Van Gogh (116 page)

The move to the Yellow House in May, which finally provided him with a place to take models other than his cramped hotel room, and the trip to the beach at Saintes-Maries, where he hoped to find bathers to pose for him, announced yet another burst of enthusiasm for “figures, figures, and more figures.” “I shall make a furious onslaught on the figure,” he declared, “[for] that is really what I aim at.” As in Antwerp, he began to talk confidently about luring women to his new studio for portraits. “I am pretty sure they’d take the bait,” he wrote leeringly.

But they didn’t. In Saintes-Maries, he had come too early for the bathing season, and in Arles, the labor demands of the harvest deprived him of the models he needed to depict it. Nor could he persuade the suspicious peasants to freeze their gleaning or pitching long enough to sketch them in action. As a result, in painting after painting, the heroes of rural life barely feature. Unlike Millet’s farmyard icons, the figures in Vincent’s harvest paintings, small and roughly drawn, virtually disappear in the celebration of sun and wheat. All during June, he spoiled more than a few images by trying to freehand a figure for lack of a model to pose. “I
still feel
the want of my models,” he wrote, recalling the obliging De Groots of Nuenen, “who seemed to be made for me, and whom I still adore; if only I had them here.”

Finally, in desperation, he begged Wil to retrieve some of the prints that had been salvaged from his Kerkstraat studio. If he had to work from paper models, not flesh-and-blood, he wanted at least to work from the best. As in the past, he feverishly imagined that his failure to secure models—women especially—imperiled his whole artistic project. “Doing portraits has much more depth,” he insisted. “It makes me cultivate whatever is best and deepest in me.” Projecting this obsession onto his vision for the Yellow House, he prophesied in oracular tones that the coming artistic messiah—the “Bel Ami of the Midi”—“will be in figure-painting what Claude Monet is in landscape.” Like Maupassant’s hero, he imagined, the erotic conquistador Gauguin, tamer of wild negresses, would come to Provence and lure the legendary beauties of Arles into the studio that he would share with Vincent.

This vision of vicarious sexual and artistic conquest was only whetted by news that Gauguin had begun his painting of peasant girls dancing—an Arcadian fantasy out of Jules Breton. At the same time, twenty-year-old Bernard tormented Vincent with titillating tales of Parisian bordellos, accompanied by drawings of prostitutes and poems of erotic encouragement. Desperate not to be outdone, Vincent trawled the brothels and back alleys of Arles, just as he had in Antwerp, in search of “public women” to pose for him. That may be how
he found the “dirty little girl” who sat for a single portrait that summer, then disappeared. Vincent boasted of his discovery—a “mudlark with a head like a Monticelli”—to friends like Russell, who both appreciated a good street whore and, Vincent hoped, might support his great plans for the Midi. (He said nothing about her to Theo, however, having vowed abstinence from women for fear of another “petticoat crisis.”)

In fact, the best advertisement for the sexual allure of Arles that Vincent could find—and could share with everybody—wasn’t a woman at all. It was a man. In mid-June, just as the harvest was interrupted by a week of torrential rain, a striking figure strode into the Yellow House and straddled the chair in front of Vincent’s easel. He wore a sleeveless scarlet tunic decorated with bold scrolls of gold and an embroidered collar. A rumpled red fez sat on his head, cocked at a rakish angle. A big black tassel dangled to the side. He straddled the small chair with his legs wide apart, as if on a horse, his hands on his thighs and his elbows akimbo. He stared at Vincent with his dark, deep-set eyes and impatiently chewed a pipe.

“I have a model at last,” Vincent exulted, “a Zouave.”

