Book sheds new light on Vincent van Gogh’s life and fellow inmates at St-Paul-de-Mausole asylum
A NEW book on Vincent van Gogh reveals details on the French asylum where the Dutch artist spent most of his last year of life.
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The asylum inmates screamed, howled and tore their straitjackets. Some erupted into sudden violence, threw their food around or simply languished in a torpor of depression.
These were the sad and desperate companions of Vincent van Gogh during most of the artist’s final year of life.
They are described for the first time in a new book about the mental asylum in the south of France where the legendary artist lived for a year before moving away and committing suicide two months later at Auvers-sur-Oise.
It has always been known that van Gogh was periodically beset by hallucinations and breakdowns, and that he committed himself to the asylum of St-Paul-de-Mausole, near Arles, in the south of France.
But it was only last year that a British van Gogh specialist called Martin Bailey heard about a certain ledger that was stored in the municipal archives of St-Remy-de-Provence, the closest town to the St-Paul asylum.
Bailey, a journalist, “rushed” to gain access to the ledger and found that it did indeed exist. It was the admissions register of the asylum, recording the arrivals and departures of inmates during the time that van Gogh lived there. It was bound in mottled paper and tied up with white ribbon.
Aside from recording the arrival of van Gogh himself, the ledger named many of the other unfortunates confined at the asylum by virtue of their debilitating and, back then, little understood mental health complaints.
Bailey cross-referenced the details in the ledger with information recorded by a former director of the asylum, and built up a picture of some of the 18 other men who shared the asylum of St-Paul with van Gogh. (Women lived in a separate wing.)
“I was shocked to discover quite how ill most of them were — and what a challenging environment this must have created for van Gogh,” Bailey writes in his book Starry Night: van Gogh At The Asylum.
“The artist, I now realised, was not exaggerating when he wrote that ‘one continually hears shouts and terrible howls as though of the animals in a menagerie’.”
Browsing through the names in the ledger, a terrible image of human suffering emerged. These were the men among whom van Gogh struggled with his own mental health.
Jean Revello, Bailey worked out, was 20 when he arrived at the asylum in May 1887. Revello was described as an “idiot”, a term then used for someone with a mental age of less than three years.
Revello had never learned to speak and was prone to acts of violence. He died in the asylum in 1932 aged 65, having been held there nearly 45 years.
Joachim Raineri was 26 and was “a true suicidal monomaniac”.
Another patient was a former lawyer who feared the secret police were after him, accusing him of being a pimp, a pederast, a thief and an assassin.
One patient was a Count who continually cried out after “my mistress”, and beat his chest with a piece of wood.
Henri Enrico was admitted two weeks after van Gogh. “Although not naming him, the artist wrote that this new arrival ‘breaks everything and shouts day and night’,” Bailey writes.
Other patients suffered from “frequent paroxysms of maniacal agitation”, melancholy and delirium.
One inmate suffered, like van Gogh, from “auditory hallucinations”.
“These hallucinatory noises could explain why van Gogh had earlier taken the terrible step of cutting off his left ear,” Bailey writes.
“He might well have done this in a desperate effort to silence the noises or words that he believed he was hearing.
“Although the fact that van Gogh had experienced auditory hallucinations is recorded in the asylum medical records, I feel that insufficient attention has been focused on this evidence.”
Bailey has written four other books about van Gogh, as well as curating two exhibitions devoted to the Dutch artist’s work. But, considering the desperate state of the artist’s co-inmates, he found himself amazed by van Gogh’s extraordinary feat in producing almost one painting for every day of reasonable health he enjoyed during his year at the asylum. About 150 paintings from that period survive, while Bailey surmises that more than a dozen have been lost.
For Bailey, the painting that is most emblematic of van Gogh’s year at the asylum is the famous Starry Night, which hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
“Starry Night represents a vibrant testament to the artist’s struggle to overcome the challenges of living and working in an insane asylum,” Bailey writes.
In his book, Bailey describes St-Remy-de-Provence as “an enchanting cluster of buildings nestled together amid cobbled alleyways”.
Surrounding the town are olive groves, vineyards and cypresses. With its backdrop of picturesque hills, and its clear light, St Remy was just the ticket for an artist who loved colour.
Van Gogh’s painted legacy proves that he did find beauty and inspiration in St-Paul and its surrounds. But Bailey’s research has added grim details to the nature of van Gogh’s experience of life at the asylum. Today, after being modernised, St-Paul-de-Mausole is still a hospital for the mentally ill.
Starry Night: Van Gogh At The Asylum, by Martin Bailey, Four Winds Press, RRP$49.99
Originally published as Book sheds new light on Vincent van Gogh’s life and fellow inmates at St-Paul-de-Mausole asylum
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