12

Descent into Madness

The summer heat came to the south of France, enveloping people in a cocoon of apathy and idleness and choking them. It would prove especially destructive for Vincent. His work didn’t stop completely, however. In a June 25 letter, he wrote to Theo: “We’ve had some fine hot days and I’ve got some more canvases on the go, so that there are 12 no. 30 canvases on the stocks. Two studies of cypresses of that difficult shade of bottle green. I’ve worked their foregrounds with thick impastos of white lead, which gives firmness to the ground.”93 These lead whites, used to prime the canvases, were kryptonite to Vincent.

As the summer heat of southern France bore down on Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, weakening van Gogh’s desire to venture far afield, the change in the types of paintings he would produce over July and August became clear. He completed only two more field paintings: Enclosed Field with Ploughman and Wheat Field with Reaper at Sunrise. Then there were three up-close studies—Tree Trunks with Ivy, Undergrowth with Ivy, and another Tree Trunks with Ivy. Since those paintings were produced on site, it is little surprise that he painted them under the thick canopy of trees in shade, out of the scorching hot sun that tormented him, breaking down his psyche, zapping his spirits, draining his body of energy.

After suffering a prolonged attack—from sunstroke or tinnitus or a seizure or nibbling on paints or inhaling the lead whites or a combination of many of those ailments—in late July and through most of August, van Gogh went off the 1889 version of the grid. Depression set in, along with inertia, night sweats, personal demons, and dark illusions. He stopped painting. He also stopped writing his literate thousand-word letters to his brother, sister, and sister-in-law. His previous correspondents, Theo, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, and railway postmaster Joseph Roulin, wrote to Vincent in August trying to get him to respond. But for more than a month their inquiries after his health and state of being were met with silence. Each letter went unanswered, making the wait more anxious as time passed by. At the end of August, Vincent came around and explained his self-imposed quarantine.

At that time, he picked up the paintbrush again. He would create three self-portraits, ranging from dark hues to brighter and then to an intense flare. Each portrait captured his left ear intact—yes, the same ear he mutilated in his argument with Paul Gauguin and that he gave to Rachel the prostitute as a memento. Two of the self-portraits depicted van Gogh with a crimson beard. The middle portrait showed a clean-shaven artist with pursed lips, not quite smiling, not somber.

The summer tally produced a meager eight paintings over a period of nine weeks, about one work of art every nine days. Many of those were not new; more like copies, derivative, lacking in both originality and passion. Prior to that, Vincent had been painting and drawing at a rate of one study per day. The precipitous drop in productivity was noticeable; gone were the optimism and desire that he had rediscovered in late May and through all of June.

The artist was human after all—flawed, sad, drowning in an ink-dark pool of doubt. Vincent broke his summer silence and wrote to Theo for the first time on August 22, 1889, writing: “You can imagine that I’m very deeply distressed that the attacks have recurred when I was already beginning to hope that it wouldn’t recur…. These days, without anything to do and without being able to go into the room [Dr. Peyron] had allocated me for doing my painting, are almost intolerable to me.”94

Vincent must have sensed that the summer would be a difficult one much earlier. On July 2, 1889, Vincent’s 1,416-word letter to his brother Theo highlighted many of the great paintings and drawings he created, pairs of them. He also hinted at the depths of his sadness, writing about it from his asylum room in the stifling heat. It suffocated van Gogh, producing the sluggish idleness he had detested in other people he saw in the South of France. The end of that long letter, of his quiet cry for help, read:

It is precisely in learning to suffer without complaining, learning to consider pain without repugnance, that one risks vertigo a little; and yet it might be possible, yet one glimpses even a vague probability that on the other side of life we’ll glimpse justifications for pain, which seen from here sometimes takes up the whole horizon so much that it takes on the despairing proportions of a deluge. Of that we know very little, of proportions, and it’s better to look at a wheatfield, even in the state of a painting.95

There was trouble on another front. Theo was having difficulty selling Vincent’s latest artworks. The Impressionist movement wasn’t really selling in the art market at all. That meant money left Theo’s hands each month to support his brother, but the world had not awakened to van Gogh yet as an artist. Money was going out, but it was not coming in as a return on Theo’s investment in his older brother’s work.

Theo must have wondered if Vincent’s artwork would ever sell. Since Vincent was an unknown artist outside his circle of Parisian friends, Theo had trouble not only selling his brother’s paintings, but also getting his artwork to be shown in the right venue.

Not only was Vincent living in a mental hospital 500 miles south of where the Impressionist artists lived, he was part of an art movement that, in his own words, had “no unity.”96

Regardless of the reception of his work, the artist kept painting. He also managed to provide detailed descriptions that went with the stunning works that he sent to Postmaster Roulin, who then rolled the still-damp canvases with the paint facing out, stacked four or five on top of each other, inserted the rolls into shipping tubes, like architectural drawings, and sent them with Vincent’s letters by postal train north to Paris to art dealer Theo van Gogh. These letters are a great source of information about these works that would prove invaluable in the inquiry into Wheat Field with Cypresses.

