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Van Gogh Museum Journal 2002 (2002)

Van Gogh Museum Journal 2002

(2002)– [tijdschrift] Van Gogh Museum Journal–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende


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fig 1
Claude Monet, Menton seen from Cap Martin, 1888, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts


A Dutchman in the south of France: Van Gogh's ‘romance’ of Arles
Vojtĕch Jirat-Wasiutyński+

The lure of the Mediterranean was as strong for a Dutchman as for any northerner seeking profit and adventure in the warm climate and foreign culture of southern Europe. As Van Gogh remembered when visiting Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer at the end of May 1888, his Uncle Jan, with whom he stayed in Amsterdam during 1874-75 - the latter was by then a rear admiral - had himself sailed the Mediterranean [622/499]. Dutch merchants and sailors had been an important presence there since the late 16th century.1 By the 19th century, the developing Italian and French Rivieras had become the favourite winter destinations of the well-to-do for holidays and convalescence. Uncle Cent, for example, the successful art dealer who had sponsored Van Gogh's career at Goupil & Cie, wintered every year at Menton on the French Riviera (Côte d'Azur) because of his ill health.2 Artists followed. Félix Ziem's career was launched in the 1840s by the patronage of the British and Russian aristocracy residing in Nice. Claude Monet explored the potential of the coast in 1884, reporting his progress to his dealer Durand-Ruel, and returned in 1888 (fig. 1). Van Gogh mentions both Ziem and Monet in his correspondence, as well as Paul Cézanne and Auguste Renoir. Supported modestly by his brother Theo, Vincent had neither patrons nor a dealer. Something of a convalescent, paradoxically he travelled south as winter ended. Summer holidays by the beach and sea bathing, developed on the Baltic and Channel coasts, were just spreading to the Mediterranean, as Van Gogh noted [622/499]. Neither a summer holidaymaker nor wintering patient, he chose as his destination Arles, some 40 kilometres up the Rhône from the sea, rather than the coast itself.

Van Gogh arrived in Arles on 20 February 1888, and stayed until his departure for the asylum at Saint-Rémy on 8 May 1889, ending his stay in the south of France a year later.3 The voyage south was motivated by his need to escape the stress of the modern metropolis and by his search for a suitable location in which to create a vital contemporary art.4 Van Gogh thought of Arles as a starting point for a prolonged trip; on the main line from Paris, it lies close to Marseilles. There are indications in the letters that he also considered the Marseilles region, especially Martigues - a favourite artists' haunt where Félix Ziem painted - as another possible destination [603/479, 606/482]. Once Gauguin arrived, Van Gogh hoped to explore other parts of Provence, particularly the mountains [671/W6]. He never mentions the major centres of Avignon and Aix, where he might have had Cézanne's company. In the event, however, he remained in Arles. He knew a fair bit about the place and its setting before arriving. He apparently chose this small provincial town, surrounded by lush and easily accessible farmland, because it suited his plan to return to painting the countryside and doing portraits of ordinary people. As important to Van Gogh as guidebooks were the writings of Alphonse Daudet, whose fictional Provence lay all around Arles.

Van Gogh imagined the French south, le Midi, as a land of sun and colour that would restore his health and provide the model for a new art [587/469, 576/W1]. In fact,

restoring his health was a precondition for this. As he advised his sister before leaving for Arles, ‘what is required in art nowadays is something very much alive, very strong in colour, very much intensified, so try to intensify your own health and strength and life a little’ [576/W1]. Such statements help us understand Van Gogh's way of painting Arles and its surroundings. Seen against the backdrop of expanding industrial employment, his colourful representations of the Arlesian countryside can be considered a ‘romance’ of the country. Romance evokes the sense of fantasy and strong feeling that Van Gogh attached to the southern countryside and its representation. It is also a particularly appropriate term for historic and geographic reasons. In modern aesthetic usage, the term ‘romantic’ refers back to late-medieval romances, which are viewed as a precedent for the liberation of feeling and imagination in romantic art and literature from classical reason and rules.5 In its original medieval meaning, a romance was a tale of adventure, chivalry or love. The Provence of the troubadours was the setting for many such romances, as Van Gogh well knew, and this literary tradition coloured views of the region. However, rather than produce medievalising images of Provence, he painted a vision of the south as exotic. Substituting for a displacement in time one in space, Van Gogh's bright, intensely coloured paintings situate contemporary Arles in a Mediterranean world that occupies a position vis-à-vis European modernity rather like that of the Orient of the orientalists.6

