The Provence that greeted van Gogh in 1888 had already been the subject of painting for over a hundred years. Among the better-known Provenqal artists were Fragonard (1732-1806), Constantin (1756-1844), Bidauld (1758-1846), Granet (1775—1849) and Aiguier (1814—1865). All were realistic painters, adhering to the classical and until then relatively undisputed notion that their task was to render on canvas an accurate version of the visual world. They went out into the fields and mountains of Provence and painted recognisable versions of cypresses, trees, grass, wheat, clouds and bulls.
Yet van Gogh insisted that most had failed to do justice to their subjects. They had not, he claimed, produced realistic depictions of Provence. We are apt to call any painting realistic that competently conveys key elements of the world. But the world is complex enough for two realistic pictures of the same place, at the same moment, to look very different, as a consequence of differences in artistic styles and temperaments. Two realistic artists may sit at the edge of the same olive grove and produce divergent sketches. Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole, as Nietzsche mockingly pointed out in a bit of doggerel verse entitled ‘The Realistic Painter':
‘Completely true to nature!'—what a lie:
How could nature ever be constrained into a picture?
The smallest bit of nature is infinite!
And so he paints what he likes about it.
And what does he like? He likes what he can paint!
If we in turn like a painter's work, it is perhaps because we judge that he or she has selected the features that we believe to be the most valuable within a particular scene. There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
Alternatively, if we complain that, for example, our portrait does not look ‘like us', we are not accusing its painter of trickery; we are simply suggesting that the process of selection that goes on in any work of art has in this instance gone wrong, and that parts of us that we think of as belonging to our essential selves have not been given their due. Bad art might thus be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
And leaving out the essential was precisely what van Gogh accused most of the artists who had painted southern France before him of doing.
4.
There was a large book on him in the guest bedroom, and because I was unable to sleep on my first night, I read several chapters, eventually falling asleep with the volume open on my lap as a trace of dawn-red appeared in the corner of the window.
I awoke late and found that my hosts had gone to Saint-Rémy leaving a note to say that they would be back around lunchtime. Breakfast was laid out on a metal table on the terrace, and I ate three pains au chocolat'm guilty, rapid succession, all the while keeping one eye out for the housekeeper, who I feared might put an unflattering spin on my gourmandise for her employers.
It was a clear day with a mistral blowing that ruffled the heads of the wheat in an adjacent field. I had sat in this same spot the day before, but only now did I notice that there were two large cypresses growing at the end of the garden, a discovery that was not unconnected to the chapter I had read the night before on van Gogh's treatment of the tree. He had sketched a series of cypresses in 1888 and 1889. ‘They are constantly occupying my thoughts,' he told his brother. ‘It astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them. The cypress is as beautiful in line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk. And the green has a quality of such distinction. It is a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes, and the most difficult to get exactly right.'
What did van Gogh notice about cypresses that others had failed to see? In part, the way they moved in the wind. I walked to the end of the garden and there studied, thanks to certain works (Cypresses and Wheat Field with Cypresses of 1889 in particular), their distinctive behaviour in the mistral.
Vincent van Gogh, Cypresses, 1889
Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889
There are architectural reasons for this movement. Unlike pine branches, which descend gently downwards from the top of their tree, the fronds of the cypress thrust upwards from the ground. The cypress's trunk is, moreover, unusually short, with the top third of the tree being made up wholly of branches. Whereas an oak will shake its branches but keep its trunk immobile in the wind, the cypress will bend, and furthermore, because of the way the fronds grow from a number of points along the circumference of the trunk, it will seem to bend along different axes. From a distance, the lack of synchronicity in its movements makes it look as though the cypress were being shifted by several gusts of wind blowing from different angles. With its conelike shape (cypresses rarely exceed a metre in diameter), the tree takes on the appearance of a flame flickering nervously in the wind. All of this van Gogh noticed and would make others see.
A few years after van Gogh's stay in Provence, Oscar Wilde remarked that there had been no fog in London before Whistler painted it. Surely, too, there were fewer cypresses in Provence before van Gogh painted them.
Olive trees must also have been less noticeable. I had the previous day dismissed one example as a squat, bushlike thing, but in Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun and Olive Grove: Orange Sky of 1889, van Gogh brought out (that is, foregrounded) the shape of the olives' trunks and leaves.
I now noted an angularity that I had earlier missed: the trees resemble tridents that have been flung from a great height into the soil. There is a ferocity to the olive trees' branches, too, as if they were flexed arms ready to hit out. And whereas the leaves of many other trees make one think of limp lettuce emptied over racks of naked branches, the taut, silvery olive leaves give an impression of alertness and contained energy.
After van Gogh, I began to notice that there was something unusual about the colours of Provence as well. There are climatic reasons for this. The mistral, blowing along the Rhone Valley from the Alps, regularly clears the sky of clouds and moisture, leaving it a pure, rich blue without a trace of white. At the same time, a high water table and good irrigation promote a plant life of singular lush-ness for a Mediterranean climate. With no water shortages to restrict its growth, the vegetation draws full benefit from the great advantages of the South: light and heat. And fortuitously, because there is no moisture in the air, there is in Provence, unlike the tropics, no mistiness to dampen and meld the colours of the trees, flowers and plants. The combination of a cloudless sky, dry air, water and rich vegetation leaves the region dominated by vivid primary, contrasting colours.
Painters before van Gogh had tended to ignore these contrasts and to paint only in complementary colours, as Claude and Poussin had taught them to do. Constantin and Bidauld, for example, had depicted Provence entirely in subtle gradations of soft blue and brown. Van Gogh was incensed by this neglect of the landscape's natural colour scheme: ‘The majority of [painters], because they aren't colourists… do not see yellow, orange or sulphur in the South, and they call a painter mad if he sees with eyes other than theirs.' He abandoned their chiaroscuro technique and soaked his canvases in primary colours, always arranging them in such a way that their contrast would be maximised: red with green, yellow with purple, blue with orange. ‘The colour is exquisite here,' he wrote to his sister. ‘When the green leaves are fresh, it is a rich green, the likes of which we seldom see in the North. Even when it gets scorched and dusty, the landscape does not lose its beauty, for then it takes on tones of gold of various tints: green-gold, yellow-gold, pink-gold…