In May 1890, fresh from a
self-imposed stay at an insane asylum, Vincent Van Gogh arrived
in the little village of Auvers-sur-Oise, about 20 miles outside
of Paris. He found modest board and accommodation at the Auberge
Ravoux, moving into an attic room and living there peacefully,
painting and always smoking his pipe, until his death two months
later, in that same room.
Adeline, one of the daughters of
the Ravoux family, sat for him. Her portrait, a girl in blue on
a blue background, did not please her very much then, although
modern eyes have found more to value. As an old woman, Adeline
recalled that Monsieur Vincent had not been a difficult boarder.
"I have no memory of M. Vincent repeatedly missing the meals
that he regularly took at our place.... The menu was typical for
meals at the time in restaurants: meat, vegetables, salad,
dessert."
It wasn't Van Gogh's usual diet,
as described in his copious letters to his ever-patient brother
Theo. He seemed to subsist on a diet of coffee and bread for
weeks on end while he devoted his meagre funds to paint and
materials. In fact, one of the main charms of the Auberge Ravoux
for him was that it was very, very cheap.
That's probably not the case
today, as the Auberge exists partly as a shrine to the troubled
artist, and also as a restaurant. Not long after Van Gogh's
death, the acclaim for his work that eluded him all his life
arose, and people began to make pilgrimages to visit his room.
In 1926, it was renamed Maison de Van Gogh. It survived many
owners and incarnations until a Belgian owner took over in 1985,
restoring the auberge to something resembling its former dignity
(an elderly lady, invited for the reopening, delighted the owner
by asking, "When are you going to start?"). What's more, a chef
was added who could create the classic peasant dishes of the
auberge's earlier days.
Vincent's food preferences
Van Gogh's relationship with food was
complicated. Like his fellow Protestants, he equated virtue with
abstinence from luxury. This held especially true for food,
which he often reduced to its essence, "bread." For Van Gogh,
bread was pure nourishment or fuel, much like potatoes were the
essence of sustenance in his painting
The Potato Eaters.
Here, the potato eaters enacted a Biblical
imperative that was dear to Van Gogh, and which he often quoted
in his letters: "In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat thy
bread." As a painter he could honour the working class, whom he
considered to be more honest than high society: "I have wanted
to give the impression of a way of life quite different from
that of us civilized people." To earn your bread meant to make a
living, or rather to sustain yourself through your own efforts.
To Van Gogh, who was supported largely by his family, in
particular by his brother Theo, the mandate to pay his own way
was a painful reminder of his shortcomings in that regard. His
failure to earn his own bread his own livelihood, in effect was
a constant source of worry, irritation, and guilt.
Van Gogh had a certain talent for suffering.
Although he did his best to make money by selling his work, he
felt compelled to defend himself against attacks from an art
dealer: "I work as hard as I can and 1 do not spare myself, so I
deserve my bread and they ought not to reproach me with not
having been able to sell anything up to now." The only way out
of this moral dilemma was to stint even more on food and other
everyday necessities. For someone of Van Gogh's frugality, this
was not a hard task. He even derived some pleasure from it.
(When he was a preacher in Cuesmes in the Borinage, Belgium's
mining district, he reported that he mainly lived on "dry bread
and some potatoes or chestnuts." Only every now and then did he
enjoy "a better meal in a restaurant whenever I can afford it.")
Often, he was able to distil virtue
from necessity as he saw it. Shortly before, in Nuenen, he had
been living in a barn that doubled as a studio. Buying painting
supplies nearly depleted his finances, but he exulted in the
simplicity of his lifestyle, exclaiming that he was "sick of the
boredom
of civilization .... One may sleep on straw, eat black bread;
well, one will only he the healthier for it."
