(Click on images to enlarge them.)
I thought you might find this fun. Vincent painted fifteen pictures of the view from his bedroom window in the asylum at Saint-Rémy (sixteen if you count The Starry Night). In addition to being painted from two slightly different vantage points, they are also all painted from a slightly different perspective, sometimes looking toward the left (north), sometimes looking directly east, sometimes skewing more toward the south. I thought it would be fun to superimpose an outline of all the paintings on top of each other to illustrate the range of Vincent’s perspective over the fifteen paintings. I ordered an LED tracing light box from Amazon and bought a ten-pack of my favorite pen, the Pilot G-2, in assorted colors.
Vincent’s second-story cell in the asylum looked out over a field enclosed by a stone wall. Beyond the wall was a rolling countryside of fields and woodlands, with the Alpilles mountains on the horizon. The Alpilles are a subrange of the Alps situated south and east of Saint-Rémy. There were four buildings on the other side of the wall, at least one of which Vincent included in every painting of the view. Two of the buildings are nondescript, but the other two are fairly distinctive. The two nondescript buildings are to the left and right of the view (I have christened them “left” and “right”). In the distance is a building comprised of two sections: a larger section in the rear and a smaller section in the front, which I picture as an anteroom to the larger structure. In the foreground of the area just beyond the wall is a building with an asymmetrical roofline and gable. I have christened these buildings “anteroom” and “asymmetrical.”
The noted Impressionist and Postimpressionist scholar John Rewald visited the asylum at Saint-Rémy in the 1950s and took photographs of the view from Vincent’s cell. In 2015 I requested and was granted access to Rewald’s slides in the archives department of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. When Rewald took his photos, “anteroom” and “asymmetrical” were still there, which was cool in and of itself, but it also confirmed that Vincent was painting what he saw, which will turn out to be integral to my interpretation of The Starry Night.
Rewald's photo of the view
I started with an outline in black ink of the major elements visible in the Rewald slide. It’s hard to make out in the picture in the folder, but “anteroom” is situated directly above “asymmetrical,” and “left” is also there. “Right” may also have still existed when this photograph was taken, but it would have been hidden by the foliage that had grown up on the south side of the enclosed wheat field and the row of cypress trees that appear to have grown up just beyond the south wall of the field. The one element that appears in all the paintings, besides the mountains, is the stone wall, so I used this as the anchor for tracing all the paintings, specifically the crook in the wall where the south wall turns inward from the east wall at a roughly ninety-degree angle.
At the upper left of my superimposition you will see each painting identified by its current location and its de la Faille and Hulsker numbers. Jacob-Baart de la Faille was the first to catalogue Vincent’s works and give them numbers (The Starry Night is F612). Jan Hulsker later compiled his own catalogue raisonné; his numbers are preceded by the initials “JH.” You will count eleven paintings. I did not trace the other four pictures for a couple of reasons. First, two of them are exact copies (“repetitions,” as Vincent called them) of an earlier version, namely the one commonly called Reaper. The original version (F617/JH1753) is in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands. They call it Korenveld met maaier en zon; Wheat Field with Reaper and Sun—their translation, not mine! (Many of Vincent’s paintings are known by differing titles. He rarely gave them titles, per se. Rather, he gave them descriptions, which themselves often varied from letter to letter.) The two repetitions of Reaper are in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany. The original includes all four buildings; the two repetitions leave out “right.”
The other two pictures that I didn’t trace are only very loosely based on the view. One (variously titled Wheat Field with Plowman or Laborer in a Field; F625/JH1768), formerly in the collection of Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass of Fort Worth, Texas, and which was sold to an anonymous bidder at Christie’s in 2017 (for $81 million), includes the wall, a rather flattened depiction of the mountains, and the rising sun, but otherwise contains imaginative elements, including a building that doesn’t resemble any of the actual buildings and what appear to be weeping willow trees. A similar picture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (F706/JH1794) is even more fanciful, with Dutch windmills in the background.
All of the pictures except for the one in Amsterdam are painted horizontally in what we would now call “landscape” view. The Amsterdam picture and the one in Richmond are quite small, roughly nine by thirteen inches. Of the remaining thirteen, nine are painted on Vincent’s preferred Size 30 canvas, roughly twenty-eight by thirty-six inches, the remaining four being only slightly smaller.
