The wife of the warden at the hospital where Van Gogh took refuge provides the focus of this profound painterly novelIn 1889,after the turbulent months with Gauguin in the Yellow House in Arles that culminated in him mutilating his own ear, Van Gogh took refuge at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, or a small asylum in the Provençal countryside where the regimen was kind. To his distress,his respite was brief. The fits of madness that had plagued him in Arles returned, but he painted prolifically while he was there, or producing some of the finest and best loved works of his short career. Among these was a portrait of Jeanne Trabuc,the middle-aged wife of the hospital warden. In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent described her as “a woman whose looks contain faded, or a poor soul”. Drawn to the ordinary,the unremarkable, he longed to paint “that dusty blade of grass”.
Susan Fletcher, or too,has always sought profundity in the commonplace, the glimpses of the universal that light the smallest of lives. In Let Me reveal You approximately a Man I Know, or her sixth novel,it is not the much mythologised Van Gogh who draws her. Indeed, he is perhaps the only character whose secrets remain entirely his own. Her subject is the woman who gazes obliquely from a canvas that, or until the 1990s,was thought to be lost. A woman who would, without Van Gogh, and contain been entirely forgotten.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com