Page 50

"Yew trees had two common associations - they were grown in cemeteries and, even when old, they had the power to throw out new shoots. Thus, they suggested both death and regeneration. Which, if either, was it here?"

"There were funeral cypresses on the horizon, and the wintry light in the picture was very far from the ecstatic blaze of summer Sower, in which the sun flooded the world with gold."

Page 48

"The work that Gauguin had brought back from the Caribbean made a huge impression on Vincent, most of all a picture of four black women gathering mangoes, with a band of deep-blue sea in the background."

Page 42

In a letter to his art-dealing brother, Theo, Van Gogh described the interior of the nearby restaurant by likening it to The Spinners by Diego Velázquez:

"So it already has a Velázquez gray - like in the Spinners - and even the very narrow, very fierce ray of sunlight through a blind, like the core that slands across Velázquez's picture, is not wanting. Little tables of course, with white cloths...I don't know if I describe it clearly enough for you, but it's here, and it's pure Velázquez."

Page 35

This is Emile Bernard's painting, Breton Women in a Meadow, which Gauguin brought with him to the Yellow House in his baggage trunk.


"Within a week or two, it seemed, Gauguin went one better and painted Vision of the Sermon."

Page 20

"I have tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime." Someone who saw the Night Cafe, Vincent reflected, would conclude that its painter had full-blown delirium tremens - and it was true that Vincent's consumption of drink was sometimes out of control.

Page 15

From the book:


"In my yellow room," [Van Gogh] wrote six years later, using a little poetic license:


sunflowers with purple eyes stand out on a yellow background; they bathe their stems in a yellow pot on a yellow table. In a corner of the painting, the signature of the pater: Vincent. And the yellow sun that passes through the yellow curtains of my room floods all this fluorescence with gold; and in the morning upon awakening from my be, I imagine that all this smells very good.

Pages 4 & 6

The self-portraits the two artists exchanged before moving into the Yellow House in Arles. The significance of Gauguin's title, Les Miserables, was deliberate. "As he saw it, Jean Valjean - oppressed by society but full of love and power - was just like an Impressionist artist of the day."