I would like to paint in such a way that everybody,
at least if they had eyes, would see it.
—LETTER TO THEO, AUGUST 1888
IN HIS BRIGHT BLUE postman's uniform with gold buttons, Vincent's new friend, Joseph Roulin, sat stiffly posing for his portrait. Vincent thought the postman looked like Socrates, with his large head, ruddy cheeks, and long salt-and-pepper beard. He painted quickly, as Roulin could hardly contain himself. His wife had just delivered a baby girl, and he was “proud as a peacock and aglow with satisfaction.” He promised Vincent he could paint the baby in her cradle, and then he proceeded to sing the “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, in a terrible voice, vowing to christen his daughter at home instead of at church. Vincent thought him more inter-esting than anyone he'd met in Arles. When he finished the portrait, the Roulins invited him to stay for supper. Roulin, after a bottle of wine, expounded on his socialist politics and offered the younger artist advice about life. For Vincent, who long ago had lost faith in his own father, Roulin, “so wise and so trustful,” became a father figure: “Roulin has a salient gravity and tenderness for me such as an old soldier might have for a young one.” He painted eight versions of the postman, as well as portraits of Mrs. Roulin and their two sons. Despite his poverty, Roulin refused to be paid, so Vincent ended up buying him food and many drinks at the local café. He also gave the Roulins paintings. Spending time with them helped Vincent feel less lonely, more a part of a family life he missed.
Also at this time Vincent painted a flamboyant portrait of a soldier of the Algerian infantry, whom he gleefully described as “a man with a small face, a bull neck, and the eye of a tiger.” The soldier faces the viewer in full Zouave uniform. His legs, clad in wild red pantaloons, are spread wide, taking up a fourth of the canvas. Vincent liked the style of this portrait—“vulgar, loud”—in opposition to the overly refined portraits that the rich commissioned in Paris. He painted his other friend in the regiment, Paul-Eugène Milliet, but complained that the young, handsome soldier was a bad poser and too much of a womanizer to sit still. Milliet probably wouldn't get the girls, Vincent grumbled to Theo, if he were an artist.
Though he often forgot mealtimes when he painted, Vincent was concerned about eating properly and wrote to Theo that he'd finally found a café that served decent food. Near his yellow house, the Café de la Gare was run by Mr. and Mrs. Ginoux. He painted her as a classically beautiful Arlesienne wearing an elegant black dress.
He also spent some nights living at a cheap inn, the Café Alcazar, before his yellow house was completed. The bar was open all night and attracted the “night prowlers,” who had no money for lodging. Before long Vincent started on a painting of the interior, staying up for three nights and sleeping all day. He started it as a joke because, he said, he had paid the landlord so much money that he would “paint his whole rotten joint to repay himself” The Night Café, which he called “one of the ugliest I have done” because of the harsh contrasts of reds and greens, was explained in detail in a letter to Theo. Charming interiors painted by the Impressionists or the grand settings of the court painters held no interest for Vincent. “In my picture I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, commit crimes. In short I have tried to express the powers of darkness in a low public-housing, by using soft Louis XV green and emerald green, contrasting with yellow-greens and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere of pale sulfur, like a devil's furnace.”
A few painters passed through Arles, and one of them, the Belgian Eugène Boch, captured Vincent's imagination. They hiked, debated about art, and watched bullfights in the Roman amphitheater. In Boch he found the model he sought for a painting of a dreamer using exaggerated colors against a starry sky, with his face pale against the deep blue “like the mysterious brightness of a pale star in the infinite.” The fanciful background of stars represented the character of an artist-poet to Vincent, who wrote, “I want to say something comforting, as music is comforting. I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal.” Seeking to infuse his portraits with a lasting quality, he was returning to sentiments he'd held in Holland before “I knew the Impressionists.”
Boch, with his “face like a razor blade” and “very sensible ideas,” according to Vincent, had plans to go to the Borinage to paint the coal miners. Vincent encouraged him, as he hoped Boch would start an artists' commune there. This could be a counterpart in the north to the one he dreamed of putting in place in his yellow house. It was criminal, he said, that young artists in Paris struggled so hard to survive, thus falling prey to a decadent life. In Arles, surrounded by natural beauty, he fantasized that artists would bond like brothers, sharing ex-penses, ideas, and eventually profits from the collective sale of their works. The group would forge a new direction in art, one that would surpass the spontaneous imagery of the Impressionists and convey a deeper feeling. This fantasy centered on the artist Paul Gauguin, whose work he admired above all his contemporArles. With Gauguin's help, he believed, his artists' colony could work, but first Vincent had to persuade him to move to Arles.
