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that it was not by worrying about scale that he would end up conveying what was important in the South: his art would involve, as he mockingly told his brother, ‘a likeness different from the products of the God-fearing photographer'. The part of reality that concerned him sometimes required distortion, omission and the substitution of colours to be brought to the fore, but it was still the real—the ‘likeness'—that interested him. He was willing to sacrifice a naive realism in order to achieve realism of a deeper sort, like a poet who, though less factual than a journalist in describing an event, may nevertheless reveal truths about it that find no place in the other's literal grid.

Van Gogh elaborated on this idea in a letter he wrote to his brother in September 1888 about a portrait he was planning: ‘Rather than trying to reproduce exactly what I see before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily, in order to express myself forcibly. … I'll give you an example of what I mean: I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend, a man who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because it is his nature [the portrait was Poet, of

The van Gogh Trail, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence

early September 1888]. He'll be blond. I want to put my appreciation, the love I have for him, into the picture. So I paint him as he is, as faithfully as I can, to begin with. But the picture is not yet finished. In order to finish it, I am going to be the arbitrary colourist. I mean to exaggerate the fairness of the hair, even get to orange tones, chromes and pale citron yellow. Behind the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I will paint infinity, a plain background of the richest, most intense blue I can contrive, and by this simple combination of the bright head against the rich blue background, I will achieve a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky. … Oh, my dear boy… and the nice people will see the exaggeration only as a caricature.' [Emphasis added}

A few weeks later, van Gogh began another ‘caricature'. ‘Tonight I am probably going to start on the interior of the café where I eat, by gaslight, in the evening,' he told his brother. ‘It is what they call a café de nuit (these are fairly common here), one that stays open all night. Night prowlers can take refuge there when they have no money to pay for a lodging or are too drunk to be taken in elsewhere.' In painting what would become The Night Café in Aries, van Gogh abandoned adherence to some elements of ‘reality' for the sake of others. He did not reproduce the proper perspective or colour scheme of the café; his light bulbs metamorphosed into glowing mushrooms, his chairs arched their backs, his floor buckled. Yet he was still interested in expressing truthful ideas about the place, ideas that would perhaps have been less well expressed if he had had to follow the classical rules of art.

6.

The complaints of the Australian man were unusual within our group; most of the rest of us came away from Sophie's lecture with a newfound reverence both for van Gogh and for the landscapes he painted. But my own enthusiasm was undermined by the memory of an exceptionally acerbic maxim that Pascal had penned several centuries before van Gogh's southern journey: ‘How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals' (Pensées, 40).

It struck me as awkwardly true that I had not much admired Provence before I began to study its depiction in van Gogh's work. But in its desire to mock art lovers, Pascal's maxim was in danger of skirting two important points. Admiring a painting that depicts a place we know but don't like seems absurd and pretentious if we imagine that painters do nothing but reproduce exactly what lies before them. If that were true, then all we could admire in a painting would be the technical skills involved in the reproduction of an object and the glamorous name of the painter, in which case we would have little difficulty agreeing with Pascal's description