Vincent van Gogh, the Tre Corone, and the Studio of the South

Summary

The Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) described his painting Portrait of Eugène Boch (Fig. 1) as the expression of his ideal Artist/Poet: “this young man with the Dante-like face” (September 3, 1888, Letter 673).Recent scholarship confirms the place of the Dante-inspired Portrait of Boch within Vincent’s plans for the Studio of the South: when it was clear to Vincent that his plans would not come to fruition, when his dreams for founding this utopian artist community had died, the Portrait of Boch no longer had a place in his bedroom.The Dante-like Artist/Poet represented by the Portrait of Boch was to be joined, in Vincent’s utopian community, by the modern-day equivalents of Dante’s compatriots Petrarch and Boccaccio, hence completing the triumvirate commonly known then, as now, as the Tre Corone.But in October 1888, when he lived in that bedroom and first painted it (Fig. 2), the Portrait of Boch in place above Vincent’s bed, the Artist/Poet was central to his plans for the Studio of the South and a significant element of the larger décoration he planned for the Yellow House as its home.When taken in the context of his references to Petrarch and Boccaccio, which start appearing in his letters in relation to his Studio of the South in September 1888, the Artist/Poet modeled on Dante – as symbol of those rare persons worthy of authority and emulation – becomes the Auctoritas who is ever-present inspiration and master and, what Van Gogh did not anticipate, also a subject of unresolved contention.

Thus, what Vincent did not seem to realize, and, sadly, what occurred in Arles upon the arrival of Gauguin, is that, contrary to the mythic Tre Corone of the nineteenth century, the actual relationship among the Italian poets was anything but the harmonious and mutually supportive collaboration Vincent intended for his Studio of the South. Unwittingly, in those fateful few months of partnership in Arles, Vincent recreated with Gauguin the actual jealousies, rivalries, and tensions of the Tre Corone. These conflicts with Gauguin, and the resulting failure to realize his utopian Tre Corone-inspired artistic collaboration, precipitated Van Gogh’s mental breakdown in December 1888 and subsequent confinement in asylums at Saint-Rémy and, finally, Auvers-sur-Oise, where he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1890.