The description of the drawing Reaper, for instance, said: “The latest one begun is the wheatfield where there’s a little reaper and a big sun. The canvas is all yellow with the exception of the wall and the bottom of purplish hills.”97

That of the painting Wheatfield After a Storm read: “The canvas with almost the same subject differs in coloration, being a greyish green and a white and blue sky.”98

The description of the ultra-up-close, vertical painting Cypresses read: “I have a canvas of cypresses with a few ears of wheat, poppies, a blue sky, which is like a multicolored Scottish plaid.”99

And the description of the painting Reaper read: “This one, which is impasted like the Monticellis, and the wheatfield with the sun that represents extreme heat, also thickly impasted, I think that this would explain to him more or less, however, that he couldn’t lose much by being our friend.”100

Yet none of these four similar studies were Wheat Field with Cypresses, though they certainly shared similar elements of nature.

Even in his lucid, beautifully written descriptions of four of the ten works he shipped along with the July 2 letter, Vincent hammered away about the intense heat with words like “big sun” and “all yellow” and “extreme heat.” Whatever the combination of triggers he suffered from that summer, one thing was clear: mentally and physically, van Gogh didn’t do well in extreme states.

On that same Tuesday, July 2, Vincent penned another thousand-word letter, this one to his sister. He confided in her about the state of his life, of the solitary profession of being an artist, writing: “What else can one do, thinking of all the things whose reason one doesn’t understand, but gaze upon the wheatfields. Their story is ours, for we who live on bread, are we not ourselves wheat to a considerable extent, at least ought we not to submit to growing, powerless to move, like a plant, relative to what our imagination sometimes desires, and to be reaped when we are ripe, as it is?”101

Two paragraphs later, he bluntly stated: “I, who have neither wife nor child, I need to see the wheatfields, and it would be difficult for me to exist in a town for long.”102

Vincent wrote to Theo on July 5, again to Theo and sister-in-law Jo the next day, and to his mother on July 8. He informed them that he would take a day trip back to Arles, leaving the asylum for the first time since he had arrived.

In Arles, he learned that the reverend who escorted him to the asylum had left for summer holiday in Marseille by the Mediterranean coast, while Dr. Felix Rey had taken a trip north to Paris. The journey to Arles wasn’t a total loss, however. Van Gogh was able to retrieve paintings he had stored with Joseph Roulin and ship the leftover items from Arles to Theo. But not seeing his two key contacts, who had previously helped him climb out of the black hole of his depression, likely taxed his fragile mental state and primed him to succumb to the midsummer attacks.

On July 14, van Gogh mailed the artwork he created during his stay in Arles. It included five paintings: View of Arles, Orchards in Blossom, The Ivy, The Lilacs, and Pink Chestnut Trees in the Botanical Gardens in Arles. He also “enclosed another seven studies.”103 Those studies covered subjects he had drawn and created in both Arles and Saint-Rémy—works he would temporarily abandon until September; one of these was Wheat Field with Cypresses.

He also wrote a second, longer letter to Theo to pass on to “his pal” Paul Gauguin, saying, “Above all, dear fellow, I beg of you, don’t fret or worry or be melancholy on my account, the idea that you would do so, certainly in this necessary and salutary quarantine, would have little justification when we need a slow and patient recovery.”104

Vincent understood what it would take for him to recover—time and patience. But when the attacks finally arrived with the apex of summer heat, those words, “slow and patient,” and other sayings were rendered meaningless. The two July 14 letters were the last that Vincent wrote until the third week of August. They sounded pragmatic and stable enough. We can see from Theo’s practical reply that there seemed to be no cause for concern just yet:

As from the 15th of this month I no longer have the rue Lepic apartment, and as it was absolutely impossible to store all the canvases at our place, I’ve rented a small room in Père Tanguy’s house where I’ve put quite a few of them. I’ve made a choice of those which are to be taken off the stretching frames and then we’ll put others on them. Père Tanguy has already given me a lot of help, and it’s going to be very easy to let him continually have new things to show. You can imagine how enthusiastic he is about colored things like the “Vineyards,” the “Night effect,” etc.105

If there was any information in Theo’s reply letter that Vincent took in, it was that the growing volume of artwork needed additional storage, stretching, and display space, which were offered by Père Tanguy, who was the go-to art supplier for Vincent’s special paint colors, pigments, fine canvases, and variety of paintbrushes. That must have given the artist some hope. Tanguy would likely display his artwork, so Theo could sell a couple of them.