Van Goghs Six Large Drawings of and from MontmajourJohn A. Walker (copyright 2009)

Five kilometres north of the town of Arles in Provence, close by the road to Fontvielle, is a rocky hill called Montmajour on which is perched the ruins of a medieval monastery church and a fortified tower. The hill of the Abbey of Montmajour was a favourite spot of Vincent van Gogh during the period he spent in Arles. We learn from his letters that he visited it in March, May and July 1888. Sometimes he went alone and sometimes with male companions. The hill was within walking distance of his studio, the Yellow House, and its slopes afforded excellent panoramic views of La Crau, the plain through which the river Rhne meanders towards the Mediterranean.

In March van Goghs first visit to Montmajour was by way of a reconnaissance whereas in May and July he undertook two campaigns of drawings while surviving on a diet of bread and milk. In May, for instance, he completed eight drawings: two depicting the ruined Abbey and six depicting views from the hill with rocks and bushes in the

foregrounds. Six of the drawings employed a horizontal format and two a vertical format. These drawings were executed with pencils, reed and quill pens using a purple aniline ink which has now faded to a light brown colour and in at least three cases the drawings are so faded they are hardly visible. (Photographs of some of the faded drawings taken decades ago give a better impression of their original condition.) Looking south-eastward from Montmajour, van Gogh could address himself to the fields of La Crau - the very fields in which he was to paint so many scenes of sowing and harvesting - among which appears a long, low, rocky hill called La Montagne des Cordes (Mountain of String) resembling an upturned boat or stranded whale. This hill is famous for having a Neolithic rock cut tomb called Grottee des Fes (Fairy Grotto) and was depicted in the drawing View of La Crau.

View of La Crau. Essen: Museum Folkwang.

Since it can be seen in the backgrounds of several of the Arles landscapes, it is useful for establishing the sites where van Gogh set up his easel. A later drawing - La Crau vue prise Mont Major(sic), (inscription in the bottom left-hand corner) - executed in July 1888, features the tail end of the Montagne des Cordes in the top left-hand corner.

Vincent van Gogh, La Crau vue prise Mont Major(sic), July 1888, reed pen, black chalk. 490 x 610 mm. Amsterdam: Vincent van Gogh Museum.

Towards the end of May van Gogh posted seven drawings to his brother Theo in Paris for possible inclusion in an exhibition. Then he executed a larger drawing depicting the view looking south from Montmajour towards the town of Arles with its serrated towers, spires, factory

chimneys and Roman amphitheatre on the horizon. He described this drawing - View of Arles from Montmajour - in letter to his artist friend A. H. Koning written on 29th May:

I have just finished a drawing of a cluster of straight pines on a rock, seen from the top of a hill. Behind this foreground a perspective of meadows, a road with poplars, and, in the far distance the town. The trees are very dark against the sunlit meadow I did it with thick reed pens on thin Whatman paper, and in the background I worked with a quill for the finer strokes. Letter 498a.

Vincent van Gogh, View of Arles from Montmajour, 29 May 1888. Reed pen and ink drawing, 486 x 600 mm. Oslo: National Gallery.

In early July van Gogh returned to Montmajour to execute a second cycle of five drawings: one depicted the Abbey ruins and a huge rock;

Landscape with Cloister at Mont Majour, July 1888, Reed pen and ink, 483 x 598 mm, Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum Museum for Art and History.

Olive and Pine trees at Montmajour, 6-12 July 1888, Pencil, reed pen and ink. 48 x 60 cm. Tournai: Muse de Beaux-Arts.

Two other drawings were close ups in the sense that they focused on the trees and rocks of Montmajour. However, the one illustrated below does have a distant view of Arles on the horizon on the left.

The rock of Montmajour with Pine Tress , 6-8 July 1888. Reed pen and ink drawing on wove paper, 49.1 x 61 cm, Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum.

The last two - the most impressive of all (in Vincents opinion also) depicted views from the hill. Around 13th July Vincent wrote to Theo as follows:

I have just sent off to you by post a roll containing five big pen drawings. You have a sixth of that series from Mont Majour - a group of very dark pines and the town of Arles in the background In my opinion the two views of the Crau and of the country on the banks of the Rhne are the best things I have done in pen and ink. Letter 509

I have already mentioned one of the panoramic drawings from the second series - La Crau vue prise Mont Major(sic) - the other, now in the British Museum, merits an extended analysis. From a vantage point on Montmajour Vincent looked northwest at the plain immediately adjoining the banks of the Rhne, which is traversed by a road and a narrow-gauge railway (linking Arles to Fontveille); on the horizon to the right are the foothills of the Alps, Les Alpilles. In the bottom right-hand corner of his drawing of this view is an inscription which serves as a title, La Campagne du ct des bords du Rhne vue de Mont Majour(The country bordering the Rhone viewed from Montmajour).