Choosing Arles

Tourists were warned against the rigours of Provence outside the mountain-sheltered paradise of the Côte d'Azur that Monet had painted (fig. 1): guidebooks told them to expect a dusty and rocky landscape, intense summer heat, the violent mistral and mosquitoes.7 The mistral, a cold and powerful north-westerly wind, and the intense summer sun were also constant sources of trouble for artists working outdoors, as were mosquitoes and flies [642/506, 643/509]. For the tourist, the compensation lay in visiting the outstanding antique and medieval monuments of towns such as Arles, where the women's beauty and folk costumes could also be admired. Local elites, nostalgic for the Provençal past, shared this admiration. Catering to regional, metropolitan and tourist markets, painters and photographers

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fig. 2
Jean Belon, Jealous, she interrupts the farandole, 1889, Arles, Museon Arlaten


regularly depicted these sites, monuments and costumes. In the 1880s, the field was crowded: many painters were working in Arles producing picturesque views of its medieval ruins and using them as settings for genre paintings. Many of these paintings were exhibited locally in the shop window of the Maison Bompard, on Place de la République.8

Soon after arriving, Van Gogh ‘had a visit from two amateur artists, a grocer who sells painting materials as well and a magistrate’ [585/467]. The grocer, whom he had probably met buying artist's supplies, was almost certainly Jules Armand (Ronin), who painted a summer evening's view at Montmajour in 1888 (location unknown) and an Arlésienne the following year (Arles, Museon Arlaten).9 Summer 1888 seems to have been a particularly active time for visiting artists. According to the weekly arts chronicle of the Homme de Bronze, four professional artists, including Vincent van Gogh, joined several amateurs working in the streets of the town and outside the walls, in the Alyscamps and at Montmajour.10 José Belon was completing his Jealous, she interrupts the farandole (fig. 2) for the Paris Salon of 1889; it is set in the palaeo-Christian cemetery of the Alyscamps, before the Chapelle Saint-Accurse, which he had been drawing on the spot. A Monsieur Stein

was ‘painting the courtyard of an ancient and remarkable house in the rue des Arènes.’ Alfred Casile, from Marseilles, was ‘installed at Montmajour to reproduce the magnificent ruins’ (Avignon, Musée Calvet); and ‘M. Vincent, an impressionist painter, works at night, we are told, by gaslight on one of our squares.’ Unlike Belon, Stein and Casile, Van Gogh produced a resolutely modern image of the town in his Café terrace at night (F 467 JH 1580), a night-time view of Place du Forum.

Like the impressionists with whom he was identified in the local weekly, Van Gogh was interested in contemporary life and not the aura of the past. He did not pursue relations with the French artists working locally. With Casile, who had been friendly with the impressionists in Paris in the early 1880s, he would have had more in common, but the two appear not to have met. Van Gogh preferred to associate with the foreign artists working in the countryside around Arles, all of whom were painting the contemporary rural world. Although the Arles of history and tradition did not interest Van Gogh, its picturesque possibilities did not escape him. He regularly drew and painted at the ruined abbey of Montmajour early in his stay and, in late October, took Paul Gauguin to paint the ancient burial ground of the Alyscamps. But, with these and a few other exceptions, Van Gogh largely shunned the town of Arles, turning his back on it to depict the surrounding fields and rural labour instead. One can only conclude that he chose Arles as a convenient location from which to paint the Midi as he envisaged it, as a colourful, rural utopia.11

