The Art of Travel

VII

On Eye-Opening Art

1.

One summer I was invited to spend a few days with friends in a farmhouse in Provence. I knew that the word Provence was for many people rich in associations, though it meant little to me. I tended to switch off at its mention, out of a sense, founded on little, that the place would not be congenial to me. What I did know was that Provence was generally held by sensible people to be very beautiful—'Ah, Provence!' they would sigh, with a reverence otherwise reserved for opera or Delft porcelain.

I flew to Marseilles and, after renting a small Renault at the airport, headed for the home of my hosts, which lay at the foot of the Alpilles hills, between the towns of Aries and Saint-Rémy At the exit out of Marseilles, I grew confused and ended up at the giant oil refinery at Fos-sur-Mer, whose tangle of pipes and cooling towers spoke of the complexity involved in the manufacture of a liquid that I was used to putting into my car with scant thought for its origins.

I found my way back to the N568, which led me inland across the wheat-growing plain of La Crau. Outside the village of Saint-Martin-de-Crau, a few miles from my destination, being too early, I pulled off the road and turned off the engine. I had come to a stop on the edge of an olive grove. It was quiet save for the sounds made by cicadas hidden in the trees. Behind the grove were wheat fields bordered by a row of cypresses, over whose tops rose the irregular ridge of the Alpilles hills. The sky was a cloudless blue.

I scanned the view. I was not looking for anything in particular—not for predators, holiday homes or memories. My motive was simple and hedonistic: I was looking for beauty. ‘Delight and enliven me' was my implicit challenge to the olive trees, cypresses and skies of Provence. It was a vast, loose agenda, and my eyes were bewildered at their freedom. Without the motives that had marked the rest of the day—to seek out the airport, the exit out of Marseilles and so on—they careered from object to object, so that if their path had been traced by the mark of a giant pencil, the sky would soon have been darkened by random and impatient patterns.

Although the landscape was not ugly, I could not—after a few moments of scrutiny—detect the charm so often ascribed to it. The olive trees looked stunted, more like bushes than like trees, and the wheat fields evoked the flat, dull expanses of southeastern England, where I had attended a school and been unhappy. I lacked the energy to register the barns, the limestone of the hills or the poppies growing at the feet of a group of cypresses.

Bored and uncomfortable in the Renault's increasingly hot plastic interior, I set off for my destination and greeted my hosts with the remark that this was simply paradise.

Because we find places to be beautiful as immediately and as apparently spontaneously as we find snow to be cold or sugar sweet, it is hard to imagine that there is anything we might do to alter or expand our attractions. It seems that matters have been decided for us by qualities inherent in the places themselves or by hardwiring in our psyches, and that we would therefore be as helpless to modify our sense of the places we find beautiful as we would our preference for the ice creams we find appetising.

Yet aesthetic tastes may be less rigid than this analogy suggests. We overlook certain places because nothing has ever prompted us to conceive of them as being worthy of appreciation, or because some unfortunate but random association has turned us against them. Thus our relationship to olive trees might be improved if we directed our attention towards the silver in their leaves or the structure of their branches; new associations might be created around wheat once we are directed to the pathos of this fragile and yet essential crop as its stalks bend their grain-filled heads in the wind. We might find something to appreciate in the skies of Provence once we are told, even if only in the crudest way that it is the shade of blue that counts.

And perhaps the most effective means of enriching our sense of what to look for in a scene is by studying visual art. We could conceive of many works of art as being immensely subtle instruments for telling us what amounts in effect to ‘Look at the sky of Provence, redraw your notion of wheat, do justice to olive trees.' From amidst the million things in, for example, a wheat field, a successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator. It will foreground elements ordinarily lost in the mass of data, stabilise them and, once we are acquainted with them, prompt us imperceptibly to find them in the world about us—or, if we have already found them, lend us the confidence to give them weight in our lives. We will be like a person around whom a word has been mentioned on many occasions, but who only begins to hear it once he or she has learnt its meaning.

And insofar as we travel in search of beauty, works of art may in small ways start to influence where we would like to travel to.

2.

