Breaking van Gogh

With Vincent ready to move beyond the healing process of the summer attacks with the three self-portraits he painted in August, it would soon be time for more meaningful artwork. He strolled next door to the storage room, picked up the Wheat Field with Cypresses study he had drawn, and recalled his wandering in the woods outside the asylum walls in late June.

For Vincent to paint such a magnificent scene, he had to walk halfway between where his room stood in the corner east wing of the asylum and a large overhang at the top of the Alpilles crag. It was a distance of about 8,800 feet, or over a mile and a half.106

Of the weather that month and that year, D. W. Olson’s Texas State research group found the following:

Meteorological observations from 1889, preserved at the Météo-France archives, show that favorable conditions prevailed on both of these evenings. Very heavy rain fell on May 14th and 15th, but skies cleared on May 16th. No rainfall at all occurred during the entire first 2 weeks of July, and the fraction of the sky covered by clouds decreased on July 13th from 50% to 30%. The weather records provided a good consistency check but did not help us to establish a unique date.107

The wet May contributed to two of van Gogh’s other wheat field studies, Green Wheat Field (green because of the rain) and After the Storm. (The unique date was for van Gogh’s Evening Landscape with Rising Moon, which Olson, with his team and astronomers from Arles, confirmed in 2002.)

With days getting hotter in late June, turning the wheat incandescent yellow, Vincent walked from the asylum wall to a place called Haute Galline—“high” or “raised hen”—near Eygalieres. The pitch overlooked a wheat field with cypresses standing tall in the corner, with foothills rolling to the mounds and shoulders and peaks of the Alpilles and a big windswept sky of roiling clouds rising high above.

In order to paint the Wheat Field with Cypresses as a study, Vincent first drew a copy of the landscape using black chalk, a reed pen, and ink on graphite on woven paper.108

Before Van Gogh treated cypress as the principal subject of his canvases (ca. June 25), he included them in two landscape paintings with wheat fields, of which one served as the model for this sheet (drawing) … The artist executed two other paintings of the same composition, which has led to differences of opinion about which was the first version, that is, the one after which this drawing was made.109

The drawing technique allowed him to experiment with the colors, using “long thin lines, small dots and areas left blank.” Like Sunflowers before it, Wheat Field with Cypresses became a passion for Vincent to perfect, to tinker with and refine. Along with the study, one of the three painted versions was allegedly completed in June, the First version (the one that would eventually end up at the Met). After sunstroke and another “attack” forcing van Gogh to take the summer off, the artist returned to the study and, in September, painted the Small and Final versions that he instructed Theo to send to his sister and mother in Holland, respectively.

One of the drawings of Wheat Field with Cypresses resides today in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Of the three Wheat Field with Cypresses paintings, not one is hanging anywhere in Holland. Two of the landscapes are in America (the First and the Small versions); the Final version is in London. So instead of a painting valued at around $100 million today, the Van Gogh Museum owns the drawing of the study, which is worth a great deal less.

That September, van Gogh emerged from his summer stupor with his mind clouded, as though waking from a weeklong absinthe bender. Although he eventually regained some of his equilibrium, he had to be feeling at a loss. A loss of confidence. A loss of hope. His dream of a studio in the South of France and his optimism died that summer. Like his mental health, they would never fully return.

The cornucopia of emotions that Vincent experienced can be found in the paintings he created when he first came to Saint-Rémy that May. They can be found in the bright colors, the passionate iconic swirls of objects, like the sun, stars, and clouds, and in the thick impasto brushstrokes that separated his skill as a master with the brush from his Impressionist peers. No one in France painted like the Dutchman.

Van Gogh’s deepest feelings and emotions, twisted in the throes of his ailments, have become a joy to us as museum visitors, art lovers, art collectors, art curators, and art historians more than a century after his premature death.

Deep inside, Vincent wanted to get back to the May–June zenith of creativity, but he knew it would take time to get there. He couldn’t just come out of his misery, pull away from the insufferable heat, the sunstroke, the fear of the next attack—the toxic mix was still there for him in late summer—and wish that the reoccurrence of the next psychotic break would somehow be forestalled all on its own. Like a wounded animal, he needed time to heal.