Originally recruited to the French army from the Zouaoua tribe of Algeria, the Zouaves had earned a place in the European imagination that reached far beyond the Berber highlands of North Africa. Untamed for centuries by the Ottoman beys, and rebellious against French colonization even into the 1870s, the Zouaves had become symbols of fierceness in battle and feral virility in sex. By the time Vincent encountered them in the brothels of Arles, however, the Zouaves’ fame had enticed so many Frenchmen to their ranks that little was left of Africa except the exotic garb and the erotic mystique. Indeed, Vincent had probably been introduced to his young model by a lieutenant in the third regiment of the Zouaves named Paul-Eugène Milliet, whose unit was barracked not far from the brothel district. An estranged son of the middle class turned soldier of fortune, Milliet had come to Arles on leave after a long campaign in French Indochina. He spent his nights at the brothels, but his days indulging his other recreation: drawing. Vincent shared both of the lieutenant’s pastimes and soon offered to tutor him in the latter.

But Milliet had a sweet face and refined features—not the image of animal fierceness and carnality that Vincent wanted to send to his confrères in Paris and Brittany. His young model, on the other hand, had “a bull neck and eyes like a tiger,” he told Theo—a description that traded on the Zouaves’ reputation for both fighting and fucking. On a dare or a bet, perhaps, or after being plied with liquor (as Vincent later confessed), the young soldier came at least twice to the Yellow House and sat broodingly for Vincent’s fanatic eye.

To convey the brute sexuality he saw in his subject, Vincent applied thick strokes of saturated color in crashing complementaries: the red fez against a
slab of green with a flash of orange brick to the side, the decorative gold scrolls on his tunic set off by a broad waist sash painted in bright blue instead of its actual color, red. When the Zouave arrived for a second sitting wearing a pair of billowing red pantaloons, Vincent posed him sitting in front of a whitewashed wall with his legs spread wide, creating a huge triangle of vivid red draped over an orange-ocher tile floor and topped by the decorative blue-and-orange tunic and a sash now painted green. He slumps tensely on a bench, staring straight out with coal-black eyes, his sun-darkened skin even darker against the white wall. One large hand fidgets on his knee, the other rests in the blood-red hammock of his pantaloons, drawing attention to the wonders beneath.

Zouave Sitting
, J
UNE
1888,
PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 20½ × 26 IN
. (
Illustration credit 31.5
)

As boldly jagged and jarringly colored as these two portraits were, Vincent reported them to Theo and his friends in even starker terms: “That bronzed, feline head with the reddish cap, against a green door and the orange bricks, it’s a savage combination of incongruous tones, not easy to manage.” Claiming the inspiration of Delacroix, the famous painter of big cats who handled paint as ferociously as his subjects hunted their prey, he boasted of the image’s “ugliness,” “vulgarity,” and “horrible harshness,” and vowed to make others just like it because “it may pave the way for the future.” The message to his mates was
clear enough. Only in the South, only in Arles, only in the Yellow House could they find the primitive sexuality they craved and the savage imagery their art demanded. As for models: Would a magnificent predator like his Zouave hunt anything but the finest game on anything but the richest range?

Finally, in July, Vincent was able to show the prize. Somehow he managed to persuade or pay a young Arlesian woman to sit for him. She was no beauty; nor was she a stranger to modeling. If the portrait that Mourier-Petersen painted of her earlier that year is any guide, she was a long-faced, raven-haired, thin-lipped, gimlet-eyed woman in her late teens or early twenties. But that is not what Vincent painted. In his fever to lure his companions to the place Lamartine, that is not what he saw.

Licensed by yearning, Vincent’s imagination transformed Mourier-Petersen’s pensive model into an ideal of sexual gratification that was, at that moment, enthralling men all across France: a
mousmé
. In his fairy-tale travelogue of Japan,
Madame Chrysanthème
, Pierre Loti had described in lurid detail his encounter with this exotic sexual species—a virgin in her early teens, flushed with the first pink bloom of womanhood, offered up by the natives of that most exotic land for the delectation of a white visitor—a prostitute, a mistress, a child bride, a sex doll, whose only purpose was pleasure. “Now if you know what a
‘mousmé’
is,” Vincent announced to Theo, who was, like all of the brothers’ circle, entranced by Loti’s recently published fantasy, “I have just painted one. It took me a whole week, and I haven’t been able to do anything else.”