Vincent van Gogh arrived in Provence at the end of February 1888. He was thirty-four years old and had dedicated himself to painting only eight years before, after failing in attempts to become first a teacher and then a priest. For the previous two years he had been living in Paris with his brother Theo, an art dealer, who supported him financially. He had had little artistic training but had befriended Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and exhibited his work alongside theirs at the Café du Tambourin on the Boulevard de Clichy.

‘I can still remember vividly how excited I became that winter when travelling from Paris to Aries,' van Gogh would recall of his sixteen-hour train journey to Provence. On his arrival in what was then the most prosperous town in the region and a centre for the olive trade and railway engineering, van Gogh carried his bags in the snow (an exceptional ten inches had fallen that day) to the small Hotel Carrel, not far from Aries's northern ramparts. Despite the weather and the small size of his room, he was enthusiastic about his southerly move. As he told his sister, ‘I believe that life here is just a little more satisfying than in many other spots.'

Van Gogh was to remain in Aries until May 1889, fifteen months during which he produced approximately two hundred paintings, a hundred drawings and two hundred letters—a period generally agreed to have been his greatest. The earliest works show Aries lying under snow, the sky a limpid blue, the earth a frozen pink. Five weeks after van Gogh arrived, spring came, and he painted fourteen canvases of trees in bloom in the fields outside the town. At the beginning of May he painted the Langlois drawbridge over the Arles-Bouc Canal, on the south side of Aries, and at the end of the month he produced a number of views from the plain of La Crau, looking towards the Alpilles hills and the ruined abbey of Montmajour. He also painted the reverse scene, climbing the rocky slopes of the abbey for a view of Aries. By the middle of June his attention had shifted to a new subject: the harvest, of which he completed ten paintings in only two weeks. He worked with extraordinary speed, or as he put it, ‘quickly quickly, quickly and in a hurry, like a harvester who is silent under the blazing sun, intent only on his reaping'. He noted, ‘I work even in the middle of the day in the full sunshine, and I enjoy it like a cicada. My God, if I had only known this part of the country at the age of twenty-five, instead of coming here when I was thirty-five years old!'

Later, explaining to his brother why he had moved from Paris to Aries, van Gogh offered two reasons: because he wanted to ‘paint the South' and because he wanted, through his work, to help other people to ‘see' it. However unsure he might be of his own powers to achieve that, he never wavered in his faith that the project was theoretically possible—that is, that artists could paint a portion of the world and in consequence open the eyes of others to it.

If he had such faith in the eye-opening power of art, it was because he had often experienced it himself, as a spectator. Since moving to France from his native Holland, he had felt it most particularly in relation to literature. He had read the works of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and Maupassant and been grateful to those writers for opening his eyes to the dynamics of French society and psychology. Madame Bovary had taught him about provincial middle-class life, and Pere Goriot about penniless but ambitious students in Paris; he now recognised the characters from these novels in society at large.

Paintings had similarly opened his eyes. Van Gogh frequently paid tribute to painters who had allowed him to see certain colours and atmospheres. Velazquez, for example, had given him a map that allowed him to see grey. Several of Velazquez's canvases depicted humble Iberian interiors with walls of brick or a sombre plaster, where, even in the middle of the day when the shutters were closed to protect the house from the heat, the dominant colour was a sepulchral grey, occasionally pierced, where the shutters were not quite closed or where a section had been chipped off them, by a shaft of brilliant yellow. Velazquez had not invented such effects; many others must have seen them before him, but few had had the energy or the talent to capture them and transform them into communicable experience. Like an explorer with a new continent, Velazquez had, for van Gogh at least, given his name to a discovery in the world of light.

Van Gogh ate in many small restaurants in the centre of Aries. Their walls were often dark, and the shutters closed against the bright sunlight outside. One lunchtime, he wrote to his brother to announce that he had stumbled upon something utterly Veläzquez-ian: ‘The restaurant in which I am sitting is very strange. It is grey all over… a Velazquez grey—as in the Spinning Women—and there is even a very narrow, very fierce ray of sunlight coming through a blind, just like the one that slants across Velazquez's picture. … In the kitchen are an old woman and a short, fat servant also in grey, black, white… it's pure Velazquez.'