This vision had been formed even before he arrived in Arles, through contemporary literature and images from the history of art. It was strongly influenced by the paintings of Adolphe Monticelli and the writings of Alphonse

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fig. 3
Adolphe Monticelli, The return from the hunt, 1866, Washington, Corcoran Museum of Art


Daudet. Arles was the perfect centre from which to paint that world. It was on the Paris-Lyon-Marseilles railway line and close to Marseilles, where Monticelli had lived, painting the surrounding countryside. Van Gogh admired the older artist's work immensely and felt that he was in some sense continuing it.12 He praised Monticelli (fig. 3) as the consummate southern colourist working from the motif, but also noted his nostalgic imagery of courtiers and fêtes champêtres. Once in Arles, Van Gogh intended to visit Marseilles to examine the art scene, buy art supplies (including Ziem's non-fading blue) and look for paintings by Monticelli [580/464]. He even fantasised that when he and Gauguin went, he would stroll along the Cannebière, the city's principal commercial boulevard, ‘with a grand southern air,’ dressed like Monticelli, ‘with an enormous yellow hat, a black velvet jacket, white trousers, yellow gloves [and] a bamboo cane’ [674/W8]. The Dutch artist's boldest plan included setting up a ‘permanent exhibition’ of contemporary impressionist painting there, to complement

others in Paris, The Hague and London [581/465, 589/470, 591/471], for which his own studio, the Yellow House as it came to be known, would serve as the storehouse [604/480].

However, Monticelli's Marseilles was, like Paris, too large and urban for Van Gogh to want to settle there; Arles was of a more modest size (about 23,000 inhabitants), reminding him of Breda and Mons [579/463]. It must have seemed an appropriate starting point for his ‘long journey in the Midi.’ Van Gogh's image of the south was strongly influenced by things he had read. He avidly consumed contemporary French literature and greatly enjoyed Daudet's series about Tartarin, the intrepid lion hunter from Tarascon, with its amusing caricatures of southern character and life.13 Arles is only 15 kilometres to the south and, after settling there, Van Gogh did make a trip in early June to see the town where Tartarin's adventures had taken place [626/496]. Daudet's windmill, in which he claimed to have written his immensely popular Lettres de mon moulin, was also close by, at Fontvieille; Van Gogh visited the village many times and depicted the mills on the hills nearby (F 1496 JH 1496), but he makes no mention in his letters of either the book or Daudet in this context.

The south of France was also becoming a focus of interest for contemporary avant-garde painters; a number of impressionists were working there in the 1880s. Paul Cézanne, a native, painted the landscape around Aix and L'Estaque; Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir worked along the Mediterranean coast.14 To a considerable extent, Van Gogh based his expectations of the southern landscape on their paintings, though once in Arles he quickly realised that geology, vegetation and, to some extent, climate differed. Nevertheless, he saw the pervasive bright sunlight and clear air of the south as giving rise to a shared vision of natural vitality in these impressionist paintings. For Van Gogh, Cézanne's work, which he regretted not knowing better, represented the harsher aspect of the south, an aspect that came to the fore as the dry summer weather settled in and golden tones predominated [612/488, 627/497]. Thinking of Renoir's pictures, he expected to find gardens and flowers everywhere around him [612/488]; although he did not immediately find them, he was constantly reminded of Renoir's ‘pure, clean line’ by the crisp vision afforded by the ‘clear air’ [605/481]. Thinking no doubt of Monet's paintings, he noted that nature in Arles was ‘very different from what it must be at Bordighera, Hyères, Genoa, Antibes, where there is less mistral, and where the mountains give a totally different character. Here, except for a more intense colour, it reminds one of Holland, everything is flat’ [634/502]. Situated just north of the delta of the Rhône, about ten metres above sea level, Arles was surrounded by drained and irrigated land with rocky outcrops such as Montmajour announcing the Alpilles to the north and east.

