VAN GOGH AND RAILWAYS

We have already seen that Van Gogh had, like Monet, included a railway bridge as a subject in his painting Bridge at Asnieres (left) in 1887 while living in Paris. He moved south to live in Arles in 1888; within the city walls there remained the large Roman arena and the ancient church of St.Trophime among picturesque narrow streets. But there was a new Arles, a direct consequence of the coming of the railway. The poet Lamartine, a hero of the 1848 revolution, was determined that Arles should receive some share of the new industrial progress going on elswhere. He had succeeded in getting not only a railhead at Arles but also a locomotive centre for the south with rolling-stock factories employing a thousand craftsmen.

Van Gogh included these railways as important features in three paintings out of the many he produced during his stay in Arles. These included the distant view of a locomotive puffing steam, hauling a train over a viaduct, to the right of his house in the famous The Yellow House (Sept. 1888). In Le Train Bleu ou les Moyettes a locomotive hauling a long train of goods wagons (right) is seen through the trees in a park as it crosses the massive embankment that carries the rail track into the centre of Arles. The two tiny black figures walking along the road below the short bridge lend scale to the height of the embankment.

In another painting, Les Moissonneurs, (left), the main subject is a vast golden cornfield extending into the distance with, in the foreground, cut corn and some stooks with two harvesters. Across the top of the painting he reveals how the cornfield extends right up to the industrial suburbs and the railway line. A long black train races at high speed, indicated by the low plume of steam streaming back horizontally from the stack of the locomotive. The red-roofed factories on the left are the railway workshops with their tall smoking chimneys contrasting with the old church towers on the right.

In 1890 Van Gogh returned to Auvers, a village to the northwest of Paris close to the railway line which followed the valley of the river Oise. Among the many wonderful paintings he produced in his short period there was the Paysage avec Charrette et Train, June, 1890, (right). This is a serene panoramic view across a wide vista of cultivated fields, which extend across the plains surrounding Auvers. The scene, almost entirely in a range of greens, is bisected horizontally by a sand-coloured lane extending from white-walled red-roofed farm buildings on the extreme left and right. On this empty lane, almost in the centre, is the small black horse and cart, with the flash of its red wheels.

The 'lines' of growing vegetables, crops, and field boundaries converge to a 'vanishing point' near the top centre, bringing the eye to the 'shock' of the intrusion into this pastoral scene of a long train of passenger coaches horizontally spanning the whole picture. From the stack of the locomotive on the right-hand edge extends the great plume of white steam, stretching backwards as expanding spherical clouds, portraying very accurately the 'puffing' discharge of bursts of steam. The strong sense of the train's speed is in sharp contrast to the leisurely pace of the isolated horse and cart.

The following Sunday, after completing this picture Van Gogh travelled on this train to Paris. He had been worried about the financial situation of his beloved brother Theo, but far from being reassured he returned to Auvers more disturbed. Two weeks later in July he painted his last two paintings, Crows over the Wheat Fields, and The Plains of Auvers under a Stormy Sky, which are intense in colour and brushwork, full of foreboding.

Many who have written about Van Gogh's life even consider that it was while working on Crows over the Wheatfield that he shot himself. But none of them have commented on the possible significance of his inclusion in this preceding painting, only a few weeks earlier, of the train to Paris. Did it symbolise to him his linkage to Theo, a lifeline in case the insanity he was dreading was about to recur? With hindsight, did he also, suffering loneliness in Arles so distant from Paris, include the railway trains in his Arles paintings as symbolic links to Theo on whom he depended so much for his frequent letters coming to him on the mail trains and his life-line back to Paris?