Van Gogh (146 page)

Olive Trees in a Mountain Landscape
, J
UNE
1889,
PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 18½ × 24⅝ IN
. (
Illustration credit 39.3
)

The regimen of close looking and serene color worked so well that by early June Vincent was allowed to seek his subjects in the world outside the asylum gates. “As I find him entirely tranquil,” Peyron informed Theo, “I have promised to let him go out in order to find scenery.” To be sure, he could only take daylight trips, and had to be accompanied by a warden. But even this limited freedom liberated his brush. His walks in the orchards and fields beyond the walls invited his eye to explore the serrated horizon in a way impossible from the bedroom
window’s frozen tableau or the garden paths where buildings blocked the view altogether.

The nearby Alpilles changed shape with every step. The craggy limestone escarpments, just fringed with green, jutted into the sky in odd shapes and gravity-defying curves. Beneath him, the ground undulated. Groves and meadows alternated with rocky barren patches, hollows with hillocks, as the valley rose to meet its stone ramparts.

In this peaceful, supple valley, far from the storms of Paris, surrounded by the fantastical shapes and meandering lines of the Alpilles, Vincent conceived a new notion of line and form. “When the thing represented is, in point of character, absolutely in agreement and one with the manner of representing it,” he suggested after one of his first outings, “isn’t it just that which gives a work of art its quality?” Not only should
color
express the essence of the subject depicted (earth tones for the peasants of Nuenen, red and green for the lonely denizens of the night café); so, too, the
form
should reflect the subject’s true nature, not just its outward appearance. And what could be more “in agreement” with this enchanted valley and its fairy-tale mountains than an art of exaggerated forms and playful lines?

Exaggeration, of course, had long been a mandate of the new art, at least as Vincent first understood it from his correspondence with Bernard after leaving Paris. But Gauguin had brought a very different notion of modeling to the Yellow House: an insistence on precise line and idealized form that proved frustratingly elusive to Vincent’s unruly hand. Now, finally, in the clarity and serenity of his alpine retreat, Vincent could set aside his useless perspective frame, unclench his fist, and let his brush find the truest image. “In the open air,” he wrote, “one works as best one can, one fills one’s canvas regardless. Yet that is how one captures the true and the essential—the most difficult part.”

He found support for his serene new art in a most unexpected place. After reading an article about a display at the Exposition Universelle, he determined that the ancient Egyptians—another “primitive” race, like the Japanese—must have known the secret of true art that he had discovered in the hills and vales of the Midi. Recalling the granite images he had seen in the Louvre, he imagined that Egyptian artists, “working by feeling and by instinct,” were able to express the “patience, wisdom, and serenity” of their potentates simply “by a few knowing curves and by the marvelous proportions.” Vincent found the same “harmony” of subject and art in the still lifes of Chardin and in the Golden Age glories of Hals, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. But he wondered to Theo whether the Impressionists, or any of their noisy would-be successors, could make a similar claim.

Meanwhile, in his own little world, he found that harmony everywhere. On
his canvases, the valley’s rocky parapets came to life in cartoons of huge boulders piled in precarious walls and impossible overhangs. Close up, the ground ripples like a choppy sea. In the distance, it piles up in a dizzying multiplication of horizons. The clouds overhead hover not as atmosphere or light, but as objects in space, as solid as the mountains beneath, only bulbous and buoyant. The moon rises as a huge crescent, fantastically big and bright in its enclosed patch of sky. On the ground, olive trees loosen their crooked limbs and seem to shake to life, like characters in an Andersen fairy tale. With trembling foliage and twisted roots, they spring from the rolling ground as spritely curls of smoke.

In this enchanted valley, everything has a life of its own. Even the stone wall that enclosed the field outside Vincent’s window seems to merge into the living landscape. Its angles soften; its hard edges melt. Instead of hewing to its straight course, it wanders across the undulating ground like a country lane or a hedgerow, as much a part of the countryside as the furrows and fields it encloses. Vincent was convinced that his old comrades Bernard and Gauguin would approve his new, “more spontaneous drawing.” “They do not ask the correct shape of a tree at all,” he insisted. But, in fact, nothing could have been further from either Gauguin’s ambitious striving after Degas’s or Bernard’s cerebrated ornamental-ism than Vincent’s tranquil, childlike world outside the world.

That world would not have been possible without brushstroke. “What an odd thing the touch, the stroke of the brush, is,” he wrote in newfound wonderment. By altering the brushstroke “in keeping with the subject,” he discovered, “the result is without doubt more harmonious and pleasant to look at, and one can add whatever serenity and happiness one feels.” Freed from the “isms” that had chained it for so long, Vincent’s hand now returned to his Hague quest (kept alive since in drawings and letter sketches) to find the perfect fit of subject, line, texture, and mood. He cited the great engravers Félix Bracquemond and Jules Jacquemart, who had transformed works of art from one medium (oil) to another (copper plate) and in the process given them new perfection. He would do the same for nature, using the distinctive marks of
his
medium: brushstroke.