Van Gogh's artistic project differed fundamentally from that of Cézanne, Renoir and Monet, and he therefore sought a different countryside to paint. Focusing on the lush farms and gardens and on rural labour, he began to draw and paint the orchards and fields to the north and east of Arles soon after he arrived in February. He probably consulted a guidebook before journeying south and he seems to have known a certain amount about the town. He visited its two museums and many of its monuments in the first days of his stay, offering pithy commentaries to his brother: ‘The museum in Arles [Musée Réattu] is a horror and a humbug, and ought to be in Tarascon [Tartarin's hometown]. There is also a museum of antiquities, but these are genuine’ [580/464]. He grew to admire the porch of Saint-Trophime, always calling it Gothic and never quite reconciling himself to its apocalyptic imagery [589/470], and he visited the Roman arena for a bullfight one Sunday [596/474]. Guidebooks offered some information about the landscape and agriculture of the immediate region. Joanne's (1881) signalled the plain between Tarascon and Arles as the most fertile in the Bouches-du-Rhône and Murray's (1881) noted that where it was irrigated Provençal land was very productive.15 Surely, Van Gogh chose Arles because of its comfortable size and the accessibility of the countryside. He was by no means alone in his focus. He soon met several other northern artists working in the villages nearby. Christian Mourier Petersen from Denmark and the American Dodge Macknight were already in Fontvieille, and the Belgian Eugène Boch arrived a little later, after Mourier Petersen had left for Paris. Like Gauguin and the American and Scandinavian painters of Brittany, these artists were studying rural France.

The romance of the country

Van Gogh set to work enthusiastically painting the flowering orchards on the outskirts of Arles in March and April, soon after he arrived. In June and July, following the seasons, he concentrated on flowering gardens and field studies. The productive fields and gardens seen in his drawings and paintings were made possible by the canals draining the marshes surrounding Arles to the north, the Canal du Vigueirat (early 16th century) and the Canal du Vuidanges (1642). Because some branch canals were filled in the 18th century, the marshes reappeared and were only finally eliminated early in the 19th century.16 These extensive farmlands, stretching up to Tarascon, form part of the Trebon. Van Gogh seems to have confused this area with the better-known semi-desert of the Crau; unaware that it actually begins to the south and east of Arles, he labelled the fields he drew from the rocky outcrop of Montmajour La Crau: vue prise de Montmajour (F 1420 JH 1501). The Trebon is a district of fertile alluvial soil from the Rhône, farmed by cultivateurs from Arles in small plots near the roads, and quite different from the stony plain of the Crau, which, however, also supported agriculture, thanks to the 16th-century Canal de Craponne. Farmland in the Crau, constantly expanded in the 19th century with further canalisation and watering, produced excellent hay and feed, as can be seen in Paul Guigou's Le cheval blanc of 1871 (private collection).17 This was not an area that Van Gogh explored; with the exception of trips to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and Tarascon, he only painted territories accessible on foot, particularly the Trebon.

Like the agricultural workers who were his neighbours around the Porte de la Cavalerie and with whom he identified in his labour [638/507], the artist headed out from Arles to work in the fields to the north and east. The harvest (fig. 4) is perhaps the best known of Van Gogh's paintings of these farms. Carefully prepared in two large drawings, it depicts the fields outside Arles, inscribed between

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fig. 4
Vincent van Gogh, The harvest (F 412 JH 1440), 1888, Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)


the canal bank at the edge of town, on which the artist stood, and the distant Alpilles, with the ruined abbey of Montmajour visible on the left. It is a peaceful vision of an industrious rural world hardly touched by modernity, with an Arlésienne in the foreground garden and other figures working and walking in the distance. Van Gogh compared the breadth and depth of the motif to the Dutch views of Salomon Koninck from the 17th century and Georges Michel's and Jules Dupré's French landscapes from the 19th [626/496], while the colour reminded him of the golden tones of the paintings of Cézanne and Delacroix [627/497]. Always informing Van Gogh's vision of Arles, too, was the feeling that he was in Japan. By overlaying the decorative colour of Japanese prints and the spatial schemata of Dutch 17th-century landscape paintings, created with the aid of a perspective frame in The harvest, Van Gogh

makes the picture resonate with both an exotic ‘Japanese dream’ [611/487] and a pre-modern echo of ‘the Holland of Ruysdael, Hobbema and Ostade’ [634/502].18

