Chapter Four

 

Van Gogh’s Provence

 

Part Two: The Alpilles

 

The London Alpine Club, says Alphonse Daudet in Tartarin sur les Alpes (1885), is renowned “jusqu’aux Indes”. There is this difference between it and the Club Alpin of Tarascon: “the Tarasconnais, instead of leaving their country to conquer foreign peaks, have contented themselves with what was to hand, or rather to foot, on their doorstep.” They go not to the Alps but to the “Alpines”—more often called the Alpilles:

 

that chain of little mountains scented with thyme and lavender, harmless and not very high (150 to 200 metres above sea-level), which provide the roads of Provence with an undulating blue horizon and which local imagination has endowed with such fabulous and characteristic names as “le Mont-Terrible”, “World’s End”, “The Giants’ Peak”, etc.

 

On Sunday mornings, claims Daudet, you can see the members going off to these mountains, gaitered, pick in hand, bag and tent on back, for climbs amid what the local press exaggerates into terrifying abysses, gulfs and gorges. Tartarin, although he is President of the club and will eventually find himself forced to ascend the Alps, rarely takes part in these expeditions. He prefers reading out the newspaper’s “tragic accounts” with “much rolling of eyes and intonation fit to make the ladies pale”.

The Alpilles, it is true, are not enormous. But their appearance and structure—the pale limestone moulded into jagged, irregular crags— belie the lack of height. In rain or fog they can be quite forbidding. If they are an easy target for Daudet’s comic distortion, they also lend themselves to van Gogh’s more intense rearrangements or realizations. In Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background the mountains (Mont Gaussier and the Montagne des Deux Trous) ripple in deep and even deeper purple and the grey-blue sky shows through the “two holes”. In Mountains at Saint-Rémy van Gogh looks at the mountains from a different angle and further away; the Alpilles here are yellow, green, purple. The yellow shapes in the foreground are more liquid and mobile while the deep colour is reserved mainly for the more static—but it looks like a temporary stasis—Montagne des Deux Trous.

 

Les Antiques: the mausoleum or cenotaph and arch at the edge of Roman Glanum.

 

Saint-Paul-De-Mausole: “Light Turning Into Conflagration”

 

Van Gogh saw the Alpilles most often from the asylum of Saint-Paul-de- Mausole, where he voluntarily interned himself on 8 May 1889. This site between Saint-Rémy and the mountains has long been associated with healing—possibly since ancient times when pilgrims came to the sacred spring at the city of Glanum, probably since the early Middle Ages. There was a church here by 962; the surviving church is mostly twelfth- century apart from the eighteenth-century façade and is adjoined by a small cloister. This leads on to the former asylum, where patients with mental and other problems were tended by Franciscan Observantine monks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After the selling-off of ecclesiastical property during the Revolution the asylum was run by lay staff, later in collaboration with two orders of nuns. The institution van Gogh entered had been formally established in 1855. Since 1995 the Maison de Santé Saint-Paul-de-Mausole has been associated with Valetudo, an organization named after the goddess of health worshipped at Glanum. Art is one of the therapies practised, and some paintings by current patients are on sale. Van Gogh himself fantasized about using the corridors and empty rooms to exhibit paintings.

The treatment available at Saint-Paul in 1889 was fairly unsophisticated. It consisted mainly of hydrotherapy: regular long baths. This often calmed the patients, but did little to effect long-term cure. Boredom was the norm, not the Gothic “melancholy of death” perceived in the sleepy grounds and “suffocating” buildings by Paul Mariéton (La Terre provençale) a year earlier: van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo on 25 May 1889 about “these unfortunates who, having absolutely nothing to do (not a book, nothing to occupy them but games of boules and draughts) have no other daily distraction but to cram themselves with chickpeas, beans and lentils” in regular quantities at regular times. It is an inoffensive and a cheap way to fill your day, particularly since “digesting such stuff presents certain difficulties.” On rainy days the inmates gather in a room “like a third-class waiting-room in some stagnant village” where the would-be passengers look the part with their hats, glasses, sticks and travelling clothes. It is almost as if they were at the seaside. (More evidently disturbed patients were confined to another part of the building.)

