Tag Archives: Alpilles

The Starry Nights of Vincent van Gogh (4) : The Starry Nigh at St-Rémy-de-Provence (2/2)

Continuation of the previous post The Starry Night of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (1/2)

In September 2016 I went to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole monastery, a masterpiece of Provençal Romanesque art built in the vicinity of the Gallo-Roman city Glanum, south of Saint-Rémy de Provence. Part of the building remains today a psychiatric institution. Van Gogh stayed there from May 8, 1889 to May 16, 1890. On the second floor, the room where he was interned has been reconstructed.

Aerial view of the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum and orientation of the window of Van Gogh’s room

Through the window, facing east, we can see the landscape that Van Gogh could contemplate. Even if this landscape has been transformed for a little more than a century, one does not see the hills represented in his painting. In reality, there is the wall of the asylum’s park that encloses a field of wheat, which extends between the asylum and the wall. And there are no large cypress trees in sight, and even less the village of Saint-Rémy.

In fact the small chain of Alpilles is in direction of the South. As for the village of Saint-Rémy and its church tower, which is quite far away in the northern direction, it is just as invisible from the window. We conclude that Van Gogh did not paint the terrestrial part of his Starry Night from what he saw from his window.

He must have gone outside. But when?

My friend Philippe André, a psychiatrist and art lover who studied Van Gogh’s correspondence in depth before publishing his novel Moi, Van Gogh, artiste peintre in 2018, wrote to me that in the first days after his internment on May 8: “At night, he is locked in his room and his equipment is under lock and key in another empty room that he was kindly allocated for this purpose. Moreover, he was very distressed and only managed to paint his own works (Sunflowers, Joseph Roulin…) or to paint very similar elements that were in the park of the asylum (Iris, Lilacs…). No strength, during those first weeks, to paint deep landscapes! “

In fact, when I was finally able to consult Van Gogh’s complete correspondence, I read that on May 9, the day after his arrival, he wrote to his sister-in-law “Jo” (Theo’s wife, therefore):

« Although there are a few people here who are seriously ill, the fear, the horror that I had of madness before has already been greatly softened.

And although one continually hears shouts and terrible howls as though of the animals in a menagerie, despite this the people here know each other very well, and help each other when they suffer crises. They all come to see when I’m working in the garden, and I can assure you are more discreet and more polite to leave me in peace than, for example, the good citizens of Arles.

It’s possible that I’ll stay here for quite a long time, never have I been so tranquil as here and at the hospital in Arles to be able to paint a little at last. Very near here there are some little grey or blue mountains, with very, very green wheatfields at their foot, and pines. » [Letter 772]

From the first sentence it is clear that his anxiety was perhaps not so great, and the rest of the letter confirms that he did begin to paint, but without being able to go beyond the confines of his room or the small garden.

On May 23, he wrote to his brother Theo:

« The landscape of St-Rémy is very beautiful, and little by little I’m probably going to make trips into it. But staying here as I am, the doctor has naturally been in a better position to see what was wrong, and will, I dare hope, be more reassured that he can let me paint.

[…] Through the iron-barred window I can make out a square of wheat in an enclosure, a perspective in the manner of Van Goyen, above which in the morning I see the sun rise in its glory. With this — as there are more than 30 empty rooms — I have another room in which to work. […] So this month I have 4 no. 30 canvases and two or three drawings. » [Letter 776]

This shows that Vincent plans to be able to walk in the countryside outside the monastery very soon. The four canvases he has in progress were painted in the garden.

Between May 31 and June 6 he wrote to Theo asking him to send him canvases, colors and brushes, his Arles supply being exhausted. He adds :

« This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big. […] When I receive the new canvas and the colours I’ll go out a bit to see the countryside. » [Letter 777]

And finally, on June 9, after he had received the canvases and colors sent by Theo, whom he thanked warmly:

« I was very glad of it, for I was pining for work a little. Also, for a few days now I’ve been going outside to work in the neighbourhood. […]I have two landscapes on the go (no. 30 canvases) of views taken in the hills. […] Many things in the landscape here often recall Ruisdael » [Letter 779]