The artist's most cherished aim in this period was to do a series of contemporary portraits [657/516, 658/517], continuing the studies of peasants that he had executed in Holland [669/B15]. In early August he painted two likenesses of a farm worker called Patience Escalier. Van Gogh had begun making portraits in June, with a soldier and a young woman posing for him; it was with special tenacity that, in August, he pursued a peasant model. His interest may have turned to the subject because of a visit to the painters Macknight and Boch in Fontvieille. ‘The village where they're staying is real Millet, small-time peasants and nothing else, absolutely rural and intimate’ [652/514]. ‘Peasant,’ however, was a charged term, certainly as applied at this late date and to the poor farm labourers living near the Porte de la Cavalerie among whom Van Gogh found his models.19 Escalier was a typical member of the rural proletariat: he had been a bouvier or cowboy in the Camargue, the Rhône delta to the south of Arles, and had since worked as a gardener in the town itself. In the first version of the portrait (fig. 5), ‘the orange colours flashing like lightning, vivid as red-hot iron’ and ‘the luminous tones of old gold in the shadows’ are meant to suggest ‘the furnace of the height of harvest time’ in the south [663/520]. The oranges and reds in the face are intensified by the complementary contrasts of the peasant's blue smock and the green background. In the second version (F 444 JH 1563), an intense orange background visualises the powerful sunlight and heat.

Van Gogh related the ‘poor peasantry’ of Provence to the images of Jean-François Millet he knew so well [661/519], and to the ‘wild beast’ [669/B15] described by Emile Zola. Stressing this primitivising vision, he asked his brother to compare the first version of the painting with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's Poudre de riz (fig. 6), Theo's portrait of a woman preparing to apply her make-up over a rice-powder base [663/520]. Van Gogh used this contrast between the rustic vigour of Arles and the refinement of the capital to underline his preference for the former and to indicate his return to the project of painting the countryside that had motivated him in the Netherlands. The contrast also makes plain the dependence of the rural image

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fig. 5
Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Patience Escalier (F 443 JH 1548), 1888, Pasadena, Norton Simon Art Foundation


on urban modernity: it is painted for a modern urban audience and against encroaching modernity.

Van Gogh depicted the contemporary countryside and not some nostalgic vision of a rural past. His paintings show the land around Arles as it had been transformed by new ownership and markets. Agricultural land was increasingly owned by distant proprietors and exploited for greater yields and cash crops.20 Escalier had retired from life as a cowboy on a big estate in the Camargue to tend the market gardens of Arlesian cultivateurs working for urban markets. Increasingly, the fruit and produce were taken to markets outside Arles by train. It was this modern agricultural world that provided Van Gogh with his motifs of orchards and his views of the fields around Arles. As noted above, he was generally interested in contemporary life rather than the past of historical monuments and folk traditions.



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fig. 6
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Poudre de riz, 1887, Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)


When he did paint the Alyscamps in the autumn, he was acting as Gauguin's guide, just after the latter's arrival on 23 October. Van Gogh depicted the treed alley of sarcophagi leading to the Chapel of Saint Honorat as a local promenade with a glimpse of the smokestack of the adjacent locomotive works visible through the poplars (F 568 JH 1622). His colleague, on the other hand, painted costumed Arlésiennes by the nearby canal with a view of the church (Paris, Musée d'Orsay).

Van Gogh's paintings of Arles are, however, highly selective in subject and his expressive, coloured vision is charged with ‘romance.’ Emphasising the rural quality of Arlesian labour, he did only a few paintings of shipping on the Rhône and none of the industrial activity at the gasworks or the extensive repair shops of the railway. His selection, then, did not reflect contemporary reality. Agricultural employment had dropped from supporting almost half the working population of Arles at the beginning of the century to less than 20 percent by the 1880s,21 while sailors' work on the river had virtually disappeared with the arrival of the railway. After 1848, the railway workshops and, later, new industries provided replacement jobs.

