The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [52]
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…
Vincent van Gogh, Olive Grave: Orange Sky, 1889
And this [is then] combined with 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 is not only the day that abounds in colours in Provence; van Gogh saw that and brought out the colours of the night as well. Previous Provenqal painters had depicted the night sky as groupings of little white dots against a dark background. But when one sits under the Provenqal sky on a clear night far from the glow of houses and street lamps, one notices 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 to be 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 one pays attention to it, one sees that certain stars are citron yellow, while others have a pink glow or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expiating on this theme, it should be clear that putting little white dots on a blue-black surface is not enough.'
5.
The tourist office in Aries is housed in an undistinguished concrete block in the southwestern part of town. It offers visitors the usual fare: free maps, advice on hotels and information about cultural festivals, child-minders, wine tastings, canoeing, ruins and markets. One attraction is emphasised above all others: ‘Welcome to the land of Vincent van Gogh,' exclaims a poster with the sunflowers in the entrance hall; inside, the walls are decorated with harvest scenes, olive trees and orchards.
The office particularly recommends what it describes as the ‘van Gogh trail'. On the one hundredth anniversary of his death in 1890, van Gogh's presence in Provence was honoured by a series of plaques—fixed onto metal rods or stone slabs—positioned in some of the places he painted. The plaques feature photographs of the relevant works and a few lines