Van Gogh, however, had an inestimable advantage over the other bean-eaters and would-be railway-passengers: he was allowed, except during his periodic crises, to go on painting. This was one of the privileges afforded to him as someone who had entered of his own free will and was evidently not, most of the time, conventionally “mad”: Dr. Peyron at Saint-Paul, among others, diagnosed epilepsy. He was given not only a bedroom but a second room for use as a studio, from which he could see the cornfield and large wall which figure in a number of the paintings. There are some reproductions, as well as reconstructions of the rooms, at Saint-Paul today. Mariéton complained at “such misery and darkness” so near the “poésie lumineuse” of the landscape; van Gogh, however, engaged with the surrounding brightness. Melissa McQuillan (Van Gogh, 1989) points out that in the Saint-Rémy paintings especially he sought “luminosity”; he moved on to “a subtler range and mixture of hues... as if light as colour had ceded to light as charged atmospheric illumination.”

For the first few weeks he worked in his studio and the asylum garden, producing paintings and drawings at his usual remarkable speed. From June he was also allowed to go into the countryside with an attendant. Later, work would be interrupted by his attacks and convalescence. The first attack since Arles came on when he was painting on a windy day in July, leaving him depressed and frustrated at being forbidden to paint for about a month. In December during an attack he tried to poison himself, as on other occasions, by eating paints. A third crisis came soon after a visit to Arles on 19 January 1890 and a fourth while he was actually in Arles on 22 February. This time van Gogh was ill—often, reported Peyron, “despondent and suspicious”—until April. His own theory about this collapse was that it had been caused by his reaction to the enthusiastic article about his work by Albert Aurier, published in Le Mercure de France on 1 January: he feared, he said, that punishment would somehow follow praise. Some have felt that the problem had more to do with suppressed feelings of exclusion following the birth of a son, at the end of January, to Theo and his wife Jo (an event he claimed, at least, to welcome wholeheartedly). By the end of April van Gogh was desperate to leave the asylum, which had clearly not been able to cure his condition—although Peyron surprisingly wrote “guérison”, “cure”, in the “Observations” column of his register. On 16 May he left for a brief visit to Theo and his family in Paris, a final move to Auvers- sur-Oise, and suicide at the end of July.

In spite of the breakdowns, van Gogh achieved a great deal at Saint- Paul. Producing an average of one work per day, he painted the asylum garden, the corridors and vestibule (ochre, red, brown), rich blue irises, quarries, wheat fields, the Alpilles, white almond-blossom against a blue sky as a welcome to his baby nephew, the church of Saint-Paul with autumn trees and field, and imaginative re-workings of prints by Rembrandt, Delacroix, Millet and Daumier. He painted fifteen pictures of olive-groves, including one where what he calls the leaves’ “violet shadows on the sunny sand” have an extraordinary pulsing effect. He worked on two versions of his “pale, blond yellow” wheat field with a reaper who figures death, he told Theo, but “a death where there is nothing sad; it happens in full light with a sun which floods everything with a fine gold light.” The cypress, too, was traditionally associated with death but one would not gather this from most of the paintings:

 

its lines and proportions are as beautiful as an Egyptian obelisk. And the green is of so refined a quality. It is the splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes, the most difficult to get exactly right that I can imagine. Well you must see them against the blue, or, to put it better, in the blue.

 

Some of van Gogh’s most famous cypresses occur in “Starry Night” (Museum of Modern Art, New York), one of his most popular and most interpreted paintings. Ronald Pickvance notes that “suggested sources range from the Bible (Genesis or Revelations) to Whitman and Longfellow, from Zola and Daudet to Dickens and Carlyle.” In a sense this is a view over Saint-Rémy with houses and Alpilles, but the pointed, aspiring bell-tower of the church is completely unlike the real one, and what is happening in the sky seems too vast or too apocalyptic to be tied to a locality. This is perhaps the painting which can be most readily aligned with Aurier’s ecstatic early account of van Gogh’s dazzling skies of “sapphires and turquoises”, skies “like flows of fused metals and crystals” sometimes irradiated by “terrible solar discs”; a strange nature, both real and somehow supernatural, which involves “form becoming nightmare, colour becoming flames, lava, and gems, light turning into conflagration, life, hot fever.”