It was for van Gogh the mark of every great painter to enable viewers to see certain aspects of the world more clearly. If Velazquez was his guide to grey and to the coarse faces of large cooks, then Monet was his guide to sunsets, Rembrandt to morning light and Vermeer to adolescent girls (‘A perfect Vermeer,' he exclaimed to Theo after he spotted one example near the arena). The sky over the Rhone after a heavy rain shower reminded him of Hokusai, the wheat of Millet and the young women in Saintes-Maries de la Mer of Cimabue and Giotto.

3.

Nevertheless—and fortunately for his artistic ambitions—van Gogh did not believe that previous artists had captured everything there was to see in southern France. To the contrary, many had, in his view, completely missed the essentials. ‘Good Lord, I have seen things by certain painters that did not do justice to the subject at all,' he exclaimed. ‘There is plenty for me to work on here.'

No one had, for example, captured the distinctive appearance of the middle-aged middle-class women of Aries, of whom van Gogh asserted, ‘Some women resemble a Fragonard and some a Renoir, but there are others who cannot be labelled according to anything that has ever yet been done in painting” (emphasis added). The farm labourers whom he saw working in the fields outside of Aries had likewise been ignored by artists: ‘Millet has reawakened our minds so that we can see the dweller in nature. But until now no one has painted the real southern Frenchman for us.' He elaborated, ‘Have we in general learned to see the peasant now? No; hardly anyone knows how to pull that off.'

The Provence that greeted van Gogh in 1888 had already been the subject of painting for over a hundred years. Among the better-known Provenqal artists were Fragonard (1732-1806), Constantin (1756-1844), Bidauld (1758-1846), Granet (1775—1849) and Aiguier (1814—1865). All were realistic painters, adhering to the classical and until then relatively undisputed notion that their task was to render on canvas an accurate version of the visual world. They went out into the fields and mountains of Provence and painted recognisable versions of cypresses, trees, grass, wheat, clouds and bulls.

Yet van Gogh insisted that most had failed to do justice to their subjects. They had not, he claimed, produced realistic depictions of Provence. We are apt to call any painting realistic that competently conveys key elements of the world. But the world is complex enough for two realistic pictures of the same place, at the same moment, to look very different, as a consequence of differences in artistic styles and temperaments. Two realistic artists may sit at the edge of the same olive grove and produce divergent sketches. Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole, as Nietzsche mockingly pointed out in a bit of doggerel verse entitled ‘The Realistic Painter':

‘Completely true to nature!'—what a lie:

How could nature ever be constrained into a picture?

The smallest bit of nature is infinite!

And so he paints what he likes about it.

And what does he like? He likes what he can paint!

If we in turn like a painter's work, it is perhaps because we judge that he or she has selected the features that we believe to be the most valuable within a particular scene. There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.

Alternatively, if we complain that, for example, our portrait does not look ‘like us', we are not accusing its painter of trickery; we are simply suggesting that the process of selection that goes on in any work of art has in this instance gone wrong, and that parts of us that we think of as belonging to our essential selves have not been given their due. Bad art might thus be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

And leaving out the essential was precisely what van Gogh accused most of the artists who had painted southern France before him of doing.

4.

There was a large book on him in the guest bedroom, and because I was unable to sleep on my first night, I read several chapters, eventually falling asleep with the volume open on my lap as a trace of dawn-red appeared in the corner of the window.

I awoke late and found that my hosts had gone to Saint-Rémy leaving a note to say that they would be back around lunchtime. Breakfast was laid out on a metal table on the terrace, and I ate three pains au chocolat'm guilty, rapid succession, all the while keeping one eye out for the housekeeper, who I feared might put an unflattering spin on my gourmandise for her employers.

It was a clear day with a mistral blowing that ruffled the heads of the wheat in an adjacent field. I had sat in this same spot the day before, but only now did I notice that there were two large cypresses growing at the end of the garden, a discovery that was not unconnected to the chapter I had read the night before on van Gogh's treatment of the tree. He had sketched a series of cypresses in 1888 and 1889. ‘They are constantly occupying my thoughts,' he told his brother. ‘It astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them. The cypress is as beautiful in line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk. And the green has a quality of such distinction. It is a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes, and the most difficult to get exactly right.'