Vincent considered Gauguin a hero for his reckless but courageous decision to give up an affluent life to be an artist. As a teenager, Gauguin had run off to serve as a cabin boy on a ship. When he returned to Paris, he worked his way up as a stockbroker, enabling himself and his wife and their five children to live lavishly. In his spare time he studied painting, exhibiting a few pictures and winning critical praise. With typical bravado he quit his job to pursue art, and in less than three years he lost everything. His family left him and fled to his wife's native Denmark. Borrowing money from a friend, Gauguin moved from Paris to a village in Brittany, where his distinctive painting style slowly evolved.
But four years later Gauguin, now forty-four, ill and deeply in debt, wrote to Theo asking for help. Letters went back and forth from Paris to Arles to Brittany as Vincent lobbied Gauguin to join forces with him and persuade Theo to bankroll the artists' colony venture. Finally they struck a deal. Gauguin would go to Arles, and Theo would send him 150 francs a month in exchange for paintings. Vincent was overjoyed at the thought of having a companion, someone who would make his life less lonely. In preparation for Gauguin's arrival, he decorated the house, hanging his best paintings in the guest room, including two dazzling still lifes of sunflowers painted as variations on the color yellow. They had to be painted quickly, “for the flowers fade so soon, and the thing is to do the whole in one rush.” Vincent, extremely satisfied with these works, said, “If by the time I am forty I have done a figure piece as good as those flowers … I shall be the equal of any artist.” He even suggested to Theo that it would be a good idea to make cheap prints of the sunflowers to brighten the rooms of working people.
His pride in the yellow house led him to spend his whole al-lowance fixing it up for his friend. He rushed to finish paintings, “living on twenty-three cups of coffee, with bread that I still have to pay for.” He had gas lines run downstairs to light the main room so that they could work in the evenings. Frantic to impress Gauguin, he had “no time to think or feel; I just go on painting like a steam engine.”
To give Theo some idea of the interior, Vincent painted a picture of his bedroom. Unlike the garish Night Café, Vincent's Bedroom at Arles offers a lighter mood with softer, more soothing colors. “Color is to do everything… and is to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, looking at the picture ought to rest the brain, or rather the imagination.” To achieve this sense of calm, he used paler complementary colors—walls of blue violet, a butter yellow chair and bed, a scarlet coverlet, sheets and pillows of yellowish green, an orange washstand, and a blue washbasin. He painted no shadows and no stippling, as the picture was meant to be in the flat tints of Japanese prints. This remained one of his favorite paintings, and he copied it three times, with one copy intended for his mother, one for Theo to sell, and the other to save. In his letters he continued to remind Theo that his best work must be kept intact.
In the fall Gauguin sent his trunk ahead to Arles and soon arrived himself by the night train. He first went to the café, where the landlord recognized him from the self-portrait he had sent to Vincent. If Vincent presumed that his friend would be overwhelmed by the yellow house and especially by his paintings, he was in for a big disappointment. Gauguin said almost nothing about either, except to write years later that what struck him was how messy the house looked. “Between two such beings as he and I, the one a perfect volcano, the other boiling inwardly too, a sort of struggle was preparing. In the first place, everywhere and in everything I found a disorder that shocked me. His color box could never contain all those tubes, crowded together and never closed.” Most likely Gauguin was shocked by the power and skill of Vincent's new work. He hadn't expected such competition.
At first the two artists enjoyed each other's company. To Vincent's delight, Gauguin took over the cooking and the household accounts, as he was more organized. They worked side by side in the vineyard, in the public garden, and in the fields, facing in opposite directions, painting one great canvas after another. At night in the cafés they discussed art over dinner and many drinks.
Gauguin encouraged Vincent to paint from his imagination instead of from life. Vincent wrote, “Gauguin has more or less proved to me that it is time I was varying my work a little. I am beginning to compose from memory.” Vincent's passion at the time was robust, heightened color; Gauguin's was imagining his subjects from memory. Although both men believed that the artist's role was to move beyond imitating nature to a deeper construction of reality, their styles and techniques differed. Vincent favored thick paint and vigorous brushstrokes. Gauguin used thin, flat planes of strong color and simplified shapes, giving his painting a dreamlike quality.
