturating every corner of the mosaic plain in vivid color: white sandy paths, lavender reed fences, orange tile roofs, a spectrum of yellow and gold fields interlaid with mint-green shards of new growth. Forest-green groves, brakes, and copses stutter into the distance as far as the purple rocks of Montmajour and, at the horizon, the lilac Alpilles under a cloudless cerulean sky.

In a triumph of Cloisonnist gospel over the observable reality of haze and glare, the atmosphere is crystal clear all the way from the bristling cane enclosure in the foreground to the serrated line of mountains miles away. Every fragment of color, from the little blue hay cart at the center of the canvas to the white citadel of Montmajour’s ruins near the horizon, shines translucently, unblurred by dust or distance. On this vast, serene landscape, tiny peasants go about their labors in a cartoon narrative of rural life: a reaper finishes his work in one field; a horse-drawn cart trots along the edge of another; a couple walk home in the distance while, not far away, a farmer stands on the back of his wagon and pitches wheat into his grain loft. In the foreground, the ancient artifacts of the harvest are arrayed in silent testimony: ladders against a haystack, the empty blue cart, and a spare set of wheels in brilliant red.

After completing the image in a single day under the burning sun, Vincent came home bursting with new confidence in his art (“this picture kills the rest”) and new arguments for his mission in the Midi. “I am on the right track,” he exclaimed. “If Gauguin were willing to join me … it would establish us squarely
as the explorers of the South.” In a reverie of regression, he renewed his vow of solidarity with the peasants of Nuenen. “During the harvest my work was not any easier than what the peasants who were actually harvesting were doing,” he insisted. “In the long run I think I shall come to belong to the country altogether.”

To support the primitive bona fides of his new images, he recruited both the rustic icons of Millet and the “innocent and gentle beings” of Zola. Following Geffroy’s nativist injunctions, he compared his simple images not to Japanese prints, but to the “naïve pictures out of old farmers’ almanacs where hail, snow, rain or fine weather are depicted in a wholly primitive manner.” He cited as direct inspiration a harvest painting that he had seen in Paris by the newly elevated Anquetin. He claimed a newfound kinship with Paul Cézanne, admired by both Gauguin and Bernard and artistic godfather to the Cloisonnist imagery that now united all three men. Just as Cézanne had become “absolutely part of the countryside” that he painted so often around Aix, only fifty miles away, Vincent claimed an ineffable connection to the Crau. “Coming home with my canvas, I say to myself, ‘Look! I’ve got the very tones of old Cézanne!’ ” he wrote. “I work even in the middle of the day, in the full sunshine, without any shadow at all, in the wheat fields, and I enjoy it like a cicada.”

To Theo, Vincent invoked a pantheon of shared favorites and Goupil bestsellers: from the skyscapes of Philips Koninck and Georges Michel to the Barbizon pastorals of Millet and Dupré to the landscapes of Monticelli. But mostly he invoked the current
entresol
star. A sunset over the Crau had “just the effect of that Claude Monet,” he attested; “it was superb.” Where Monet had the Mediterranean at Antibes, Vincent had the Crau—“stretching away toward the horizon” as “beautiful and infinite as the sea.” Just as Geffroy had claimed for Monet’s coastal vistas the power to lull the senses into a dreamlike state, Vincent claimed for his Elysian panorama the power to soothe the weary soul with contemplation of the infinite. “[In] that flat landscape,” he wrote, “there [is]
nothing
but eternity.”

To underscore that point, he returned in July to the heights of Montmajour and drew his beloved valley from an even loftier perspective. Had the walk from town not been so long or had the wind not blown so hard across the rocky hilltop, he probably would have painted the dizzying view from the abbey ruins. But even with just pen and paper, Vincent could summon up a vision of paradise. On two large sheets (19 by 24 inches), he drew a bird’s-eye view of the entire valley. “At first sight it is like a map,” he said.

From the limestone outcropping of the Mont de Cordes in the east to the banks of the Rhône in the west, spotted with villages, barns, and farmhouses and crisscrossed with fences, roads, and even a train track, he documented the view at his feet. Then, with an intensity and inventiveness astonishing even by
Vincent’s standards, he filled the outline with an ecstasy of tiny pen strokes. No furrow, no fence picket, no stubble of wheat, no plug of grass, no change in texture, no matter how far away, went unrecorded by his obsessive quill. With endless dots and dashes, hash marks and hatchings, strokes and squiggles—each one an argument for the splendor and sublimity of the Crau—he transformed the maplike vista into a magical place. As soon as he finished, he mailed the two drawings to Theo as report, invitation, and plea. “Refresh your eyes with the wide-open spaces of the Crau,” he enjoined his brother. “I so much want to give you
a true idea
of the simplicity of nature here.”

Landscape Near Montmajour with Train
, J
ULY
1888,
INK AND CHALK ON PAPER, 19⅜ × 24 IN.
(
Illustration credit 31.4
)

BUT ONE THING
was still missing both from Vincent’s art and from his brief for the Midi. He had come to the country, as he always did, looking for models. Stymied for two years in Paris by the expense and the lack of a private studio, he arrived in Arles with his eye alert to the potential for figure painting and portraits in a region well known for its attractive natives. “People are often good-looking here,” he confirmed to his sister Wil. On every walk in the streets, he said, he saw “women like a Fragonard or a Renoir,” “girls who reminded one of Cimabue and Giotto,” or “figures quite as beautiful as those of Goya or Velasquez.” But except
for one old Arlesian woman that he painted soon after arriving, his luck had hardly improved from Paris.