Page 491 - The Secret Museum

Vincent to Theo written in chalk. There is one stray sheet, which the artist tore out in

order to write a note to his brother announcing his arrival in the city.

After Paris, van Gogh set off to the south of France, to Arles, hoping to see an
echo of the countryside he’d fallen in love with in Japanese woodblock prints; on his
way, he said he kept looking ‘to see if it was Japanese yet’. When he arrived, he
thought the people in Arles were like ‘creatures from another world’, including the
‘priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros’.

One of these creatures was named Madame Jeanne Calment. She lived in Arles
her whole life, and ended up breaking records: living for 122 years and 164 days,
until 1997. She rode her bicycle until she was 100 years old. When asked the secret

of her long life, she said she was always very calm, like her name. ‘I dream, I think, I
go over my life,’ she said. ‘I never get bored.’

According to a legend, she met van Gogh when she was 13. He came into her
uncle’s shop in 1888. She found him to be ‘dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable’.
She could remember selling him coloured pencils. Perhaps he sketched her.

Van Gogh had been lonely, and hoped to create a collective of artists, living
together in Arles. Paul Gauguin came to join him. Van Gogh painted several versions
of Sunflowers, the series of paintings of bright, wilting, yellow and brown flowers,
while waiting for his friend to arrive.

The two artists lived together in the Yellow House, and a painting of sunflowers
hung in Gauguin’s room there. Gauguin even painted van Gogh painting sunflowers,

in The Painter of Sunflowers. In a letter to Theo, van Gogh wrote of Sunflowers, ‘It
is a kind of painting that rather changes in character, and takes on a richness the
longer you look at it. Besides, you know, Gauguin likes them extraordinarily. He said
to me, among other things – “That … it’s … the flower” … You know that the peony
is Jeannin’s, the hollyhock belongs to Quost, but the sunflower is somewhat my own.’

Having never sold a painting in his life, at that moment, van Gogh would never
have conceived of a time when his sunflowers would be instantly recognizable
across the planet.

The artistic dream didn’t work out in Arles: the artists argued and, famously, van
Gogh cut off his ear. (It has also been argued that Gaugin cut it off when the two were
arguing.) The residents of Arles wrote a petition asking that the ‘fou roux’ – the mad

redhead – be evicted from the Yellow House. Van Gogh moved into an asylum,
continuing to paint there, and then ended up in Auvers-sur-Oise, where, months later,
aged 32, he shot himself.

The final sketchbook has a linen jacket, a tie to keep it closed and a pocket at the
back, which contains the business card of E. Walpole Brooke, a painter, who had
lived in Japan and with whom van Gogh went out walking. Perhaps they discussed
Japanese art and nature – the subjects that fascinated them both.

There are two sketches of sunflowers in the final book. One shows 16 sunflowers