In that week of exhausting effort, Vincent worked and reworked his portrait of the Provençal girl in an ardor of image-making reminiscent of
The Potato Eaters
. He narrowed her eyes, darkened her brows, and puckered her mouth to comply with Loti’s descriptions. He tried especially hard to transform his model’s slender face into the pleasing and docile “puffy little visage” that so beguiled Loti. He layered color after color on her hands and face, searching for the exact combination of yellow and pink—Nipponese exotic and feminine universal—that Loti, too, had struggled to reconcile. He dressed her in garish country-girl finery that owed less to Arles or Japan or even Loti’s fancy of Japan than to Cloisonnist precepts of design and ornament: a red-and-violet-striped bodice with bright gold buttons, and a billowing skirt vividly polka-dotted in orange and blue. He sat her on an extravagantly curvilinear bentwood chair and set her against a background of pure celadon—a misty green, borrowed from oriental porcelain, that resisted the red stripes of her bodice and the scarlet bow in her hair even as it submitted to the royal blue of her skirt.

Finally, he placed in her hand a branch of oleander, a blossom that symbolized for Vincent both the allure and the thrilling danger of sex. Its pale pink blossoms could be poisonous. Its tender leaves could raise sores on tender skin. Even its enchanting fragrance, if inhaled too deeply, could kill. The hand that
holds this ambivalent bouquet rests, like the Zouave’s, on her lap, in the bole of her colorful skirt, gesturing toward the treasures beneath.

With
La mousmé
, Vincent completed the narrative of primitive lust begun with the Zouave: the former’s design for pleasure a pendant to the latter’s savage appetite. With these images, advertised in elaborate drawings sent to all his friends, Vincent beckoned everyone—but especially Gauguin—to a land of exotic eroticism; a land filled with women of “shapely, firm breasts” and lamblike docility that matched anything in Loti’s Japan or Gauguin’s Martinique; a land of sexual adventurers and the child brides to amuse them; a land without inhibitions—sexual or artistic; an erotic nirvana of primitive sex and primitive art equal to anything in fiction or sailors’ tales. It was a promise sure to lure even the Bel-Ami to the Midi.

WITH UTOPIAN VISIONS
like these filling his head, Vincent waited in a reverie of anticipation for word from Pont-Aven. Accompanied by the Zouave lieutenant Paul Milliet, he made frequent sketching trips into the countryside in July and August, especially to his favorite spot, the rocky summit of Montmajour. Together they explored the craggy mountaintop and its mazelike ruins. It was on one of these fraternal expeditions that Vincent discovered the abbey’s old garden, a crumbling enclosure neglected for a century, boisterously overgrown in the benevolent southern sun. “We explored it together and stole some excellent figs,” Vincent reported, describing for Theo the garden’s “great reeds, vines, ivy, fig trees, olives, pomegranates with lusty flowers of the brightest orange … and scattered fragments of crumbling walls here and there among the greenery.”

In this word painting of the hidden paradise among the ruins of Montmajour, as in all things, Vincent’s imagination was tutored by his reading. The abbey’s untouched garden reminded him of the famous walled garden in Zola’s
La faute de l’abbé Mouret
(
The Sins of Father Mouret
), a wonder of nature and neglect where Zola’s hero finds both the unspoiled bounty and sensual abandon of the Garden of Eden. Zola described it as “a bit of paradise” where nature “frolicked wildly” and “offered herself strange bouquets, destined to be picked by no hand”; where flowers “stampeded into the walks” and “gamboled about with such exuberance, that it was now nothing but a riot, a bushy mob beating against the walls.” Zola called this mystical garden, also abandoned for a century,
Le Paradou
.

Like Zola’s amnesiac hero, Serge, who fell in love with the
Paradou’s
only inhabitant, a wild young blond girl named Albine, Vincent found a promise of happiness in the abbey’s hidden garden. Rehearsing the longed-for arrival of another Paul from Pont-Aven, he walked among the garden’s hundred-year-old trees, lichen-covered rocks, and profligate fruitings in the playful company
of the young soldier Milliet. “He is a handsome boy, very unconcerned and easy-going,” Vincent wrote, “and very nice to me.”