As he presents a range of his own remarkable images inspired by Vincent Van Gogh, Jon Wyand muses on vineyard paintings both real and imagined.
It puzzles me that 19th-century French or France-based artists painted cornfields, meadows, riverbanks, mountains, and even their own gardens, but rarely vineyards. Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) was exceptional not least in this respect. The Red Vineyard (1888), a harvest scene near Arles at Montmajour, was the only painting he sold during his lifetime, and he devoted two others to the same subject: The Green Vineyard (also 1888), and Vineyard with a View of Auvers (1890). He was, by his own account, pleased with The Red Vineyard; no doubt the red and gold leaves of autumn excited him, along with the harvest atmosphere, though it was completed in his studio at the Yellow House in Arles, which he shared briefly with Paul Gauguin. The painting sold for 400 francs, and his agent, his brother Theo, was probably owed every sou. (For more on the painting, see WFW 2, 2004, pp.52–55.)
One 20th-century artist who shared van Gogh’s interest in vineyards was Argentinian-born artist Alfred Gaspart (1900–93), who spent more than a year in Burgundy in 1935/36, living in Beaune’s Rue de Paradis. He cycled out almost every day into the Côte de Beaune, with a sketchbook and a camera (most likely a Kodak folding model), as well as, no doubt, a baguette, a chunk of cheap local cheese, and a half-bottle of Passetoutgrain.
Gaspart was not interested in landscape—he was busy snapping the workers. He was, it seems, like van Gogh in his early years, a follower of artist Jean-François Millet (1814–75). Unfortunately, Gaspart was no Millet, which is why an original 10 x 8in (25 x 20cm) watercolor can be yours for only $1,000 or so. But his camera work is an object lesson in how to integrate with subjects. He manages to be both welcome and invisible. He sent his films to his sister Paule in Paris to be processed and printed, along with a letter relating his progress. She replied in kind, with the results. A selection of these photos and letters was published by Rafaèle Antoniucci and Michel Blay in Alfred Gaspart: Une Année dans la Vigne (Jean-Michel Place, Paris; 2006), and a gallery somewhere in California may still have a few of Gaspart’s watercolors, which are clearly based on his photographs.
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Millet himself was always preoccupied with the human element—the peasants—and never seems to have painted a vineyard, only an exhausted and sabot-shod laborer sitting in the shade of the vines, perhaps in Chablis.
Based in Barbizon, south of Paris, he focused on laborers, the rural community, and its harsh life. Van Gogh was a great admirer of Millet’s portraits, and his early painting The Potato Eaters (1885) is seen as a signal of that, though it lacks Millet’s vision of acceptance and dignity. Not having Millet’s agricultural background and sympathies, van Gogh does not quite see his subjects in the same way. Vincent preferred bright colors and sunshine, blue skies, sunflowers, and cornfields, rather than backbreaking labor and the soft light or gloom of the potato fields in the north. So, he headed to Arles in Provence, hoping to start an artists’ commune like that at Barbizon, while also escaping from the cholera of Paris.
Van Gogh’s The Red Vineyard was painted near Arles before he became disenchanted with both the area and the company of Gauguin, who had eventually agreed to join him there. Vincent began eating paint and pruned one of his ears, perhaps, some say, as a gift for a lady friend… And thus, understandably, he ended up in the local asylum at St-Remy, though he did continue to paint.
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In early 1890, van Gogh followed his brother Theo’s suggestion to move north to Auvers-sur-Oise, 20 miles (32 km) north of Paris, where he could find support from Dr Paul Gachet. Gachet was already an admirer of van Gogh’s work, with an interest in mental health, and he became the subject of one of the painter’s most famous portraits (1890).
Despite having sold only one painting, van Gogh produced more than 900 works in his ten-year career, including more than 70 in his last few months at Auvers. Several of these were versions of works by artists he admired—including Rembrandt, Millet, and Cézanne—as he searched for himself. But there was no silver bullet, only the very ordinary one with which he killed himself less than a year later.
A pipe dream
I daydream about a chest containing a few rolled-up canvases painted by Vincent during an unrecorded brief break in his journey to Auvers as he passed through Burgundy on his retreat from Provence. Passing within sight of the Beaujolais hills, might he not have seen other vineyards that inspired him there? A quiet, undiscovered region where he could stay a while and explore, before continuing north? Uncertain and indecisive, he may have missed that opportunity, then, angry with himself for having done so, disembarked at Mâcon. Or did he again stay on the train and alight finally at Chalon-sur-Saône? Exploring the town, he may have been attracted by the character, humor, and warmth of its inhabitants and decided to stay a while among the rolling hills and farms, the villages and vineyards. There would have been plenty of material here for him—forests and solitude, cornfields and Charolais cattle, without the same blazing Provençal sun all day, every day. A spring season was coming to refresh his eyes and rebuild his soul, to wash away his mind’s frailties.
He had plenty of life to live in the right place, with new unthought-of possibilities. I don’t think Bordeaux would have inspired him. Fairy-tale castles, wicked uncles, and ugly sisters did not interest him. But he would surely have liked the myth and mystery that pervade Burgundy if you know it well enough to sense them.
Could it have saved him from his depression, such a fresh start? Perhaps we can imagine a local aristocrat in Mercurey, feeling the need for views of his estate with which to decorate his walls, offering Vincent a small stipend for a few months, along with a small cottage, a sanctuary overlooking vineyards enclosed by stone walls, a church’s bell not far away, and hills all around him.
Perhaps this conservative landowner, having expected gentle, classic, bucolic landscapes in return, was disappointed, even shocked, by the paintings he received and sent Vincent on his way, dispatching the unsigned canvases to his château’s cellar. Perhaps they rest there still, nameless in the darkness, gathering dust.
Could Vincent, realizing he was happy among the vines and their carers, then have disembarked next at Beaune to try again? Beaune, after all, was home to the négociants, the winemaking power brokers who had the largesse to patronize the arts and enhance their reputations. A short walk in a straight line from the station would have led him straight to the front door of Bouchard Père & Fils. Surely a winemaking patron would not have been difficult to find? Could it be that M Pinault already has some of Vincent’s efforts tucked away?
This, of course, is just a pipe dream of how Vincent might have prospered if only he’d stuck to painting vineyards. I’m not sure he will have been a morning person, but we can imagine his reaction on trudging up the vineyard paths on the great Hill of Corton in the half-light before dawn and glancing over his shoulder for his first sight of Mont Blanc’s silhouette, glowing pink more than 125 miles (200km) beyond Ladoix’s smoking chimneys below. Indeed, this is a view made more mystical and miraculous by its sudden disappearance in the morning haze.
A note on the images
In these days of AI, I should reassure readers that it was not used to create the images here, which result instead from my use of Photoshop on photographs taken by me. You could call it manipulation, but where is the dividing line between that and self-expression? Is the actuality of an image essential, or might we not also treat it as a fairy tale? I now prefer these images over the original photographs.
If we consider Turner or van Gogh, they sought to represent not reality but, rather, their reactions to what they saw. Who goes to an art gallery hoping for only factual information rather than an opening of the mind and other perspectives on the world? Van Gogh’s perspective arose from his restless and troubled mind. He was not, as Millet was, a communicator, a translator of everyday realities. Ahead of his time, he was a disrupter of the aesthetics of his day, the inventor of a new language that did not sell because no one understood it. Only when abstract art removed the necessity to identify, to understand, would his genius finally be recognized.
