In a letter to his sister Wil in 1887, Vincent van Gogh comes straight to the point: 'I, for one, feel the need for a really good laugh above all else.'

A Tile Factory

A Tile Factory 1888

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)

In pursuit of this much-needed change of mood, not long after writing to his sister Van Gogh left the heavy gloom of Paris, a place he said made him feel like a tired cab-horse about to be put out to pasture. He headed south and in February 1888 reached the small town of Arles in Provence.

Over the next two years he would produce an extraordinary body of work inspired by his new surroundings – paintings and drawings that articulated a deep desire for company, if not from his friends, then from the old writers he held so dear. Many of these works are currently on display at The National Gallery in London as part of the breathtaking exhibition 'Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers'.

A Wheatfield, with Cypresses

A Wheatfield, with Cypresses 1889

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

The National Gallery, London

The written word was a vital resource for Van Gogh – he would recommend a list of novels to his family and friends just as readily as he would reel off a list of his favourite paintings and drawings – and there is one series of landscapes he produced during this sojourn in Arles where his passion for art and literature coalesce: the drawings at Montmajour.

La Crau seen from Montmajour

La Crau seen from Montmajour

1888, pencil, pen, reed pen & ink on paper by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

Raised high above the plains known as La Crau, Montmajour was a hilltop area north of Arles defined by the ruins of a medieval abbey, wild orchards and tree-lined rocky paths. Van Gogh's drawing activity at this once holy site took on its own religiosity – the artist returned no less than fifty times to study the area – culminating in a series of large-scale reed pen drawings which are given their own room in the exhibition.

The exhibition attributes Van Gogh's interest in the site to the fact that it 'put him in mind of places mentioned in his favourite novels.' More than that, the drawings of Montmajour are said to have been inspired by one novel in particular: The Sin of Abbé Mouret (1875) by Émile Zola.

Zola's novel tells the story of the young priest Serge Mouret who, having fallen into serious illness and amnesia due to self-neglect, restores himself by roaming through the Eden-like paradise of Le Paradou with his lover Albine, seeking a forbidden tree. The novel must have resonated with Van Gogh, who was seeking restoration after a sequence of failed romances and the abandonment of his decision to become a preacher. And it is in his Montmajour series where Zola's work is staged in surprising, joyful ways.

La Crau from Montmajour, France

La Crau from Montmajour, France

1888, reed & quill pen and brown ink, over black chalk & graphite by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

La Crau from Montmajour, considered to be the last drawing of the Montmajour series and now in the British Museum's collection, is a fitting place to start an exploration of Van Gogh's engagement with literary figuration. Two roaming figures at the centre of the composition recall the escapades of the central lovers in Book II of Zola's novel. A Trunk of a Tree provides a further allusion to Serge and Albine who, in this drawing, appear to have located the forbidden tree standing within its trunk.

A Trunk of a Tree

A Trunk of a Tree

1888, pen & sepia ink on buff paper by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

The tree, whose lines of bark double as the bodies of the two lovers bring together Zola's writing and Van Gogh's own thoughts on landscape drawing, expressed to his brother Theo in an 1881 letter: 'If one draws a pollard willow as if it were a living being, which after all is what it is, then the surroundings follow almost by themselves, provided only that one has focused all one's attention on that particular tree and not rested until there was some life in it.'

But Van Gogh's interest in drawing the landscape around Montmajour reaches far beyond a desire to illustrate Zola's plot. The drawings reveal an alignment with Zola's way of thinking and writing about landscape as an encounter with humanity. A little further down that same letter to his sister, Van Gogh's search for laughter develops into a search for a portrait in a landscape: 'I'm always on the lookout for the same thing – a portrait, a landscape, a landscape and a portrait.'

In his drawing The Rock of Montmajour, Van Gogh finds a visual articulation of the same laughing landscape of rocks, paths, trees and bushes Zola describes in Abbé Mouret: 'And what a happy place it was for this first escapade! A den of leaves, full of excellent hiding places. Paths on which it was impossible to stay serious, with such gourmet laughter falling from the hedges.'

