1.
One summer, I was invited to spend a few days with friends in a farmhouse in Provence. I knew that the word 'Provence' was for many people rich in associations, though it meant little to me. I tended to switch off at its mention out of a sense, founded on little, that the place would not be congenial to me. What I did know was that Provence was generally held by sensible people to be very beautiful- 'Ah, Provence!' they would sigh, with a reverence otherwise reserved for opera or Delft earthenware.
I flew to Marseilles and, after renting a small Renault at the airport, headed for the home of my hosts, which lay at the foot of the Alpilles hills, between the towns of Arles and Saint-Rémy. At the exit out of Marseilles, I grew confused and ended up at the giant oil refinery at Fos-sur-Mer, whose tangle of pipes and cooling towers spoke of the complexity involved in the manufacture of a liquid that I was used to putting into my car with scant thought for its origins.
I found my way back to the N568, which led me inland across the wheat-growing plain of La Crau. Outside the village of St-Martin-de-Crau, a few miles from my destination, being too early, I pulled off the road and turned off the engine. I had come to a stop on the edge of an olive grove. It was quiet save for the sounds of cicadas hidden in the trees. Behind the grove were wheat fields bordered by a row of cypresses, over whose tops rose the irregular ridge of the Alpilles. The sky was a cloudless blue.
I scanned the view. I was not looking for anything in particular: not for predators, holiday homes or memories. My motive was simple and hedonistic: I was looking for beauty. 'Delight and enliven me' was my implicit challenge to the olive trees, cypresses and skies of Provence. It was a vast, loose agenda and my eyes were bewildered at their freedom. Without the motives that had marked the rest of the day-to seek out the car-rental desk, the exit out of Marseilles and so on-they careered from object to object, so that if their path had been traced by the mark of a giant pencil, the sky would soon have been darkened by random impatient patterns.
Though the landscape was not ugly, I could not-after a few moments of scrutiny-detect the charm so often ascribed to it. The olive trees looked stunted, more like bushes than trees, and the wheat fields evoked the flat, dull expanses of south-eastern England, where I had attended a school and been unhappy. I lacked the energy to register the barns, the limestone of the hills or the poppies growing at the feet of a group of cypresses.
Bored and uncomfortable in the Renault's increasingly hot plastic interior, I set off for my destination and greeted my hosts with the remark that this was simply paradise.
Because we find places to be beautiful as immediately and as apparently spontaneously as we find snow to be cold or sugar sweet, it is hard to imagine that there is anything we might do to alter or expand our attractions. It seems that matters have been decided for us by qualities inherent in the places themselves or by hard-wiring in our psyches and that we would therefore be as helpless to modify our sense of the places we find beautiful as we would our preference for the ice-creams we find appetizing.
Yet aesthetic tastes may be less rigid than the analogy suggests. We overlook certain places because nothing has ever prompted us to conceive of them as worthy of appreciation, or because some unfortunate but stray association has turned us against them. Our relationship to olive trees can be improved by being directed towards the silver in their leaves or the structure of their branches. New associations can be created around wheat once we are directed to the pathos of this fragile and yet essential crop as its stalks bend their grain-filled heads in the wind. We may find something to appreciate in the skies of Provence once we are told, even if only in the crudest way, that it is the shade of blue that counts.
And perhaps the most effective way in which our sense of what to look for in a scene can be enriched is through visual art. We could conceive of many works of art as 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, it will stabilize 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 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 has learnt its meaning.
And in so far 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-five years old and had devoted 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 Arles,' Van Gogh would recall of his sixteen-hour train journey to Provence. On his arrival in Arles, 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 Hôtel Carrel, not far from the northern ramparts of the town. 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 Arles until May 1889, fifteen months during which he produced approximately 200 paintings, 100 drawings and 200 letters-a period generally agreed to have been his greatest. The earliest works show Arles 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 Arles. At the beginning of May, he painted the Langlois drawbridge over the Arles-Bouc Canal, on the south side of Arles, 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 Arles. 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: as he put it, 'quickly, quickly, quickly and in a hurry, just like a harvester who is silent under the blazing sun, intent only on his reaping'. '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 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 Arles, Van Gogh offered two reasons: because he had wanted to 'paint the south' and because he had wanted, through his work, to help other people to 'see' it. However unsure he was of his own powers to do this, 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 as a spectator. Since moving to France from his native Holland, he had felt it particularly in relation to literature. He had read the works of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and Maupassant and been grateful to these writers for opening his eyes to the dynamics of French society and psychology. Madame Bovary had taught him about provincial middle-class life and Père Goriot about penniless ambitious students in Paris-and he now recognized 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. Velzquez, for example, had given him a map that allowed him to see grey. Several of Velzquez's canvases depicted humble Iberian interiors, with walls made 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 a section had been chipped off them, by a shaft of brilliant yellow. Velzquez had not invented such effects, many would have witnessed them before him, but few had had the energy or talent to capture them and turn them into communicable experience. Like an explorer with a new continent, Velázquez 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 Arles. The walls were often dark, the shutters were closed and the sunlight outside was bright. One lunchtime, he wrote to his brother explaining that he had stumbled upon something utterly Velázquezian: 'This restaurant where I am is very strange. It is grey all over … a Velasquez grey-like in the Spinning Women-and even the very narrow, very fierce ray of sunlight through a blind, like the one that slants across Velasquez's picture, is not missing … In the kitchen, ［there's］ an old woman and a short, fat servant also in grey, black, white … it's pure Velasquez.'