Aurier’s visionary rhetoric applies less well to the portraits which van Gogh sometimes said were his most important area of endeavour. At Saint-Paul there were fewer opportunities for portraiture than in Arles. But François Trabuc, the chief orderly, sat for him as did Trabuc’s wife Jeanne. Van Gogh was interested by his look of “contemplative calm” in spite or because of the fact that he had witnessed much death and suffering—he had worked in a hospital in Marseille during two outbreaks of cholera. Writing to Theo, van Gogh went on searching for the essence—physical appearance expressing inner quality—of Trabuc. He has a rather military air and “small keen black eyes”; he would look like a bird of prey were it not for his evident intelligence and kindness.

The same interest is arguably evident in the self-portraits he painted in September 1889, just before his Trabucs. In the first, the haggard face in pale greens and yellows “emerges, unearthly, from the surrounding darkness” (Ronald Pickvance). It is easy to see this as an image of the artist’s situation or state of mind: precarious composure as he recovers from his most recent collapse, perhaps renewed commitment to his art— he shows himself here with smock, brushes and palette. The extraordinarily different images projected in van Gogh’s various self- portraits should caution us, however, against too simply psychological a reading: they are controlled experiments as much as personal statements or mood-barometers. Even the second Saint-Paul version (at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris), begun immediately after the first, is strikingly different: the background and the coat are light blue and the expression in the blue eyes may be read as reserved, perhaps a little suspicious, sad but resolute, more inward-looking—or as the painter put it himself to Theo, “vague and veiled”. Even in his last months at Auvers he was still searching for ways to represent “our impassioned expressions”.

 

Les Antiques

 

Saint-Paul-de-Mausole takes its name from an ancient monument a few hundred metres away, the mausoleum on what has long been known as the Plateau des Antiques. The mausoleum, now in fact believed to be a cenotaph—a memorial rather than a burial-place—stood just outside the entrance to the Gallo-Greek and Gallo-Roman city of Glanum and quite close to the Via Domitia, the main road from Narbonne to Arles. With the triumphal arch which marked the entrance to the city, the cenotaph remained largely intact while the rest of Glanum was worn away, quarried and gradually covered by alluvial deposits from the Alpilles.

The mausoleum, probably built in about 30-20 BC, honours members of a Gallic family who appear—they took the name Julius—to have been rewarded for loyal military service with a grant of Roman citizenship from Julius Caesar. Sextus, Marcus and Lucius Julius commemorate their father Caius and their grandfather. Identifying the two statues was once a popular local pastime. Mary Darmesteter, writing about a trip to Provence for The Contemporary Review in 1892, claims to have been told that they were Julius and Caesar, the similarly divided general Caius and Marius, or “the great Caius Marius and the Prophetess Martha, the sister of Lazarus... They were, as you may say, a pair of friends.”

The base celebrates, by mythological analogy, the family’s heroic achievements. The relief on the south face shows Meleager hunting the Calydonian boar with the help of the mounted Castor and Pollux. The struggle is fierce: Meleager’s wounded colleagues are to be seen at left and at right an axe spills over from the main frame. Desperate battle also figures on the west side, a scene from The Iliad in which Menelaus defends Patroclus’ body from the Trojans. To the north unidentified horsemen fight; this time a sword and the front-quarters of a horse spill over. To the east, according to most interpreters, the noble ancestor unseats a mounted Amazon, a figure of Victory puts a hand on his shoulder and, on the left, Fame delivers to his family news of his success and perhaps the grant of citizenship.

The general emphasis on battle around the base contrasts with the serenity of ordered arches, columns and effigies above: a four-sided arched structure, a frieze of tritons and other legendary creatures, the funerary inscription, and then a circular tholos whose Corinthian columns surround the two figures in togas. Physically and metaphorically the ancestors are lifted high above the contingent, if glory-gaining, world of conflict.