I don’t know that my superimposition image teaches us much more than what we learn by simply looking at the paintings. I just thought it would look cool, you know, as a work of art (What is art?). One thing it does highlight is that in addition to painting the view from the different perspectives identified above, Vincent also depicted the view from two slightly different vantage points. Six of the paintings show the view from his room, where “anteroom” is pretty much directly behind “asymmetrical.” In seven the vantage point is from slightly to the north of Vincent’s cell, so that “anteroom” appears to the left of “asymmetrical.” This occurs in one of the first paintings he made of the view, the dramatically skewed perspective depicted in Wheat Field with Rising Sun (F720/JH1728), currently in Otterlo.
Wheat Field with Rising Sun
Another element you will notice in some of the pictures is the rising sun (and in one case the rising moon). Shortly after checking into the asylum, Vincent now famously wrote to his brother, Theo, "Through the iron-barred window I can make out a square of wheat in an enclosure . . . above which in the morning I see the sun rise in its glory." You see the sun in the skewed image above. It is in all three versions of Reaper. It’s in the one from the Bass collection. And it is in the painting that must be considered the masterpiece of the series, also usually called Wheat Field with Rising Sun (F737/JH1862), formerly in the collection of none other than Robert Oppenheimer—yes, the father of the atomic bomb! (Oppenheimer actually inherited the painting from his parents. He sold it in 1965 to Florence J. Gould, daughter-in-law of nineteenth-century robber baron Jay Gould. Florence Gould auctioned the painting off through Sotheby’s in 1985, where it was sold to a private collector for just under ten million dollars. I would give anything to know where it is today.)
Wheat Field with Rising Sun
With apologies to Sanford Gifford, this might be the most amazing picture of the sun ever painted. Brushstrokes of light radiate out from the yellow-white disc, filling nearly half the sky. Anyone who has ever even momentarily looked at the sun knows that it is not just the disc one sees but the aureola surrounding it. The darker shadows just inside the wall are a virtuoso example of Impressionist coloration. And the furrows that fill fully two-thirds of the canvas rush toward the viewer, giving the picture a dynamism which places it squarely at the transition from Impressionism, which Vincent generally considered himself to be a practitioner of (depending on his mood), to Postimpressionism, the tag which later scholars gave to painters like Van Gogh and Gauguin, who were seen to have infused emotion into the more dispassionately naturalistic works of Monet, Pissarro, et al.
Vincent described this painting in a letter to Emile Bernard: “Another canvas depicts a sun rising over a field of new wheat. Receding lines of the furrows run high up on the canvas, towards a wall and a range of lilac hills. The field is violet and green-yellow. The white sun is surrounded by a large yellow aureole. In it . . . I have tried to express calm, a great peace.”
Vincent also showed this picture in the Spring 1890 exhibition of the Salon des Indépendants, along with nine other works, including a vertical painting of cypresses now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which I will discuss below), one of the two iconic Sunflowers, and one of the other iterations of the view from the asylum window, Landscape after a Storm (F611/JH1723), now in Copenhagen. (This is generally considered to be the first iteration of the view.) Vincent received favorable press coverage for his pictures in this show, and Theo wrote to him that none other than Claude Monet, whom Theo represented in his gallery, had said Vincent’s paintings “were the best in the exhibition.” Gauguin said they were the feature attraction.
Landscape after a Storm
=//=
The standard interpretation of The Starry Night, not to overstate it too much, is that it is the hallucinatory vision of a madman. Even with the knowledge that Vincent could not work during his epileptic fits or the days following them, pretty much everyone from Meyer Schapiro to the Van Gogh biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have sought a way to interpret the picture in this way. A classic example is Ronald Pickvance’s interpretation in his catalogue for the monumental Van Gogh exhibition (the second of a tandem of exhibitions, actually) presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the winter of 1986-87. Pickvance interprets The Starry Night as being a composite of two other pictures from that same June of 1889: the first iteration of the view, Landscape after a Storm (mentioned just above), and a painting of cypress trees and a farmhouse in a field of wheat painted around the same time (now in the National Gallery in Prague) which Pickvance suggests is taken from a different area in the vicinity of the asylum.
Vincent checked into the asylum at Saint-Remy on May 8, 1889. He was given a second-story room to live in and a ground-floor room to paint in. Even though he had voluntarily committed himself, he was not allowed to leave the grounds of the former monastery for about a month. His studio was near the entrance to the former cloister, now simply an enclosed courtyard garden. In his first letter from the asylum, written on May 9 to Theo and his new bride Jo, Vincent wrote, “I have two [paintings] on the go—violet irises and a lilac bush. Two subjects taken from the garden.” The Irises are the famous ones currently in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
The usually prolific correspondent didn’t write again for two weeks. In his second letter from the asylum he reported that he now had two more paintings “on the go” (as he liked to say). “Since I’ve been here, the neglected garden planted with tall pines under which grows tall and badly tended grass intermingled with various weeds, has provided me with enough work, and I haven’t yet gone outside” of the asylum grounds. This is also the letter where he said he can see the morning sun rise in all its glory. (Vincent had been sober for a few months now, so he was probably waking up early for the first time in a long time.) His next letter is from yet another two weeks later. Now he was evidently waking up even earlier because it is in this letter that he reported that he could see Venus: “This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big.” Still, he had yet to leave the asylum grounds: “[W]hat a beautiful land and what beautiful blue and what a sun. And yet I’ve only seen the garden and what I can make out through the window.”
Then, three days later, on June 9, he reported that he had finally gone off the grounds of the asylum. “Thanks very much for the consignment of canvases, colors, brushes, tobacco and chocolate, which reached me in good order. I was very glad of it, for I was pining for work a little. Also, for a few days now I’ve been going outside to work in the neighborhood. . . . What can I tell you that’s new, not much. I have two landscapes on the go (no. 30 canvases) of views taken in the hills.” He immediately describes Landscape after a Storm: “One is the countryside that I glimpse from the window of my bedroom. In the foreground a field of wheat, ravaged and knocked to the ground after a storm. A boundary wall and beyond, grey foliage of a few olive trees, huts and hills. Finally, at the top of the painting a large white and grey cloud swamped by the azure.” He then loses his train of thought and never identifies or describes what the second picture is of.
Vincent’s next letter is a week later to his sister Willemien (sic), whom he calls Wil. In this letter he describes his three latest paintings: “I’ve just finished a landscape of an olive grove with grey foliage more or less like that of the willows, their cast shadows violet on the sun-drenched sand. Then yet another that depicts a field of yellowing wheat surrounded by brambles and green bushes. At the end of the field a little pink house with a tall and dark cypress tree that stands out against the distant purplish and bluish hills, and against a forget-me-not blue sky streaked with pink whose pure tones contrast with the already heavy, scorched ears, whose tones are as warm as the crust of a loaf of bread. I have yet another in which a field of wheat on the slope of the hills is completely ravaged and knocked to the ground by a downpour, and which is drenched by the torrential shower.” The first picture is of nearby olive groves that Vincent would do two series of over the next few months. The third picture he describes is the one he described in the previous letter to Theo, before he lost his train of thought. The middle picture is Wheat Field (F719/JH1725), currently in the National Gallery in Prague. Given its proximity to the depiction of Landscape after a Storm in this letter, along with the fact that it was clearly “taken in the hills,” this is most likely the second painting that Vincent meant to describe in the previous letter to Theo.
Wheat Field
This is the picture that Pickvance wants to say is one of the two paintings that Vincent incorporated elements of to compose The Starry Night. “At the asylum,” Pickvance writes, “he had been given a room overlooking the garden to use as a studio. But from the studio, unlike the bedroom, he had no view of the Alpilles. In that studio in mid-June, several recently painted canvases were drying. From two of them, Mountainous Landscape Behind the Asylum (F611 [this is the title Pickvance uses for Landscape after a Storm]) and the Wheat Field now in Prague, van Gogh extracted elements that he then used in his new painting [The Starry Night]. From the one he took the outline of the Alpilles, and from the other he took the cypresses.” Aside from the fact that it is immaterial that there is no view of the Alpilles from the ground-floor studio, since Vincent would have used sketches made from his second-story cell to paint all images of the view, Pickvance is suggesting that the Prague Wheat Field actually depicts a field with cypresses in another area of the countryside. “The Prague landscape cannot be identified as the second view ‘taken in the hills’. Rather, it is the very opposite. Van Gogh turned his back to the Alpilles.” This doesn’t make any sense. First of all, there are other hills in the distance in this picture. And secondly, if he turned his back on the Alpilles, he must necessarily be in the vicinity of the Alpilles.
Pickvance pushes this theory in order to characterize The Starry Night as a product of Vincent’s imagination. He writes: “[W]ith its mixed genesis, its composite procedures, and its arbitrary collage of separate motifs, it is overtly stamped as an ‘abstraction’ of the kind he painted in Arles under the tutelage of Gauguin.” Gauguin (and Bernard) actually used the term "abstraction" in two different ways. They used it to refer to paintings composed from the imagination—in other words, compositions that they basically made up, composites of different ideas, rather than images taken directly from nature. They also used it to refer to a style of painting using broad, perhaps even arbitrary colors and/or infusing personal expression into the picture. Pickvance seizes on Vincent’s comparison of The Starry Night to another painting of his from the same time, Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background, now in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA just calls this painting The Olive Trees; F712/JH1740. This is the first of the three paintings Vincent refers to in his letter to Wil, quoted above). To support his argument, Pickvance quotes Vincent writing to his brother, “Though I have not seen either Gauguin’s or Bernard’s last canvases, I am pretty well convinced that these two studies I’ve spoken of are parallel in feeling.” The problem is, this second painting is not an abstraction of the composite variety; it is a plein air view of olive trees with the Alpilles in the background. Vincent is linking these two pictures based on painting style, not arbitrary, composite composition.
Pickvance’s assertion that the Prague painting depicts a separate parcel of the vicinity seems to suggest that there were no cypresses in the countryside visible from Vincent’s bedroom window, which is kind of like saying that there are sections of Parris Island where there are no sand gnats, or indeed that there are parts of the night sky where there are no stars. (Another art historian by the name of Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski, in a paper based on a lecture given at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the occasion of the second Pickvance exhibition, basically parrots Pickvance’s assumption, stating unequivocally that there were no cypresses visible from Vincent’s bedroom and giving as “proof” just one of the fifteen paintings Vincent made of the view, Landscape after a Storm.)
But Provence is lousy with cypress trees, as Vincent noted on several occasions in letters to his brother. In June 1889, a week or so after painting The Starry Night, he wrote, “The cypresses still preoccupy me, I’d like to do something with them like the canvases of the sunflowers because it astonishes me that no one has yet done them as I see them. It’s beautiful as regards lines and proportions, like an Egyptian obelisk. And the green has such a distinguished quality. It’s the dark patch in a sun-drenched landscape, but it’s one of the most interesting dark notes, the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine. Now they must be seen here against the blue, in the blue, rather.” Elsewhere he referred to the color of the cypresses as being “that difficult shade of bottle green.”
In a letter from November, 1889, he wrote, “I still have the great desire to do for the mountains and for the cypresses what I’ve just done for the olive trees, have a really good go at them. The thing is, the olive tree and the cypress have rarely been painted.” The next month he reiterated this plan: “I have a great desire to do more of both the cypresses and the Alpilles.” He had earlier stated that these pictures would “form a kind of ensemble, ‘Impressions of Provence’.” And in January, 1890, he was still talking about it: “To give an idea of Provence it’s vital to do a few more canvases of cypresses and mountains.” “The cypress is so characteristic of the landscape of Provence,” he wrote to the critic Albert Aurier. “[B]efore leaving here, I am planning to return to the fray to attack the cypresses.” (All of these quotes come from the invaluable online resource provided by the Van Gogh Museum Foundation, the Van Gogh Letters Project.)
Vincent actually started his attack on the cypresses in June of 1889. Around June 18 he wrote to Theo that he had “a new study of a starry sky.” (The Starry Night is actually Vincent’s third nocturnal painting, following two he had executed in Arles the previous summer: Café Terrace at Night and Starry Night over the Rhone. Vincent referred to most of his paintings as “studies,” works that he intended to utilize at a later time to produce what he considered finished works. But except for a few notable repetitions of some paintings, the majority of the paintings that we consider Vincent’s greatest are “studies.” He did not sign his “studies”; The Starry Night, for example, is not signed.) A week later he wrote, “We’ve had some fine hot days and I’ve got some more canvases on the go, so that there are 12 no. 30 canvases on the stocks.” Included among these canvases were three new pictures of cypresses, in addition to The Starry Night and the Prague Wheat Field. Two of these pictures are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Cypresses
Wheat Field with Cypresses
The cypresses in each of these two paintings are very similar. They both appear to be a pair of cypresses growing right next to each other. There might be a technical term for this in botany. Anyway, they are clearly the same pair of trees in each picture, and in each picture the blue slope of the Alpilles is visible in the background. (One of them also has a stylized crescent moon.) These also appear to be the same two trees depicted in the Prague Wheat Field, only from the opposite side, as the smaller of the two trees is now on the right rather than on the left. And, of course, The Starry Night depicts two companion cypresses, a big one and a little one.
The Starry Night
According to Hulsker’s catalogue, there are at least nine extant sketches of the view that Vincent would have based his paintings on. Most of these sketches actually show the view from the slightly skewed northern vantage point, but one is a preliminary drawing for the one vertical version of the view, in Amsterdam.
