Van Gogh’s Blossoming Orchard Triptych, and His Friends Through Art

In early April, I began a series on the art of Vincent van Gogh. Propelled by a thematic display of his works at the Hermitage Amsterdam, my series continued on as these works were removed and transported back across the city for the reopening of the Van Gogh Museum, on 1 May, and with a new exhibition, entitled Van Gogh at Work.

The first piece in my series centred on psychological interpretations of the use of red and green in a number of Van Gogh’s paintings: Gauguin’s Chair, La Berceuse, and The Garden of Saint-Paul Hospital. The second piece provided an overview of Van Gogh’s early artistic career, through Brussels, Etten, The Hague, and Nuenen, before viewing the emboldening of his art during the time he spent in Antwerp and Paris. The third piece considered new research undertaken by the Van Gogh Museum into Van Gogh’s artistic practices and use of pigments; and compared his Still Life: Vase with Irises Against a Yellow Background with Vermeer’s The Milkmaid. So in turn these three short essays saw Van Gogh in Arles from late 1888 to the spring of 1889, prior to his installation in the asylum at Saint-Rémy; in Antwerp from late 1885 to early 1886, then in Paris over the next two years; and towards the very close of his year in Saint-Rémy, just as he was about to move on to Auvers-sur-Oise.

It is rare that any endeavour is completed – so many of our tasks are cyclical, looping, or intermittently repeating; and work started upon tends to encourage more ideas, to bring about new prospects, to demand ever-more work. This piece in my series draws from the research and the concerns of the others, and views Van Gogh during his early days in Arles, in the spring of 1888. Van Gogh left Paris for Arles in February. Just as he moved from Antwerp to Paris struggling with ill health – the effects of an insufficient diet, and excessive drinking and smoking – so the move further south was made with Van Gogh ill and seeking a kinder climate. More, he had become exhausted with life in Paris, and sought for his art to be reinvigorated by Arles’ light and its exotic atmosphere.

Though he had become close with Paul Signac living in Paris, and had experimented with pointillism, Van Gogh met Georges Seurat for the first time only in the hours before his departure from the city. Vincent arrived in Arles on 20 February. He found the town under a cover of snow; and began staying in accommodation at the Restaurant Carrel. Immediately setting about his work, between the beginning of March and the end of April he completed fifteen paintings of trees and orchards in blossom. These were prefaced by two still life studies, ‘Blossoming Almond Branch in a Glass’ and ‘Blossoming Almond Branch in a Glass with a Book’: the movement between indoors and outdoors, between still life paintings and painting en plein air, was always a fluid movement for Van Gogh; and he kept objects and themes in mind, dwelling on them in sustained short bursts, often returning to them in the longer term.

Of the fifteen blossoming orchard scenes he completed, three stand out because, in a letter to Theo on or around 13 April, Vincent explicitly tied them together as a triptych. These are The Pink Orchard (also known as Orchard with Blossoming Apricot Trees), The Pink Peach Tree (or Peach Tree in Blossom), and The White Orchard. Vincent included in his letter a sketch of this triptych. He was increasingly fond of linking his works in such a way, and would later envision his Sunflowers in triptychs, one either side of a La Berceuse. While stating his desire to paint repetitions of his blossom paintings, and his hope to complete at least nine canvases in total – with the implication that these nine canvases would divide into three triptychs – we have no information regarding which of the other finished paintings Vincent may have intended to go together.

In fact, even Vincent’s ink-sketch is not decisive: The Pink Peach Tree is almost identical in composition with The Pink Peach Tree (Souvenir de Mauve), which was the second painting in the blossom series, completed just after The Pink Orchard (The Pink Orchard and Souvenir de Mauve were the first two paintings in the series, from March; whereas The Pink Peach Tree and The White Orchard were the last two, finalised towards the end of April). We can conclude that The Pink Peach Tree is the painting Van Gogh conceived for the triptych because, in a letter to his sister Willemien on 30 March, he expressed his intention to send the earlier painting to the widow of Anton Mauve. Mauve was Vincent’s cousin-in-law and had been an important figure in Van Gogh’s early artistic development; Vincent sent Souvenir de Mauve to Theo in May, and it was subsequently passed on to Mauve’s widow Jet.

Together, the three paintings of the triptych show Van Gogh developing upon the techniques and inspirations of his time in Paris. There is the bold use of vivid colour; and the influence of ukiyo-e Japanese prints evident in his cropped, asymmetrical compositions and his rhythmic lines and contours. In fact, Japonaiserie: Flowering Plum Tree (after Hiroshige), from the autumn of 1887, is a distinct precursor to the series.

Just as in some of his later paintings – including The Bedroom, painted in Arles in October 1888, and Still Life: Vase with Irises Against a Yellow Background, painted in May 1890 in Saint-Rémy – the canvases here too demonstrate the diminishing of red pigment over time, for the pink blossom which was present in the first two paintings of the triptych, as indicated by their titles, has faded and become predominantly white.

In The Bedroom and Still Life: Vase with Irises Against a Yellow Background, Van Gogh would mix red pigment with blue to arrive at violet-purple. Contrasting this purple with a range of yellows, Van Gogh was thereby remaining true to traditional colour theory, which he had studied in Antwerp. As the red pigment which he utilised has faded, the palette of these two paintings has changed from yellow-purple to yellow-blue; two colours which, while not strictly opposing on the colour-wheel, remain highly complementary. The disappearance of so much pink in Van Gogh’s blossom paintings perhaps represents, therefore, a greater change to the nature of these works and the way they are viewed and considered. With the red pigment’s absence leaving only the white behind, these works take on a luminous, spiritual quality.

The Pink Orchard well demonstrates the range of painterly techniques which Van Gogh had by this point developed. It features short brushstrokes of red and green for the grass in the foreground, painted thinly and with the canvas showing through – characteristics of some of his paintings of Parisian streets and gardens in Montmartre. Its trees rise in tones of ultramarine, with blue contour lines and bare branches. The composition moves diagonally, from the near left to the far right; this was the first blossom painting Van Gogh painted, early in the season after a long winter, and many of the trees are not in bloom; the handful of trees in the centre which are blooming show flowers painted in impasto, now predominantly white, but with highlights of pink and orange. Set against the contours of the trees and a light-blue, almost turquoise sky, which moves horizontally behind the branches, the painting divides loosely into two colour contrasts: the red/green of the ground, and the blue/oranges of the sky above.

The Pink Peach Tree shows an impasto application of paint throughout, with flowers painted so thickly that they all but hang from the canvas. The central colours here are in the white of the ground and the blossom, in their green highlights, and in the thick blue-turquoise sky painted and suspended around the blossom flowers. The fence to the right of the composition is painted in long verticals and with a diversity of colours again reminiscent of Van Gogh’s 1887 Montmartre paintings; its oranges, browns and reds offset the central, titular, sky-bearing tree, and juxtapose with the lower greens and upper blues.

The White Orchard is the most evenly painted of the three works, and appropriately the one with the least pink in the blossom of its trees. Their white and green blossom, resting upon blue branches, is counterbalanced by the pinks and purples – in fact, mauves – which highlight the ground. This orchard appears in full blossom, the branches of its trees entangling against a delicate sky.

The popular conception of Van Gogh often seems one of a headstrong, difficult and solitary artist; whose relationships with the opposite sex were ill-conceived and ultimately short-lived; who concluded perhaps the most famous co-habitation in the history of art by cutting off his own ear; who went unrecognised in his lifetime; and who died alone in Auvers-sur-Oise. The difficulties he had within specific relationships cannot be denied, and that there was a strong solitary strain to his personality is also clear. In October 1876, years before he embarked upon his artistic career, in a Methodist church in Richmond, England, Van Gogh delivered his first sermon, and opened with the belief ‘I am a stranger on the earth’. Yet this sense of Van Gogh alone does not account for the complexities of his personality, or for the connections he sought and the very real connections he made.

In Paris, Van Gogh became acquainted with Émile Bernard, with whom he began corresponding, especially during his time in Arles, and with Lucien Pissarro; both men would attend Van Gogh’s funeral in Auvers. Of the older Pissarro, Van Gogh would frequently ask Theo to pass on any painterly advice he gave; and he entertained the idea of lodging with Camille, for the sake of Camille’s finances, and towards his own improvement as an artist. In addition to Signac, in Paris Van Gogh worked closely with Toulouse-Lautrec. Toulouse-Lautrec’s use of the peinture à l’essence technique, where oil paint first rests on paper for several hours so that some of its oil is absorbed, and is then thinned with turpentine before being applied to canvas – a technique which Toulouse-Lautrec himself derived from Degas – was borrowed and experimented with by Van Gogh for some of his paintings of Paris and Montmartre.

From the very first, Van Gogh had moved to Arles not only for its light and vibrant colours, but also with the conception of forming an artist’s colony – or at least a retreat which his fellow artists could visit, and from which there would derive inspiration, and the intermingling of diverse ideas. The Yellow House was to be the centre of this vision, and Van Gogh encouraged Gauguin to come and stay there and decorated the house for his arrival. Even after Gauguin left Arles after only two months, at the end of December 1888, still he and Vincent remained in contact, and would resume friendly terms. On 20 March, 1890 – whilst Van Gogh suffered through a sudden, prolonged illness – Gauguin sent him a letter commenting on the recent display of ten of Van Gogh’s paintings at the Artistes Indépendants exhibition in Paris:

It’s above all at this latter place that one can properly judge what you do, either because of things positioned beside each other, or because of the neighbouring works. I offer you my sincere compliments, and for many artists you are the most remarkable in the exhibition. With things from nature you’re the only one there who thinks.

At the Les XX exhibition in Brussels a couple of months earlier, the Belgian Symbolist painter Henry de Groux had taken exception to being exhibited alongside Van Gogh, and had insulted those of Van Gogh’s works on show. In his absence, Van Gogh was defended by Toulouse-Lautrec and Signac, who both challenged De Groux to a duel. De Groux was expelled from Les XX.

Van Gogh’s blossoming orchard triptych hangs today in the Van Gogh Museum, the three paintings shown in white frames alongside a work by the Danish artist Christian Mourier-Petersen. Mourier-Petersen was another painter who Vincent readily befriended and worked alongside. From a wealthy Danish family, he had been a student of medicine before turning to art, which he studied in Copenhagen in 1880. Having undertaken a proposed three-year Grand Tour of Europe, he spent from around 10 October, 1887 until 22 May, 1888 in Arles; before moving on to Paris, where he lodged with Theo from 6 June to 15 August. Van Gogh wrote warmly of Mourier-Petersen and regarded his intelligence, but thought little of his paintings. Mourier-Petersen – who admitted finding Van Gogh a little mad at first – would send Vincent a friendly letter in January 1889, having returned to Denmark upon the conclusion of his travels.

Mourier-Petersen painted with Van Gogh in Arles during the months of March and April. His Blossoming Peach Tree views precisely the same scene as Van Gogh’s The Pink Peach Tree. Perhaps seated slightly to the right of Van Gogh when he painted the scene, Mourier-Petersen’s work features three trees: aside from the one upon which Van Gogh’s composition centres, there appears a tree just behind and to the right in even fuller blossom, and a small shrub positioned in the foreground which serves to frame the work. The shrub’s flowers are white; but Mourier-Petersen’s flowers for the other two trees have remained a vivid pink.

Where the impasto of Van Gogh’s flowers makes their blossoming palpable, felt as vigorous explosions of the spring, Mourier-Peterson’s paint is thinner and his style gentler, with his trees elongated, stretching upwards in their frailty in contrast to Van Gogh’s relatively squat and sturdy depictions. A golden-yellow hue stretches across the extent of the fence in the middle of Mourier-Peterson’s canvas; his fence lilts forwards; the ground comes in tones of pink-orange with silver-blue highlights; and the sky distends in heavy purple-blue.

________

The full text of Van Gogh’s first sermon, Sunday, 29 October, 1876: http://www.vggallery.com/misc/sermon.htm

Vase with Irises Against a Yellow Background and The Milkmaid: Van Gogh and Vermeer

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam reopened after seven months a few days ago, 1 May – the culmination of a renovation process which I briefly discussed over at amsterdamarm. The new exhibition which marks the museum’s reopening is entitled Van Gogh at Work, and is the product of eight years of research undertaken by the Van Gogh Museum, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, and researchers from Royal Dutch Shell. This research has brought various confirmations and some new insights regarding Van Gogh’s working practices, his artistic techniques, and his use of materials. We now know, for instance, that during Van Gogh’s two years in Paris, he bought his canvases from the same shop as his colleague Toulouse-Lautrec; and have gained a sense of the frequency with which he recycled canvases, painting over works or utilising both canvas sides.

The research also extends and establishes our understanding of the way in which some of Van Gogh’s pigments have changed and faded through the course of years. The resulting change in the colour of some of Van Gogh’s paintings is the central theme of articles written about the reopening in The New York Times (‘Van Gogh’s True Palette Revealed‘) and The Guardian (‘Van Gogh’s true colours were originally even brighter‘).

The New York Times piece discusses in particular Van Gogh’s The Bedroom (or Bedroom in Arles). The title refers to three oil paintings: the first painted in Arles in October 1888; the subsequent two painted after the original, in September 1889, whilst Van Gogh was a patient at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, in Saint-Rémy. The New York Times focuses on the initial painting, held by the Van Gogh Museum; and explains that, whilst its ‘honey-yellow bed pressed into the corner of a cozy sky-blue room’ is so familiar to us today, in fact Van Gogh originally painted the walls of the room in violet. The red pigment which he used to mix this violet has faded over time, leaving only the blue. Marije Vellekoop, the Van Gogh Museum’s head of collections, research and presentation, comments, ‘For me, the purple walls in the bedroom make it a softer image. It confirms that he was sticking to the traditional colour theory, using purple and yellow, and not blue and yellow’.

This diminishing of pigment is less evident in the two Saint-Rémy paintings. The second version of The Bedroom, in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, shows more intense, cornflower-blue walls. This version is on loan from Chicago for the duration of the Van Gogh Museum’s exhibition, displayed side-by-side with the Arles rendition. The third version of the painting, held by the Musée d’Orsay, bears more trace of the original violet, the colour of its walls approaching lavender.

The emphasis in the New York Times on these particular colour combinations – on violet and yellow becoming blue and yellow – relates to my series on Van Gogh, inspired by the previous collection of his works at the Hermitage Amsterdam. The first piece in that series, published early last month, is titled ‘Gauguin’s Chair and La Berceuse: Conceptualising Red and Green in the Art of Van Gogh‘. The second piece, published at the start of this week, discusses ‘Van Gogh in Paris: The Radicalising of a Palette and a Brush‘. In it, I depict the months he spent in Antwerp, between late 1885 and early 1886, as crucial to Van Gogh’s artistic development. It was in Antwerp that he studied colour theory and began to broaden his palette; inspired as he was upon arriving in the city by the busy, varied life of its docks, and by the Japanese woodcuts he found on sale there.

This, the third piece in my series, considers precisely the occurrence of a violet and yellow contrast becoming a contrast of yellow and blue. Namely, I want to view Van Gogh’s Still Life: Vase with Irises Against a Yellow Background, and compare it with Johannes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid.

Still Life: Vase with Irises Against a Yellow Background was one of the last paintings Van Gogh worked on in Saint-Rémy. He completed it in May 1890, before leaving the hospital and moving to Auvers-sur-Oise; where – after achieving dozens more canvases, including his innovative double-square paintings – he would die at the end of July. In marked contrast with the rest of his artistic career, Van Gogh painted relatively few still lifes during his time at Saint-Rémy, painting instead outdoors, in the hospital’s gardens and then in the surrounding countryside. Though he frequently appreciated the order imposed by life at the hospital, and painted prolifically, he continued to experience periods of deep anguish and physical illness.