The arch at Les Antiques (c. 20AD) has lost its attic storey and is generally in worse condition than its neighbour. But enough remains to suggest something about the attitudes of Romans and Gauls in the post- conquest period. The east side shows chained Gaulish captives, one bound to a “trophy”—a heap of weapons. On the west side are more chained prisoners; a female figure sitting on a second heap is either another of the defeated or, more likely, the victorious goddess Roma. Most interestingly, a free Gaul or Gallo-Roman wearing his traditional cloak or sagum is shown beside one of the prisoners. There may, as has sometimes been suggested, be some implied sympathy for the vanquished, or it may simply be that Rome needs to be shown defeating strong, worthy adversaries. If there is sympathy, it is purely retrospective. In the present, Rome offers a choice: you can be like the cloaked figure— dress traditionally rather than engage in traditional armed resistance—or you can be bound with the defeated. Glanum has chosen the first option, it is implied.

The abundance available to the cooperative is suggested by the fruits and flowers on the frieze of the archivolt. Nearly nine centuries later, Paul Mariéton delighted in the actual vegetation nearby. For him the site was Greek rather than Roman, with its asphodels and “small Attic flowers” and its air “balsamically perfumed” by aromatic herbs.

 

Glanum

 

The site of the city, excavated mainly from the 1940s onward by Henri Rolland, slopes gradually up a defile through the Alpilles, the Vallon de Notre Dame de Laval. Stone for building was available in plenty; a small late-Roman quarry has left its traces just before the site entrance and there are larger quarries nearby. Near the Mas de la Pyramide the so- called Pyramid, a pillar of stone over 20 metres tall, indicates the depth dug down from the original surface level. The other, perhaps the main, reason for settling here was the presence of a spring. From early times it was regarded as sacred and, probably, associated with healing.

Neolithic and Bronze Age people lived here, and by the seventh century BC there was a Celto-Ligurian settlement which traded, after 600, with the new Greek colony of Massalia (Marseille). In later centuries Glanum (or Glanon) itself developed along Greek lines. (Two models in the entrance building helpfully reconstruct the Gallo-Greek city of 150-50 BC and the Gallo-Roman version of 50 BC-AD 270.) The most clearly visible Gallo-Greek remains are at the south end of the site. A second-century BC staircase leads down to the sacred spring-head, still a numinous place, cool even in a hot Provençal summer. Beside this destination of ancient pilgrimages were shrines to Hercules and later— no doubt replacing or complementing earlier equivalents—to the Roman goddess of health, Valetudo. The town’s principal Greek building was the once-tiered bouleuterion or council-house. The presence of so many olive-trees near the site, especially in the grassy area between it and Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, is another reminder of the Greeks—as well as the sign of a flourishing local industry today.

Not surprisingly, somewhat more is left of Roman Glanum, mostly at the middle and north end of the site. The main public buildings included the basilica and, next to it, with prominent apse and still substantial walls, the curia. Part of the façade of one of the twin temples of the imperial cult was reconstructed in 1992. Its white pillars provide a useful landmark for visitors trying to understand this rich and sometimes confusing site. There are traces too of the public baths, most visibly the cold pool. Towards the north end are the remains of some large private residences, among them the House of the Antes, a Hellenistic and Roman peristyle house with courtyard.

Glanum is one of the most attractive of archaeological ensembles. It is surrounded by trees and inhabited by cicadas, lizards, butterflies, damselflies. And the Alpilles are always there in the near distance, low enough for trees and greenery, steep enough for large stretches of bare pale rock. Mont Gaussier is the dominant hill, to be seen too from the streets of Saint-Rémy. Further left is the “Montagne des Deux Trous” which van Gogh painted, its dark holes clearly visible above the undulating olive-trees.