Preliminary drawing for F723/JH1722
This drawing shows what appears to be a lone cypress on a little hill just beyond “anteroom.” Although this cypress does not show up in the finished painting based on this sketch, it does appear in two of the horizontal versions of the view. It is visible in the skewed view in Otterlo shown above. And it is visible in the version in the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which I was able to view in person two years ago on my way back from visiting my stepfather in Memphis.
Enclosed Field with Peasant or
Plowed Field with a Man Carrying a Bundle of Straw
The romantic in me likes to think that Vincent identified with this solitary cypress (or what looked like a solitary cypress) on a distant hill, and that on one windy day that June when he was finally allowed off the grounds of the asylum he trekked up into the hills to find his kindred spirit. Once he got there he saw that it was actually two cypresses, but no matter. They don’t show up in all of his paintings of the view, just as a lot of particulars are left out of the various versions, but they do show up in the two I’ve identified (in addition to the preliminary sketch). And I believe these are the cypresses that famously dominate the foreground of The Starry Night.
My theory is that while the fifteen iconic versions of the view are all basically panoramic views, for The Starry Night Vincent telescoped the view to focus on the cypresses on the distant hill. From the earliest days of his painting career, Vincent relied on a perspective frame whose construction he had specially commissioned from a carpenter in The Hague (he had a couple of them made). The use of such a technical implement runs contrary to our perception of Vincent as an expressionist artist, but the fact of the matter is that Vincent was not a very good freehand draftsman. This is one of the reasons he was always pining for models. And it’s one of the reasons that he bristled at painting “abstractions.” He needed to have something in front of him to draw or paint. And he made extensive use of the perspective frame to paint his landscapes. He probably didn’t have the perspective frame with him in the asylum, but the window itself would have served the purpose. After all, a window is essentially what a perspective frame is, an analogy that goes all the way back to the invention of linear perspective in the fifteenth century by Brunelleschi, as chronicled by Alberti in his seminal On Painting. All Vincent would have had to do was stand back in his bedroom in order to telescope the view of the cypresses on the hill, not to mention the bright morning star, Venus.
But Pickvance doesn’t mention Venus, beyond quoting Vincent’s now famous statement to Theo about seeing the morning star, “which looked very big.” Maybe it’s the post-Enlightenment separation of the so-called “fine arts” from all other arts and sciences that accounts for Pickvance’s failure to recognize Venus as an integral part of The Starry Night. Arty people are not supposed to know anything about science, and Pickvance allowed Vincent’s mention of Venus and his inclusion of it in this painting to fly right past him. (Albert Boime, longtime UCLA art historian, did not. He and Harvard astrophysicist Charles A. Whitney, working independently, have conclusively established that Venus was visible from Vincent’s bedroom window that Summer.) Venus is one of the key indicators that The Starry Night, so often characterized as a product of Vincent’s imagination, is in fact a fairly literal depiction of the view from his cell in the asylum.
I say “fairly literal” because there are definitely some imaginary elements in the painting. First and foremost among them is the village, which everyone agrees is made-up. (Pickvance argues that the church in the picture is in more of a Dutch style than Provençal, but this is immaterial, since, Dutch or Provençal, it’s imaginary anyway.) And, except for Venus, the positions of the stars (and the phase of the moon) are imaginary. Vincent painted the picture during the day in his ground-floor studio. He would have known where Venus was, but otherwise there were no distinctive constellations visible in that part of the sky on those mornings, so he just randomly filled the sky with stars. The moon was waxing gibbous when he painted The Starry Night, meaning it would have been visible in the east in the early evening, not in the early morning. So for compositional effect, Vincent just put a stylized crescent moon in the upper right-hand corner. At least he got the orientation right if the moon had been there, something that cannot be said of his inclusion of a crescent moon in some of the cypress paintings. The swirls in the sky represent the mistral, and the whitish-blue brushstrokes just above the horizon line represent the first light of morning.
So the score is tied at 2. There are two imaginary features: the village and (collectively) the stars and moon. And there are two features that are definitely not made-up: Venus and the slope of the Alpilles mountains. The tiebreaker hinges, literally, on the cypresses.
There is actually one more element in The Starry Night that comes from the view. In the foreground of the imaginary village is “anteroom.” This is one of the few buildings of the imaginary village that is depicted boldly and large. My theory is that Vincent painted it first as an established element of the telescoped view, and then decided for whatever reason to surround it with imaginary buildings.
It’s fun to crop the upper left-hand area of the Indianapolis painting of the view, to create a miniature version of The Starry Night (albeit during the daytime). I’ll admit that Vincent moved the cypresses forward in The Starry Night, but I’ll chalk this up to artistic license and stand by my theory.