To practice this “fit,” he found the ideal subjects right in plain sight, where he had looked past them a thousand times: cypress trees.

They grew everywhere in the valley, some dating back to Roman times. They served as windbreaks and grave markers; they lined roads and marked boundaries; they stood in cohorts and in lonely sentinel. Once he
saw
them, their compact, “bottle-green” foliage and plain conical shape captivated him. He compared them in “beauty of line and proportion” to Egyptian obelisks. “The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts,” he wrote. “I should like to make something of them like the canvases of the sunflowers, because it astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them.”

He saw them not just as simple cones (“a splash of black in a sunny landscape”),
but as constellations of strokes. Like an astronomer looking through a telescope, the more closely he looked, the more he saw—and the more his brush recorded. From a distance, the dense branches all curved toward the pointed tip, twisting and flickering upward like flames. But as he approached closer and closer, each quivering branch became a little spiral of color and motion. Some curled upward, advancing the tree toward the sky; others flung themselves outward into space. Branch by branch, spiral upon spiral, he patiently piled them up, transforming ancient monuments of nature into towering monuments of paint.

Cypresses
, J
UNE
1889,
INK ON PAPER, 24⅝ × 18½ IN
. (
Illustration credit 39.4
)

By the end of the month, Vincent was working on a dozen canvases at once—almost all of them featuring cypress trees. Another dozen sat in the dormitory doorway, drying in the June heat. One of these was a nighttime study of a single tree silhouetted against a strange celestial display.
“Enfin,”
he wrote Theo, “I have a new study of a starry sky.”

—

VINCENT’S SEARCH TO
express the serenity he felt led him inevitably to this familiar image. He was proud of the nightscape over the Rhône that he had painted in September the previous year (1888), on the eve of Gauguin’s arrival. Theo had liked it, too. Only a week after his brother complimented that painting in late May, Vincent proposed submitting it to the
Revue Indépendante
show in September—“in order not to exhibit anything too mad.” If not for the confinements of the Arles hospital—daylight-only releases, windowless isolation cells, bans on paints and brushes—he undoubtedly would have returned to the subject sooner.

At Saint Paul, the constraints had hardly loosened. He still could not venture out after dark to paint, as he preferred, directly under the stars. Brushes and paints remained in his studio downstairs, to which he had access only during the day. To paint a starry night, he could only watch from behind the bars of his bedroom window as the asylum lights blinked off, the sky darkened, and the stars assembled. He may have made drawings—and tested other, deeper inventions—while staring at the small quadrant of the eastern sky that filled his little window. Over the course of the night, he saw a waning moon and the constellation Aries, lying low in the east, just above the hilltops, its four bright stellar points arrayed in a rough arc over the faint blush of the Milky Way. In the predawn hours, Venus, the morning star, appeared prominently on the horizon, bright and white—a perfect companion to an early wakening or a sleepless night. He stared and stared at the light they each shone, and the sparkling darkness around them.

All this and more made its way onto Vincent’s canvas in the daylight hours. To ground his celestial vision, he added a sleeping village in the middle distance. Earlier in June, he had taken a day trip into the town of Saint-Rémy, about a mile downhill from the asylum gates. On this visit, or on one of his other forays into the hills overlooking the town, he had made a careful sketch of the popular mountain resort, with its dense warren of medieval streets girdled by broad modern boulevards: famous birthplace of Nostradamus, astrologer and prophet, and still a watering hole for passing luminaries like Frédéric Mistral and Edmond de Goncourt.

For his painting, however, Vincent reduced the bustling town of six thousand to a sleepy village of no more than a few hundred souls—no bigger than Zundert or Helvoirt. The twelfth-century church of Saint Martin, which dominated the town with its fearsomely spiked stone bell tower, became a simple country chapel with a needlelike spire that barely pierced the horizon. Finally, he moved the town from the valley floor north of the asylum and placed it to the east, directly between
his bedroom window and the familiar serrated line of the Alpilles—a spot from which it, too, could witness the celestial spectacle about to begin.

With all these elements—cypress tree, townscape, hills, horizon—secured in his imagination, Vincent’s brush launched into the sky. Unconstrained by sketches, unschooled by a subject in front of him, unbounded by perspective frame, unbiased by ardor, his eye was free to meditate on the light—the fathomless, ever-comforting light he always saw in the night sky. He saw that light refracted—curved, magnified, scattered—through all the prisms of his past: from Andersen’s tales to Verne’s journeys, from Symbolist poetry to astronomical discoveries. The hero of his youth, Dickens, had written of “a whole world with all its greatnesses and littlenesses” visible “in a twinkling star.” The hero of his age, Zola, described the sky of a summer night as “powdered with the glittering dust of almost invisible stars”: