The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [53]
I persuaded my hosts to spend an afternoon following the trail, to which end we stopped in at the tourist office to collect a map. By chance we learnt that a guided tour, a once-weekly event, was about to start in the courtyard outside, and that there were still places available for a modest sum. We joined a dozen other enthusiasts and were first taken to the Place Lamartine by a guide, who told us that her name was Sophie and that she was writing a thesis on van Gogh at the Sorbonne in Paris.
At the beginning of May 1888, finding his hotel too expensive, van Gogh had rented a wing of a building at 2 Place Lamartine known as the Yellow House. It was one half of a double-fronted building that had been painted bright yellow by its owner but left unfinished inside. Van Gogh developed a great interest in the interior design. He wanted it to be solid and simple, painted in the colours of the South: red, green, blue, orange, sulphur and lilac. ‘I want to make it really an artist's house—nothing precious, but with everything from the chairs to the pictures having character,' he told his brother. ‘About
Vincent van Gogh, ‘The Yellow House' (Vincent's House), Aries, 1888
the beds, I have bought country beds, big double ones instead of iron ones. That gives an appearance of solidity, durability and quiet.' The refurbishment complete, he wrote elatedly to his sister, ‘My house here is painted the yellow colour of fresh butter on the outside, with glaringly green shutters; it stands in the full sunlight in a square that has a green garden with plane trees, oleanders and acacias. It is completely whitewashed inside, with a floor made of red bricks. And over it there is the intensely blue sky. In this house I can live and breathe, meditate and paint.'
Sadly, Sophie had little to show us, for the Yellow House had been destroyed in the Second World War and subsequently replaced with a student hostel, which itself was now dwarfed by the giant Mono-prix supermarket that had gone up beside it. We drove next to Saint-Rémy and there spent more than an hour in the fields around the asylum where van Gogh had lived and painted. Sophie had with her a large plastic-coated book containing the main Provence paintings, and she frequently held it up in spots where van Gogh had worked, letting the rest of us crowd around to look on. At one point, with her back to the Alpilles, she held up Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background (June 1889), and we admired both the view and van Gogh's version of it.
But there was a moment of dissent in the group. Next to me, an Australian wearing a large hat said to his companion, a small, tousle-haired woman, ‘Well, it doesn't look much like that.'
Van Gogh himself had feared he might encounter such accusations. To his sister, he wrote that many people already said of his work, ‘ “This really looks too strange,” not to mention those who think it a total abortion and utterly repulsive.' The reasons for such opinions were not hard to find: the walls of his houses were not always straight, the sun was not always yellow or the grass green, there was an exaggerated sense of movement in some of his trees. ‘I have played hell somewhat with the truthfulness of the colours,' he admitted, and he played similar hell with proportion, line, shadow and tone.
Yet in playing hell, van Gogh was only making more explicit a process in which all artists are involved—namely, choosing which aspects of reality to include in a work and which to leave out. As Nietzsche knew, reality itself is infinite and can never be wholly represented in art. What made van Gogh unusual among Proverai artists was his choice of what he felt was important. Whereas painters such as Constantin had expended much effort in getting the scale right, van Gogh, though passionately interested in producing a ‘likeness', insisted