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For over two thousand years, philosophers have searched for it, scientists have studied it – and great artists have captured it in paint. Drawing upon his ground-breaking work in the psychology of happiness and mindfulness, Christophe André shares 25 paintings by a wide range of masters, including Van Gogh, Vermeet and Chagall, and invites us to consider how they capture the many colours of happiness in their air, alongside its inseperable shadow, sadness.

This beautiful book explains how to look at a painting and let the picture speak and live within us. In this way, each painting in this book holds a life-changing lesson, helping us to feel, meditate and reflect – and discover the meaning of happiness for ourselves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christophe André is the bestselling author of many books, including the internationally acclaimed Mindfulness: 25 ways to live in the moment through art. One of France’s leading psychiatrists, he works at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, where he helps people to free themselves from emotional problems such as anxiety and depression through the use of mindfulness and positive psychology.

In memory of Aleth and to Rémy for the moments of happiness and sadness spent together.

HAPPINESS

AS A WORK OF ART

‘Painting is a ceremony in solitude,’ wrote the philosopher Alain. Is it my work as a psychiatrist, my fondness for silence and my interest in the personal and emotional that draws me to painting and its power to affect us? I can’t say. But I would like to help readers explore the benefits of looking at a painting, breathing gently, saying nothing and letting the picture speak and live within us – making space for it within us.

In this book the faces, forms and flow of happiness are embodied in twenty-five masterpieces. These paintings encourage us to feel, meditate and reflect. They also offer twenty-five ‘lessons’ to help us develop our capacity for happiness.

Some of these painters of happiness had happy lives, others were unhappy for long periods. But all were drawn to the idea of happiness and its necessity. Even the most fulfilled among them were aware that happiness is fleeting and hard to find, and that having appeared it inevitably fades.

For happiness is a living emotion, which is born, grows, blossoms, fades and vanishes. It goes in cycles, just as night follows day. This natural rhythm will be our guiding thread through the masterpieces in this book, which depict mornings, middays, dusks and nights of happiness – and also, of course, its endless rebirth.

PRELUDE

THE ENIGMA OF HAPPINESS

We’ve been searching so long for happiness that we may even come to doubt its existence or the point of pursuing it. So we get on with our ordinary lives, neither totally sad nor totally happy, until once again we sense the existence of happiness like a question to be answered, an imperious mystery to be solved.

The geographer in Vermeer’s painting is trying to solve an enigma of a different kind – perhaps it is the mystery of Paradise. Well into the seventeenth century many people still believed that Paradise might be somewhere on Earth, and many speculated as to the most likely location – the Middle East maybe, or South America. Though centuries have passed since then, the geographer’s quest is similar to our own. In the closed space of his room he is trying to make a map of the world, and we do the same in our thinking about happiness, based on our personal experiences.

People have always searched for happiness. The Greeks adopted it as the first goal of philosophy more than two thousand years ago. The word eudaimonia, Aristotle’s highest human good, is usually translated as ‘happiness’. The aim of Greek philosophy was to help human beings attain happier lives. Today, scientists have been taking a keen interest in happiness for some years – they refer to it by the less poetic appellation of ‘subjective well-being’. In their eyes this well-being is good for us in many different ways, from increasing longevity and improving health to making us more altruistic.

Artists too have talked of happiness and also unhappiness, its unavoidable shadow. Poets, writers and musicians have created works that make us weep and then suddenly make us feel light-hearted, confident and happy. Painters have shown that they can arouse our emotions in more subtle ways, changing our routine, habitual view of reality, moments of happiness and feelings of unhappiness. As we seek to solve the mystery of happiness, painting can act as our enigmatic guide, speaking to us only through images and metaphors, beyond words and reason.

