Breaking van Gogh

By the third week of September 1889, Vincent decided it was time to ship a roll of paintings, including some of his repetition studies, to Theo. Rolled-up canvases, four to six of them stacked on top of one another with the thick impasto paint often not fully dry, were packaged compactly; tubes of paintings were stuffed in crates and put on the goods train.

For an artist who lived month to month on his brother’s stipends, it was the most economical way to ship his paintings from Arles up to Paris. Unfortunately, it was also the way that was more damaging to the paintings’ condition. This method of packaging would accelerate the aging of a painting, as some of the stacked canvases in the roll would stick to one another, particularly on hot and humid days like those of the September in question. Upon receiving them, Theo knew that the paintings would have to be touched up and restored before they could be exhibited or sold.

In a September 20 letter, Vincent wrote, “I’m also adding a study of flowers to the roll of canvases—not much, but anyway I don’t want to tear it up.” (Art scholars believe the “study of flowers” was one of the Irises paintings.)119

Eight days later, he “dropped Theo another line” that he had removed three studies from the “consignment of canvases (which you will have already), since by removing them the roll cost 3.50 francs less for carriage. So I’ll send them next opportunity—or rather they’re leaving today with other canvases—the following.”120

Those studies he held back, to save his brother some money, included the various versions of Wheat Field with Cypresses.

Painting continued to carry a practical and an emotional significance for van Gogh—giving them as gifts was a way for him to ease the anxiety of his loved ones, as well as show that he was painting again, and painting well, with color and virtuosity. He wrote to Theo, “Soon I’m sending you a few smaller canvases with the 4 or 5 studies I wanted to give to Mother and our sister. These studies are drying at the moment. It’s no. 10 and no. 12 canvases, reductions of the Wheatfield and Cypresses, Olive Trees, Reaper and Bedroom and a little portrait of me.”121

The National Gallery of Art’s 1987 Technical Bulletin also included the description of van Gogh’s signature impasto with reference to the Cypresses painting:

“I have a canvas of cypresses with some ears of wheat, some poppies, a blue sky like a piece of Scotch plaid; the former painted with a thick impasto like the Monticellis, and the wheatfield in the sun, which represents the extreme heat, very thick too (note 10).”

This description matches the painting now in Switzerland which has the same dense impasto as the recently completed “Cypresses”, a surface which is an accumulation of several layers of paint.122

The “thick” and “dense impasto” also applies to the A Wheatfield, with Cypresses, the Final version of that repetition study catalogued by the National Gallery in London. “A blue sky like a piece of Scottish plaid,” on the other hand, is a very specific, very detailed description that Vincent included in his letter to Theo on July 2, 1889.

Of the 864 paintings in van Gogh’s oeuvre,123 only one is referred to as having a “multicolored Scottish plaid” sky, Cypresses. This seemingly minor point will play a central role in determining the authenticity of the different versions of the Wheat Field with Cypresses paintings.

Cypresses, which is a vertical canvas hanging today at the Metropolitan Museum—donated as part of the fifty-two paintings in the Annenberg Collection in 2002—should not be confused with the First Wheat Field with Cypresses landscape, which is a different painting altogether. The vertical Cypresses already belonged to the Annenberg Collection, while the First version of the landscape painting was purchased by Walter Annenberg in spring 1993 and immediately donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for the then sky-high price of $57 million.

Upon arrival, the Saint-Rémy paintings would be handled by Theo, or maybe a messenger, someone like Jo’s brother, Andries Bonger, and then by Père Tanguy, or some employee at his art house. Someone would stretch them out and fully dry them (without the benefit of today’s climate-control heating, careful ventilation, and air conditioning). The 142 paintings that arrived from Saint-Rémy would be cared for in the primitive au naturel state, aging at an accelerated rate due to being stacked and rolled, compressed into tubes, and stretched; many were then stacked under Vincent’s bed or stuffed back in the tubes for storage.

The rate of aging would be especially high for the landscape and nature paintings that van Gogh created outdoors. Having been painted outside, exposed to the elements, those paints would have collected dust particles: microscopic bits of earth, dirt, and pollen.

The National Gallery of Art’s A Wheatfield with Cypresses condition report didn’t find any pollen in the paints they examined under microscope, by X-ray, with chemical analysis in the laboratory, or using UV-fluorescence photographs. No earth, no pollen. Nothing.

