11

Finding van Gogh

After the first month in Saint-Rémy, Vincent van Gogh was satisfied with where he ended up. As he explained to his brother Theo, “Not one single time have I had the slightest desire to be elsewhere; just the will to work again is becoming a tiny bit firmer.”85 In addition to feeling alive and enthusiastic about painting again, he was now also free to move beyond the property wall he looked at every day through the iron-barred window, unlike the other patients at the hospital.

The property wall tantalized van Gogh. It reminded him of his limits in mental and physical health. It was a wall he captured so vividly in his early June painting Wheat Field After the Storm. That landscape showed the wall containing the monastery wheat field on one side, while keeping wild nature out on the other side. The wall became less of a barrier while he got fitter in mind, body, and spirit, as he knew soon he would walk beyond it and explore natural beauty up close.

When Vincent first arrived at the old monastery converted into a hospital, his friend, railway postman Joseph Roulin, wrote a letter stating, “You seemed to me disposed to begin your work in earnest again, the countryside is beautiful, you cannot lack for models.”86 The postal clerk, who came to Vincent’s aid after the artist mutilated his ear and who rolled, packaged, and shipped his paintings north by train to Paris where Theo lived, was now gently nudging his Impressionist friend to look beyond any wall and embrace all that nature had to offer him.

In another letter, Roulin further encouraged the artist: “Continue your paintings, you are in a beautiful part of the world, the countryside is very beautiful, the soil is very well worked, you will find a great change in the farming down there, you will not find gardens that look like cemeteries, as in Arles.”87

When June came about with the days growing longer and with nature transitioning toward summer, Vincent knew “there were lots of flowers and color effects” and asked his brother if he could send “another five meters of canvas in addition.”88

He was ready to paint again at a prodigious level.

Before he ventured further afield from the property line, Vincent wanted to return to a theme that had moved him in Arles. He had painted the Starry Night Over the Rhone, in which he captured a ring of stars floating over Arles, with gaslight reflections shimmering on the water, outside, with candles wedged in his straw hat to illuminate the work in the darkness. For the new Starry Night, van Gogh wouldn’t be standing outside like he did with so many of his nature paintings. Perhaps for the first time, he painted the image from memory—the stars and the planet Venus and the moon were out that night, but he added something that wasn’t there outside his asylum window: a village with a church steeple in its center. He would paint it from inside his room using his imagination.

The painting, which one day would become the most recognized and replicated piece of art in history, had been created by a hybrid of Vincent’s skills. He synthesized a part of the nocturnal landscape with his eyes peering out the bedroom window; other parts, such as the small town and cypresses, he imagined with his inner eye, supplementing his imagination with details from his memory. He also added several overt and subtle touches to the painting.

In a way, Starry Night represents van Gogh’s attempt to put his past failures behind him. After that painting, van Gogh would take his easel and paint box and venture off the grounds for the first time. Starry Night was a nod to the past with eyes looking ahead, an attempt at a departure from all that had pained and disappointed him in the past.

The overt symbol of the church at the center of the painting, upstaged by the robust cypresses and luminous stars, represented a symbolic break, a departure from the artist’s religious past. (He had twice failed the church’s exam because of his refusal to learn the “dead language”—Latin. One had to wonder about that, since Vincent was fluent in his native Dutch, as well as French, German, and English.)89

The church was no longer the center of Vincent’s world. Nature was. In Christianity, the natural world is one of temptation, where one is apt to lose his faith and commit a sin; nature is closer to Satan than God as a result (we might remember that the first sin was committed in the Garden of Eden with the temptation to bite into the forbidden fruit). And yet, subtly, Vincent painted eleven stars in Starry Night, as if he were tipping his hat in honor of Christian faith. In the view of most art historians who have analyzed the masterpiece, the eleven stars are a clear reference to Genesis 37:9, where Joseph has a dream that includes eleven stars and provokes a rebuke from his family.

Perhaps there was a sense of personal identification at play that was mirrored by the symbolic choices in the painting: “In the Bible, Joseph was thrown into a pit, sold into slavery, and underwent years of imprisonment, much like Van Gogh did the last years of his life in the Arles [sic] asylum.”90

Blogger K. Shabi advanced the Old Testament interpretation of Starry Night for the literary journal Legomenon in its “What is the meaning?” series. But it just as easily could have symbolically referenced the eleven disciples, with Venus being Jesus and a falling moon Judas, from the New Testament. Either way, Vincent steeped that painting with symbolism aplenty, with the cypress in the foreground reflecting his embracing of nature over religion. That was the symbolism that mattered to him.