The artwork that he created during this period wouldn’t be on par with the starburst paintings he made a season before, with the intense colors and epic strokes and swirls. It would be more refined, with tighter strokes, and on subjects that wouldn’t require being en plein air. Van Gogh had enough studies to work from to keep busy, to see if he could recapture that initial zest and artistry without leaving the asylum.

For Vincent, these paintings were baby steps. But underneath he had to cleanse, expel the layers of pain and doubt from a lost summer. The first three paintings he created coming out of sunstroke depression were self-portraits. Straightforward. Easy. Light on the fingers, second nature, but emotionally necessary. Use the mirror, look at his face, see his own reflection, study his expression at that moment in time, even capture an intense, predatory wolf-like stare, and yet paint with quicker brushstrokes influenced by the staccato taps and touches of Pointillism.

British art teacher Ashlee Farraina captured van Gogh’s state by examining all of the artist’s dozen and a half self-portraits on her art and photography blog; writing about self-portrait No. 12, the third of such paintings from summer 1889, she holds that it:

brings together all the elements of Van Gogh’s later work: a choice of color that reflects his emotional state and a style of drawing that pulsates with energy. It was painted shortly after he left the St. Rémy asylum in July 1889 and shows that he was still fighting his demons. It is arguably the most intense self portrait in the history of art.110

That intensity can be gleaned from his August 22, 1889, letter to his brother Theo, in which he was conflicted. In the second paragraph of his letter to his brother, Vincent wrote, “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.”111 As before, he also continued to write about how painting was quite necessary for his recovery.112

For many days I’ve been absolutely distraught, as in Arles, just as much if not worse, and it’s to be presumed that these crises will recur in the future, it is ABOMINABLE. I haven’t been able to eat for 4 days, as my throat is swollen. It’s not in order to complain too much, I hope, if I tell you these details, but to prove to you that I’m not yet in a fit state to go to Paris or to Pont-Aven unless it were to Charenton.

It appears that I pick up filthy things and eat them, although my memories of these bad moments are vague, and it appears to me that there’s something shady about it, still for the same reason that they have I don’t know what prejudice against painters here. I no longer see any possibility for courage or good hope, but anyway it wasn’t yesterday that we found out that this profession isn’t a happy one.113

Self-confined to his bedroom and studio rooms at the start of September, van Gogh used the iron-bar window as a portal to his studies from early June. As he wrote to Theo:

I have two landscapes on the go (no. 30 canvases) of views taken in the hills. One is the countryside that I glimpse from the window of my bedroom. In the foreground a field of wheat, ravaged and knocked to the ground after a storm. A boundary wall and beyond, grey foliage of a few olive trees, huts and hills.114

One day, after having gazed long enough at the wheat fields at the foothills of the Alpilles range from his room, van Gogh went back to his studio next door. There, he picked up the preliminary sketch of Wheat Field with Cypresses, drawn in charcoal, and studied the majestic landscape, then turning to the drawing in reed pen, examining the swirls.

As with all his studies—compositions that often had several permutations, like the fourteen still-life Sunflowers paintings—Vincent started with a sketch and then later a drawing to flesh out the details of the work. Using the drawing (he usually also made an initial painting version, which in this case either did not exist or does not survive) as a model, he took out a carpenter’s pencil and, beginning at the center of a blank canvas, marked the location of three boulders, the bushes to the left, and then the tall and shorter cypress trees on the right side of the painting. He outlined the foothills in the middle background and then traced the shape of the Alpilles mountains in the background.

Before painting the study, he would prime the canvas and then pencil in the outline of the figures or the elements of nature, from trees to villas, and work from the center of the canvas out to the edges, mapping locations of tree lines, rooftops, walls, boundaries of fields, the horizon, and sky above to capture the backgrounds. After doing the sketches and drawings first, by the time he painted on canvas he could do it with the eye of his brain—from memory—as it would be intimately familiar territory for him.

That Wheat Fields with Cypresses drawing, which hangs today in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, was drawn with pen and ink. He executed it first using a thick carpenter’s pencil. He then inked over the pencil’s marks once he was happy with what he had drawn. (When he first arrived in Arles in 1888, van Gogh “discovered the pen (made from local hollow-barreled grass, sharpened with a penknife). It changed his drawing style. He created some extraordinary drawings of the Provençal landscape, including a series of drawings of and from Montmajour (east of Arles), in reed pen and aniline ink on laid paper. The ink has now faded to a dull brown.”)115

Wheat Field with Cypresses was one of those “extraordinary drawings”—several of them in fact—that turned into an extraordinary masterpiece. It is believed there are three of these masterpieces in existence. The First, thought to have been painted in June 1889, hangs today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Small one was sent to Vincent’s sister “Wil” and is now in a private collection of the late Greek shipping magnate Stavros S. Niarchos; the Final version made its way from the South of France to the Tate in London and eventually to the National Gallery in the early 1960s, where it remains to this day.