La Campagne .., July 1888, Reed pen and ink, black chalk. 487 x 607 mm. London: British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings.

The inscription supplies the precise geographical location of the scene. It implies that van Gogh conceived of the drawing as a topographical record of a particular place, but even without it, an exact location could be deduced from the amount of descriptive detail which the drawing itself embodies. The drawing also depicts a particular moment in the

year: harvest time. In other words, there is an isomorphism between van Goghs representation of the terrain and the land itself. The accuracy of the drawing can be demonstrated by the fact that a map constructed from it would closely match a large scale map of the area near Montmajour. However, this does not mean that the drawing is a naturalistic simulacra of the view, because the independent reality of the means of representation - the emphatic dots and strokes of the pen (indexical signs influenced by the pointillist technique favoured by Seurat and Signac) - is such that the difference between them and the subject depicted is always clearly marked. In this respect van Gogh complies with Theodor Adornos aphorism: Language becomes a measure of truth only when we are conscious of the non-identity of an expression with what we mean. (1)

Montmajour, which centuries ago was surrounded by lagoons and marshland, dominates the land to the east of the Rhne and the routes running north to south. No doubt it was for this reason that it was originally selected as a site for the Abbey and the fortified tower. In other words, the views which it affords were once synonymous with political, economic, and military power and control. Speaking more

generally, the birds-eye viewpoint which a hill, a watchtower, a ferris wheel, or a satellite provides is one symbolic of knowledge and/or omnipotence. Height and distance produce a literal perspective but also a sense of perspective: the details and partial views experienced at ground level fall into place and are perceived as elements belonging to a gigantic patchwork, a coherent totality which is the earth. From a height the world resembles the models or globes with which children love to play. Here is the source of pleasure associated with the birds-eye viewpoint. This pleasure is directly linked to the unrestricted character of the gaze of the viewer which for once is able to range freely through space across the landscape to the farthest horizon. Of course, this latter point does not apply to the drawings in which trees or rocks block or partially block the viewers gaze.

In a letter to Theo written in May Vincent explains one of the reasons the views attracted him: The contrast between the wild romantic foreground, and the distant perspective, wide and still, with horizontal lines sloping into the chain of the Alps ... is very striking. (2) This contrast between the near and the far can also serve as a metaphor for the difference between the present and the future, the mundane position

we now occupy and the transcendent horizon to which we aspire.

Although van Gogh was at various times influenced by English, French and Japanese art, and although he worked outside of Holland for many years, he remained, in important respects, a Dutch painter. Provence appealed to him largely because it reminded him of Holland with its flat landscape, intensive agriculture, and canals spanned by white wooden drawbridges. His birds-eye views of La Crau can be related, therefore, to the national tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting established by such artists as Philips Koninck, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Meindert Hobbema, and also to the Flemish landscape tradition of the previous century associated with the Weltbilder (world pictures) of Joachim Patinir, as well as Pieter Bruegel the Elder's paintings of the seasons. As the numerous references to the works of Dutch painters in his letters makes clear, van Gogh was fully conscious of this art-historical heritage while he was engaged in producing his drawings.

In many of the seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes the skies dominate the composition. Van Gogh, on the other hand, gives priority

to the land. The land occupies most of the picture area: in most of the drawings a clear sky is represented with absolute economy by leaving the paper at the top of the drawing untouched. He exploits the elevated vantage point of Montmajour in order to tip up the land towards the picture plane. Even so, a sense of aerial perspective and recession in depth is achieved by the remarkably simple device of progressively decreasing the size of the pen strokes from foreground to background. (3)