A number of paintings and drawings nevertheless stand out in Van Gogh's Arlesian production because they feature industry and railway yards as a prominent backdrop to the fields and rural labour at harvest time. Traditional agricultural life and activities are the focus of the images, yet their contrast with recent industrial development is crucial to Van Gogh's romanticised vision of the town and countryside. Harvesters (fig. 7) shows the wheat harvest in June with Arles in the background. Deliberately using a steep perspective in a vertical format, Van Gogh produces a primitivising painting like an image from a 19th-century almanac.22 Three-quarters of the composition is taken up by the landscape, with one-quarter left for the town and sky. The two parts are differentiated by brushwork and a complementary colour contrast: sunlit yellow fields and shadowed violet buildings below a pale blue sky. The wheatfields are brighter and more extensive yet the distant, smoky town is easily their match. Our eyes are drawn to its dark narrow band, which forms the inescapable horizon of our vision. Van Gogh placed two labouring figures deep in space, drawing us into the composition. The reaper and his female companion stacking



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fig. 7
Vincent van Gogh, Harvesters (F 545 1477), 1888, Paris, Musée Rodin (photograph by Jean de Calan)


the sheaves of grain appear just below the railway line, still safely contained in the fields, but with their manual work given a special poignancy because of the industrial setting. This is clearly hand labour, despite the availability of mechanical reapers in the Midi by the 1880s; it is not entirely old-fashioned, however, as the man now uses a scythe rather than a sickle.23 In Summer evening (fig. 8), the town of Arles rises insistently over the acid-yellow wheatfields silhouetted against the setting sun. There are no labourers in the fields at this late hour, but the stacks of the workshops continue to belch smoke. Against this dramatic backdrop, a couple walks out from town in the early evening, the wind blowing through the ripe wheat. Here the huge orb of the sun, setting improbably in the southwest, and its yellow glare are meant to overwhelm the townscape and absorb the fertile fields and strolling lovers in the cycle

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fig. 8
Vincent van Gogh, Summer evening (F 465 JH 1473), 1888, Winterthur, Kunstmuseum Winterthur (Gift of Dr Emil Hahnloser)


of nature. Like Harvesters, the image brings out the ‘romance’ of the countryside by dramatising the contrast between the mechanical and the organic, between the industrial belt and agricultural country. There is also a subsidiary tension between the town's ancient monuments and the industrial smokestacks. Van Gogh was well aware of the possibilities for historicist romance around Arles. Writing in July about the second series of drawings he produced at Montmajour, the picturesque monastery ruin just outside town, he noted that the landscape at sunset was ‘as romantic as you can get, like Monticelli,’ and observed that ‘one would not have been at all surprised to see knights and ladies returning from hawking appear suddenly or to hear the voice of an old Provençal troubadour’ [639/508]. Van Gogh never painted such a scene, but he visualised a similar ‘romance’ by depicting lovers walking at sunset in the wheatfields against the backdrop of smokestacks, or harvesters working in the heat of the day at the edge of town. What we are given is not the realism of everyday rural labour, but rather a poetic and picturesque contrast of tradition and modernity; in the ex-

pressive charge of that contrast lies Van Gogh's ‘romance’ of the countryside.

Statistically, these paintings are an insignificant minority compared to the overwhelming number of purely agricultural images; but they are immensely revealing about the deeper meaning of all Van Gogh's depiction of rural Arles. In them, he acknowledged modernity, but constrained its signs (railways, industry) in an exaggerated, distorted perspective full of tensions created by bold colour and flat, decorative surfaces. He intensified the impact of nature and the human presence within it, fighting to preserve a place for them in a modernising world. Paintings such Harvesters and Summer evening remind us that in all of Van Gogh's agricultural images, the modernity of industrial labour and production is the invisible other that motivates the intense experience of the exotically coloured landscape and the ‘romance’ of the Arlesian countryside.