 

Saint-Rémy-De-Provence

 

When there was first talk of excavating at Glanum, the poet Mistral worried that any objects found on site would end up in Paris, as had the Venus of Arles; better they should remain buried, like the legendary local treasure guarded by the Cabro d’Or, the golden goat. (The story was probably inspired by occasional finds of coins and other objects during the period of Glanum’s entombment.) In the event, fortunately, attitudes to the dispersal of finds had changed by the time excavation actually took place, and most of what was unearthed went down the hill to Saint- Rémy, the town which began to supersede Glanum as early as the third century AD. (The later name comes from a connection with the abbey of St Rémy in Reims.) The museum in the Hôtel de Sade contains statues and statuettes, reliefs, inscriptions, lamps, jewels and ex-voto altars from the site.

The sculpture includes the figured four-headed capitals from the portico near the sanctuary. They depict Apollo crowned with laurel, Dionysos, Hermes with small wings attached to his hair, Africa crowned with elephant-skin, and a damaged Pan whose horns and goats’ ears are still visible. The classical and the Celtic are interestingly blended: the gods and mythological figures are often Greek, and to have capitals at all is classical, but the figures have a Celtic air, imparted mainly by their ringed, staring eyes. Celtic religion clearly remained a presence in the Gallo-Greek city as perhaps in the Roman: there is a lintel with recesses for human skulls like those from Roquepertuse and Entremont, and a squatting figure with torcs, bracelet and exposed genitals may once have rested his arms on severed heads.

At the twin temples of the Roman imperial cult two more simply classical pieces were discovered: heads generally supposed to represent Augustus’ sister Octavia and his wife Livia. The first, as A. Trevor Hodge says in Ancient Greek France (1998), “has a round, open, almost chubby face”, the second “a longer aristocratic face with high cheek-bones”. This is the way the two were traditionally portrayed, perhaps even the way they looked: the noble, put-upon Octavia and the intelligent, purposeful Livia or, in more extreme versions, the hapless, rejected Octavia of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and the ruthless Livia of Graves’ I Claudius.

The Hôtel de Sade itself, built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is one of a number of fine former aristocratic residences in the old town. Nearby is the finest, the Hôtel Mistral de Mondragon, the sixteenth-century building which, with its seventeenth-century neighbour, houses a museum of local history, geography and tradition, the Musée des Alpilles. Here the façade blends classical, well- proportioned elegance of architecture and somewhat more vigorous and grotesque elements in the decoration—faces framed by extreme hair, horned masks or skulls and the heads of fierce, noble lions with manes flying. The building runs along one side of Place Favier, a smoothly paved, gently sloping square with horse chestnuts and a small fountain, an area, as James Pope-Hennessy says in Aspects of Provence (1952), “more like a room than an open space”. Place Péllissier, a somewhat larger square but still compact, has stout plane-trees, a small fountain derived from that of the Four Dolphins at Aix-en-Provence, and the town hall in a former seventeenth-century convent.

Also in the old town is the Hôtel Estrine, which is occupied by the Centre d’Art Présence Van Gogh. In the absence of the paintings themselves (many of them are in Amsterdam) the ground-floor of the gallery shows an audio-visual presentation on the artist, high-quality reproductions of some of the work done at Saint-Paul, and relevant extracts from the letters. A 1956 bronze by Osip Zadkine shows van Gogh drawing with visionary concentration. Upstairs are both temporary exhibitions and selections from the permanent collection of modern painting. Elsewhere in the town are various other galleries. The partly twelfth- and thirteenth-century Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Pitié houses religious and other works by Mario Prassinos (1916-85). The large Musée Jouenne shows landscapes and townscapes—the popular, fairly realistic works of Michel Jouenne—which will appeal to a very different taste.

 

Les Baux: “Bastions And Buttresses And Coigns Of Vantage”

 

The rock of Les Baux (from Provençal baou—”rock” or “escarpment”) has been inhabited since Neolithic times. Both human and natural agency are strongly apparent in the pocked, holed, battered, fissured ruins of the buildings begun by the Counts of Les Baux in the tenth century and subsequently much reduced, rebuilt, blown up and quarried. (The light-coloured stone can be dazzlingly, painfully white in summer sun, when the whole hill-top seems as much Middle Eastern as Provençal.) Underfoot now are bare rock, loose stones and sandy soil.

