In a letter he wrote to his sister Willemien sometime in the autumn of 1887, Vincet Van Gogh talks mockingly about how his own adventures were

confined above all to making swift progress towards growing into a little old man – you know, with wrinkles, a rough beard, a certain number of false teeth, etc. But what does it matter? I have a dirty and difficult trade, painting...

With affection and gratitude, Van Gogh refers to brother Theo, without whose support he knows he couldn’t have hoped to achieve much; “but having him for a friend, I’m sure I shall make progress and things will fall into place”.

In much the same breath, however, he tells Willemien:

As soon as possible, I plan to spend some time in the south, where there is even more colour and even more sun.

After nearly two years in Paris, Van Gogh had begun to feel claustrophobic. The city’s swirling fogs, its clammy winter nights seemed to be getting into his very bones. He strained at the leash to get away. Toulouse-Lautrec had told him about the pretty little town of Arles, on the river Rhone, in France’s warm south, not far from where, in Aix, Cezanne lived and worked. So, on February 19, 1888, Van Gogh left Paris for Arles, hoping to be welcomed there by a sun-drenched early spring. He would turn 35 in a month from then.

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Alas! Arles too was cloaked in snow. But, determined not to let that trouble him, Van Gogh plunged into his new life with gusto, telling Theo in his first letter how he had seen

some splendid red stretches of soil planted with vines, with a background of mountains with the purest lilac colour. And the landscapes in the snow, with the summits white against a sky as luminous as the snow, were just like the winter landscapes that the Japanese have painted.

The streets of Arles delighted Van Gogh with their liveliness and bright colours. Characteristically, he did not feel at all drawn to the numerous Roman relics scattered all over this ancient town. Indeed, though he was impressed by the portico of the church of St Trophime, it struck him as “so cruel, so monstrous, like a Chinese nightmare”. Instead, he admired “the Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlesiennes, going to their first Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the people drinking absinthe”, all of whom seemed to him to be “creatures from another world”.

The heavy fall of snow and the freezing temperatures did not stop him from energetically exploring the town and the surrounding countryside. And spring was breaking, hesitantly at first, only to burst forth soon with Provencal abandon. Van Gogh’s excitement at the visual spectacle around him – especially the peach, almond, and plum blossoms – is dramatically spelt out in the many studies of fruit orchards that he launched upon soon, painting steadily outdoors. As he wrote to Theo:

I have been working on a size 20 canvas in the open air in an orchard, lilac plowland, a reed fence, two pink peach trees against a sky of glorious blue and white. Probably  the best landscape I have done.

In another letter he wrote a few days later, he added:

I want to paint a Provencal orchard of astounding gaiety... the work I am doing here is better than in the Asnieres country last spring.                        

As spring made way for summer, the fields of blossom disappeared, and Van Gogh applied himself in earnest to other subjects in the town and its outlying districts. Vistas of the summer around Arles offered up a dizzying variety of themes, and his canvas seemed to come alive with forms that burst through the soil, sparkle in the light, and sway in the breeze.

At the height of the Provencal summer, Van Gogh wrote to Theo,

(e)verywhere now there is old gold, bronze, copper, one might say, and this, with the green azure of the sky blanched with heat, imparts a delicious, exceptionally harmonious colour, with broken tones a la Delacroix.

He contrived to build into his paintings new elements that seemed to hold him in thrall: the scorching dryness of the soil, the terra-cottas and gilded ochres of the corn-fields, and the unforgiving light, with its near-hallucinatory effects of glare and saturated hue. With all this, though, some of his paintings took on a calmness of aspect which was rarely seen in his work before.

The warm south with its profusion of light and colour intoxicated Van Gogh, and his palette took on increasingly richer hues. But he was also possessed by the desire to record the physiognomy and the bearing of the region’s inhabitants, who looked to him to be so different from the denizens of Paris. Unfortunately, he had access to very few human models, but he made the most of his friendship with a local postman, every member of whose family sat for the painter multiple times. The portraits he drew of these simple and kind-hearted southerners make for a rich human gallery of the Provence in the latter half of the 19th century.

In a letter he wrote to his friend the painter Emile Bernard in June, 1888, Van Gogh speaks of how

I even work (here) right in the middle of the day, in the full sun, with no shade at all, out in the wheat fields, and lo and behold, I am as happy as a cicada. My God, if only I had known this country at 25 instead of coming here at 35! At that time I was fascinated by grey, or rather lack of colour.

Also Read: Vincent Van Gogh: The Colourist of the Future

It was as though he couldn’t have enough of light, of the sun. He went back here to an old theme, that of the sower on a large piece of land with clods of ploughed earth – an image of the renewal of life. Only here his canvas shed the sombre greys and darkish browns of his Dutch period and installed a burning, flaming sun at very nearly its centre. The viewer looks at this painting with something akin to a terrified admiration for the dramatically assembled trinity of large shapes – the sun, the sower’s silhouette and the tree.

Even his nightly canvases here are shot through with light. Legend has it that he would settle himself on the bank of the Rhone, sticking candles on the brim of his hat to give light, and paint the stars, his nocturnal sunflowers.

But he also used light, or rather a hallucinatory representation of light, to evoke a sense of decadence, of an impending crime, or of doom. Writing to Theo in September 1888, he points out that

I have tried to express, as it were, the power of darkness in a low public house by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow green and hard blue-green, all this in an atmosphere like the devil’s furnace, of pale sulphur.

That darkness was to engulf Van Gogh just about three months later. Its power gripped his soul, ironically, in a cafe like the one he painted in September. He had gone there along with friend Paul Gauguin for a drink in the evening.

Van Gogh spent a little over fourteen months at Arles, from February 21, 1888 to May 3, 1889, and two of those 14 months saw him confined to a hospital as he teetered on the brink of insanity. His Arles oeuvre comprises over 300 paintings and drawings, representing perhaps the most productive, and most mature, period of his tragically short life as painter. He had come to Arles with the high hope of founding a lively and thriving artists’ community there. But one cruel December night saw all his hopes go up in smoke. As he neared the end of his time at Arles, he was again assailed by his worst enemy – self-doubt -- and this time he was also was consumed by guilt and remorse. Besides, the shadow of his crippling illness was lengthening across his sensibility, and he was no more to know any peace of mind. Van Gogh willingly gave himself over to the asylum at Saint-Remy in May 1889, and he would never again know a spell of good health, nor dare harbour any real hope for his future. Little did he, though, know that his work at Arles would be treasured by posterity as one of the most incandescently beautiful artistic portfolios in history.

Anjan Basu freelances as literary critic, translator and commentator. He can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.

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