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Van Gogh Museum Journal 1999 (1999)

Van Gogh Museum Journal 1999

(1999)– [tijdschrift] Van Gogh Museum Journal–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

[Van Gogh Studies]

Facts instead of suppositions: Roland Dorn revisited
Jan Hulsker

When I started reading the series of Van Gogh Studies in the Van Gogh Museum Journal 1997-98 - this was at the beginning of 1999 - I was surprised to see that the first of these articles was almost entirely devoted to what I had written about Vincent's Arles period. ‘Devoted to’ is, of course, a manner of speaking, because the author, the art historian Roland Dorn, seems to have felt it was his task to correct or condemn most of my findings, at the same time also criticising a few points in the work of Ronald Pickvance. He had therefore given his study the modish subtitle ‘Pickvance and Hulsker revisited,’ using as his main title the even more intriguing ‘Refiler à Saintes-Maries?’1 My surprise soon turned to stupefaction when I discovered that all Dorn's supposed ‘corrections’ were, in fact, blatant errors.

Had he published his article in a newspaper I would have reacted immediately. It is at the request of John Leighton, director of the Van Gogh Museum, to whom I sent an extensive survey of all Dorn's mistakes, that I have written the following rebuttal.

 

There are six main points about my research on the Arles period which Dorn believes to be erroneous:

 

1 In the manuscript of one of Vincent's letters [624/494], Johanna van Gogh-Bonger changed the words ‘Je refile à Saintes-Maries’ to ‘Je file à Saintes-Maries.’ According to Dorn, this change makes no difference, as filer can also mean refiler. It cannot and, moreover, Van Gogh intended to say refiler - i.e. retourner.

2 According to Dorn, the Yellow House was owned by a certain Mme Vénissac. In reality it belonged to the owner of the building to Vincent's left.

3 Dorn claims that Van Gogh had great difficulty paying the rent on time. The letters prove this was not at all the case.

4 According to Dorn, letters between Paris and Saint-Rémy took two days. Many letters confirm what I had already been told by the French postal service, namely that in Van Gogh's time they took only one day.

5 Dorn states that Vincent's stay in Saintes-Maries took place from 10-16 June 1888. It can be proven that he was actually there two weeks earlier.

6 Dorn was thus also mistaken in his dating of Van Gogh's series of harvest scenes, stating that they were painted in ‘two tranches,’ one before and one after the visit to the coast.

 

The following is a more detailed account of these questions.

Linguistics

Let us begin with the issue Dorn hints at in his main title: the meaning of the word refiler. This verb was used in a letter to Theo in the sentence: ‘Si tu m'envoies la prochaine lettre dimanche matin il est probable que je refile ce jour-là à Saintes-Maries’ [624/494]. When Johanna van Gogh-Bonger published the letters in 1914, she changed the word refile to file (one of many such unfortunate interventions in the original text). The result was that in the English translation, for example, the line now reads: ‘If you send me the next letter on Sunday morning, I shall probably take myself off that day to Saintes-Maries.’2 In a long paragraph Dorn explains that for various reasons refiler could also be taken to mean filer. Therefore, in his view, Jo's ‘correction’ was unimportant; otherwise the sentence would have implied that Vincent had been in Saintes-Maries before, and - according to Dorn - he had not.

This shows that the author has not read the letters closely enough. The fact is that Vincent had been in Saintes-Maries earlier and had thus indeed meant to return

there. This is proven by at least two letters. In 622/499, written to Theo from Saintes-Maries itself, Vincent states: ‘Mais je compte encore retourner ici’; and in a letter to his friend John Russell (written in English): ‘I have been to the seaside for a week and very likely am going thither again soon’ [629/501a].

This first error and some further discussion of Vincent's stay on the coast leads Dorn to the conclusion: ‘All this seems to indicate that Van Gogh was in Saintes-Maries from 10 to 16 June 1888.’3 Well, he was not; far from it. In the middle of June Vincent was actually in Arles, hard at work on his series of harvest scenes. The correct dates of his visit to Saintes-Maries were 30 May to 3 June, and Pickvance (whom Dorn also attacks here) has preceded me by no less than 15 years in citing this period.4 At the time, he did not explain how he had come to these dates, and readers of today cannot be blamed for wanting some proof of their accuracy. The shortest and simplest way of confirming them seems to be as follows:

We know for certain that letter 615/490 was written on a Saturday; the postscript clearly states: ‘il ne me rest d'argent que pour demain, dimanche.’ That particular Saturday could only have been Saturday, 26 May - and not 19 May or 2 June - as follows from the text of the preceding and following letters. Therefore, the Sunday mentioned in 615/490 must have been Sunday, 27 May. That day Vincent wrote Theo again, this time more urgently: ‘Ecris-moi aussitôt, je n'ai plus d'argent du tout’ [616/491].

