Leaving Van Gogh (6 page)

Vincent was using a kind of shed at Ravoux’s as storage, and by early June, it was beginning to fill with images of Auvers, then with shipments of paintings Vincent had made in the South, then with more Auvers paintings. He loved the crooked little thatched cottages and the fields patchworked with their different shades of green. I never tired of examining the way he applied the paint—in waves or dashes or thick, swirling rosettes. Sometimes he would cover a background with a kind of woven effect, painstakingly applied.

He did not mind at all when I watched him, I discovered. In fact, he said he concentrated better with someone to talk to.

I thought that was why he wanted to paint my portrait—that he might as well make use of my constant presence. He was surprisingly modest in his request, asking if I might be able to spare him the time for a sitting. Of course I was flattered and intrigued. I had by then seen his exquisite self-portrait, the one with the swirling blue background that I am fortunate enough to own now. There was a rigor to it that I admired immensely. It was not a portrait in the old-fashioned sense, a painting that demonstrated a sitter’s position in life and permitted him to think well of himself. Van Gogh’s self-portrait with the blue flames is an examination. In fact, I thought, that afternoon, as Vincent arranged his easel, that it was now his turn to examine me. I had peered at his body and attempted to diagnose the state of his mind, and he would now do likewise to me.

When my old friend Amand Gautier painted me as a young man, we discussed the format, the pose, even which one of my two coats I should wear. He sketched a few different poses, drew my figure three or four times to work out his lighting scheme. That portrait was finished in three weeks, and we thought his swiftness astounding. (I might add that it was a great success in the Salon of 1861, and that I gained a degree of renown from the painting and the lithograph reproduction of it.) Now here I was, sitting at the red table in the garden behind the house, without any obvious preparation. But of course Vincent van Gogh never did anything conventionally. I would have liked to change into something more elegant, but Vincent would not permit this.

“No, Doctor, just as you are,” he said. “We’ll do very well with your old jacket.” I made to take off my hat, but he would not permit that, either, though it was only a stained sailor’s cap with a narrow leather brim. Vincent stood a few feet away, squeezing blue and red and yellow paint onto his palette.

“And how would you like me to pose?” I asked, feeling somewhat at a loss. “Perhaps I could be writing something?”

“No, no,” he answered, scrutinizing the bristles on a brush and discarding it. “Just lean your head on your hand and look at me.” I obeyed. I already knew better than to suggest an alternative.

He stepped back and gazed at me. “We need another note,” he muttered, almost to himself. “Yellow.” He glanced around, as if the desired color would appear before him.

“Have you any yellow blooms, Doctor?” he asked. “I don’t know your northern plants very well. I want something strong, like the yolk of an egg.”

“There are the orange dahlias you painted the other day,” I suggested.

“No, I must have yellow, the primary color. You see the red of the table and the blue of your coat require it, a strong, true yellow like the cover of a novel. Actually, a book would do nicely.”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “Shall I get one?”

“Yes,” he said. “But I will paint your figure first. I like this pose. It shows that you have been long acquainted with grief.”

So he was indeed examining me, and he had managed to discern a truth about me that I did not often acknowledge. Blanche had been gone for many years already; perhaps I should have been able to put the pain and guilt of her death behind me. Yet I often felt that I carried it with me like a heavy stone, a burden I could never put down. Many a man has been widowed young, but there is a special anguish in being a doctor who cannot cure his wife. Vincent watched me as if waiting for a response. “I lost my wife to illness fifteen years ago,” I confessed. “It is a long time, yet the sadness persists.” I looked around the garden and gestured to the trees and shrubs. “It was at this time of year. Sometimes the way the sunlight falls, or a certain scent on the breeze, brings back a rush of memories.”

“And you did not marry again,” Vincent observed. He had begun to paint, but I hardly noticed his hand moving swiftly from palette to canvas and back.

“No, I did not,” I confirmed. “I never met another woman …”

“Another woman like Madame Gachet?” Vincent prompted.

“No,” I agreed. I fell silent again. It was the truth. Yet there was a freedom, too, in being unmarried, which brought me occasional solace. Sometimes bachelors like Vincent imagine marriage as a blissful union, but there is a constraint. A married man must live up to his wife. Or perhaps I felt this only because of how Blanche had died. The last days of a consumptive’s life are wretched and painful, yet Blanche showed only courage and kindness as she left us. For me she had forgiveness and more. There is a terrible rebuke in pity from a woman you have failed. I felt that, in contrast to her steadfastness, I had discovered only cowardice in myself. That discovery has haunted me ever since. In any event, I did not expect Vincent to understand.

Looking at one of his canvases, you can imagine how he moved constantly while he painted. The pigment seems to have been applied with his whole body. As I sat still on that early summer afternoon, he danced around me, stepping back and forth to the canvas, bending his knees, shifting his weight. And talking all the while. I value intensely some of the things he told me that afternoon. He was fascinated by portraits, and loathed photographs; he despised their slavish recording of physical features.

“I believe that, with color, I can capture a more enduring truth,” he said. “Something more in the nature of a dream, that has a truth of its own that may be different from what we experience every day. For example, I will paint your face in brick red.” (Naturally I found this notion somewhat alarming.) “Next to the blue background, it will appear much paler. Your face will look rosy, healthy—but I will be able to show also how the distress of time has played on your features.” He hoped, he told me, that his portraits might still be valued a hundred years hence, allowing the people of that distant era to better understand the conditions of life as we ended the nineteenth century. He seemed not to think it at all unlikely that people would still know his paintings in 1990. It was a strange kind of confidence for a man whose work had been seen primarily in cafés, a paint shop, and his brother’s apartment, and bought by precisely one collector.

