I want to produce, to produce a lot and with a consuming drive.
—LETTER TO THEO, SEPTEMBER 1888
VINCENT'S FIRST VIEW of Arles was cold, deep snow. After a fifteen-hour train journey, he lugged his heavy baggage through the thick white drifts into the town, down an avenue of plane trees, through red stone towers, to the Hôtel Carrel, where he rented a room for five francs a night—too much money, in his opinion, and no warmth anywhere.
He came prepared for sunshine and friendly natives, but he had trouble settling in. His letters were full of complaints. The weather was terrible. Everything cost too much. He couldn't find decent food or good blue paint or correct information on the price of stamps. In addition, the townspeople, who spoke in their own peculiar dialect, didn't understand the Dutchman's French. “You have no idea of the slackness and the nonchalance of the people here,” he wrote to Bernard. At first he agreed with the guidebooks that the women of Arles were beautiful, only to revise his opinion later, “They are, no question about it, really charming, but no longer what they must have been … for they are in their decadence.” As for Arles, “It is a filthy town this, with old streets,”
Arles had its roots in ancient times, with a still-standing Roman amphitheater and a magnificent medieval church. These were classic subjects for some artists, but Vincent thought of himself as modern, a man of his own time. Old buildings and ruins held no interest. Instead he painted a street scene of a butcher shop seen from a window, a landscape of the snowy fields, and a portrait of an old woman in the costume of the region.
The mistral, a seasonal wind that swept down the Rhone valley, made painting outside a struggle. Some claimed that a few days spent in the relentless sixty-mile-an-hour wind was an excuse for murder. To Vincent, the mistral was an unexpected handicap that “got on one's nerves badly.” On days when he felt strong enough, he'd set up his canvas on an easel fastened into the ground with pegs. When the gales were too fierce for that, he laid the canvas flat on the ground and painted on his knees. Perhaps one of his first scenes, a snowy field painted in the short brushstrokes and light palette of the Impressionists, was done quickly because he was uncomfortable out in the cold. But he did describe the picture as “just like the winter landscapes that the Japanese have painted.”
As Theo sent him money every month, Vincent felt obliged to let Theo know how hard he was working, writing long letters about his progress. “At present I feel pretty bad some days, but I don't worry about it in the least, as it is nothing but a reaction to last winter, which was out of the ordinary.… I must reach a point where my pictures will cover my expenses.”
The letters chronicle the steps he took in organizing his compositions (possibly his way of defending his unconventional style) and also trace his mood swings. To Bernard, who was painting with Gauguin and other artists in Brittany, he wrote his most cheerful letters, to show how well he was doing. To Theo he tended to pour out his fears and insecurities. With the first signs of spring, his mood lightened and his letters became enthusiastic about his move to Arles and the abundance of subjects to paint. The wide plains and canals reminded him of Dutch scenery. He delighted in the women's multicolored clothes with yellow, green, and red stripes. Arles suddenly seemed as gay as Holland was gloomy.
In April, when the trees blossomed, he wrote to Bernard, “At the moment I am absorbed in the blooming fruit trees, pink peach trees, yellow-white pear trees. My brushstroke has no system at all. I hit the canvas with irregular touches of the brush, which I leave as they are. Patches of thickly laid on color, spots of canvas left uncovered, here and there portions that are left absolutely unfinished, repetitions, savageries; in short I'm inclined to think that the result is so disquieting and irritating as to be a godsend to those who have fixed preconceived notions about technique.”
He described himself as being in “a frenzy of work,” painting the pear and plum orchards laden with pink, white, and purple blossoms, trying to capture their fullness before they faded, and using up more than a hundred tubes of color. Then, worried that Theo couldn't afford to send him extra money to buy more, he did a dozen or more pen-and-ink drawings, mailing them off for his brother's approval.
Vincent had experimented briefly with a reed pen back in Nuenen. Now he found that the reeds, which grew in abundance in the marshes around Arles, were even better for his drawings. The reed pen allowed him to make the broad, flat strokes that imitated the fluid lines of Japanese artists, “Their work is simple as breathing, and they do a figure in a few sure strokes with the same ease as if it were as simple as buttoning your coat,” he wrote. In his drawings of Arles, the jabs, dots, and hatching demonstrate a quick, flowing energy that would be characteristic of his style.
Not only was his painting unconventional, but in town Vincent himself was viewed an odd figure. In his old clothes and floppy hat, weighted down with all his equipment, wandering about at odd hours, especially at night, he didn't try to blend in with the local population. To paint outside in the dark, he rigged up a hat rimmed with candles and set up his easel on a street corner. Stars glimmered in the real sky and on the-canvas. Flames flickered on his hat. “The night is more alive, more richly colored than the day,” he said. This image of Vincent might seem romantic and amusing, but the townspeople of Arles were not used to artists. The adults saw him as bizarre, and the teenage boys jeered and made fun of him as he crept by, his head lowered and his back “loaded like a porcupine” with painting equipment.