What did van Gogh notice about cypresses that others had failed to see? In part, the way they moved in the wind. I walked to the end of the garden and there studied, thanks to certain works (Cypresses and Wheat Field with Cypresses of 1889 in particular), their distinctive behaviour in the mistral.

Vincent van Gogh, Cypresses, 1889

Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889

There are architectural reasons for this movement. Unlike pine branches, which descend gently downwards from the top of their tree, the fronds of the cypress thrust upwards from the ground. The cypress's trunk is, moreover, unusually short, with the top third of the tree being made up wholly of branches. Whereas an oak will shake its branches but keep its trunk immobile in the wind, the cypress will bend, and furthermore, because of the way the fronds grow from a number of points along the circumference of the trunk, it will seem to bend along different axes. From a distance, the lack of synchronicity in its movements makes it look as though the cypress were being shifted by several gusts of wind blowing from different angles. With its conelike shape (cypresses rarely exceed a metre in diameter), the tree takes on the appearance of a flame flickering nervously in the wind. All of this van Gogh noticed and would make others see.

A few years after van Gogh's stay in Provence, Oscar Wilde remarked that there had been no fog in London before Whistler painted it. Surely, too, there were fewer cypresses in Provence before van Gogh painted them.

Olive trees must also have been less noticeable. I had the previous day dismissed one example as a squat, bushlike thing, but in Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun and Olive Grove: Orange Sky of 1889, van Gogh brought out (that is, foregrounded) the shape of the olives' trunks and leaves.

I now noted an angularity that I had earlier missed: the trees resemble tridents that have been flung from a great height into the soil. There is a ferocity to the olive trees' branches, too, as if they were flexed arms ready to hit out. And whereas the leaves of many other trees make one think of limp lettuce emptied over racks of naked branches, the taut, silvery olive leaves give an impression of alertness and contained energy.

After van Gogh, I began to notice that there was something unusual about the colours of Provence as well. There are climatic reasons for this. The mistral, blowing along the Rhone Valley from the Alps, regularly clears the sky of clouds and moisture, leaving it a pure, rich blue without a trace of white. At the same time, a high water table and good irrigation promote a plant life of singular lush-ness for a Mediterranean climate. With no water shortages to restrict its growth, the vegetation draws full benefit from the great advantages of the South: light and heat. And fortuitously, because there is no moisture in the air, there is in Provence, unlike the tropics, no mistiness to dampen and meld the colours of the trees, flowers and plants. The combination of a cloudless sky, dry air, water and rich vegetation leaves the region dominated by vivid primary, contrasting colours.

Painters before van Gogh had tended to ignore these contrasts and to paint only in complementary colours, as Claude and Poussin had taught them to do. Constantin and Bidauld, for example, had depicted Provence entirely in subtle gradations of soft blue and brown. Van Gogh was incensed by this neglect of the landscape's natural colour scheme: ‘The majority of [painters], because they aren't colourists… do not see yellow, orange or sulphur in the South, and they call a painter mad if he sees with eyes other than theirs.' He abandoned their chiaroscuro technique and soaked his canvases in primary colours, always arranging them in such a way that their contrast would be maximised: red with green, yellow with purple, blue with orange. ‘The colour is exquisite here,' he wrote to his sister. ‘When the green leaves are fresh, it is a rich green, the likes of which we seldom see in the North. Even when it gets scorched and dusty, the landscape does not lose its beauty, for then it takes on tones of gold of various tints: green-gold, yellow-gold, pink-gold…

Vincent van Gogh, Olive Grave: Orange Sky, 1889

And this [is then] combined with blue, from the deepest royal blue of the water to the blue of the forget-me-nots, a cobalt, particularly clear bright blue.'

My own eyes grew attuned to see around me the colours that had dominated van Gogh's canvases. Everywhere I looked, I could see primary colours in contrast. Beside the house was a violet-coloured field of lavender next to a yellow field of wheat. The roofs of the buildings were orange against a pure blue sky. Green meadows were dotted with red poppies and bordered by oleanders.