The next day - Monday, 28 May - the rescuing letter containing a 100-franc note arrived, confirmed by Vincent with the words: ‘Ta lettre de ce matin m'a fait grand plaisir, je te remercie beaucoup du billet du 100 fr. qui y était inclus,’ and he could now tell Theo: ‘Je compte faire un excursion à Stes Maries pour voir enfin la Méditerranée’ [617/492]. However, as it was the end of the month he had a few payments to make and thus could not start his trip until early in the morning on Wednesday, 30 May.

Dorn erroneously states that the trip Vincent announced in this letter was unexpectedly cancelled. He came to this conclusion on the basis of letter 626/496, which he dates to 5 June (the correct date is 12 June), and where one reads: ‘Je ne suis pas parti pour Stes Maries - ils ont fini de peindre la maison et j'avais à payer et puis j'ai à prendre provision de toiles assez considérable.’ It is unnecessary to point out that this time Vincent was referring to his plan to return to the coast.

The Yellow House and the rent

In reference to the so-called Yellow House, which Vincent had rented for four months on 1 May, Dorn assures his readers that Vincent had great difficulty paying his monthly rent: ‘the landlady's agent was apparently on the doorstep on the very first of the month.’5 (The rent, it should be noted, was no more than the very modest sum of 15 francs per month.) Again, Dorn is entirely wrong. To begin with, the house was not ‘owned at the time by the widow Vénissac.’6 Vincent's own correspondence confirms that it belonged to the neighbour at his left, who was also in possession of the large building on the same side of the square. He mentions this in the very letter of 1 May in which he announces the rental. It is worth repeating the surprising details about the house he notes, as they also reveal who the owner actually was: ‘Cela te paraîtra drôle que le cabinet d'aisances se trouve chez le voisin dans un assez grand hôtel qui appartient au même propriétaire’ [604/480]. The ‘veuve Vénissac’ was the proprietress of the restaurant located to Vincent's right, across the side street. The artist mentions this establishment in letter 695/543, where he explains: ‘C'est là le restaurant où je vais diner tous les jours.’

As this proves it was not Mme Vénissac, it must have been the owner of the building to Vincent's left who (supposedly) caused him so many problems: ‘As regards the rent, too, Van Gogh had trouble obtaining even the slightest referral.’7 In reality, however, the landlord appears to have been extremely generous. Even before the first month was over, Vincent could write proudly to his brother: ‘J'ai obtenu qu'on peindra la maison, la façade, les portes, et les fenêtres à l'extérieur et à l'intérieur à neuf.’ And for all this work he had only to pay 10 francs ‘as his share’ [616/491].

And what of the harassment on the first of every month? Let us take a good look at the letters:

 

1 June: evidently no problem. Vincent seems to have paid on time, having received Theo's letter (which even contained 100 instead of the usual 50 francs) on 28 May [617/492].

1 July: again Vincent could pay punctually, having gotten Theo's 50 francs on 29 June [638/507]. Later, on 5 July, he did complain a little, writing that he was astonished to already see ‘the bottom of his purse’; this was not surprising, however, because he had begun the month with only 50 francs, and he openly admitted: ‘Il faut bien savoir que si j'en abstrais la nourriture et le logement, tout le

reste de mon argent va encore dans les toiles’ [639/508].

1 August: what happened here is even more interesting. Vincent had certainly received Theo's 50 francs on time - he thanked him for it in a letter of 31 July [656/516] - and yet in his next note he had to acknowledge: ‘Je ne pouvais payer ma loyer le 1er ayant modèle en train pour toute la semaine - j'ai deux portraits du même modèle en train qui sont plus importants pour moi que le reste’ [658/517]. As is well known, the modèle was his friend, the postman Joseph Roulin.

