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Aries in 1888 was a torpid provincial town, as filthy and exotic-at least to a Parisian eye as North Africa. Van Gogh's first reactions to it describe a foreign country. "The Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlésiennes going to their first Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the people drinking absinthe, all seem to me creatures from another world." In fact, his stay there began the general pattern of migration southward that would be as obligatory for early modern French artists-Signac to Saint-Tropez, Matisse to Nice, Derain to Collioure-as a stint among the marbles of Rome had been to their 18th century forebears. Provence presented itself as a museum of the prototypes of strong sensation: blazing light, red earth, blue sea, mauve twilight, the flake of gold buried in the black depths of the cypress; archaic tastes of wine and olive, ancient smells of dust, goat dung and thyme, immemorial sounds of cicada and rustic flute-"O for a beaker full of the warm South!" In such places, color might take on a primary, clarified role. Far from the veils and nuances of Paris fog and Dutch rain, it would resolve itself into tonic declaration-nouns that stood for wellbeing. Such, at least, was Van Gogh's hope.
Vincent was ill when he arrived in Aries, jittery from booze, racked with smoker's cough. He had expected, curiously enough, that the place would look like one of the Japanese prints by Hokusai or Utamaro that had been circulating among avant-garde painters in Paris. In a way it did: the ground was covered with snow, like the top of Fuji. But soon it (and he) melted, and in his letters no less than in his paintings one sees the colors that sign his Arlesian period, the yellow, ultramarine and mauve. In the late spring, "the landscape gets tones of gold of various tints, green-gold, yellow-gold, pink-gold, and in the same way bronze, copper, in short starting from citron yellow all the way to a dull, dark yellow color like a heap of threshed corn. And this combined with the blue-from the deepest royal blue of the water to the blue of the forget-me-nots, cobalt . .." Some artists' letters are unrevealing about their work; others mythologize it. Van Gogh's correspondence was unique: no painter has ever taken his readers through the processes of his art so thoroughly, so modestly, or with such descriptive power.
The forms of the Arlesian landscape, its patchwork of fields and tree-lined roads, were already embedded in his Dutch background-"it reminds one of Holland: everything is flat, only one thinks rather of the Holland of Ruisdael or Hobbema than of Holland as it is"-but the color was like nothing in Van Gogh's previous life. Seeing his desire for "radical" color confirmed in the actual landscape gave him confidence. It affected even those paintings in which no landscape occurs, like the self-portrait of Vincent with a shaved head, gazing not at but past the viewer with an intensity (conferred by the unearthly pale malachite background) that verges on the radioactive.