The British Museum drawing consists of three main spatial zones close, intermediate, and far - differentiated from one another by the road at the foot of the hill, a row of trees and bushes in the middle distance, and by variously sized pen strokes. Thus, when the viewer gazes at Vincents drawing, the gradated spatial structure of the original scene is reconstituted. La campagne is a complex, carefully constructed, and finished drawing. There is nothing sketchlike or perfunctory about it. From his letters we learn that Vincents intention was to produce a cycle of six large drawings (all approximately 19 x 24 inches, or 49 x 60 cm in size) which would serve as an epitome of a very beautiful corner of Provence. (4) This series of drawings using Montmajour as an

observation tower prompts the question was van Goghs aim to produce a complete 360 degree panorama of the surrounding countryside? One must answer no, because the drawings do not match exactly and there are gaps between them. Nevertheless, as indicated by maps of the area which have been constructed by van Gogh scholars to show the vistas depicted in the various drawings, van Gogh's intention was certainly to provide a systematic documentation of La Crau in approximate concordance with the four main points of the compass. (5)

The six large drawings of Montmajour and La Crau were not, like other van Gogh drawings, preparatory studies for paintings or sketches done as records of paintings; instead, they were conceived as works of art in their own right. He signed them and hoped that his art dealer brother Theo in Paris would be able to sell them: If Thomas [Georges Thomas, a Parisian art dealer with a gallery at 43 Boulevard Malesherbes] should happen to want them, he cannot have them for less than 100 francs each. (6)

It seems that in May and July 1888, Van Gogh found drawing both cheaper and easier than painting in oils. Painting out-of-doors in

Provence during the summer months was made physically difficult by the heat, the strong Mistral wind, and by clouds of mosquitoes. From his letters we can see the intimate link which existed between writing and drawing; he alternated between the two with the greatest of ease. Within the drawing La campagne, van Goghs pen strokes - graphic equivalents of the firm brushwork of the paintings - are extremely varied. The drawing is virtually a lexicon of representational marks, each serving different pictorial functions and some several

simultaneously. For example, one kind of dot can signify the texture of earth or crops, the distance from the observer, a kind of life-force or energy, the tone and even the colour of a field. Carl Nordenfalk has commented upon the speckled appearance of van Gogh drawings: the changing character of these patterns conveys an impression of diversity corresponding to the colour impression of a painting. The principle is the same as that of the heraldic method, where the different principal colours are indicated by means of punctuations and line patterns in different directions. (7) La campagne was executed with reed and fine quill pens with dark and light brown ink over pencil outlines on wove paper. Vincent made the reed pens himself from the reeds which flourish in the canals around Arles. The pleasant sepia tint of the ink

now serves to evoke the colour of the soil. However dense the pen strokes, they do not obliterate the colour of the paper. As in the watercolours of Czanne and the work of Chinese painters, the white ground of the paper is a positive factor which plays an important role in the final result.

The letters written to Theo and to his painter friend Emile Bernard in the summer of 1888 reveal the kind of thoughts and feelings which informed La campagne. To Theo, Vincent wrote:

The fascination that these huge plains have for me is very strong, so that I felt no weariness, in spite of the really wearisome circumstances, mistral and mosquitoes. If a view makes you forget these little annoyances, it must have something in it. You will see, however, that there is no attempt at effect. At first sight it is like a map, a strategic plan as far as the execution goes. Besides I walked there with a painter [who was probably the Danish artist Christian Mourier-Petersen]; and he said, There is something that would be boring to paint. Yet I went fully fifty times to Mont Majour to look at this flat landscape, and was I wrong? I went for a walk there with someone else who was not a painter,

and when I said to him, Look, to me that is as beautiful and as infinite as the sea; he said and he knows the sea -

For my part I like this better than the sea, because it is no less infinite, and yet you feel that it is inhabited. (8)

To Bernard, he wrote:

I have done some large pen-and-ink drawings. Two: an immense stretch of flat country, a birds-eye view of it seen from the top of a hill - vineyards and fields of newly ripened wheat. All this multiplied in endless repetitions, stretching away toward the horizon like the surface of a sea, bordered by the little hills of the Crau. It does not have a Japanese look, and yet it is really the most Japanese thing I have done; a microscopic figure of a labourer, a little train running across the wheatfield - this is all the animation there is in it. Listen, one of the first days after I came to this spot I talked to a painter friend of mine, who said, How boring it would be to do this. I didn't say anything, but I thought it so astounding that I didnt even have the strength to give that

idiot a piece of my mind. And I am still going there, over and over again. All right! I have done two drawings of it - of that flat landscape, where there is nothing but ... Infinity eternity. All right! While I was drawing, there came along a fellow who is not a painter but a soldier. I said to him, Does it amaze you that I think this as beautiful as the sea? Now this fellow knew the sea. No, it doesn't amaze me, he said, that you think this as beautiful as the sea, but I myself think it even more beautiful than the ocean; because it is inhabited. Which of the two spectators was more of an artist, the first or the second, the painter or the soldier? Personally I prefer the soldiers eye - am I right or not? (9)

The soldier to whom van Gogh refers was undoubtedly a Second Lieutenant in the Zouaves named Paul-Eugne Milliet. (10) Van Gogh painted his portrait in the autumn of 1888.