The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees

The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees

1888, pencil, pen, reed pen, brush & ink on paper by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

In Van Gogh's drawing, we discover a pathway similarly incapable of staying serious as it becomes the access bridge to a portrait of a gently smiling face that emerges from the perilous rocks. Either side of the nasal path, the clumps of grass in the hollow of the rocks form two eyes and a sequence of pen strokes denoting the same type of grass at the bottom of the drawing allows the viewer to pull out a mouth emerging from the cleared, open path. The drawing marks an intersection of Van Gogh's own writing with Zola's.

Conjuring 'the balustrade of rocks that began just there to climb to the horizon' in Zola's Paradou, the drawing makes literal a piece of advice Van Gogh offers his sister: 'But by and large I muddle along steering clear of the rocks. "If you can't be strong, be clever," is a motto you and I, with our constitutions, should take to heart. Incidentally, work, when it does go well, helps a great deal.'

In Olive Trees, Montmajour, Van Gogh continues his walk through the trees with Zola. Here, he uses the same marks and figures to fulfil a wish he expressed in his letters just months earlier: 'to do a Provence orchard of tremendous gaiety.'

Olive Trees, Montmajour

Olive Trees, Montmajour

1888, pencil, reed pen, brown & black ink on Whatman paper by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

On the far side of the drawing, an area of darker strokes demarcates a kindly grandfather tree laden with the treats of Van Gogh's pen, whose eyes emerge from swirling patterns of leaves either side of a bold brown tree trunk. Beside this older head stands a succession of lighter, bushy trees which, matching Zola's description, are 'simply having the time of their life.' Van Gogh empties areas of the paper to allow a laughing tongue to stretch out of the rocks, forming another path on which it is impossible to stay serious.

Two bold crows towards the top of the composition are stood down from their well-brought-up positions as harbingers of death, forming instead a pair of joyful eyes above a pair of trees which, in their diagonal synchrony, italicise themselves like Zola's vines which 'darted off again in a further outburst of even louder laughter.'

Van Gogh presents a treescape which finds no shortage of ways to propel itself out of the barren rocks of melancholy, with laughter, in the company of the 'ravaged heads of the grand old men of the orchard' who had 'a touch of drunkenness.'

In Hill with the Ruins of Montmajour, Van Gogh contemplates the man-made structures of his surroundings as two distant figures holding a parasol survey the abbey ruins.

Hill with the Ruins of Montmajour

Hill with the Ruins of Montmajour

1888, ink, chalk & pencil on paper by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

Extending his translation of Zola's description of the 'grand old men of the orchard,' he entombs human figures and faces in the rocks surrounding the former site of worship.

The huge rock dominating the foreground of the composition forms a headstone where the profile of several smaller faces are inscribed. The ruins of the abbey itself hold a few of these figures in their windows which tower over the landscape reaching out to Arles. The drawing is a testament to Van Gogh's long-held belief that 'when I do landscapes there will always be something of the figure in them.'

The sweeping landscape drawing View of Arles from Montmajour, intended as the first of this epic figurative series, seems a fitting place to end.

View of Arles from Montmajour

View of Arles from Montmajour

1888, drawing by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

Van Gogh, having drawn out the poetics of his favourite writers in his other drawings, now casts them out from their rocky tombs and sets them sailing on the mistral over Arles. 'Drawing is becoming more and more a passion with me, a passion just like that of the sailor for the sea,' he wrote to Theo in 1882.

 

 

The Montmajour drawings reveal the close relationship between drawings and words that Van Gogh felt all his life, where specific lines and phrases are continually loved and held dear by their reader, and then repurposed into a new graphic type. Turning tree trunks into lovers, rocks into tongues, crows into eyes, and clouds into flying poets, Van Gogh fulfils the letter to his sister – making sure his drawings at Montmajour have a really good laugh above all else.

Edward Richards, writer

'Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers' is at The National Gallery, London, until 19th January 2025

This content was funded by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation

Further reading

Vincent van Gogh and Ronald de Leeuw (ed.), The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Penguin, 1997

Émile Zola, The Sin of Abbé Mouret, Oxford World's Classics, 2017