After suffering what the director of the asylum described as an ‘attack’ on 22 February, Van Gogh kept painting, but wrote few letters over the next two months (he received letters meanwhile from Theo and Gauguin among others; his paintings had recently been shown at Les XX’s annual exhibition in Brussels, and with the Artistes Indépendants in Paris, to the warm acclaim of his fellow artists). This attack motivated his decision, made in early May, to leave for Auvers. Vase with Irises Against a Yellow Background was therefore presumably undertaken with his move already firmly in mind. In a couple of letters, Van Gogh writes of working in a ‘frenzy’ during his last few days in Saint-Rémy.

He had completed two studies of irises, out in the garden of Saint-Paul, the previous May, soon after committing himself to the asylum following his time in Arles. Theo greatly admired these, and submitted them to the Société des Artistes Indépendants’ annual exhibition in September. Vase with Irises Against a Yellow Background was one of two still lifes with irises which Van Gogh painted a year after these studies. In his own words, in a letter to Theo,

At the moment the improvement is continuing, the whole horrible crisis has disappeared like a thunderstorm, and I’m working here with calm, unremitting ardour to give a last stroke of the brush. I’m working on a canvas of roses on bright green background and two canvases of large bouquets of violet Irises, one lot against a pink background in which the effect is harmonious and soft through the combination of greens, pinks, violets. On the contrary, the other violet bouquet (ranging up to pure carmine and Prussian blue) standing out against a striking lemon yellow background with other yellow tones in the vase and the base on which it rests is an effect of terribly disparate complementaries that reinforce each other by their opposition.

The crisp contours of the leaves and the Japanese-influenced diagonals of the flowers are set against a background which moves thickly around them. Indeed, Van Gogh painted this background last, after the flowers and vase. Yet in the painting as it appears today, the carmine – that pure, rich red which Van Gogh mentions as a facet of it – only faintly remains. As with The Bedroom‘s walls, the violet flowers have turned blue. In this manner, Van Gogh’s art makes explicit the idea that all art is involved in a continual process of becoming. In the particular case of Vase with Irises Against a Yellow Background, Van Gogh’s painting has become a perfect Vermeer: echoing in its current form Vermeer’s predisposition for the bold and brilliant use of yellow and blue.

Vermeer’s The Milkmaid evinces both this predisposition for colour and his strikingly modern painterly techniques. It was painted around 1668, when Vermeer was just twenty-five years old. In some respects Vermeer is a difficult artist to analyse, for only 34 paintings remain attributed to him, and there is a dearth of material and information relating to his studies and preparatory methods. He appears about 1665 already remarkably accomplished and mature. Broadly, there is something readier, a little rougher, more captured than composed about his earlier works.

Yellow and blue are the dominant colours of The Milkmaid. In the organisation of these, Van Gogh’s Vase with Irises Against a Yellow Background appears like The Milkmaid reversed. The distinguishing feature of Vermeer’s palette, when contrasted with those of his contemporaries, was his use of expensive natural ultramarine: this gives his blues here an exceptional vividness, in tune with his similarly luminous handling of lead-tin yellow. Yet the colour combinations in The Milkmaid are complex and various, and not limited to yellow and blue. The contrast in these colours is repeated in the rich contrast between the green of the tablecloth and the maid’s carmine-red skirt.

The same green depicts the milkmaid’s rolled oversleeves, which Vermeer painted alla prima (wet-on-wet), mixing and working the yellow and blue of the maid’s shirt and apron. This method was not uncommon amongst Early and Golden Age Dutch painters: it was adopted by Jan van Eyck and by Rembrandt for several of their compositions. It became a characteristic of many Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, aided by the new availability of pigments in portable tubes, which allowed artists like Van Gogh to go out into nature and paint rapidly en plein air.

A further aspect which links Vermeer to the art of the Impressionists is his use of a pointillé technique – patterns of small dots which, to a modern eye, evoke the pointillism of Seurat and Signac, with which Van Gogh experimented. Collections of small, white dots add texture and suggest the play of light in Vermeer’s painting, noticeable especially on the bread and on the top of the maid’s apron; highlighting also her cap, oversleeves, and the lip of the jug with which she pours. They enhance the atmosphere of softly diffusing light which characterises this brilliant but gentle, boldly restrained, most harmonious of works.