It was painted so quickly and has dried in such a way that the essence evaporated at once, and so the paint is not firmly stuck to the canvas at all. That will be the case with other studies of mine too, which were painted very quickly and very thickly.124

The fact that Vincent “painted so quickly” when working on the Final version of the landscape confirms the way he painted his study—the outline layout, then working from his sharp memory with the agile brushstrokes of a master artist. Other observations from the Bulletin included:

• “Besides, after some time this thin canvas decays and cannot bear a lot of impasto.”125

• “[ … ] you will, by varnishing, get the black, the very black tones, necessary to bring out the various somber greens.”—A neat trick he learned from Paul Gauguin.126

• It is not clear why both the size 30 versions of “A [Wheatfield], with Cypresses” escaped this treatment but the difficulties in finding a suitable protective layer.127

• The impasto is extensive and very raised with many delicate brittle points. This rough surface could not be cleaned using normal methods.128

• He was also aware of its relatively poor drying qualities, and in the impasto of the pure white of the sky in No.3861 relatively deep, sharped-edged cracks have formed.129

What the National Gallery scientific team also discovered was that Vincent likely finished the Final version of the picture quickly, but then came back and touched up a few areas; that the thick impasto fields in the foreground were painted in layers; that the “cracking” of the painting was due to its being rolled up for shipping in the crates and then north to Paris by train; and that being painted in the studio inside the asylum kept the artwork in otherwise good condition. Unlike the model version of the painting or the drawing that was rendered outside at the end of June, the London version was not contaminated by dirt.

Based on additional scientific, technology-based tests, the Technical Bulletin stated emphatically, “The vigorous swirling brushstrokes are very clearly displayed in the photograph of the reverse by transmitted light. The condition of the painting sets it apart from the three others in the Collection [ed.: a reference to the drawing, the Met’s First version, and van Gogh’s sister’s Small version] as it is both unlined and not impregnated with anything which would change the refractive index of the paint and ground. It has never been varnished or treated with polishing wax.”130

For some reason, perhaps because of his mental state, emerging from the lost summer, Vincent didn’t varnish and seal the canvas as he had done with many other of his paintings in Arles and Saint-Rémy.

Talk about the “devil in the details.” Three decades ago, the National Gallery in London nailed down virtually every aspect of its masterpiece, arriving at the conclusion that it was the Final version, painted indoors and not subjected to pollen, and that its impacted impasto was the result of rolling a still-damp painted canvas and the years the painting spent languishing after Theo van Gogh died prematurely in January 1891.

In late October 1889, Vincent received a letter from Roulin, who talked about being happy to hear that he was painting again (there was a period of productivity after the summer delirium subsided), that he should “finish [the works] in good health,” and that his “return to Paris is almost decided.” Above all, Roulin used the power of words and the eternal bond of friendship when he wrote: “Let us hope that one day again we shall have the happiness to shake hands and to tell each other in person such good things and to cement our friendship once more.”131

When van Gogh read that letter in his room at the asylum, he must have thought about the first time he met Roulin over a drink at the café, or the night when he cut off his ear, when Joseph Roulin followed him home to make sure he was all right, or the six portraits he did of the old man and the one of his wife Augustine and youngest daughter. But whatever glimmer of hope Vincent gained from reading, and perhaps rereading, that letter would come to a grinding halt in the darkest months of December and January, when his affliction, his “attacks,” returned with a vengeance.

There was also some positive news, however. At the end of January 1890 Vincent received a letter from his sister-in-law Jo. It was a breakthrough, a shift from his status of an unknown to public recognition. She wrote:

This morning Theo brought in the article in the Mercure, and after we’d read it Wil and I talked about you for a long time—I’m so longing for your next letter, which Theo is also looking forward to. Shall I read it? But everything has gone so well up to now—I’ll just keep my spirits up.132

What his sister-in-law was referring to was the fact that a renowned French art critic, Albert Aurier, wrote a five-page article on the up-and-coming Impressionist painter titled “Les isolés: Vincent van Gogh,” in Mercure de France (January 1890). “In his article Aurier praises Van Gogh’s ‘strange, intense and feverish work’ (oeuvres étranges, intensives et fiévreuses) and calls him a worthy successor to the seventeenth-century Dutch masters. In his eyes, Van Gogh is not only a realist with a great love for nature and for truth, but also a symbolist who uses his idiom to express ‘an Idea’ (une Idée)…. 133

“With regard to Van Gogh’s technique, he writes that it matches his artistic temperament: ‘vigorous, exalted, brutal, intense’ (vigoureuse, exaltée, brutale, intensive). His palette is ‘incredibly dazzling’ (invraisemblablement éblouissante) and his brushstrokes ‘fiery, very powerful and full of tension’ (fougueux, très puissants et très nerveux). Aurier closes his article by lamenting that Van Gogh will never be completely understood, for he is ‘too simple and at the same time too subtle for the contemporary bourgeois mind’ (à la fois trop simple et trop subtil pour l’esprit-bourgeois contemporain).”134

