The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [50]
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.'
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