An exoticism of colour

When Van Gogh thought about the south, he characterised it in terms of colour. From Paris he wrote to the English painter H.M. Livens, whom he had met in Antwerp: ‘in spring - say February or even sooner, I may be going to the south of France, the land of blue tones and gay colours’ [572/459a]. He also notified his sister that it was his ‘plan to go as soon as possible for a time to the south, where there is even more colour and even more sun’ [576/W1]. As Van Gogh familiarised himself with the countryside around Arles, he frequently compared it to the flat, irrigated fields of Holland; but he always insisted on the very different colouration. This difference corresponded to the changed modern palette of the impressionists, as he explained in a later letter to his sister: ‘You will understand that nature in the south cannot be painted with the palette of [Anton| Mauve, for example, who belongs to the north, and who is, and will always remain, a master of grey. But the contemporary palette is distinctly colourful - sky blue, orange, pink, vermilion, bright yellow, bright green, bright wine-red, violet’ [593/W3]. In truth, the intensely sunlit Midi was not so much colourful as washed out or even white by nature, as Paul Signac noted in his comments on the Dutch artist's paintings in 1894.24

Van Gogh chose to represent the bright light of the south by intensifying local colours and using a system of induced complementaries to create vibrant harmonies. In his opinion, ‘by intensifying all the colours, one arrives once again at calm and harmony’ [593/W3]. At the end of his Parisian stay, he developed a new art of colour in a small group of paintings strongly influenced by Japanese prints and modern colour theory. He first applied this new palette consistently in Arles, in order to create vital images of the exotic south such as The harvest (fig. 4) or the Portrait of Patience Escalier (fig. 5), which he regarded as counter-parts to the drained, over-refined life of modern Paris. Southern colour was a cultural construct that Van Gogh brought with him from the north; an exoticism, this northern vision produced an image of the Midi as sunlit and colourful. With the triumph of the avant-garde between 1890 and 1910, it would dominate the representation of the region; even Signac began to use such a colourful palette in the later 1890s.25

The romantic poet and critic Charles Baudelaire posited an aesthetic geography of north and south that split France and Europe in two. In his account, the rational south, where the sun shone and nature needed no supplementation, produced a timeless (classical) art, a sculptural vision based on clear line and tonal modelling. In contrast, the imaginative, mist-filled north gave rise to a modern (romantic) art, a painterly coloured vision.26 Some 40 years

later, Van Gogh identified impressionism and his own work with the colourist tradition in a letter to the Australian painter John Russell, arguing that its future now lay in the Midi. Contemporary artists were in a position to continue colourist painting, he wrote, equipped as they were with ‘universal knowledge’ and an understanding of ‘the colours of the prism and their properties.’ He cited Monticelli's paintings from the south of France and Delacroix's from North Africa as precedents. Van Gogh concluded that in order to give the viewer ‘something passionate and eternal - the rich colour and the rich sun of the glorious south,’ local colour should be ignored and ‘the south now be represented by a contraste simultané of colours and their derivations and harmonies, and not by forms and lines in themselves, as the ancients did formerly’ [600/477a]. While it maintained the binary opposition, Van Gogh's identification of the south with colour was a reversal of Baudelaire's position. There were powerful cultural reasons for this shift in the system.

When he wrote of the art of the south, the romantic poet was thinking of Italy, classical sculpture, the Renaissance (particularly Raphael) and the art of the academy. As numerous images and texts show, this form of classicism was often also located in the south of France, and this was the vision preferred by the bourgeois elites of the period and the visual artists and writers they supported. However, in the age of French colonialism - colonial troops passed through Arles and Van Gogh even painted them - and with the opening of the Suez Canal, the south of France was increasingly situated as part of a newly orientalised Mediterranean world, which was stereotyped as colourful, exotic and unruly, close to the Near East and North Africa. Daudet's works, the product of a southern writer catering to a Parisian audience, are a major example of this development. In Tartarin's overheated imagination and colourful language, the author created a self-conscious caricature of the exotic southern stereotype. Orientalisation of the south was an effect of the discourse of modernity and its historicist division of cultures into ‘universal’ (that is, modern) and ‘historical.’27 This new construction of the Midi provided Van Gogh with a readymade subject for his colouristic painting.