Between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries particularly, the rulers of Les Baux dominated and sometimes terrorized the surrounding area. They fought long wars with the Counts of Barcelona for control of Provence. Occasionally conflict reached Les Baux itself, as when Roger de Duras laid siege to it in 1355. The castle now displays a reconstruction of one of Roger’s weapons—a four-ton ballista in dark wood—and such other medieval siege-aids as a massive trebuchet and a battering-ram. Some more organized demolition followed a rebellion of the once fiercely independent Baux against the kingdom of France in 1483. Restoration and rebuilding followed after 1528, under the aegis of the then owner, Constable de Montmorency. There are remains of the once elegant, porticoed Hôpital Quinquéran, founded in 1583 by the governor’s wife, Jeanne de Quinquéran. She also built the so-called Pavillon de la reine Jeanne, in the Vallon de la Fontaine.

But Les Baux looks predominantly medieval, not Renaissance, because of the new demolition campaign of the early 1630s. The town, mainly Protestant, was involved in the rebellion led by Louis XIII’s dissident brother Gaston, Duke of Orléans. Royal troops attacked the citadel from the convenient Plateau of Costapera, and once the rebels were defeated the dismantling, on Cardinal Richelieu’s instructions, began. Further damage was sustained during the Revolution. In the nineteenth century quarrying continued and parts of the site became houses or store-rooms.

What remained by the 1870s impressed John Addington Symonds (“Old Towns in Provence”) as “a naked mountain of yellow sandstone, worn away by nature into bastions and buttresses and coigns of vantage, sculptured by ancient art into palaces and chapels, battlements and dungeons”. Art and nature are “confounded in one ruin”, for, Symonds insists:

 

blocks of masonry lie cheek by jowl with masses of the rough-hewn rock... the doors and windows of old pleasure-rooms are hung with ivy and wild fig for tapestry... High overhead, suspended in mid-air hang chambers—lady’s bower or poet’s singing-room—now inaccessible, the haunt of hawks and swallows.

 

As well as birds, he writes, there are two hundred poor inhabitants. They too witness to the glory that has gone, “foddering their wretched goats at carved piscina and ugly sideboards, erecting mud-beplastered hovels in the halls of feudal princes.” This is not the well preserved medieval town described in Murray’s guide. It is more like “a decayed old cheese... The living only inhabit the tombs of the dead.” A small community continued to live in the village of Les Baux. Near the entrance building of the château is a small twentieth-century graveyard. Here a memorial shows that even such a place lost nine men in 1914-18, two of them, Marius and Célestin Autran, members of the same family. A memorial board in the village church adds a tenth victim.

 

 

Now, of course, the locals are more likely to fodder tourists than wretched goats. One food tourists have thrived on is the bloody history of the Lords of Les Baux. Symonds seems to relish this more than the troubadour associations of bowers and singing-rooms. (The most notorious villain based at Les Baux was the murderous Raymond de Turenne, “Scourge of Provence” at the end of the fourteenth century, who was said to enjoy forcing his enemies to jump to their deaths from the towers of the citadel.) Sir Theodore Cook, too, experiences, on his Edwardian readers’ behalf, the pleasing frisson of historical violence: at

Les Baux “you feel as if a blood-stained band of medieval cut-throats were lurking behind every crag, or slowly retreating, as you mount, to lure you on to final, irremediable fate.”

For years already, Rose Macaulay observes in Pleasure of Ruins (1953), “from the walls of Victorian drawing-rooms discreet pale water- colours [had] looked down, entitled in flowing scripts, ‘A Robbers’ Eyrie in Provence’, and painted by great-aunts.” (The shade of irony distinguishes Macaulay’s account, and her generation, from Cook’s or Symonds’.) And much visited Les Baux has, she says, “grown vulgar”. Nevertheless “it still makes its flamboyant dramatic effect”; it still has Macaulay figuring “a fantastic Doré scene of infernal nightmare”, a place “sprawling over its high escarpment with the crazed air of an extinct moon.”