Maatstaf. Jaargang 30

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William J. Beck More on van Gogh's Yellow Vision and the Purple Foxglove

In an article which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (February 20, 1981, pp. 727-729), Dr. Thomas C. Lee of Georgetown University has advanced a number of thought-provoking suggestions which intimate that Vincent van Gogh suffered from some form of epilepsy, for which he was treated with digitalis, often recommended by continental physicians du ring the latter half of the nineteenth century. While Dr. Lee did not offer any direct, conclusive evidence that digitalis was prescribed to van Gogh, he did suggest strongly, however, that the circumstantial evidence surrounding the painter's last years was fairly persuasive. Dr. Lee bases his clinical insight primarily on two of van Gogh's paintings, his ‘The Starry Night,’ and more particularly, on his ‘Portrait of Dr. Gachet,’ the latter the Dutch artist's intimate friend and personal physician for a number of years. In this painting, of which there are two versions, Dr. Gachet is holding the purple foxglove plant, whose leaves are used to make an extract, digitalis, valuable in treating epilepsy.

Dr. Lee asserts that digitalis intoxication might reasonably explain some bizarre aspects of van Gogh's personal life: his depressions, rage, and his sense of rejection, and more importantly, van Gogh's preoccupation with, and use of, the color yellow during a specific phase of his painting style. Not only did van Gogh move into a house which he painted entirely yellow, but nearly all of his paintings contain or were dominated by yellow, a color he frequently mentioned in his letters to friends and family. Dr. Lee's evidence is both provocative and persuasive, and the present study brings additional support to his theory by examining the pictorial elements in van Gogh's painting of his physician. The presence and significance of the foxglove plant are crucial in both Dr. Lee's hypothesis and in my amplification.

The two portraits of Dr. Gachet contain significantly broad hints which support Dr. Lee's hypothesis. We know how strong were both van Gogh's resemblance to, and emotional dependence on, Dr. Gachet. Both had red hair, and they looked alike to such an extern that Jo, Theo's wife, commented on it when she first saw them together. Furthermore, there seemed to be even an additional striking family resemblance between the Gachets and the van Goghs, since Dr. Gachet's sixteen year old son bore a dramatic resemblance to Theo. This similarity was not lost to Vincent, who noted it in one of his letters. Like van Gogh, Dr. Gachet had tried to establish an art center for a brotherhood of painters at Auvers, precisely as Vincent had aspired to do earlier at Arles. In a letter to his sister Wilhelmien, van Gogh declared, ‘And then I have found a true friend in Dr. Gachet, something like another brother, so much do we resemble each other physically and also mentally... I painted his portrait the other day...’^1. At Dr. Gachet's request, van Gogh painted his two portraits of the doctor in the same spirit as his own last self-portrait which he brought with him from Saint-Rémy in 1890. Family resemblance, then, and individual similarities, physical, moral, and psychic, as well as a close,

1. V. van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh (New York Graphic Society, New York, 1958), iii, 469.

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fratemal tie and dependence, in addition to deliberately molding Dr. Gachet's portrait on his own, all of these factors suggest strongly that in Dr. Gachet as depicted in the two portraits, the viewer is really looking at van Gogh's alter ego. Clearly, admiration had tumed into identification.

Furthermore, there are the constitutive elements of the portrait. It is here also that one must read closely into van Gogh's paintings in order to see and comprehend the man clearly, as Theo suggested to Albert Aurier, the young poet, Vincent's first art critic after his suicide. Earlier, van Gogh had written to Gauguin in an unfinished letter, ‘Meanwhile I have a portrait of Dr. Gachet with the heartbroken expression of our time.’^2. Portraits are often more than mere portrayals; particularly with van Gogh, they usually contain unmerciful interpretations. What are these broken hearted expressions van Gogh refers to? They are to be found, I believe, in addition to the colors used and in Dr. Gachet's facial expression, in the two novels and the foxglove plant, all of which constitute meaningful elements in the portrait. The portrait of Dr. Gachet is based, significantly, on a self portrait completed earlier by van Gogh. The colors are somber, and Dr. Gachet's face looks like over-heated brick (van Gogh's words);^3. his obstetrician's hands are pale, paler than his face. His clothes are ultra-marine blue, and the portrait is placed in a landscape setting of blue hills. The predominant color is blue, which sets the entire psychological and emotional tone of the portrait: melancholy or rather an all-pervasive sadness and loneliness. As in Vincent's self portrait, the viewer sees a broken man whose eyes appear to be searching in space for some meaning in life. The two books, bound significantly in yellow, for van Gogh the symbol of warmth, love, and friendship, are the only bright note in the painting; and they are eye catching; the titles are dimly readable. They are two novels by the Goncourt brothers, Jules and Edmond, Germinie Lacerteux and Manette Salomon, and a brief description of their basic meaning is quite relevant to the theme of the portrait and the thrust of this study.