 

And did this cause a lot of trouble? Quite the opposite. Vincent apparently knew how to handle such a situation. According to letter 658/517, he simply asked ‘the good fellow’ to come back ‘lundi prochain.’ The man, he wrote, had only reminded him that it was Saint Michael's Day - 1 September, the date when rentals were usually renewed or cancelled; and, indeed, on 1 May Vincent had rented the house for four months. But let Van Gogh tell the rest of the story in his own words: ‘Il a dit quelque chose qu'il pouvait trouver un autre locataire pour la maison si je n'étais pas décidé à la garder. Ce qui m'étonne peu puisque moi je l'ai fait réparer et qu'elle y a gagné.’ However, we know that Vincent had already decided to keep the place for a few months more... and that is the end of the undramatic tale told by Dorn under the heading ‘The rent.’

The postal service

In the preceding section (‘Dates and chronology’), Dorn discusses the problem that most of Vincent's letters are undated, and notes that the dates written above them in another hand are often ‘debatable’;8 I don't think there are many scholars who would disagree. He then goes on to examine the reference system I developed based on the regularity of Theo's dispatches of money, declaring that my so-called ‘Saturday theory’ had led me to underestimate the time it took for letters from Paris to reach Vincent in Arles or Saint-Rémy. What Dorn fails to mention, however, is that my writings on this system date from almost 40 years ago.9 Nor does he allude to the fact that it was thoroughly revised in my Vincent van Gogh: a guide to his work and letters, published by the Van Gogh Museum in 1993. As for Dorn's own ideas about the rapidity (or slowness) of the mail, he here refers back to what he wrote in his dissertation in 1990: ‘Thus, in general Van Gogh only received a letter from Paris after two days, that is on the third day after its composition, and could have counted on receiving a reply to his own letter only on the fifth day after writing it.’10

Anyone who has had anything to do with publishing Vincent's letters, or a selection thereof, will immediately recognise how mistaken Dorn is once again. The readers of the present article may even have noticed it for themselves, in connection with the quotations given above: letter 615/490: 26 May; 616/491: 27 May; 617/492: 28 May, while Theo must have written Vincent on Sunday, 27 May since Vincent's reply is from Monday, 28 May.

I would like to give one more example, which might be said to speak for many others. It has to do not with an exchange of letters between Paris and Arles, but rather between Paris and Saint-Rémy, some 25 kilometres northeast (it is worth noting that there still was a railway station in the village in Van Gogh's day). In 1890, when Vincent was in the asylum, Theo and his wife Jo congratulated him on his birthday (30 March). As he was in very poor health at the time, they certainly would not have wanted to risk being late with their good wishes, and yet both sent their letters only the day before, on 29 March. This even follows from what Theo actually wrote: ‘Comme je serais content de pouvoir aller te voir demain pour te serrer la main le jour de ta fête’ [861/T31]. And Jo wrote: ‘Among all the letters you will receive tomorrow from your brothers and sisters, mine should not be wanting to wish you all the best’ [860/T30]. And Vincent's reply? He would probably have thanked them the next day, but he did not; nor did he do so the following day. But that was not because the mail took

more than one day to reach Paris: he was simply so ill that he could not even read the letters that had arrived for him in the course of that month.11

The visit to Saintes-Maries and the harvest scenes

I now come to the longest chapter of Dorn's study, the discussion of Vincent's series of harvest scenes, illustrated with ten such canvases or related ones. I am sorry to say that here, too, I am in complete disagreement with his findings. The problems surrounding this group of works are not new to me: only recently I wrote a 9-page reexamination of these questions, which I sent to the Van Gogh Museum in December 1998.

Dorn begins his discussion, published under the heading ‘La moisson en Provence,’ with a long-winded sentence summarising the entire issue and, at the same time - certainly without realising it - exposing the two points on which he is wrong. It is the sentence of which I have already quoted the introduction: ‘All this seems to indicate that Van Gogh was in Saintes-Maries from 10 to 16 June 1888.’ Dorn continues: ‘The series of paintings known collectively as “La moisson en Provence” - which Pickvance, based on his new chronology, considered to have been executed in a single period of work between 4 and 20 June - would then have to be divided into two tranches, separated by the Saintes-Maries episode, just as they had been before his rearrangement.’12

‘Would then have to be divided’ may sound a bit hesitating, but let us not be mistaken - ‘then’ meaning: if Van Gogh really was in Saintes-Maries from 10 to 16 June, as Dorn believes. This becomes perfectly clear when one turns the page and reads: ‘The first tranche was produced in the week from 3 to 10 June [...]. The second [...] was executed in the days following his return to Arles from Saintes-Maries on 16 June.’13 However, as I have demonstrated, in reality Vincent was not in Saintes-Maries from 10 to 16 June, and therefore his harvest pictures were not painted in two separate tranches. I have already noted the proper dates of Vincent's stay on the coast: 30 May to 3 June. I will now show what the artist himself had to say about his ‘études des blés.’