Like the Broadway musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat that followed van Gogh a century later, putting the story of “Joseph the Dreamer” to life with dance, music, and colorful lights in the theater, Vincent’s canvas became a “technicolor dreamcoat” that expressed his feelings, how he related to nature, and why he pivoted and transitioned away from religion without fully severing his roots. Van Gogh’s roots, like those of the trees, shrubs, and plants he painted were essential to his being, to being grounded, to standing upright.

Admired for the virtuosity of the impasto brushstrokes, the stars emboldened by the maelstrom swirls that would become van Gogh’s hallmark, his signature style of Impressionism meets Expressionism, Starry Night also became a science project one hundred years after the artist’s death. Many experts and researches have claimed van Gogh saw and was influenced by the black swirls that French author and astronomer Camille Flammarion had drawn of the spiral galaxy, using a powerful telescope, in 1881.91 (Vincent was an avid reader and Flammarion was a very popular science fiction writer in his day. Thus, van Gogh must have read him.)

Another question about the Starry Night has been the extent to which it might be taken as an accurate depiction of the night sky over the asylum. If US art professor Albert Boime was the first to look at Starry Night in a new light in 1984, then the scientists who followed in his wake in 2002 took the research to the next level, deploying local astronomers, celestial software, and data analysis that tracked the movements of the moon, planet Venus, and the stars hovering over Saint-Rémy in June 1889. They managed to figure out the date the stars were aligned in the way depicted in the painting, with Venus as big and bright as the morning star, and they even accurately pinpointed the exact time that Vincent saw Venus through his bedroom window.

Starry Night represented an artistic turning point in Vincent’s stay at Saint-Rémy. In the next few weeks he would spend the days outdoors, painting en plein air, up close to his subjects. He finally crossed the walled boundary of the former monastery to go see nature’s temple firsthand in the divine majesty of summer.

His signature brushstrokes wouldn’t end with the stars, moon, and Venus in Starry Night. They would be adapted time and again to bold daylight landscape paintings, such as the towering Cypresses—in the Annenberg Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—and Wheat Field with Cypresses, where he applied those swirls to cotton balls of rolling clouds that drifted over the Alpilles mountains.

Van Gogh packed his French box that contained tubes of paint, brushes, a jar of turpentine, a folding-stock stand, rags, a painter’s knife, and the moist color box that contained watercolors. He put on his worn straw hat and stepped outside of the old monastery walls, as if being freed from religious persecution, his sentence commuted:

There was a range of hills, the Alpilles, with countless olive trees at their feet and an occasional solitary cypress crowning them to counteract the gentle ups and downs of the hills with a bold vertical. Little by little, van Gogh ventured closer to his new find: there was less of the field in his pictures and the landscape beyond came within reach. At the Foot of the Mountains identifies the crowns of individual trees merging into the foothills—a presentation possible only once the artist came closer.92

By late June, Vincent had amassed an impressive and diverse family of landscape paintings: Green Wheat Field with Cypresses; Wheat Field After the Storm; the vibrant Field with Poppies with its first signs of pointillism; Cypresses; Cypresses with Two Female Figures; Green Wheat Field; and a couple of Olive Groves, one of them a drawing. After finishing more than a half dozen landscapes, the artist was feeling his oats again.

But none of those “wheat fields” or “cypress” paintings were the study that would become Wheat Field with Cypresses, for which he would have to venture at least a mile from the monastery in order to be in front of the subject.

Spiritually armed with the still-drying Starry Night in the storage room next to his bedroom, van Gogh desired to tackle a big sky landscape that would incorporate the passion and beauty of Starry Night he saw and imagined but repurpose it, give it a wilder edge with conflicting colors, with chaotic movement in opposite directions set against the rugged shoulders of the Alpilles range.

By July, Vincent van Gogh had run the equivalent of an artistic triathlon: he had painted dozens of canvases, many of them masterpieces; drawn dozens of matching drawings; and stayed sober, appearing to be the only sane—though never entirely stable—person in the insane asylum for the first two months.