Germinie Lacerteux is based on a seemingly blessed and ideal servant the Goncourt bachelors had with them for many years, one Rose Malingre. After devoted domestic and maternal-like service, her abrupt death from pneumonia was a shock to the writers, since, she had been like one of the family. Within several days of her burial, a series of hideous truths was revealed: she had incurred enormous debts from drinking cognac and absinthe; she had squandered most of her money on men, in particular a young boxer who had made her pregnant. She was a nymphomaniac, an alcoholic, was involved in theft and an illicit pregnancy, and all of this went on under the eyes of the supposedly observant Goncourts, who had never suspected a thing! Subsequently, and with only a few minor transpositions, they wrote Germinie Lacerteux, essentially the life of Rose Malingre. But their depiction of Germinie is basically sympathetic, and the portrait of her which emerges is that of a woman who, all her life, suffers from la mélancolie des vierges, this in spite of the fact that she has many sexual encounters, often paying men to sleep with her. For the Goncourts, while Germinie is perhaps a passive victim of society, she really suffers from a physiological malady, a frequent explanation by the Naturalist School of writers. Her nervousness, loneliness, depression, fatigue, her inability to fmd ideal love, her virtual folly at the end of the novel, and society's scom of her, are all characteristic of the tendencies that the Goncourts saw emerging throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. Needless to say, van Gogh saw these same manifestations and railed against them in his paintings and his letters.

Manette Salomon has as its setting the world of art in Paris during the 1850's, and it is the description of a number of emerging artists and their existential and artistic struggles. One of them, Coriolis, satisfies his sexual needs with

2. 286-287.

3. In a letter to his sister, Wilhelmien, 470.

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Manette who eventually becomes pregnant by him. With motherhood, however, her personality changes, and she becomes a radically different woman: greedy, eager to make men suffer and tranquilly accepting lust as a routine fact of life. In the end, Manette drags Coriolis off to be married, but here, his suffering at the hands of a predatory female symbolizes the anguish of the modern artist at the hands of a decadent, neurotic civilization. The clash between the artist's search for noble ideals through art and the strong compulsions of human existence in a corrupt, materialistic society, very powerfully illustrates once again the central characters' anxieties, their loneliness, and their fruitless search for ideal love. Manette gets her husband, and Coriolis is sexually relieved, but neither is happy nor feels loved. The Artist and the Woman both search for the Beautiful. For Manette, it is found only in her motherhood; for Coriolis, in his art. Neither finds it in the existential demands of modern society, which can offer only palliatives.

One of medicine's palliatives, of course, is the foxglove plant, a common nineteenth century remedy, Dr. Lee has shown, for epilepsy, chronic mania, and acute insanity. These are the diseases that afflict modern man, these are the characterizations of modern society as they were enunciated by the writers of the French Naturalist School. The incursions of the industrial period, the absence of the spiritual and the mystical in modern life, the absence of love, all contribute to modern man's feeling of misery, abandonment, despair, and alienation. All of the persons, explicit and implicit in the portrait of Dr. Gachet suffer from this truly modern disease: Dr. Gachet, characterized by van Gogh as more insane than himself; van Gogh, who needed desperately all of his life to be loved by Theo - by anyone - and who feit he was ‘either a madman or an epileptic’; and of course the pathetic characters of the ‘yellow novels’ by the Goncourt brothers, Germinie, Coriolis, and Manette.

The linchpin that holds all of these characters and elements together is the foxglove plant.^4. Dr. Gachet - van Gogh, we have seen - appears to be leaning on the two novels by the Goncourts, Vincent's favorite writers, who, he feit, were the leading portrayers of modern life. In the foreground of the painting, in some ways looming larger than Dr. Gachet himself, is the foxglove plant. In one version of the portrait Dr. Gachet is holding the plant; in another, it is in a glass of water. But in either case it is uprooted from its natural habitat, not unlike modern man, who is tom out of his natural element: love; for van Gogh, of course, love as it is depicted in the Gospels. The viewer's eye travels inexorably in a circular motion, clockwise, from Dr. Gachet's pale face and striking red hair, down to his outstretched, curved left arm. The latter appears to be reaching for or, more likely, offering the purple foxglove plant to the viewer (to van Gogh?) as a remedy for his ills. Then, the eye moves on to the two yellow novels and steadfastly up his right arm on which he is leaning, back to his face, with ‘the heart-broken expression of our time’. All of these elements, in their circular sweep, remind one of the unending boredom and pain of the modern world that have returned with the pagan world's concept of circular time, replacing the linear christology of the Gospels with its hope and its promise.

The viewer is compelled to pause before van Gogh's portraits of Dr. Gachet, because they have a spiritual content which appears to be the crystallization of the painter's own deeply-felt emotions. It is true that in a sense, the portraits are self-sufficient and need no further explanation. And yet one has the feeling, obscure perhaps, that they say much more than is visible on the surface of the canvas. To the literal, obvious value of each, there appears to be a hidden symbolic one which is like a third dimension because the portraits are laden with meaning. They contain allusions, meditations, reminiscences, resemblances, even forebodings, and they provide a key to the painter's moral and mental world, helping us to take the full

4. In a letter to Theo and his sister-in-law, Jo, van Gogh writes, (p. 275), ‘Today I saw Dr. Gachet again... He seems very sensible, but he is as discouraged about his job as a doctor as I am about my painting. Then I told him that I would gladly swap jobs with him. Anyway, I am ready to believe that I shall end up being friends with him. He said to me besides that if the melancholy or anything else became too much for me to bear, he could easily do something to lessen its intensity, and that I must not feel awkward about being frank with him.’ Dr. Gachet treated van Gogh; could this have been the foxglove plant?

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measure of this valiant but pathetic genius, to probe the secret resources of his mind and heart. Dr. Gachet's portrait is overflowing with repressed compassion and tenderness; but there is also a kind of evangelie fervor - not rare in van Gogh - that brings together in a circular unity, Dr. Gachet, van Gogh, the yellow novels of the Goncourts, and above all, the digitalis purpurea.