When he returned to Arles from his excursion to Saintes-Maries, Vincent immediately set about executing a painting after the drawings of boats on the beach he had made earlier that morning. A few other paintings after studies from Saintes-Maries followed. This is confirmed by letter 626/496 of 12 June (the letter in which he states that he had not gone back to Saintes-Maries). Here we read: ‘J'ai deux ou trois nouveaux dessins et aussi deux ou trois nouvelles études peintes.’ And, even more important with regards to the harvest works, he told Theo: ‘J'ai un nouveau motif en train, des champs à perte de vue verts et jaunes que j'ai déjà deux fois dessiné et que je recommence en tableau.’ Once this painting was finished he began hastily working in the wheatfields, which were now in the middle of being harvested.

On 19 June he was forced to stop working outside due to sudden torrential rains; all he could do was to console himself with painting portraits in the studio. He reported this to Theo on 21 June, and - fortunately for us - also wrote: ‘J'ai eu une semaine d'un travail serré et raide dans les blés en plein soleil; il en est résulté des études de blés, paysages et - une esquisse d'un semeur’ [631/501]. In addition he reported on his activities to his friend Emile Bernard, and in one of these letters even mentions the exact number of paintings he had managed to produce in these six or seven days of hectic work between 13 and 19 June: ‘J'ai sept études des blés’[636/Bg]. However, he had to confess that they all had been done rather hastily: ‘faits vite vite vite et pressé.’ As an example he referred to the painting Summer evening (f 465 jh 1473), a size 30 canvas: ‘Je l'ai peinte en une seule séance.’

All this information is provided by Vincent himself who gave it to his brother and friends. It is equally certain, however, that neither the famous Harvest (f 412 jh 1440) in the Van Gogh Museum) nor the picture he referred to in letter 627/497 as ‘une ferme et des meules’ were among the seven mentioned in the letters. And let me add: this is not because these two works belonged to ‘a first tranche,’ painted before Vincent made his excursion to Saintes-Maries! It is because they have nothing in common with the others. Une ferme et des meules (f 425 jh 1442) cannot be part of the series because a picture of a farmhouse and a few haystacks is by no means a harvest scene or ‘une étude de blé.’ And The harvest, which Vincent called La moisson, cannot be included because this masterly, wide panorama, with - again - a haystack placed prominently in the middle ground, was not begun before Vincent had thoroughly prepared the composition in two watercolours. It can thus hardly be described as ‘faite vite vite vite et pressé.’

Roland Dorn replies:

 

My essay explains the premises upon which a dating of the Saintes-Maries episode could be based, and demonstrates that there is an alternative to Ronald Pickvance's 1984 interpretation, one which - with the exception of a few necessary revisions - corresponds to the reconstruction proposed by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger.

In 1988, Jan Hulsker adopted Pickvance's point of view; he is certainly free to repeat his belief in its accuracy without adding anything new to the discussion. However, it does seem appropriate to set the record straight on a few points.

In the first place, according to information from the Arles Bureau de cadastre, the veuve Vénissac owned not only the restaurant she ran (lot 400), the Yellow House (lot 398) and the Café de la Gare (lot 401), all located on the Place Lamartine, but also some of the properties ‘to the left,’ situated on the Avenue Montmajour (lot 396, etc.).

Secondly, the recent publication of Theo's correspondence with his then-fiancée Jo has shed new light on the workings of the postal service: a letter sent from Arles in the morning does indeed appear to have arrived in Paris on the evening of the following day; letters sent later, however, were only delivered the day after that.

Operating with these and other hypothesis developed in the discourse enables work on a scholarly basis - ‘sine ira et studio,’ as it should be, and with that grain of modesty that so impressed Vincent in Meissonier: ‘La science, nul ne l'a.’

 

Roland Dorn

Zürich, September 1999


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