It is not only the day that abounds in colours in Provence; van Gogh saw that and brought out the colours of the night as well. Previous Provenqal painters had depicted the night sky as groupings of little white dots against a dark background. But when one sits under the Provenqal sky on a clear night far from the glow of houses and street lamps, one notices that the sky in fact contains a profusion of colours: between the stars, it seems a deep blue, violet or very dark green, whereas the stars themselves appear to be a pale yellow, orange or green, diffusing rings of light far beyond their own narrow circumference. As van Gogh explained to his sister, ‘The night is even more richly coloured than the day. … If only one pays attention to it, one sees that certain stars are citron yellow, while others have a pink glow or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expiating on this theme, it should be clear that putting little white dots on a blue-black surface is not enough.'

5.

The tourist office in Aries is housed in an undistinguished concrete block in the southwestern part of town. It offers visitors the usual fare: free maps, advice on hotels and information about cultural festivals, child-minders, wine tastings, canoeing, ruins and markets. One attraction is emphasised above all others: ‘Welcome to the land of Vincent van Gogh,' exclaims a poster with the sunflowers in the entrance hall; inside, the walls are decorated with harvest scenes, olive trees and orchards.

The office particularly recommends what it describes as the ‘van Gogh trail'. On the one hundredth anniversary of his death in 1890, van Gogh's presence in Provence was honoured by a series of plaques—fixed onto metal rods or stone slabs—positioned in some of the places he painted. The plaques feature photographs of the relevant works and a few lines of commentary. They are to be found both within the town and in the wheat and olive fields that surround it. They extend as far as Saint-Rémy where, after the ear incident, van Gogh ended his Provenqal days at the Maison de Sante.

I persuaded my hosts to spend an afternoon following the trail, to which end we stopped in at the tourist office to collect a map. By chance we learnt that a guided tour, a once-weekly event, was about to start in the courtyard outside, and that there were still places available for a modest sum. We joined a dozen other enthusiasts and were first taken to the Place Lamartine by a guide, who told us that her name was Sophie and that she was writing a thesis on van Gogh at the Sorbonne in Paris.

At the beginning of May 1888, finding his hotel too expensive, van Gogh had rented a wing of a building at 2 Place Lamartine known as the Yellow House. It was one half of a double-fronted building that had been painted bright yellow by its owner but left unfinished inside. Van Gogh developed a great interest in the interior design. He wanted it to be solid and simple, painted in the colours of the South: red, green, blue, orange, sulphur and lilac. ‘I want to make it really an artist's house—nothing precious, but with everything from the chairs to the pictures having character,' he told his brother. ‘About

Vincent van Gogh, ‘The Yellow House' (Vincent's House), Aries, 1888

the beds, I have bought country beds, big double ones instead of iron ones. That gives an appearance of solidity, durability and quiet.' The refurbishment complete, he wrote elatedly to his sister, ‘My house here is painted the yellow colour of fresh butter on the outside, with glaringly green shutters; it stands in the full sunlight in a square that has a green garden with plane trees, oleanders and acacias. It is completely whitewashed inside, with a floor made of red bricks. And over it there is the intensely blue sky. In this house I can live and breathe, meditate and paint.'

Sadly, Sophie had little to show us, for the Yellow House had been destroyed in the Second World War and subsequently replaced with a student hostel, which itself was now dwarfed by the giant Mono-prix supermarket that had gone up beside it. We drove next to Saint-Rémy and there spent more than an hour in the fields around the asylum where van Gogh had lived and painted. Sophie had with her a large plastic-coated book containing the main Provence paintings, and she frequently held it up in spots where van Gogh had worked, letting the rest of us crowd around to look on. At one point, with her back to the Alpilles, she held up Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background (June 1889), and we admired both the view and van Gogh's version of it.

But there was a moment of dissent in the group. Next to me, an Australian wearing a large hat said to his companion, a small, tousle-haired woman, ‘Well, it doesn't look much like that.'