Vincent van Gogh, The lover - Portrait of Second Lieutenant Milliet, Late September/early October 1888. Oil

on canvas, 60 x 49 cm. Otterlo: Krller-Mller Museum.

Milliet was an amateur artist and van Gogh gave him drawing lessons using the perspective frame made from wood and thread with which he himself had mastered perspective and which he was still using to make studies in Provence. The drawings of La Crau testify to a renewed interest in the problems of perspective and the representation of deep space.

In many of van Goghs drawings and paintings there are deformations of space and perspective which have provoked lengthy and highly technical debates amongst scholars as to their true nature, causes, and significance. (11) La campagne is unusually free of such deformations, apart, that is, from the cubistic way the railway train and the distant farmhouse are rendered (not all the lines which should reach a common vanishing point actually do so). On the whole, the drawing gives the impression of an almost textbook lesson in correct perspective. Could the fact that van Gogh was giving lessons in drawing to Milliet at this time have prompted him to execute a series of drawings as demonstration pieces? Close examination of the pencil underdrawing

shows no sign of the lines dividing up the perspective frame which we know van Gogh was fond of using. This does not mean, of course, that he could not have used it on Montmajour. When he was teaching himself to draw in Holland, he relied heavily on the advice of textbooks such as those written by Charles Bargue and Armand Cassagne. It is significant that in the summer of 1888 van Gogh was writing to Theo asking him to obtain a copy of a primer on the basics of drawing by Cassagne. No doubt Vincent wanted to show it to Milliet. Cassagne (1823-1907) was a Barbizon School painter and writer of instructional books for artists. The book Vincent was seeking was the A B C D of Drawing a text sold as part of Cassagnes Drawing for All (Le Dessin pour tous. Cours dexercices lmentaires et progressifs, Paris: A. Fouraut, n.d.), which had been published in 100 sections.

Van Goghs two letters reveal the familiar pattern of his thinking, that is, the metaphorical equations which he makes from the visible world, closely observed in all its material reality, to the sea, and then to the abstract idea of infinity-eternity. Van Gogh always sought to combine the concrete and the abstract, the perceptual and the conceptual; for him the outward appearances of the world were the means by which one

gains access to underlying, latent meanings, to the symbolic realm. For van Gogh, the land, the earth had a profound significance as the ground on which humanity stands. It is the source of daily sustenance, the material from which we spring and to which we return when we die. Hence the stress in the letters upon the land being inhabited. In the drawing there are a number of signs of human habitation. The land is not wild and untamed, it is land which has been intensively farmed for many years; on the right a man ploughs a field; in the middle distance a train passes through the landscape from left to right; in the foreground a small carriage passes from right to left; between the road and the railway two peasants are walking; and on the left near the horizon is a substantial farmhouse. Vincent places the two peasants at the centre point of the land mass of the drawing and he repeats this compositional device in the Vincent van Gogh Museum drawing by depicting a woman and man (a pair of lovers?) walking from left to right along a country path. (In the middle left distance there are also two tiny figures situated along the edge of a field.)

Given van Goghs penchant for symbolic meanings, it is not too farfetched to read the travelers passing through the landscape as

metaphorical equivalents of the life-journey from birth to death. (12) We too pass through the landscapes of the world and then disappear out of frame. What van Gogh also represents, of course, in the juxtaposition of walking figures, horse-drawn carriage, and railway train, are three modes of human transport; he contrasts the slow and the fast, the traditional and the modern. The land depicted by Vincent is something worked and traversed. And just as the peasants of Provence work upon and transform La Crau, so Vincent works upon and transforms his sheets of paper. Their respective tools are different: ploughs, harrows, sickles, etc., versus pens, ink, pencils and brushes, but their actions are similar. Just as the travelers traverse the land, Vincents pen strokes traverse the paper. It is the process of movement, transformation, and labour which the peasants, the travelers and the artist have in common; it is this which constitutes the solidarity between Vincent, the artist-intellectual, and the common people he represents.