It was for Van Gogh the mark of every great painter to allow us to see certain aspects of the world more clearly. If Velázquez was his guide to grey and the coarse faces of large cooks, then Monet was his guide to sunsets, Rembrandt to morning light and Vermeer to the adolescent girls of Arles ('A perfect Vermeer,' he explained to his brother after spotting one example near the arena). The sky over the Rhône 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. Many had in his view completely missed the essentials. 'Good Lord, I have seen things by certain painters which 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 Arles: 'There are some women like a Fragonard and like a Renoir. But there are some that can't be labelled with anything that's ever been done yet in painting ［my italics］.' The farm labourers he saw working in the fields outside Arles had also been ignored by artists: 'Millet has reawakened our thoughts so that we can see the dweller in nature. But until now no one has painted the real Southern French man for us.' 'Have we in general learned to see the peasant now? No, hardly anyone knows how to pull one off.'
The Provence that greeted Van Gogh in 1888 had been the subject of painting for over 100 years. Among the betterknown Provençal 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 recognizable 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 to look very different depending on an artist's style and temperament. Two realistic artists may sit at the edge of the same olive grove and produce pergent sketches. Every realistic picture represents a choice of which features of reality are 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 about a scene. There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, we can no longer travel through it without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
Alternatively, if we complain that, for example, a portrait of us does not look 'like us', we are not accusing a painter of trickery. We simply feel that the process of selection that goes on in any work of art has gone wrong, and that parts of us which 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 the essential out was precisely Van Gogh's complaint against most of the artists who had painted southern France until his own day.
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 at lunchtime. Breakfast was laid out on a metal table on the terrace and I ate three pains au chocolat in guilty, rapid succession, while keeping one eye out for a housekeeper, whom I feared might put an unflattering spin on my gourmandise to her employers.
It was a clear day with a mistral blowing, which ruffled the heads of the wheat in an adjacent field. I had sat in this 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 in the night on Van Gogh's treatment of them. 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 of 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 hit off exactly.'
What did Van Gogh notice about cypresses that others had not？ In part, the way they move in the wind. I walked to the end of the garden and there studied, thanks to certain works (Cypresses and Wheat Field and Cypresses of 1889 in particular) their distinctive behaviour in the mistral.
There are architectural reasons behind 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 in the wind while its trunk remains immobile, 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 cone-like shape (cypresses rarely exceed a metre in diameter), the tree takes on the appearance of a flame flickering nervously in the wind. All 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. There had surely been 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 bush-like 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 olives' trunks and leaves. I now noted an angularity which 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 Rhône 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 lushness 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 in 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.' So he abandoned their chiaroscuro technique and soaked his canvases in primary colours, always arranging them in such a way that their contrast would be maximized: 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 gets tones of gold of various tints: green-gold, yellow-gold, pink-gold … And this combined with the blue-from the deepest royal blue of the water to the blue of the forget-me-nots; a cobalt, particularly clear bright blue.'
My own eyes grew attuned to see around me the colours that had dominated Van Gogh's canvases. Everywhere I looked, I could see primary colours in contrast. Beside the house was a violet-coloured field of lavender next to a yellow field of wheat. The roofs of the buildings were orange against a pure blue sky. Green meadows were dotted with red poppies and bordered by oleanders.
It was not only the day that abounded in colours. Van Gogh brought out the colours of the night as well. Previous Provençal painters had depicted the night sky as groupings of little white dots on a dark background. However, when we sit under the Provençal sky on a clear night far from the glow of houses and street-lamps, we notice that the sky in fact contains a profusion of colours: between the stars, it seems a deep blue, violet or very dark green, whereas the stars themselves appear a pale yellow, orange or green, diffusing rings of light far beyond their own narrow circumference. As Van Gogh explained to his sister: 'The night is even more richly coloured than the day … If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are citronyellow, others have a pink glow, or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without expatiating on this theme it should be clear that putting little white dots on a blue-black surface is not enough.'