Van Gogh himself had feared he might encounter such accusations. To his sister, he wrote that many people already said of his work, ‘ “This really looks too strange,” not to mention those who think it a total abortion and utterly repulsive.' The reasons for such opinions were not hard to find: the walls of his houses were not always straight, the sun was not always yellow or the grass green, there was an exaggerated sense of movement in some of his trees. ‘I have played hell somewhat with the truthfulness of the colours,' he admitted, and he played similar hell with proportion, line, shadow and tone.

Yet in playing hell, van Gogh was only making more explicit a process in which all artists are involved—namely, choosing which aspects of reality to include in a work and which to leave out. As Nietzsche knew, reality itself is infinite and can never be wholly represented in art. What made van Gogh unusual among Proverai artists was his choice of what he felt was important. Whereas painters such as Constantin had expended much effort in getting the scale right, van Gogh, though passionately interested in producing a ‘likeness', insisted that it was not by worrying about scale that he would end up conveying what was important in the South: his art would involve, as he mockingly told his brother, ‘a likeness different from the products of the God-fearing photographer'. The part of reality that concerned him sometimes required distortion, omission and the substitution of colours to be brought to the fore, but it was still the real—the ‘likeness'—that interested him. He was willing to sacrifice a naive realism in order to achieve realism of a deeper sort, like a poet who, though less factual than a journalist in describing an event, may nevertheless reveal truths about it that find no place in the other's literal grid.

Van Gogh elaborated on this idea in a letter he wrote to his brother in September 1888 about a portrait he was planning: ‘Rather than trying to reproduce exactly what I see before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily, in order to express myself forcibly. … I'll give you an example of what I mean: I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend, a man who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because it is his nature [the portrait was Poet, of

The van Gogh Trail, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence

early September 1888]. He'll be blond. I want to put my appreciation, the love I have for him, into the picture. So I paint him as he is, as faithfully as I can, to begin with. But the picture is not yet finished. In order to finish it, I am going to be the arbitrary colourist. I mean to exaggerate the fairness of the hair, even get to orange tones, chromes and pale citron yellow. Behind the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I will paint infinity, a plain background of the richest, most intense blue I can contrive, and by this simple combination of the bright head against the rich blue background, I will achieve a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky. … Oh, my dear boy… and the nice people will see the exaggeration only as a caricature.' [Emphasis added}

A few weeks later, van Gogh began another ‘caricature'. ‘Tonight I am probably going to start on the interior of the café where I eat, by gaslight, in the evening,' he told his brother. ‘It is what they call a café de nuit (these are fairly common here), one that stays open all night. Night prowlers can take refuge there when they have no money to pay for a lodging or are too drunk to be taken in elsewhere.' In painting what would become The Night Café in Aries, van Gogh abandoned adherence to some elements of ‘reality' for the sake of others. He did not reproduce the proper perspective or colour scheme of the café; his light bulbs metamorphosed into glowing mushrooms, his chairs arched their backs, his floor buckled. Yet he was still interested in expressing truthful ideas about the place, ideas that would perhaps have been less well expressed if he had had to follow the classical rules of art.

6.

The complaints of the Australian man were unusual within our group; most of the rest of us came away from Sophie's lecture with a newfound reverence both for van Gogh and for the landscapes he painted. But my own enthusiasm was undermined by the memory of an exceptionally acerbic maxim that Pascal had penned several centuries before van Gogh's southern journey: ‘How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals' (Pensées, 40).

It struck me as awkwardly true that I had not much admired Provence before I began to study its depiction in van Gogh's work. But in its desire to mock art lovers, Pascal's maxim was in danger of skirting two important points. Admiring a painting that depicts a place we know but don't like seems absurd and pretentious if we imagine that painters do nothing but reproduce exactly what lies before them. If that were true, then all we could admire in a painting would be the technical skills involved in the reproduction of an object and the glamorous name of the painter, in which case we would have little difficulty agreeing with Pascal's description of painting as a vain pursuit. But as Nietzsche knew, painters do not merely reproduce; they select and highlight, and they are accorded genuine admiration insofar as their version of reality seems to bring out valuable features of it.