Aurier had seen, for the first time, van Gogh’s artwork—six paintings in total—at an expo, “au salon de XX à Brussels,” that took place from January 18 to February 23, 1890.135

The works provoked controversy, much like van Gogh’s life. He displayed six paintings that included two versions of Sunflowers, The Ivy, Orchard in Blossom, Wheatfield, Rising Sun, and The Red Vineyard.136 He was promptly accused of being “too modern” by Henry de Groux, who was part of the XX movement, an “avant-garde group of 20 artists” also exhibiting at the expo. De Groux even wanted to pull his own work from the show “if he found it in the same room as the ‘the laughable pot of sunflowers by Mr. Vincent.’”137 That slight didn’t sit well with van Gogh’s Impressionist pals, Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Signac, who took umbrage and nearly caused a fight on opening night. “The next morning, de Groux resigned. To the critic of Le Journal de Charleroi, it was understandable: this artist had been ‘very justly exasperated’ by Van Gogh’s sunflowers.”138

Other reactions were far more positive. Claude Monet, for instance, understood better than most the raw beauty and vitality of van Gogh’s artwork and stated it was the “best of the expo.” An additional show of support came from Anna Boch, who purchased The Red Vineyard for just over 400 francs, or what today would be the equivalent of $2,000.139

Why did Anna Boch buy the painting? Was it the colors? Did it remind her of a place and time in her life? Or was it more likely that she knew Vincent through her younger brother Eugene, and knew van Gogh was poor and needed help? She was also Dutch and a painter, like van Gogh, so perhaps there was a sense of kinship.

Albert Aurier’s article, “Vincent van Gogh: The Isolated One,” hit a nerve with the artist, silenced Henry de Groux, and showed the path forward for the new trend in art at that time—Post-Impressionism. Van Gogh was not quite a star, however, since the “bourgeois”—or what has been referred to as “upwardly mobile” middle class in our time—really didn’t understand the unique quality, deep symbolism, and intrinsic ties with nature and its inner meaning that Vincent van Gogh displayed in his artwork. In fact, his paintings would languish with little movement, in terms of sales or perceived value, for another decade.

Upon reading the Aurier article about the new Dutch master, Vincent wrote a long and endearing note to the prominent art critic:

Dear Mr. Aurier,

Thank you very much for your article in the Mercure de France, which greatly surprised me. I like it very much as a work of art in itself, I feel that you create colors with your words; anyway I rediscover my canvases in your article, but better than they really are—richer, more significant.140

And then, after he finished the letter and signed his name, Vincent added the following:

When the study I send you is dry right through, also in the impasto, which will not be the case for a year—I should think you would do well to give it a good coat of varnish.

And between times it should be washed several times with plenty of water to get out the oil completely. This study is painted in full Prussian blue, that color about which people say so many bad things and which nevertheless Delacroix used so much. I think that once the Prussian blue tones are really dry, by varnishing you will obtain the dark, the very dark tones needed to bring out the different dark greens.141

Neither his first sale nor the glowing art review did Vincent’s mental health any good in the long run. He would suffer another attack—whether from epilepsy or from nibbling or inhaling the paints or from depression—that spring. And perhaps, deep down inside, he felt it was time to swim upriver like a salmon—to go north to his brother Theo, whom he loved dearly, and meet Theo’s wife, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, for the first time, and see the new life in his nephew named after him, and take advantage of the pause from the attacks he expected to reappear.

Even as he was planning the journey, concerns mounted about the state of his mental health and whether it was advisable for him to leave, especially unaccompanied by anyone who could keep an eye on his fragile health. He seemed to think that he was stable enough to do so. On May 4, 1890, just before he left, Vincent wrote to his brother:

First, I categorically reject what you say that I should be accompanied throughout the journey. Once on the train I no longer run any risk, I’m not one of those who are dangerous—even supposing I have a crisis, aren’t there other passengers in the carriage, and besides, don’t they know what to do in all the stations in such a case?

You’re giving yourself worries here that weigh on me so heavily that it might directly discourage me.

I’ve just said the same thing to Mr. Peyron, and I pointed out to him that crises like the one I’ve just had have always been followed by three or four months of complete calm. I wish to take advantage of this period to move—I want to move in any event, my desire to leave here is now absolute.142

Once in Paris, he would examine the paintings from his two-year stay in Arles and Saint-Rémy, consider how to improve upon those works of art with some “touchings” or new copies, and then head outside France’s capital for the final chapter of his life.