Vincent could take advice from the older artist on his work, but he remained his obstinate self. “Our arguments are terribly electric, sometimes we come out of them with our heads as exhausted as a used electric battery.” By December Gauguin pronounced Arles a filthy dump and its inhabitants ugly. Vincent wrote, “I think myself that Gauguin was a little out of sorts with the good town of Arles, the little yellow house, where we work, and especially with me.” The truth was that Gauguin had never been enthralled with the idea of an artists' commune. He'd needed some immediate financial support and saw Arles as a stopping-off point before he sailed for Tahiti. Vincent had put his hopes on a man who was basically self-absorbed and out for himself.
The two paintings Vincent did of his own wooden chair and Gauguin's fancier armchair, the seats empty except for objects symbolic of the artists' very different personalities, represent Vincent's sadness at the situation. The chairs also work as portraits of the two artists. Gauguin is represented by a candlestick, two modern French novels, and a richly textured carpet to indicate his vitality and sophistication. Vincent's more modest chair holds his pipe and tobacco. Onions sprouting from a wooden box emphasize his affinity with the simpler, rural life. But if Vincent intended the paintings to convince Gauguin to stay, they made no difference. Gauguin had informed Theo of his imminent departure. Vincent's yearning to have a companionable housemate as well as “a colorists' school in the south” was merely a pipe dream. Gauguin lapsed into stony silence, and no matter how hard Vincent tried to please him, the older artist remained surly and uncommunicative.
Nerves on edge, Vincent began to act strangely. Gauguin wrote, “During the latter days of my stay, Vincent would become excessively rough and noisy, and then silent. On several nights I surprised him in the act of getting up and coming over to my bed.… It was enough for me to say quite sternly, ‘What's the matter with you?’ for him to go back to bed without a word and fall into a heavy sleep.”
Another time Vincent crept in, laughing madly, and wrote on the walls, “I am the Holy Spirit; my spirit is whole.” Gauguin went on to claim that Vincent had attacked him in a bar by throwing a glass of absinthe at his head and then had passed out. The next morning Vincent told Gauguin he had only a vague memory of what had happened.
On Christmas Eve, at dinner, Vincent and Gauguin probably drank too much wine and started arguing. Gauguin might have goaded Vincent about his inability to paint from memory or his lack of success with women. When he threatened again to leave Arles, Vincent became agitated and unruly. Gauguin took off alone to get some fresh air. As he headed across the Place Victor Hugo, he recognized Vincent's quick, short steps behind him. Vincent, reported Gauguin, looked quite mad and approached him in the street saying, “You are taciturn, I shall be likewise.” Gauguin gave him a piercing glare, and Vincent lowered his head and ran off toward home.
Alarmed, Gauguin checked into a small hotel nearby and went to bed. Vincent returned to the yellow house and slashed off his earlobe with a razor. After he stopped the bleeding, he stuck a large beret on his head and brought the severed ear, wrapped in newspaper, to a brothel that he and Gauguin frequented. Calling for a girl named Rachel, he handed this gory Christmas gift to her, saying, “Keep this object like a treasure.” Back at the house, he passed out in his bed and lay there unconscious until the police, who had heard about the incident, found him the next day.
Gauguin showed up around noon to find a crowd gathered outside in the street. He entered, stared at Vincent, lifeless and rolled in his sheets, and told the police, “Awaken this man with great care, and if he asks for me, tell him I left for Paris. The sight of me may prove fatal for him.” Gauguin actually returned to Paris a few days later with Theo, who had taken a train down to Arles to be with his brother. The two artists never saw each other again.
Vincent couldn't or wouldn't remember the details of this terrible night, but one thing is true: In a deranged or drunken moment, he forever marked his place in history as the mad artist who cut off his ear.
Within two weeks Vincent was discharged from the hospital. “I am completely recovered and am at work again and everything is normal,” he wrote to his mother and his sister Wil in Holland. And to his credit, he went back to the brothel and apologized to Rachel for the outrageous act he couldn't remember. She assured him that half the people in town were crazy and told him not to worry.