Furthermore, we do not have to resume our indifference to a place once the painting of it that we have admired is out of sight, as Pascal hints. Our capacity to appreciate can be transferred from art to the world. We can find things that delight us on a canvas first but then later welcome them in the place where the canvas was painted. We can continue to see cypresses beyond van Gogh's paintings.

7.

Provence is not the only place that I began to appreciate and wanted to explore because of its portrayal in art. I once visited Germany's industrial zones because of Wim Wenders's Alice in the Cities. The photographs of Andreas Gursky gave me a taste for the undersides of motorway bridges. Patrick Keiller's documentary Robinson in Space made me take a holiday around the factories, shopping malls and business parks of southern England.

In recognising that a landscape can become more attractive to us once we have seen it through the eyes of a great artist, the tourist office in Aries is only exploiting a long-standing relationship between art and the desire to travel, a connection evident in different countries (and in different artistic media) throughout the history of tourism. Perhaps the most notable and earliest example emerged in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Historians contend that large parts of the countryside of England, Scotland and Wales went unappreciated before the eighteenth century. Places that were later taken to be naturally and inarguably beautiful—the Wye Valley, the Highlands of Scotland, the Lake District—were for centuries treated with indifference, even disdain. Daniel Defoe, for example, travelling in the Lake District in the 1720s, described it as ‘barren and frightful'. In his Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, Dr Johnson wrote that the Highlands, ‘rough' and pitifully devoid of ‘vegetable decoration', were ‘a wide extent of hopeless sterility'. When, at Glenshiel, Boswell attempted to cheer him up by pointing out that a mountain seemed impressively high, Johnson snapped irritably, ‘No; it is no more than a considerable protuberance.'

At that time, those who could afford to travel went abroad. Italy was the most popular destination, and especially Rome, Naples and the surrounding countryside. It was perhaps no coincidence that these locales were prominently featured in the very works of art most favoured by the British aristocracy: the poetry of Virgil and Horace and the paintings of Poussin and Claude. The paintings depicted the Roman exurbs and the Neapolitan coastline. It was often dawn or dusk, with a few fleecy clouds floating overhead, their borders pink and golden. One imagined that it was going to be, or had been, a very hot day. The air seemed quiet, the silence interrupted only by the flow of a refreshing brook or the sound of oars cutting through a lake. A few shepherdesses might be gamboling through a field or looking after some sheep or a golden-haired child. Gazing at such scenes in English country houses in the rain, many would have dreamt of crossing the Channel at the earliest available opportunity. As Joseph Addison observed in 1712, ‘We find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of Art'

Unfortunately for the works of British nature, for a long time few works of art resembled them at all. Yet during the eighteenth century this dearth was gradually overcome, and so, too, with uncanny synchronicity was the reluctance of the British to travel around their own islands. In 1727, the poet James Thomson published The Seasons, which celebrated the agricultural life and landscape of southern England. Its success helped to bring to prominence the work of other ‘ploughmen poets', including Stephen Duck, Robert Burns and John Clare. British painters began to consider their country, too. Lord Shelburne commissioned Thomas Gainsborough and George Barrett to paint a series of landscapes for his Wiltshire house, Bowood, declaring his intention ‘to lay the foundation of a school of British landscape'. Richard Wilson went to paint the Thames near Twickenham, Thomas Hearne depicted Goodrich Castle, Philip de Loutherbourg painted Tintern Abbey, and Thomas Smith portrayed Derwentwater and Windermere.

No sooner had the process begun than there was an explosion in the number of people travelling around the isles. For the first time,

Vincent van Gogh, Sunset: Wheat Fields near Aries, 1888

the Wye Valley was filled with tourists, as were the mountains of North Wales, the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands, a trend that seems perfectly to confirm the contention that we tend to seek out corners of the world only after they have been painted and written about by artists.

The theory must of course be a sharp exaggeration, as sharp as the suggestion that no one paid any attention to fog in London before Whistler or to cypresses in Provence before van Gogh. Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm, nor does it arise from sentiments of which nonartists are devoid; it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.

But that may—as the tourist office in Aries seemed to understand—be enough to influence where we choose to go next year.