Our geographer too is pursuing an enigma. For a long time he has been thinking, calculating, finding answers, changing his mind and realising he has gone in the wrong direction. Now he lifts his head to the light, letting his gaze leave the room and slip out of the window – which is on the left of the picture, as always in Vermeer’s paintings. Our geographer has done enough thinking. He has a feeling that science, work and intelligence are no longer enough. He has realised that for his quest to succeed he must now allow something else to emerge within him, something like intuition, or emotion. He has a sense that the solution to the question that has been plaguing him is not to be found outside, in maps, globes or the points of his compasses, but within. At this point in history, when human beings were gradually abandoning the belief that Paradise was on Earth or in the heavens, Vermeer’s geographer has a vague feeling that the Paradise whose path he seeks in fact lies within himself.

‘I HAVE STRIVEN NOT TO LAUGH AT HUMAN ACTIONS, NOT TO WEEP AT THEM, NOR TO HATE THEM, BUT TO UNDERSTAND THEM.’

1688, oil on canvas, 52 × 45.5 cm, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt-am-Main.

In the period when Vermeer painted this picture, science had just undergone a fundamental transformation. Until this time, conducting research into the nature of the stars, the Earth or life itself had been seen as contrary to the Divine plan. A mere thirty years before, Galileo had been condemned for his discoveries and forced, on his knees, to deny that the Earth goes round the sun. But by the seventeenth century scientific ‘curiositas’ was no longer banned by the religious authorities or censured by conservative humanists.

Today’s scientific research into happiness arouses ironic responses from some clerics, but this irony is unfounded and spurious. Knowing the chemical formula of a rose’s scent doesn’t make it less exquisite or poetic.

MORNING

THE BIRTH OF HAPPINESS

POWERFUL AND FRAGILE,

LIKE LIFE ITSELF

Soaring into the blue, almond blossom stretches up to the sky. Here we see only the white of the petals and the azure above, like an embodiment of happiness, as powerful and fragile as life itself. Exhausted by inner chaos and his struggle with mental illness, Van Gogh magnificently cuts to what matters most – life’s upward impulse towards the heavens and transcendence. He painted this picture with his head lifted to the sky, seeing nothing else around him. He has shut out the landscape and all other details, right down to the trunk of the tree, in order to concentrate on the union of sky and blossom – opposing poles of blue and white, ephemeral and eternal, earthly and heavenly.

In the same way, he has kept out – though not denied – his sufferings of the moment, in order to give us a lasting expression of the happiness he feels at the sight of almond blossom.

‘MAN IS BORN TO BE HAPPY, SO ALL OF NATURE TEACHES.’

ANDRÉ GIDE

Branch with Almond Blossom

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)

1890, oil on canvas, 73.5 × 92 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Vincent Van Gogh Foundation, Amsterdam.

When he painted this picture in February 1890, in the asylum of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence where he had sought refuge, Van Gogh was very ill. His life was dominated by periods of insanity that left him exhausted. In July of the same year he shot himself in the chest. And yet 31 January had seen the birth in Paris of another Vincent, son of the painter’s older brother Theo and to whom he was godfather. The picture was painted for this baby, whose new life was just beginning, like almond blossom bursting up towards the sky at the end of winter.

In May, Van Gogh left Provence and went to Auvers-sur-Oise, where he was treated by Dr Gachet. Passing through Paris, he stopped off to visit his godson and give him this gift. On seeing the baby in the cradle, the adult Vincent was moved to tears.

This painting and the ode to nature it conveys reflect Van Gogh’s sense of wonder at the infinite generosity of creation: ‘In my case the emotions that take hold of me in the face of nature go as far as fainting, and then the result is a fortnight during which I am incapable of working.’

VAN GOGH’S LESSON :

LOOK UP TO THE SKY

Sequi naturam, ‘follow nature’. The Ancient philosophers understood very well that there is an organic link between nature and happiness. No doubt this is why human beings have always imagined Paradise as a garden rather than a palace. Etymologically, the word ‘paradise’ comes from the Persian pari-deza, which became paradeisos in Greek and refers to a walled oasis, protected from the burning desert winds. Happiness is so fragile. Nature helps us understand happiness and brings us closer to it in many different ways. It offers us a peaceful, ancestral connection to the complex world around us through the unending cycle of seasons, the seemingly changeless landscapes that we love and the harmonious interconnectedness of animals and plants. It teaches us not to expect anything in particular, but just to be there and enjoy it.