The townspeople also viewed foreigners as legitimate targets for fleecing. Vincent regarded this custom fairly tolerantly, as one of the evils of a poor local economy—until his innkeeper tried to charge extra to store his canvases and then locked up his art supplies. Vincent took him to court and won, but he'd had enough of the inn and began hunting for a place of his own.
He soon found a space that suited him. “My house here is painted the yellow color of fresh butter on the outside with glaringly green shutters; it stands in the full sunlight in a square which has a green garden with plane trees, oleanders, and acacias. And it is completely whitewashed inside, and the floor is made of red tiles. And over it is the intensely blue sky. In this I can live and breathe, meditate, and paint.” Unlike the dark, furniture-crammed houses of his relatives in Holland, the yellow house was simple, fresh, and carefully arranged by Vincent, from the white walls to the paintings he chose to hang. “This is a real artist's house,” he said. The bathroom was in the building next door, but Vincent didn't view that as a big problem. He spent the money his brother sent him to furnish the two bedrooms with sturdy wooden beds, then followed it up with a letter asking for more, which, of course, softhearted Theo provided.
With his housing problems solved, Vincent felt upbeat. In his newly arranged studio at the yellow house, he had a place to paint when a raging mistral forced him inside. He continued his experiments with color, attempting to paint two still lifes of a table with a pot of flowers and other objects with “six different blues and four or five yellows and oranges.” On sunny days he ventured out into the countryside to paint the fields and views of the town.
He was eager to find new subjects, so in early June he set off to see the Mediterranean for the first time. He traveled by a type of horse-drawn carriage called a diligence through the Camargue, where wild white horses roamed the countryside, to the fishing village of Stes.-MArles-de-la-Mer. There he found one of his most popular images. Boats on the Beach was completed in his studio in Arles, but his description of the preliminary study tells the story of a breakthrough in his work. He had noticed the brightly colored little boats, but as the fishermen put out to sea so early, he had time only to do a drawing. Proudly he sent it off to Theo, saying, “The Japanese draw quickly, very quickly like a lightning flash.… I have only been here a few months, but tell me this—could I, in Paris, have done the drawing of the boats in an hour?” Instead of using a tool to draw in perspective, he wrote, “this is done without measuring, just by letting my pen go'
Back in Arles in 1888, there was such a blazing sun that some of the farmers began their harvest early. Vincent, in a fever of creativity, painted canvas after canvas of the fields and crops around Arles. He would go out at daybreak and paint nonstop until sunset, striving for what he called “the high yellow note”—vivid color and emotion in perfect harmony. The color yellow had a special significance for Vincent. It stood for life and energy.
The drawing skills he'd labored for years to acquire in The Hague and Nuenen enabled him to paint with amazing speed—so quickly, in fact, that he justified it in a letter to Theo. “I must warn you that everyone will think that I work too fast. Don't you believe a word of it.… If the emotions are sometimes so strong that one works without knowing one works, then one must remember that it has not always been so, and that in time to come there will be hard days, empty of inspiration.” Vincent feared he would run out of steam and suffer from painter's block.
But that was one problem he would never encounter. During one swelteringly hot week in June, Vincent produced ten paintings, and five drawings of the harvest. “Landscapes yellow—old gold—done quickly, quickly, quickly, in a hurry, just like the harvester, who is silent under the blazing sun, intent only upon his reaping.” He constantly criticized and devaluated the work, his quest for “the high yellow note” bringing its dissatisfactions along with its triumphs. Of the triumphs, his greatest one up to that point was the painting he called simply Harvest at le Crau—a field of corn on the fertile plain called the Crau, painted in full sunshine from a Kill.
The strain of these long, overwrought days affected his health. He wrote, “When I come home after a spell like that, I assure you my head is so tired that if that kind of work keeps recurring, as. it has done since this harvest began, I become hopelessly absentminded and incapable of doing heaps of ordinary things.” Then he confessed, “The only thing to bring ease and distraction is to sedate oneself by smoking heavily and drinking”—this despite his deteriorating health.
It was inevitable that he would crash, that he was headed for a complete breakdown, but he continued driving himself. With the same manic energy, he had pursued teaching, preaching, and missionary work without success; now he pursued painting. He had found what he was meant to do. “Left to myself, I rely on my intoxication with work … and then I let myself go without limits.” He maintained that to be a real artist he had to push himself over the edge: “The more I am spent, ill, a broken pitcher, the more I become an artist, creator, in this revival of the arts.” Yet when he was painting, he experienced a happiness that eluded him in the rest of his life. The paintings celebrated his elation. The artist, who had written earlier that his brushstrokes had no system, was producing works in a style that would forever be unique to him, even those canvases without his now-famous signature, the single name Vincent.