Back at the yellow house, he painted yet another self-portrait—a forlorn, resigned figure standing in his studio, a Japanese print in the background. With the familiar fur cap covering the top of his bandaged ear, Vincent stares out into space. “What happened?” he seems to ask. He painted several still lifes to prove to himself he could still work, and then turned to a painting he had begun before he was hospitalized, a portrait of Roulin's wife. He titled it La Berceuse (woman rocking a cradle) because she holds in her hands a rope for rocking an unseen cradle. He and Gauguin had read a book about the hard lives of Icelandic fishermen, and Vincent planned the painting as a response, so that the sailors in their fishing boats “would feel the old sense of being rocked come over them and remember their own lullabies.” The motherly, consoling figure was comforting to Vincent as he recovered from his illness. He wrote to Theo thait in his mind's eye he had visited every room in their childhood home, and had seen the views, the church, the kitchen garden, even the magpie's nest in a tall acacia in the graveyard. “Whether I really sang a lullaby in colors is something I leave to the critics.” He painted five versions of this portrait. After he let his model choose one, he gave a copy to Gauguin in trade, two to Theo to sell, and the other to Theo to keep.
Vincent reassured Theo that work and sensible living would cure him, but in spite of all his efforts, he was readmit-ted to the hospital within a month. This time he imagined that people were trying to poison him, that he heard voices. His cleaning woman, bewildered by his strange behavior—withdrawals into silence, alternating with wild outbursts—informed the police. Again he rallied, this time after ten days.
The villagers of Arles were not sympathetic, and his few friends were helpless to protect him. Bands of teenagers, whom he called “hooligans,” followed him in the streets and threw rocks at his house. “Crazy redhead,” they taunted, climbing up and peering in his windows as he crouched inside. Gossips swore he went around town shouting and grabbing women about their waists. The neighbors signed a petition claiming he was dangerous. They feared for their safety.
Busy in Paris, Theo was unable to come to his brother's rescue. His bosses at Goupil were unlikely to give him extra time off. More significant, just before Vincent's first attack, Theo had become engaged to Johanna (Jo) Bonger from Amsterdam, who was the sister of their good friend Andreis Bonger. Vincent realized that Theo's attention would be taken up by his new wife, but he wished him well.
“I assure you that I am much calmer since I picture that you have a companion for good. Above all, do not imagine that I am unhappy.” Once Vincent had counted upon leading a normal life with a wife and children, but at this point he knew it would never happen. Vincent implored Theo to do nothing, as he was “in full possession of my faculties and not a madman.… Let things be without meddling.”
The police locked him in a cell with a guard at the door. Shut in a small room with one window, he spent his days feeling helpless, like a caged animal. He tried to be patient, realizing that to rant and rave against the injustice would only build a case against him. “What a staggering blow between the eyes it was to find so many people here cowardly enough to join together against one man, and that man ill,” wrote Vincent, who always felt such compassion toward people in distress.
Paul Signac, a painter friend from Paris, was traveling to the south of France, and Theo asked him to look in on Vincent. Signac thought Vincent seemed fine, and he persuaded the authorities to let Vincent go out for a few hours so that they could visit the yellow house. The police had sealed the house, but Signac smashed the lock and forced it open. There, immersed in the shadows, were Vincent's paintings of sunflow-ers, landscapes, portraits, all created in the year since Signac had last seen him.
Many years later, the impressed artist wrote to another friend, “Imagine the splendor of those white washed walls, in which flowered those colorings in their full freshness. Throughout the day he spoke to me of painting, literature, socialism. In the evening, he was a little tired. There had been a terrific spell of mistral and that may have enervated him. He wanted to drink about a quart of essence of turpentine from the bottle that was standing there. It was high time to return to the asylum.”
Yet right after their visit, Signac wrote to Theo, telling him he had found Vincent in perfect health and sanity and quoting Vincent's doctor as suggesting that his patient needed only a tranquil place to work to avoid another attack. “How dismal the life he is living must be for him,” said the sympathetic Signac.
A month later Vincent was discharged from the hospital. Vincent's landlord, under pressure to find a new tenant, evicted him from the yellow house. With nowhere to live, Vincent's only option was to pack up his paintings, store some at Ginoux's inn, and ship the rest off to Theo in Paris, letting go forever of his dream of an artists' colony.
The doctor diagnosed Vincent's problem as seizures triggered by mental stress and poor physical condition. Three other doctors over a two-month period indicated that he was seriously ill. “M. Rey [Vincent's doctor] says that instead of eating enough and at regular times, I kept myself going on coffee and alcohoL I admit all that, but at the same time it is true that to achieve the high yellow note I attained last summer, I had to be pretty well keyed up.” In his 444 days in Arles, he had produced two hundred paintings and more than a hundred drawings and watercolors. His compulsive behavior had enabled him to make extraordinary paintings, but it also had taken a toll on his health.