So we have the answer: it was not until the first week of June that Vincent was able to leave the monastery and start painting the landscapes seen from the surrounding countryside. Let’s start with the hills of the Alpilles. As mentioned above, they are invisible from his room, so they were necessarily painted outside. We find the same profile in other paintings of the period:

Wheat Field after the Storm (detail), June 1889.
The Reaper (detail), June 1889

The profile of the hills is quite faithfully rendered, as I was able to see when I found the approximate location where Van Gogh set up his easel (today a field of vines):

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The Starry Nights of Vincent van Gogh (3) : The Starry Nigh at St-Rémy-de-Provence

Continuation of previous posts Café Terrace at night, in Arles and Starry Night over the Rhône

We left Vincent Van Gogh in September 1888, after he painted his Starry Night over the Rhône in Arles. On October 23rd, Paul Gauguin joined him in the “Yellow House” which he rented and where he stayed for two months. The cohabitation between these two geniuses of painting is not easy. Apart from quarrels of a domestic nature, things went badly wrong on 23 December 1888, after a discussion on painting during which Gauguin argued that one should work with imagination, and Van Gogh with nature. According to the classical thesis, Vincent threatens Paul with a knife; the latter, frightened, leaves the scene. Finding himself alone in a fit of madness, Vincent cuts off a piece of his left ear with a razor, wraps it in newspaper and offers it to an employee of the neighbouring brothel. Then he goes to bed. The police doesn’t find him until the next day, his head bloody and confused. Gauguin explains the facts to them and leaves Arles. He will never see his friend again.

The Yellow House (“The Street”), 1888, oil on canvas, oil on canvas, 72 cm x 91.5 cm.  Credits : Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

The day after his crisis, Van Gogh was admitted to hospital. A petition signed by thirty people demanded his internment in asylum or expulsion from the city. In March 1889, he was automatically interned in Arles hospital by order of the mayor while continuing to paint, and on 8 May he left Arles, having decided to undergo psychiatric treatment in the insane asylum at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, a little south of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He stayed there for a year (until May 1890), subject to three bouts of dementia, but between which his pictorial production was extraordinarily rich: he produced 143 oil paintings and more than 100 drawings in the space of 53 weeks.

One of the key works of this period is the Starry Night, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

I have always been fascinated by this nocturnal painting, with its tormented sky in the background, composed of volutes, whirlpools, huge stars and a crescent moon surrounded by a halo of light. In the background, a village with a church steeple overstretched towards the sky, which at first glance is thought to be the village of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Due to the position of the moon, the orientation of its crescent horns and the streak of whitish mist over the hills, one does not need to be a great expert to see at first glance that the Starry Night represents a sky just before dawn. Can we go further?

In 1995, while snooping around in a bookshop in Paris, I stumbled upon a booklet entitled La Nuit étoilée: l’histoire de la matière et la matière de l’histoire. It was the French translation of an article booklet published in 1984 in the United States by Albert Boime (1933-2008), professor of art history at the University of California at Los Angeles (“Van Gogh’s Starry Night: A History of Matter and a Matter of History, Arts Magazine, December 1984).

The book is fascinating. The author raises many questions which he tries to answer, notably concerning the date of the painting’s execution and the nature of the astronomical objects represented.

I said in previous posts that Van Gogh painted from nature, and therefore intended to reproduce the night skies as he saw them at the precise moment he began his paintings. I have shown how his Café le soir (Café Terrace at night ) and his Nuit étoilée au-dessus du Rhône (Starry Night over the Rhône), painted in Arles, showed the striking realism he displayed in his pictorial transposition of the firmament. This realism is less obvious in the Starry Night of Saint-Rémy, with its immense sky full of luminous objects, this moon and these far too big stars scattered among vast swirling volutes. Could his representations of the sky have slipped from realism to the wildest imagination, or even to delirium in front of the easel, to the rhythm of his own psychic deterioration?

To answer this question, we must investigate the precise genesis of the work. If, thanks to an astronomical reconstruction, we find a sky identical or close to the one represented in the painting – as was the case with his Arlesian nocturnal works – then we will have proved the realism of the painting, in addition to having dated the sketch to the day and hour.

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