The van Gogh Trail, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
early September 1888]. He'll be blond. I want to put my appreciation, the love I have for him, into the picture. So I paint him as he is, as faithfully as I can, to begin with. But the picture is not yet finished. In order to finish it, I am going to be the arbitrary colourist. I mean to exaggerate the fairness of the hair, even get to orange tones, chromes and pale citron yellow. Behind the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I will paint infinity, a plain background of the richest, most intense blue I can contrive, and by this simple combination of the bright head against the rich blue background, I will achieve a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky. … Oh, my dear boy… and the nice people will see the exaggeration only as a caricature.' [Emphasis added}
A few weeks later, van Gogh began another ‘caricature'. ‘Tonight I am probably going to start on the interior of the café where I eat, by gaslight, in the evening,' he told his brother. ‘It is what they call a café de nuit (these are fairly common here), one that stays open all night. Night prowlers can take refuge there when they have no money to pay for a lodging or are too drunk to be taken in elsewhere.' In painting what would become The Night Café in Aries, van Gogh abandoned adherence to some elements of ‘reality' for the sake of others. He did not reproduce the proper perspective or colour scheme of the café; his light bulbs metamorphosed into glowing mushrooms, his chairs arched their backs, his floor buckled. Yet he was still interested in expressing truthful ideas about the place, ideas that would perhaps have been less well expressed if he had had to follow the classical rules of art.
6.
The complaints of the Australian man were unusual within our group; most of the rest of us came away from Sophie's lecture with a newfound reverence both for van Gogh and for the landscapes he painted. But my own enthusiasm was undermined by the memory of an exceptionally acerbic maxim that Pascal had penned several centuries before van Gogh's southern journey: ‘How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals' (Pensées, 40).
It struck me as awkwardly true that I had not much admired Provence before I began to study its depiction in van Gogh's work. But in its desire to mock art lovers, Pascal's maxim was in danger of skirting two important points. Admiring a painting that depicts a place we know but don't like seems absurd and pretentious if we imagine that painters do nothing but reproduce exactly what lies before them. If that were true, then all we could admire in a painting would be the technical skills involved in the reproduction of an object and the glamorous name of the painter, in which case we would have little difficulty agreeing with Pascal's description of painting as a vain pursuit. But as Nietzsche knew, painters do not merely reproduce; they select and highlight, and they are accorded genuine admiration insofar as their version of reality seems to bring out valuable features of it.
Furthermore, we do not have to resume our indifference to a place once the painting of it that we have admired is out of sight, as Pascal hints. Our capacity to appreciate can be transferred from art to the world. We can find things that delight us on a canvas first but then later welcome them in the place where the canvas was painted. We can continue to see cypresses beyond van Gogh's paintings.
7.
Provence is not the only place that I began to appreciate and wanted to explore because of its portrayal in art. I once visited Germany's industrial zones because of Wim Wenders's Alice in the Cities. The photographs of Andreas Gursky gave me a taste for the undersides of motorway bridges. Patrick Keiller's documentary Robinson in Space made me take a holiday around the factories, shopping malls and business parks of southern England.
In recognising that a landscape can become more attractive to us once we have seen it through the eyes of a great artist, the tourist office in Aries is only exploiting a long-standing relationship between art and the desire to travel, a connection evident in different countries (and in different artistic media) throughout the history of tourism. Perhaps the most notable and earliest example emerged in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Historians contend that large parts of the countryside of England, Scotland and Wales went unappreciated before the eighteenth century. Places that were later taken to be naturally and inarguably beautiful—the Wye Valley, the Highlands of Scotland, the Lake District—were for centuries treated with indifference, even disdain. Daniel Defoe, for example, travelling in the Lake District in the 1720s, described it as ‘barren and frightful'. In his Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, Dr Johnson wrote that the Highlands, ‘rough' and pitifully devoid of ‘vegetable decoration', were ‘a wide extent of hopeless sterility'. When, at Glenshiel, Boswell attempted to cheer him up by pointing out that a mountain seemed impressively high, Johnson snapped irritably, ‘No; it is no more than a considerable protuberance.'
At that time, those who could afford to travel went abroad. Italy was the most popular destination, and especially Rome, Naples and the surrounding countryside. It was perhaps no coincidence that these locales were prominently featured in the very works of art most favoured by the British aristocracy: the poetry of Virgil and Horace and the paintings of Poussin and Claude. The paintings depicted the Roman exurbs and the Neapolitan coastline. It was often dawn or dusk, with a few fleecy clouds floating overhead, their borders pink and golden. One imagined that it was going to be, or had been, a very hot day. The air seemed quiet, the silence interrupted only by the flow of a refreshing brook or the sound of oars cutting through a lake. A few shepherdesses might be gamboling through a field or looking after some sheep or a golden-haired child. Gazing at such scenes in English country houses in the rain, many would have dreamt of crossing the Channel at the earliest available opportunity. As Joseph Addison observed in 1712, ‘We find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of Art'
Unfortunately for the works of British nature, for a long time few works of art resembled them at all. Yet during the eighteenth century this dearth was gradually overcome, and so, too, with uncanny synchronicity was the reluctance of the British to travel around their own islands. In 1727, the poet James Thomson published The Seasons, which celebrated the agricultural life and landscape of southern England. Its success helped to bring to prominence the work of other ‘ploughmen poets', including Stephen Duck, Robert Burns and John Clare. British painters began to consider their country, too. Lord Shelburne commissioned Thomas Gainsborough and George Barrett to paint a series of landscapes for his Wiltshire house, Bowood, declaring his intention ‘to lay the foundation of a school of British landscape'. Richard Wilson went to paint the Thames near Twickenham, Thomas Hearne depicted Goodrich Castle, Philip de Loutherbourg painted Tintern Abbey, and Thomas Smith portrayed Derwentwater and Windermere.