Nature creates harmony through connection and belonging. When we feel simply that we are alive among all other forms of life, and understand that we are lucky to be so, we taste the fundamental happiness of being alive.

For evolutionary psychologists, many aspects of our behaviour and the things that attract us are traces of the needs we had as animals. Human beings take such pleasure from looking at the beauties of nature – a tree-lined river or sun-drenched shoreline – because they see in them the promise of resources for their survival, such as food, somewhere to rest and recover. Yet, beyond the sense of pleasure there is also an obscure, deep sense of belonging to an order much greater than us and which we are part of. More than simply observing or even admiring nature, we become complicit with it, sensing our most basic identity as living things. When we look at a tree in blossom, or lose ourselves in the movement of waves and clouds, we become part of nature, we return to it.

Every time we breathe in the scent of fields or forest, the happiness we feel is the inner echo of our biological roots. These encounters with nature do more than simply foster happiness – they are indispensable to it.

‘I GOT UP IN THE NIGHT TO LOOK AT THE LANDSCAPE – NEVER, NEVER HAS NATURE APPEARED SO TOUCHING AND SO SENSITIVE TO ME.’

VINCENT VAN GOGH

Van Gogh’s painting could have been called ‘The Birth of Happiness’, because it has all the fragility and power of human joys, their rootedness in life and drive for transcendence. These emerging joys are at once extremely important and extremely vulnerable. It is so easy for them to be trampled on or neglected. This painting opens our eyes to their beauty and fragility, and to their absolute necessity to our lives.

Happiness as a whole is born in such moments of grace. Stand still and be silent. Look, listen, breathe. Admire. Make room for happiness to emerge. Gently work on perceiving it wherever it appears. This is the first and most fundamental lesson.

‘AS I WALKED LATE IN THE EVENING DOWN THIS TREE-LINED AVENUE, A CHESTNUT FELL AT MY FEET. THE SOUND IT MADE AS IT BURST OPEN, ITS ECHO WITHIN ME AND A SHOCK OUT OF ALL PROPORTION WITH THIS TINY EVENT, PLUNGED ME INTO THE MIRACLE, THE INTOXICATION OF THE DEFINITIVE, AS THOUGH THERE WERE NO LONGER ANY QUESTIONS, ONLY ANSWERS.’

ÉMILE CIORAN

OUR EARLIEST

HAPPINESS

A child snuggles up to her mother, both asleep in a touching, tender embrace. Lying against her mother’s slender breast the child seems to be absorbing all she can of the woman who has given her life, warmth and love.

As always in Klimt’s art, dreamlike decorative motifs combine with hyperrealist detail. See how the child’s extended little finger presses against the soft warmth of her mother’s skin. Look at her rumpled, tangled hair, plastered against her forehead by the hot dampness of sleep. Her head is turned to the side, against her shoulder, so she can be even closer to her mother. See how, as the child absorbs, the mother protects. The position of her head looks uncomfortable, but it shelters the child she holds with her slender arm. She is nourishing her little one with love, heart against heart, and this child, against whose head she rests her own, is also her own past and future.

Klimt’s painting helps us think about the great mystery that is the birth of happiness, and the way that we pass on and prepare for the happiness to come. The happiness depicted here is at once a legacy and a promise.

‘HAPPINESS, AN ANIMAL IDEA ...’

PAUL VALÉRY

The Three Ages of Woman

Gustav Klimt (1862–1918)

1905, oil on canvas, 178 × 198 cm, Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna, Rome.

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

HAPPINESS

AS A WORK OF ART

PRELUDE

THE ENIGMA OF HAPPINESS

MORNING

THE BIRTH OF HAPPINESS

POWERFUL AND FRAGILE,

LIKE LIFE ITSELF

OUR EARLIEST

HAPPINESS