Nevertheless, even Van Gogh realized that
virtue could lead to excess. While studying in Antwerp during
the winter of 1885, he complained to Theo about his self-imposed
frugality: "Do you know, for instance, that in the whole time
I've had only three warm meals, and for the rest nothing but
bread? In this way one becomes vegetarian more than is good for
one." After several days of fasting, he again wrote: "Perhaps
you will not understand, but it is true that when I receive the
money my greatest appetite is not for food ... but the appetite
for painting is even stronger." He spent almost all his money on
models: "All I have to live on is my breakfast served by the
people I live with, and in the evening for supper a cup of
coffee and some bread in the dairy, or else a loaf of rye bread
that I have in my trunk." Even in Aries, Van Gogh saved on food
when other priorities presented themselves. On October 8, 1888,
he had just begun to make his yellow house habitable: "I had a
meal this afternoon, but tonight I will have nothing to eat but
a crust of bread. And all that money is spent on the house or on
paintings." There is something ostentatious in Van Gogh's
repeated demonstrations of simplicity. Apparently he felt the
need not only to live this way, but also to report on it in
detail, as if he wanted to make clear to Theo that he was doing
his utmost in exchange for the money Theo sent him.
The Bible provided Van Gogh with another
familiar admonishment: "Man can not live by bread alone." In his
early years, Van Gogh put it in a purely Biblical context, but
gradually this saying adopted a slightly different meaning. "Not
by bread alone" could imply that one should strive for higher
goals in life, such as art or literature.
With Van Gogh, what held for real life also
held for painting. The still lives of food that he made while
living in Holland featured food from "the good earth," grown and
harvested by common folk. For this artist, ethics and aesthetics
were inseparable. For example, his painting of cabbages and
clogs from 1881, or baskets of potatoes from 1885 celebrated an
ethic also found in his drawings and paintings of men working in
the fields. These paintings were never exercises in the
rendering of texture, substance, or body movement. As Van Gogh
once remarked: "His bald head, bent over the black earth, seemed
to me full of a certain significance, reminiscent, for instance,
of 'thou shalt eat thy bread in the sweat of thy brow."
In Paris in 1886-87, Van Gogh continued
painting still lives. For one thing, he hoped to produce
something saleable, and he also specifically chose subjects that
challenged him. With flowers he expanded and brightened his
range of colours, whereas fish gave him the opportunity to match
his loaded brush against the shimmering surfaces of his
subjects. Toward the end of 1886, he began to show interest in
avant-garde painting, which can be detected in his paintings
over the next year. He also became keenly interested in the
pictorial possibilities of Japanese prints, which he saw at
Siegfried Bing's shop in Paris. From these prints, Van Gogh
developed a feeling for pattern, which manifested itself in
asymmetrical, risk compositions, and interplay of subject and
background. At the end of that year in 1887, Van Gogh's intense
concern with avant-garde use of pure, unmixed colour led to
striking personal results. Here, one can perceive for the first
time his great and original contribution to modern art. (A
glance back to his first effort at cabbages, some six years
earlier, is sufficient to realize that Van Gogh had reinvented
his art.)
By the time Van Gogh left behind Parisian
refinement for the countryside around Arles, he was glad to
recover the simplicity of rural life: "What a mistake Parisians
make in not having a palate for crude things... for common
earthenware .... I am returning to the ideas I had in the
country before I knew the Impressionists." In Arles, it became
apparent that nature had supplanted the Bible as Van Gogh's
inspiration, personified, in particular, in the sun and the
endless blue sky: "When you are well, you must be able to live
on a piece of bread while you are working all day, and have
enough strength to smoke and to drink your glass in the evening,
that's necessary under the circumstances. And all the same to
feel the stars and the infinite high and clear above you. Then
life is almost enchanted after all. Oh! Those who don't believe
in this sun here are real infidels." In the late summer of 1888,
colour contrasts began to obtain an emotive power that spoke of
Van Gogh's own perceptions of reality. By now, complementary
colours even invested inanimate objects with personal meaning
and feeling.
