MICROSTORY OF ART ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM Daubigny Revisited (Picture: vangoghgallery.com)

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DAUBIGNY REVISITED

Daubigny Revisited

What a precisely formulated drawing it is! Unlikely that Van Gogh produced this after one of the two well known – but mediocre – oil paintings of the very same subject (setting the smaller detail study aside): Daubigny’s garden at Auvers-sur-Oise. The format, and therefore the composition is much different (the drawing is almost 1 x 3! – while the two paintings are more or less double cubes); there is a bench, and there are three chairs in the drawing – but no table (as in the paintings)! There is a trunk, which is lacking in both paintings! There is the dynamic Van Gogh, building a picture by energetic strokes, and not a searching, powerless hand with no direction.
›Maybe you take a look at this‹, the self-critical Vincent van Gogh did write – in his last letter – to his brother Theo, ›it is one of my most purposeful pictures‹.
No, while at the moment there might be no certainty, I do not really believe anymore in either of the two painted versions (Ex-Basel and Hiroshima). The narrative of Benoît Landais and Hanspeter Born, who believe in the Hiroshima version (but not in the Ex-Basel version) leaves room for the possibility that both versions were produced years after Van Gogh’s death (only the two authors did not consider this very possibility: that an original might be lost).
But set aside the everlasting attributional questions! I do believe in this drawing. Let us review it, here, simply, but seriously as a work of art.

Sid Geisman, Daubigny Revisited
(a nocturnal version after Van Gogh’s sketch)
(picture: DS)

(Picture: DS)

What a precisely formulated drawing – and a rather complicated composition it is. Whoever tries to copy it will notice: it does require serious focus to copy it precisely. But what is rendered is a precise topography (not just a garden). A topography with areas, niches, corners and pathways. With an animal, a vaguely defined (but probably female) figure. And the invisible painter or draftsman. It is not necessary to see the topography with Van Goghs eyes, but if we do try to see it with Van Gogh’s eyes of July 1890, we might say: this is the property of Daubigny within the topography of Auvers; he had a wife, and although he died and never lived in this house and garden, this was the vision at the end of his life: to work in such a house and garden, and with his wife at his side.

(Picture: bruecke-museum.de)

We look at Emil Nolde’s Jägers Haus auf Alsen (on the right; of the Brücke-Museum Berlin). This gives a comparable view, and it is indebted to Van Gogh. This is not Nolde’s garden (but the garden of one of his neigbors) at Alsen. Nolde then, in 1909, lived in a small house with his wife. And much later, he did realize the dream of the own house with a garden. As had Monet; as was Max Liebermann to do at Wannsee. And if one does project hope in Van Gogh’s sketch or despair: in his weeks at Auvers at the end of his life, he had that vision that his brother Theo with his wife Johanna and their newborn child would come and live with him in Auvers. Maybe he had given up hope that there would be a wife on his side, but Daubigny’s garden certainly could be seen by him as representing such a model.

I don’t know if Van Gogh demonized the garden of Daubigny, as the art historian Werner Weisbach had it in his Van Gogh-monograph (vol. 2, p. 196f.). But Weisbach was looking at the (Ex-)Basel painting, and less at the sketch; and more important: Weisbach knew nervous breakdowns and panic attacks himself (he had once experienced an attack in the Berlin Tiergarten). And I believe that meditating on this drawing by Van Gogh less means to give it a precise meaning, but taking into account what a garden might mean: a refuge, but also a topography with ambiguous elements as the cat. With cosy corners, or with mysterious pathways. The church might be seen as being near (and also a graveyard). And on the other hand, depending on one’s disposition and state of mind, it might mean comfort, not despair.

(Picture: liebermann-villa.de)

It is, in my view, the precision of the drawing, its being formulated with precision, that allows these contextualizations (and many more), because precision means here, the precise imagination (and rendering) of possibilities. The possibilities of a topography, but also of a living with and in it. It is about the ways of the imagination, about giving the imagination ways. And not about blocking or narrowly defining them. An energetic hand, although the end of the drama was near on 24 July 1890 (the date of the letter), an energetic hand, fit to define energetic strokes and thereby doing to define a picture, must be called still an optimistic hand! (Maybe the hand of the Hiroshima version was simply less optimistic.)

A Last Glance At Le Jardin de Daubigny

Charles François Daubigny, House of Mère Bazot (picture: artic.edu)

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