Chaucer describes how birds tweet on Valentine’s Day and choose their mates. I am a Robin, last Wednesday was Valentine’s Day, but I am not a bird. I was in my garden, pondering, not tweeting. I had been pestered with offers of Valentine tickets for a show about Van Gogh, the immersive exhibition running in London’s Commercial Street. It promises love under “The Starry Night”, the title of a Van Gogh painting. My mind was running in broad daylight over a different show, a superb one on Van Gogh’s last months. It has just finished in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. While I worked in the garden, memories of it interrelated with plants, shapes and colours in my mind.
Gardeners, planning borders, do not paint with plants. Unlike colours from tubes, plants’ colours develop slowly and vary with the weather. Nonetheless, paintings help gardeners to look on gardens more deeply. They challenge their responses to wind and movement, juxtaposed colours and shapes. They add layers to what we first see on the canvas of the world.
Gardeners associate Van Gogh with sunflowers, famous subjects in his paintings, but his art has far more to offer, from almond blossom to roses, the gardens of others and the impact of trees. His accompanying letters add a force of emotion matched only by letters of the rural poet John Clare, writing late in life.
ln last year’s wet English summer, I had poor results from annual sunflowers. I did not spend Valentine’s Day wondering how many of them to grow. I have a yearly Van Gogh moment without them, given by a tall perennial with big leaves and orange sunflowery flowers. Inula magnifica is excellent in rough grass and wild areas, where it flowers boldly in August. I link it to the artist because a keen American visitor once welcomed its flowers by exclaiming they were “ever so Van Go . . . ”
The coming and going in Van Gogh’s last months occurred in woods and fields round the little town of Auvers-sur-Oise, about an hour by train from Paris. It was changing in a way which is still topical. Like the villages of rural England, it was being invaded by weekenders who were coming out from Paris to buy second homes. After several hazardous fires, the town banned traditional thatching, yet in May 1890 Van Gogh wrote how he found “the modern villas and middle-class country homes almost as pretty as the old thatched cottages that are falling into ruin”. I will try, but fail, to look on my village’s wave of new housing with similar generosity.
Before moving to Auvers, van Gogh had painted a superb canvas of almond blossom, set against a blue sky, as if seen from below, a viewing point he had learnt from his close study of Japanese paintings, a fashionable source. Next week, buds will show on my pink-flowered almond tree, Prunus triloba.
During three months in Auvers, he finished about 70 paintings and 30 drawings, a surge of genius, which was set free by the peaceful setting and his release from the mental health hospital in which he had just been treated. Like Manet, seven years before, he painted flowers in his final months, usually in vases, some of which survive, decorated in Japanese style.
Next week I will be ordering corms of ranunculus for their double flowers in July. I will order gladioli too for long spikes of flower as summer advances. In his late paintings, Van Gogh painted a vase of ranunculus and anemones and another of gladioli with double-flowered China asters. On my soil those annual asters are prone to mildew. He also painted robinia, or false acacia, presenting its white flowers and tinting the leaves with yellow. He painted hollyhocks too, which I will be transplanting.
On a table in his superb portrait of Paul Gachet, Auvers’ friendly doctor, he painted what he describes as a dark purple foxglove, relevant, I assume, to Gachet’s herbal medicine chest. Like some of the colours in Van Gogh’s palette, this dark purple has faded over time, becoming pale pink. I will be transplanting foxgloves with Gachet in my mind’s eye.
Van Gogh’s letters relate fascinatingly to pictures we still have. Among his flurry of flower paintings he wrote that his main ambition was to paint portraits, aiming for a “halo of intensity”. He had difficulty in finding models to sit for him, so he painted flowers, gardens and big cornfields spread flat under a turbulent sky, like arable Britain’s farmland in the years of Euro-farming. In them, he wrote, “I made a point of trying to express sadness, extreme loneliness”.
In his fine paintings of two gardens he included human figures. His admired predecessor, the artist Charles-François Daubigny, had lived in a house and walled garden in Auvers before his death in 1878. Van Gogh painted it as he, uniquely, envisioned it, with beds shaped like lozenges coloured with thick dabs of paint, “green and pink grass”, he wrote in his last letter to his brother Theo, yellow in the lime trees and lilac, not as a flower, but as a colour for the hedge. The picture challenges gardeners’ sense of colour by departing from reality, yet conveying so much more. In it, Daubigny’s widow is standing and so is a cat, painted blue, with such a long tail that I mistook it for a fox.
Van Gogh also describes two paintings of Gachet’s garden, one with cypresses and aloes, which I cannot grow in mine, the other with “white roses, vines and a white figure in it”. The figure must be the girl we still see in a pale yellow hat, modest Marguerite Gachet, 19 years old, who some believe to have refused van Gogh’s offers and inadvertently intensified the despondency which led him, on July 27, to shoot himself in a cornfield outside Auvers.
“I usually try to be quite good humoured,” he had written to his brother and sister-in-law on July 10, “but my life . . . is attacked at the very root”. His last painting is one of twisting, thick tree roots, painted with blues and greens, once seen, never forgotten. The very trees were located quite recently beside the Rue Daubigny outside Auvers.
I do not believe that Van Gogh was shot by a village boy, a guess advanced in a book in 2011 and then adopted by two films about his last days. I continue to reflect on one of them, the amazing Loving Vincent (2017), which was animated from nearly 65,000 hand-painted images, each of which imitated the artist’s own colours and style. When it is windy I will grumble, but I will remember the vitality in Van Gogh’s cypresses, curving in wind, or the wavy lines of shrubs, rhythm made visible, in his village and garden paintings.
He also suffered what none of us would wish to undergo. Tiffanie Mang, a concept artist in Los Angeles, admitted in an interview to having known little about him before beginning work on Loving Vincent, but then “I was moved so deeply by his unerring passion that at times it really made me tear up.” In his last months, evoked in the Paris exhibition, it makes me tear up too.
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