Footnotes 1) Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, London: Macmillan, 1978, p. 74. 2) Letter no. 490, 19th May 1888, to Theo. The Complete Letters of

Vincent van Gogh, London: Thames & Hudson, 1958. The letters are now available via the Internet. 3) This point is made in the catalogue entry for the Van Gogh drawing in the exhibition catalogue Drawing, Technique and Purpose, London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1981, p. 12.

4) Letter no. 505, 8th July 1888, to Theo. On the grounds of subject matter and size, the six drawings in the series are 1) View of Arles from Montmajour, 29 May 1888, Oslo: National Gallery; 2) La Campagne .., July 1888, London: British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings; 3) La Crau vue prise Mont Major(sic), 11-12 July 1888, Amsterdam: Vincent van Gogh Museum; 4) Landscape with Cloister at Mont Majour, 1888, Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum Museum for Art and History; 5) Olive and Pine trees at Mont Majour, 1888, Tournai: Muse de Beaux-Arts; 6) The rock of Mont Majour with Pine Tress 68 July 1888. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum. The best source of published information about the drawings is the book by Marije Vellekoop, Roelie Zwikker ; with the assistance of Monique Hageman, Van Gogh Drawings Vol. 4: Arles, Saint-Rmy & Auvers-sur-Oise, London: Lund Humphries, 2007.

5) See, Een Panoramalandschap van van Gogh. C. Carroy, Bulletin Rijksmuseum 1962, no. 4, pp. 139-42, and A. Tellegen-Hoogendoorn, Geen Panoramalandschap bij van Gogh. Bulletin Rijksmuseum, 1964, no. 2, pp. 57-61. 6) Letter no. 509, c. 13th July 1888, to Theo. 7) Carl Nordenfalk, The Life and Work of Van Gogh, London: Elek, 1953, p. 145. 8) Letter no. 509, c. 13th July 1888, to Theo.

9) Letter no. 10, 15th July 1888, to Bernard.

10) See, Pierre Weiller, Nous avons retrouve le Zouave de van Gogh, il etait devenu lieutenant-colonel. Les Lettres Franaises, March, 1955, pp. 24-31. 11) See, for example, A. S. Wylie, An Investigation of the Vocabulary of Line in Vincent van Goghs Expression of Space. Oud Holland, LXXXV, no. 4, 1970, pp. 210-38; P. A. Heelan, Toward a New Analysis of the Pictorial Space of Vincent van Gogh. Art Bulletin, LIV, Dec. 1972, pp. 478-92; and J. L. Ward, A Reexamination of van Goghs Pictorial

Space. Art Bulletin, LVIII, Dec. 1976, pp. 593-604.

12) In justification of this reading, see van Goghs remarks in letter no. 506, c. 9th July 1888, to Theo: Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldnt the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.

(This is a revised and expanded version of an article first published in Master Drawings, XX (4), Winter 1982, pp. 380-85, plus plate 18. ) -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Postscript What, we may wonder, was the intended function of the landscape drawings? Throughout his career as an artist Vincent oscillated between the country and cities/towns. He regarded the country or nature as a cleaner, healthier, simpler less stressful place than noisy, crowded, complex and polluted urban areas and wanted his landscapes to act as

reminders of the fact for city dwellers. By bringing the rural outdoors into the urban indoors, his landscapes served to refresh the spirit of the urban viewer. In the case of the Arles period, Vincent lived in a provincial town and made excursions into the countryside and to the seaside (Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer); consequently, his work features urban as well as rural scenes plus some images that combine the two (for example, Arles seen in the background of harvest scenes). Vincent undoubtedly hoped that his landscapes - like those of the Impressionists - would appeal to urban collectors and so one can adduce a commercial motive for his strong commitment to the genre.