In 1987, the National Gallery’s Impressionism and technical experts, John Leighton, Anthony Reeve, and Raymond White, conducted a deep analysis of the Final version, A Wheatfield, with Cypresses. Why did this technical examination occur in that year? Technology had a new way of performing a CSI-like deep-dive investigation to home in on all of the subtle techniques that Vincent van Gogh used. X-ray machines, high-powered microscopes, chemical analysis of paints, and infrared radiation allowed scientists, researchers, and art experts a new glimpse into how the artist worked and with what materials. That included, but was not limited to, paint types that were unique to van Gogh, pigment colors, the pencil lines underneath, the lead white primer, weave counts of the canvas, hidden signatures, “do overs” or scratch outs, thin and thick impasto brushstrokes. All of that and more was condensed into a twenty-page technical report, which was above and beyond a painting’s condition report, as it offered a much more detailed and multifaceted analysis.

Incidentally, 1987 was not only the year that technology arrived at the National Gallery in London. It was also the year that two van Gogh paintings—Sunflowers and Irises—broke records at the preeminent auction houses. Finally, it was also the year that Dieter and Hortense Bührle got serious about honoring their father’s private collection with a global tour, while identifying and priming suitors for the future sale of Dieter’s Wheat Field with Cypresses landscape, the First version of the painting.

Leighton, Reeve, and White published the findings of the dense report in the National Gallery Technical Bulletin, Volume 11, 1987. Today the report is published online alongside the painting. It reads:

Several of the samples show a thin, discontinuous layer of black pigment recognizable microscopically as wood charcoal on top of the white ground, indicating some preliminary sketching of the design before painting…. It is likely that Van Gogh would have defined the principal parts of the composition in a charcoal drawing on the canvas when working from one of his earlier pictures of the group. In each case the underdrawing is present beneath lines of paint which divide the main elements of the landscape horizontally—at the point for example where the dark blue line separates the cornfield from the more distant blue hills and mountains, and in the immediate foreground where the yellow stalks of corn give way to pale green and cream.116

The X-ray revealed the pencil etchings under the paint that “defined the principal parts of the composition in a charcoal drawing on the canvas.”

It is evident that Van Gogh would have painted the “[A Wheatfield], with Cypresses” quite rapidly, and the intermingling of colors revealed by some of the cross-sectional samples confirms this. For example, in the streaks of mauvish grey in the foreground at the very edge of the cornfield, the color can be seen to have been worked into the underlying white and yellow layers whilst the paint must still have been wet…. Elsewhere, though, a more organized, discrete layer structure is found suggesting subsequent adjustments to the composition after the initial layers had dried…. There is also evidence from the constitution of the paint that modifications to the design, if only minor, were made at a later stage (see the pigment section below under ‘white’), which supports the view that No. 3861 was not the first in the series of paintings, but evolved by Van Gogh in the studio as a version of the theme.117

In essence, for the first time, art experts could see behind the paint and brushstrokes and examine those in a very scientific way. It was as if they were Superman with X-ray vision that could see underneath the surface layer. It also gave the researchers at the National Gallery the DNA of van Gogh’s pigments, with three colors being unique to him—custom-made by Père Tanguy’s paint shop in Paris.

Professor of art history H. W. Janson wrote about A Wheatfield, with Cypresses: “The field is like a stormy sea; the trees spring flamelike from the ground; and the hills and clouds heave with the same surge of motion. Every stroke stands out boldly in a long ribbon of strong, unmixed color.”118

What Professor Janson had seen in the National Gallery’s Final version of the painting, Vincent saw with his eyes, an explosion of life from the tall cypresses and bushes, to the wheat all blowing in one direction, while the windswept sky is full of big and swirling clouds flying across the canvas in the opposite direction.

Like the various components of his Wheat Field with Cypresses subject, the artist’s moods and emotions could often fly in opposite directions.