Empire Dreams by Ian McDonald

Author:Ian McDonald [McDonald, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781625670755
Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
Published: 2014-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

UNFINISHED PORTRAIT OF THE KING OF PAIN BY VAN GOGH

VINCENT: THAT IS how he signs all his paintings; just his name, “Vincent,” in the bottom left corner. Sometimes, if the day has been good and the yellow sun of Provence has been warm and kind to him, splashing a paint-pot of color across the fields swept bare and clean by the cold wind from the north, then he will date it: Spring 1888, so that he will remember for always the good day when the sun was kind to him. The sun, the sun, he writes in his letters to his brother, I am a servant of the sun, and on the walls of his bedroom he hangs six paintings of sunflowers to remind him always of the sun. Yellow is the color of the sun, yellow is the color of friendship: “The House of Friends,” he christens his little yellow house on the corner of place Lamartine and dreams through the hot Provençal nights of the friends with whom he might fill its walls: a brotherhood of visionaries, a painters’ colony dedicated to the service of the sun.

Every other day he writes to his brother Theo in Paris. He asks for more yellow; Send me more yellow, and begs Theo to once again try and persuade Paul, implore Paul, go down on his knees and beg Paul, to come south to Aries to lead the artists’ colony. Letter after letter after letter he writes, letter after letter after letter arrives, brought to him by his friend the postman Roulin (who he will paint someday soon, he thinks), letters saying Not yet and In a little while and Patience, patience, my dear Vincent. Vincent sits late, very late, too late, in the Cafe L’Alcazar, writing letter after letter after letter to his brother.

“Monsieur, we are closing, monsieur, you must go now, we are taking the tables in; monsieur, have you no home to go to?” say the waiters in their white aprons and Vincent, who drinks too much and eats too little and sleeps hardly at all, crosses the square and climbs the stairs to his Yellow House. In his blue-walled bedroom, under six paintings of sunflowers, he dreams. He dreams of a brotherhood of artists, he dreams of the arch-backed bridges of Japan under needles of rain, but most of all he dreams of the boiling solar disk of the sun.

In these dreams the sun speaks to him. It calls him its child touched with divine madness, and shows him its paintings: a hat caught in a tall treetop; a rose pierced by a silver thorn; a king upon a burning throne; a raven with a cherry in its beak; a crown in a cornfield, the sky dark with birds of ill-omen.

See, Vincent, says the sun, these are my paintings of you. Are they not fine, works of note and merit?

When Vincent awakes, the canvases of the night are still with him and he packs them up with his

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