And perhaps the most effective means of enriching our sense of what to look for in a scene is by studying visual art. We could conceive of many works of art as being immensely subtle instruments for telling us what amounts in effect to ‘Look at the sky of Provence, redraw your notion of wheat, do justice to olive trees.' From amidst the million things in, for example, a wheat field, a successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator. It will foreground elements ordinarily lost in the mass of data, stabilise them and, once we are acquainted with them, prompt us imperceptibly to find them in the world about us—or, if we have already found them, lend us the confidence to give them weight in our lives. We will be like a person around whom a word has been mentioned on many occasions, but who only begins to hear it once he or she has learnt its meaning.
And insofar as we travel in search of beauty, works of art may in small ways start to influence where we would like to travel to.
2.
Vincent van Gogh arrived in Provence at the end of February 1888. He was thirty-four years old and had dedicated himself to painting only eight years before, after failing in attempts to become first a teacher and then a priest. For the previous two years he had been living in Paris with his brother Theo, an art dealer, who supported him financially. He had had little artistic training but had befriended Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and exhibited his work alongside theirs at the Café du Tambourin on the Boulevard de Clichy.
‘I can still remember vividly how excited I became that winter when travelling from Paris to Aries,' van Gogh would recall of his sixteen-hour train journey to Provence. On his arrival in what was then the most prosperous town in the region and a centre for the olive trade and railway engineering, van Gogh carried his bags in the snow (an exceptional ten inches had fallen that day) to the small Hotel Carrel, not far from Aries's northern ramparts. Despite the weather and the small size of his room, he was enthusiastic about his southerly move. As he told his sister, ‘I believe that life here is just a little more satisfying than in many other spots.'
Van Gogh was to remain in Aries until May 1889, fifteen months during which he produced approximately two hundred paintings, a hundred drawings and two hundred letters—a period generally agreed to have been his greatest. The earliest works show Aries lying under snow, the sky a limpid blue, the earth a frozen pink. Five weeks after van Gogh arrived, spring came, and he painted fourteen canvases of trees in bloom in the fields outside the town. At the beginning of May he painted the Langlois drawbridge over the Arles-Bouc Canal, on the south side of Aries, and at the end of the month he produced a number of views from the plain of La Crau, looking towards the Alpilles hills and the ruined abbey of Montmajour. He also painted the reverse scene, climbing the rocky slopes of the abbey for a view of Aries. By the middle of June his attention had shifted to a new subject: the harvest, of which he completed ten paintings in only two weeks. He worked with extraordinary speed, or as he put it, ‘quickly quickly, quickly and in a hurry, like a harvester who is silent under the blazing sun, intent only on his reaping'. He noted, ‘I work even in the middle of the day in the full sunshine, and I enjoy it like a cicada. My God, if I had only known this part of the country at the age of twenty-five, instead of coming here when I was thirty-five years old!'
Later, explaining to his brother why he had moved from Paris to Aries, van Gogh offered two reasons: because he wanted to ‘paint the South' and because he wanted, through his work, to help other people to ‘see' it. However unsure he might be of his own powers to achieve that, he never wavered in his faith that the project was theoretically possible—that is, that artists could paint a portion of the world and in consequence open the eyes of others to it.
If he had such faith in the eye-opening power of art, it was because he had often experienced it himself, as a spectator. Since moving to France from his native Holland, he had felt it most particularly in relation to literature. He had read the works of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and Maupassant and been grateful to those writers for opening his eyes to the dynamics of French society and psychology. Madame Bovary had taught him about provincial middle-class life, and Pere Goriot about penniless but ambitious students in Paris; he now recognised the characters from these novels in society at large.
Paintings had similarly opened his eyes. Van Gogh frequently paid tribute to painters who had allowed him to see certain colours and atmospheres. Velazquez, for example, had given him a map that allowed him to see grey. Several of Velazquez's canvases depicted humble Iberian interiors with walls of brick or a sombre plaster, where, even in the middle of the day when the shutters were closed to protect the house from the heat, the dominant colour was a sepulchral grey, occasionally pierced, where the shutters were not quite closed or where a section had been chipped off them, by a shaft of brilliant yellow. Velazquez had not invented such effects; many others must have seen them before him, but few had had the energy or the talent to capture them and transform them into communicable experience. Like an explorer with a new continent, Velazquez had, for van Gogh at least, given his name to a discovery in the world of light.
Van Gogh ate in many small restaurants in the centre of Aries. Their walls were often dark, and the shutters closed against the bright sunlight outside. One lunchtime, he wrote to his brother to announce that he had stumbled upon something utterly Veläzquez-ian: ‘The restaurant in which I am sitting is very strange. It is grey all over… a Velazquez grey—as in the Spinning Women—and there is even a very narrow, very fierce ray of sunlight coming through a blind, just like the one that slants across Velazquez's picture. … In the kitchen are an old woman and a short, fat servant also in grey, black, white… it's pure Velazquez.'
It was for van Gogh the mark of every great painter to enable viewers to see certain aspects of the world more clearly. If Velazquez was his guide to grey and to the coarse faces of large cooks, then Monet was his guide to sunsets, Rembrandt to morning light and Vermeer to adolescent girls (‘A perfect Vermeer,' he exclaimed to Theo after he spotted one example near the arena). The sky over the Rhone after a heavy rain shower reminded him of Hokusai, the wheat of Millet and the young women in Saintes-Maries de la Mer of Cimabue and Giotto.
3.
Nevertheless—and fortunately for his artistic ambitions—van Gogh did not believe that previous artists had captured everything there was to see in southern France. To the contrary, many had, in his view, completely missed the essentials. ‘Good Lord, I have seen things by certain painters that did not do justice to the subject at all,' he exclaimed. ‘There is plenty for me to work on here.'
No one had, for example, captured the distinctive appearance of the middle-aged middle-class women of Aries, of whom van Gogh asserted, ‘Some women resemble a Fragonard and some a Renoir, but there are others who cannot be labelled according to anything that has ever yet been done in painting” (emphasis added). The farm labourers whom he saw working in the fields outside of Aries had likewise been ignored by artists: ‘Millet has reawakened our minds so that we can see the dweller in nature. But until now no one has painted the real southern Frenchman for us.' He elaborated, ‘Have we in general learned to see the peasant now? No; hardly anyone knows how to pull that off.'