Griselda Pollock is a British feminist and social art historian who has written extensively on van Gogh. In her article On not seeing Provence: van Gogh and the landscape of consolation, 1888-9 in Framing France: The Representation of Landscape in France 1870-1914, ed. Richard Thomson, Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. 81-118, she argues that van Gogh did not see Provence because he was to some extent a foreign tourist visiting an exotic region and his Dutch origins meant that he viewed it through an optic of Dutch culture and painting. (Vincent also viewed Provence

through the optic of Japan, which he only knew through Japanese prints and novels about Japan.) I have also argued that Dutch art informed Vincents vision but no artist approaches a motif without some cultural and art-historical baggage. However, this does not prevent them from also responding empirically to the reality of the scene before them as they struggle to depict it via their chosen tools and medium. Hence my contention that there is truth value in Vincents representations of the land of Provence. Pollock also argues that Vincents Dutch vision was informed by memories of his youth, a nostalgia for the past, for a homeland of pictures that resulted in an idealised vision of a patriciate Holland rather than an accurate rendering of Provence in the 1880s. Hence her conclusion that he was not a realist but an art-historicist. (One wonders if Pollocks theory applies equally to the marines, townscapes, portraits and still lives of the Arles period?) Later, in 2004, Pollock expanded her argument as follows: despite his dependence on a given motif literally before him in order to paint, what he had always been painting had been memories of the North, or rather memories of home that were an amalgam of experience and acquired familiarity through art and fiction. Painting was always a way home from exile that was as much psychological as it

was sociological. van Gogh acknowledged that the actual landscapes in which he painted, sites around Aries for instance, were already memories. Here is the twist however: memories of pictures. Secondly, these pictures were already signs of an entire world, or shall I say of an ideological position that used an idealised past to signify a political critique of contemporary capitalist society. For example, onto the scenes of Provence that he encountered in 1888 van Gogh projected not only his memory of paintings by seventeenth century Dutch artists He felt himself transported by that visual recollection to the ordered society he imagined was represented by these painters of seventeenth century Holland because of the clarity of composition and disposition of elements their paintings achieved for their proposed spectator. Why? Behind this proclivity to identify local scenes with the contents of his imaginary museum, lay a deeper identification and dislocation that had been articulated in a critical letter written ten years before in 1880. So here we go backwards. This letter, LT 133, declares in various coded ways his decision to take up art as a new career. Writing to his brother, van Gogh declares that he longs for what he calls the homeland of pictures from which he has been exiled since he left the art dealing

profession that had allowed him to work with paintings and live in cities where he could see pictures in galleries and museums. His decision to take up a career in art is an attempted return to a patrie, a homeland, associated with and imagined through paintings. This is a powerful image. Van Gogh writes that far from that land, I am often homesick for the land of pictures. The act of making pictures, at first through drawing and only after three years through painting, is a means of travelling back to this land to assuage this heimweh, this homesickness, for what is held before him in his imaginary museum. The paintings, however, selected to fill this memoryland themselves represent the time of his childhood: they date from the mid-nineteenth century and thus are the images through which his sense of a childhood past is not remembered but recreated through the promptings of these paintings that provide an image for a sensation of lost home and past time. (Source: LAND2 : texts, The Homeland of Pictures: Reflections on van Gogh's Place Memories, http://www.land2.uwe.ac.uk/essay9.htm

Concerning Vincents attempt to be a modernist, Pollock argues that Vincents effort to depict the South in a modern manner by using vivid

colour schemes inspired by Delacroix prompted departures from reality. Vincent certainly speaks of arbitrary colours and exaggerations but he also often mentions the vividness of the colours he observes and points out that the very bright hues he is using will lessen in intensity over time as the pigments fade. Perhaps, therefore, his pictures are more realistic now than in the 1880s.

While Pollocks reasoning about the Dutch optic of Vincents landscapes is plausible, I still feel it underestimates the extent to which Vincent did record the visible and modern aspects of Provence; for example, railways, bullfights, brothels, factories and gas works, plus many of its inhabitants. He could easily have ignored these aspects and depicted only the ancient Roman monuments of Provence and picturesque rural subjects.

In an essay entitled Van Gogh in the South: Antimodernism and Exoticism in the Arlesian Paintings (in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the boundaries of Modernity; edited by Lynda Jessup, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, pp. 177-191) Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutnyski supports Pollocks arguments by maintaining that,

despite his modernist intentions, van Gogh was in certain respects antimodern and that his antimodernism was romanticised. As evidence he cites a letter in which Vincent wrote that he associated the land around Montmajour with knights and ladies returning from hawking. However, van Gogh was too much of a realist to generate pictures of medieval life as did the English painter Edward Burne-Jones. Even Jirat-Wasiutnyski admits that industry and commerce are not entirely absent from van Goghs Arlesian oeuvre. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------John A. Walker is a British painter and art historian with a longstanding interest in the life and work of van Gogh.