During his voluntary confinement in the Saint
Rémy asylum, Van Gogh again seemed to challenge his own past in
new still lives that displayed his recent stylistic conquests in
compositions of geometrical simplicity. These icons of rural
life probably coincided with his renewed interest in Millet,
whom he revered as a painter of rural life par excellence.
Around this time, he began to copy a series of prints after
Millet.
During his stay in the south, sanity of mind
and body became a concern of the artist's. The desire for good
food became synonymous with care for his mental health.
"Sanity," a recurring word in his letters, meant not only bodily
or mental health, but also healthiness from an artistic or moral
point of view. The first task was to have a healthy body.
In Arles, Van Gogh tried to restore his energy
by improving his eating habits. Because he suffered from stomach
problems, he tried to persuade restaurant owners to prepare
special food for him, such as strong brew, but he met with
little success: "It's the same everywhere in these little
restaurants. But it is not so hard to boil potatoes. Impossible.
Then rice or macaroni? None left, or else it is messed up in
grease, or else they aren't cooking it today, and they'll
explain that it's tomorrow's dish, there's no room on the stove,
and so on. It's absurd, but that is the real reason why my
health is so low." Once he found a new and better restaurant to
have his meals, Van Gogh felt his health improve immensely: "My
blood circulation is good and my stomach digesting."
In the Saint-Rémy asylum, Van Gogh felt that a
good appetite and regular meals could help to improve his sanity
in all respects. In the first days of September 1889, following
a major attack, he started to eat his way back to sanity.
Apparently Dr. Peyron, who treated him there, had prescribed
that he eat as much as he could. Van Gogh admitted that it did
him well: "Just like I swallow my food with greed nowadays, I
long to see my friends back and the northern countryside." But
he soon got the impression he was overdoing it, since how much
did a painter need anyway: "I don't see any advantage for myself
in gathering enormous physical strength, because it would be
more logical for me to get absorbed in the thought of doing good
work and wishing to be an artist and nothing but that."
After a few months, he was able to see his
friends back in Paris and to return to the healthy Auvers
countryside. When Johanna, Theo's new wife, saw her
brother-in-law for the first time, she was surprised by his
looks. After reading Vincent's letters and hearing her husband's
reports about the numerous attacks that Vincent had suffered,
she had expected an emaciated figure, but there he was, "a
sturdy, broad-shouldered man with a healthy colour." And she
thought, "He is completely healthy, he looks much stronger than
Theo." (Indeed, Theo was suffering from syphilis, which
eventually afflicted his mind.) Theo's health, plus that of the
new baby, was worrisome, so it is no surprise that Van Gogh
encouraged them to come and live in Auvers. Dr. Gachet not only
gave the artist advice to improve his eating habits, but also
recommended that a "father and mother must naturally feed
themselves up." By this the doctor meant "2 liters of beer a
day, etc."
In the meantime, Van Gogh had been painting at
Dr. Gachet's house, which pleased him enormously. The artist was
less happy, however, about the multicourse meals he was invited
for once a week. Apparently Dr. Gachet, like his colleague from
Saint-Rémy, believed that good food in large quantities was
essential for maintaining good health. A game of politeness
resulted in a situation that neither party desired or enjoyed.
"For me it is pure vexation to eat there in the evening or
afternoon, because the good man goes at great lengths in order
to prepare meals of 4 or 5 courses. This is not only for me
something dreadful, because he certainly has no strong stomach
himself. What prevented me from commenting on it, is that it
reminds him of the days of yore, when extensive meals were
served in the family circle, something that is after all not
unknown to us."
At Dr. Gachet's home, Van Gogh was a polite
guest, just as he was a pleasant boarder at the Auberge Ravoux.
One can imagine, though, that the simple food served in the
auberge was something of a relief for the artist. As for Dr.
Gachet, he could hardly believe that Van Gogh could be housed
and fed for a mere three and a half francs a day.
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