Van Gogh linked the south of France to both North Africa and Japan, seeing all three as sites for the development

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fig. 9
Vincent van Gogh, Three cottages, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (F 419 JH 1465), 1888, present location unknown


of a new art of colour: Japan as the origin, the Midi as the present site, and North Africa as the future [644/510, 646/511]. For contemporary Europeans, all three were exotic cultural spaces outside modernity. We know that Van Gogh repeatedly ‘saw’ Japan in the landscapes around Arles. When in late May he travelled across the Camargue to Saintes-Maries-de-la Mer, a small fishing village and popular pilgrimage site about 40 kilometres south on the Mediterranean coast, the knowledge that North Africa was the sea's other shore heightened his perception of the Midi as an exotic, sun-drenched world of colour. Linking the French Mediterranean coast with Africa was a common-place of contemporary geography and tourist guides.28 It was Charles Blanc who in 1876 made the crucial connection for art history by linking geography with colour theory in the person of Eugène Delacroix.

Van Gogh had read the well-known essay on Delacroix in Les artistes de mon temps as early as April or May 1885 [497/401]. Here Blanc laid the foundations for Van Gogh's exoticist vision of the south, linking North Africa, Delacroix and Michel-Eugène Chevreul's laws of

complementary colour contrast and setting out the ‘laws of colour’ in a passage that Van Gogh even transcribed. Blanc explained their application using as examples Delacroix's Women of Algiers (Paris, Musée du Louvre) and Jewish wedding (Paris, Musée du Louvre), both then in the Musée du Luxembourg, where Van Gogh could easily have seen them. The lesson echoes in his correspondence from Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer: ‘Now that I have seen the sea here, I feel completely convinced of the importance of staying in the south and of feeling that one must exaggerate the colour even more - with Africa not far from one’ [623/500]. Under the intensely blue Mediterranean sky, complementary contrasts dominated and the soil appeared orange to an artist who was thinking of the proximity of Delacroix's North Africa [625/B6] as he painted Three cottages, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (fig. 9). Van Gogh did not return to the Mediterranean coast, but this coloured vision informs all his Arlesian paintings with the romance of the exotic.

 

Van Gogh travelled south from Paris with expectations and a certain vision of the Midi. He chose Arles as a starting point for his voyage in a sense because it was not Marseilles but rather a small town with easy access to the rural world. Van Gogh may have known that the land was fertile and, in the hot southern sun, yielded abundant crops. He planned to paint the countryside and the peasants, returning to the subject matter of his Dutch works. Working initially at Montmajour and in the town of Arles, Van Gogh literally crossed paths with several other artists who were painting at these sites. However, he preferred the company of the northern artists working in the surrounding villages to these French artists and local amateurs, who specialised in picturesque views of ruins and Arlesian folklore genre painted in the style of Salon naturalism. While Van Gogh largely ignored the town's monuments and industry, his views of the rural world on the edge of Arles are suffused with the tensions of encroaching modernity. The ‘romance’ of the countryside found in his images is directly dependent on this presence and its pressures, as the few paintings that explicitly portray the industrial belt of the town as a backdrop to rural activity make clear. To counteract this intrusion, Van Gogh's paintings of orchards, fields and agricultural labourers are charged with an intense and poignant vitality, expressed above all in their brilliant colour, structured by complementaries based on contemporary colour theory and motivated by the intense sunlight of the region. Van Gogh's coloured vision transforms the Arlesian views into images of a southern ‘romance.’ Strikingly different from the rural north he had depicted in Holland in the mid-1880s, these paintings situate the landscape and people of the Midi in an exotic Mediterranean world linked to Africa.


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