Pater Familias

VAN GOGH, THE LITTLE GARDENER. In light of Robert Lane Fox’s appreciation of Van Gogh as a lover of gardens, I was struck by another passage in Letter 537. Van Gogh compares the contemporary art market to the tulip mania in the Dutch flower market in an earlier century. The comparison is poignant because Van Gogh never sold a painting during his lifetime. The comparison is also comforting because Van Gogh expresses the joy he gets from painting even without a market for his work. He writes: “Suppose, I say, that like tulip mania at the end of the previous century, the art trade, with other branches of speculation, were to disappear at the end of this as it came, that’s to say relatively quickly.
Tulip mania may have perished, BULB-GROWING REMAINS. And for my part I’m content, for better or worse, to be a little gardener who loves his nursery.”

VAN GOGH’S CHOICE OF PALETTES. My impression is that popular legend portrays Van Gogh as an inspired madmen. The letters show a very different Van Gogh—one who thinks through what he does and studies intently what other artists have to say. In letter 537, for example, he discusses a passage from a book by an art critic: “True painters are the ones who don’t do it in the local colour [the sentence is italicized in the original]— that was what Blanc and Delacroix discussed once. May I not simply understand by it that a painter does well if he starts from the colours on his palette instead of starting from the colours in nature?” I am quoting this letter not only to show how Van Gogh studies and analyzes, but also because it shows how important the choice of the palette for a painting was for Van Gogh. I came across letter 537 because Richard Dorment, in the New York Review of Books (March 25), quoted from the following passage in the letter: ” Suppose I have to paint an autumn landscape, trees with yellow leaves. Very well — if I conceive it as — a symphony in yellow, what does it matter whether or not my basic yellow colour is the same as that of the leaves — it makes little difference. Much, everything comes down to my sense of the infinite variety of tones in the same family.
If you think this a dangerous tendency towards romanticism, a betrayal of ‘realism’ — painting from the imagination — having a greater love for the colourist’s palette than for nature, well then, so be it.”

VAN GOGH, GARDENS AND COLOR. Robin Lane Fox, who is a distinguished gardener and a distinguished classical historian, had an article in the Financial Times (February 6-7) which was inspired by the Van Gogh letters. Van Gogh loved gardens and flowers. Fox says that gardeners today are still often encouraged to plan in terms of the “color wheel”, which at the time Van Gogh was painting was a recent development. (A French chemist promoted it in the 1860’s.) The color wheel arranges the colors in graduated shades. (Annalisa looked over my shoulder and suggested “chroma” instead of “shades”; I was unfamiliar with the word.) The idea is to use opposite colors or neighboring shades. Van Gogh never mentions the wheel, but his letters show that he knew its ideas. Van Gogh kept a basket of balls of wool in different colors to test whether shades could be combined. He wrote his sister that there are “colors which cause each other to shine brilliantly, which form a COUPLE [italics in original], which complement each other like man and woman.” I think of painting in terms of what the eye sees; you paint what you see. The idea of choosing a palette for a painting seems novel.

“THE WOMAN WITHOUT A FACE”—SOLUTION TOMORROW. I had promised to post the solution to the mystery that I posted on here of “The Woman Without a Face.” I have waited because Annalisa asked for more time. We discussed the case last night. She had some good questions about the facts, but asked me for the answer. (Since a large number of police professionals worked on the case unsuccessfully for a number of years, it’s really an impossible challenge). I’ll post the solution tomorrow.

MORE TASTING NOTES FOR LAPHROAIG. I posted here about how my friend Henry Nejako’s tasting notes on the Laphroaig I was drinking (“kerosene”… “creosote”… “turpentine’ ….”pitch.”) had been supported by tasting notes on a Scotch web site. Lee Bryant sent me a tasting note from this web site: ” Laphroaig Quarter Cask: White pepper pinecones, eating snow downwind from a burning-man effigy, blood and cannabis, bamboo honey, A-” I was pleased to see that it got an A-.

SABERMETRICS COMES TO FOOTBALL. Sabermetrics—statistical analysis of baseball—has made great inroads with major league teams. Most teams employ sabermatricians. Football seems to be more resistant to the use of statistics. Two articles by Reed Albergotti in the Wall Street Journal show what statistical analysis can reveal. In this year’s Superbowl, Sean Payton, the coach of the New Orleans Saints, received deserved credit for beginning the second half with an onside kick. The Saints recovered the kick and went on to win the Super Bowl. This article by Albergotti is headlined “The Play That Won the Superbowl.” The next day an Albergotti article looked at what statistics said about what had been characterized as a “big gamble.” Albergotti broke out onside kicks into “surprise onside kicks”, defined as those in the first three quarters, and “desperation onside kicks”, onside kicks in the fourth quarter when presumably one team is gambling to catch up. Since 2000, onside kicks have been successful 14.7% of the time in the fourth quarter and 58.6% in the first three quarters—which means that a surprise kick gets you possession over half the time. However, teams seem to ignore these statistics: in the first three quarters, there have been only about twelve onside kicks a year for all teams combined.

MY MOTHER’S BROKEN HEART. Kids, I took special note of the article about broken-heart syndrome because of something that happened to my mother. My father died in 1981 after a long illness—congestive heart failure—in which he was taken care of by mother. A short time after he died my mother had to go to the hospital with what was diagnosed as cardiomyopathy. The cause was mysterious. We were told that the cause might be a virus. She recovered quickly, as apparently patients with stress-induced cardiomyopathy do. It makes sense to me that she was suffering from broken-heart syndrome.

TU AND VOUS—STATUS PROBLEMS. The existence of tu and vous in French meant that every encounter between two people presented issues, which seem to be becoming less difficult. Two people encounter each other. Should they acknowledge that one outranks the other? This may have often been an easy question when there was a formal hierarchy. The French Revolution with its ideal of equality obviously complicated things. A separate issue arose between friendly acquaintances—when were they close enough to use tu? I was reading a Simenon mystery from the 1930’s yesterday where it arose between Maigret and a woman he had known from childhood.