When he was satisfied with a rough outline of my figure, he allowed me to stand up and move about. “Would you find me that novel, Doctor?” he asked. “Two volumes would be best. I don’t mind what they are, but they must be yellow.”

I returned to the garden with a pair of volumes that he placed carefully in front of me. “Have you read any of the Goncourts’ novels, Doctor?” he asked.

“No,” I answered. “I have heard of them, naturally.”

“I will give these books two of their titles. One of them,
Germinie Lacerteux
, concerns a remarkable case of mental degeneration. I understand it was the authors’ maid who inspired it. When she became ill and died, they discovered that she had led a secret existence of complete debauchery. She drank and went with men—she had even had a child, I believe. Yet they never guessed it.”

“What a tale!” I answered. “Of course I have seen women subject to these compulsions, but they normally become apparent. It seems those brothers must not have been terribly observant.”

“Perhaps not.” Vincent knelt on the ground, his head hidden by the canvas. The palette rested on one of his bent legs, and a brush laden with cadmium yellow darted between canvas and palette. “Yet because it is about the woman’s disastrous mental state, it will allude to your work with ailments of the mind. And the other title is
Manette Salomon
. You don’t know it either?” He peered out from the side of the canvas as he asked this.

“No,” I said.

“A marvelous book. Not unlike Zola’s
L’Oeuvre
. Which you certainly know,” he went on and withdrew behind the canvas again.

“That one, yes,” I answered. “I was especially interested in it because of my connection with Cézanne.” Zola’s novel had created quite a furor in the circles I frequented. It was an unsparing portrait of an unsuccessful artist who was so obviously based on Cézanne that after it was published the artist and author had parted ways, despite a lifelong friendship.

“Well,
Manette Salomon
is quite similar, only there are also echoes of Manet’s career. In any event, it concerns the harsh life of the artist who tries to create something new. And it will refer to your interest in art and artists.”

Vincent got to his feet and stepped back. “Yes, that is what I wanted. The yellow heightens the blue and the red. It locks the whole composition into place. Yet we are still missing a note. You wouldn’t have any lavender, or mauve? Surely somewhere in your garden?” He came around to my side of the canvas to look over the flower beds. There was a spot of vermilion on his sleeve.

I pointed to the bells of the foxglove just a few meters away. “Would that do?” I asked. “Shall I cut it for you?”

“No, Doctor, I can get it. Do you mind if I break off a stalk?” He didn’t wait for permission. “What a pretty blossom. What is it called?”

“Foxglove,” I told him. “Also known as digitalis. We doctors use the extract of the leaves to control some heart disorders.”

“Oh, wonderful,” he answered. “For we could also say, Doctor, that you take care of your patients’ hearts, couldn’t we?” It was the kind of allusion that made him happy.

It is easy to forget, in light of what happened to him, that Vincent had a playful side, but the evidence of his humor is right there in my portrait. We had been discussing my career and some of the more striking incidents that had earned me nomination to the Order of the Legion of Honor. For instance, when I was still a medical student, I traveled to the Jura to help care for the patients in a cholera epidemic. Upon my return, one of the doctors sent my nomination to the minister of health, but nothing came of it. Other episodes resulted in subsequent nominations: my activity during a train wreck on the Chemin de Fer du Nord, for example, or my medical services during the siege of Paris. When I related these to Vincent—I had been nominated, without success, six times by 1890—he laughed and took up a narrow brush, dashing it through a streak of scarlet on his palette, and slashed a thread through my lapel on the canvas—the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor. “Never mind, Doctor,” he said, “you’ll get your ribbon yet. Perhaps for your services to the arts!” he crowed, taking the joke a step further. “Doctor to all the renegade painters in Paris, the
refusés
and
intransigeants
and Impressionists and every kind of rebel. The Ministry of Arts will reward you for keeping us all alive and making masterpieces!” He paused in the midst of laughing and frowned, scrutinizing the canvas. “In any event, that streak of red intensifies the blue of your coat. I like the effect.” Still, he did not include the “ribbon” in the duplicate portrait he made for me at my request. I suppose I am glad, since I still have not received the award. It might have been difficult to explain to viewers that this was a little painterly joke.

When Vincent allowed me to stand up and stretch, I could see that it was indeed my face appearing on the canvas. I looked despondent. My eyes gazed out beyond the viewer to something—or nothing. You could say I was lost in an unhappy reverie. The skin of my cheek was pushed up and wrinkled by the fist it rested on. There, identifiably, were my red hair, my mustache, the tiny bit of beard I wore in those days. The features were mine.

Yet in a way it was also not me. There I was, a haunted man, with the gay yellow books and the bells of the foxglove pressed up to the front of the picture. The angle of the flowers echoed the way my body leaned to the side of the canvas, so that the yellow books somehow held us steady. But for all the physical resemblance, what makes this portrait a marvel is not the way it captures anything specific to me. It is more than that: Vincent used my features to create a portrait of world-weariness. He later told me that he had described it to Gauguin in a letter as having “the despairing expression of our times.”

I have thought of every conversation I had with Vincent so often that I could repeat them all exactly. Vincent asked questions. He solicited opinions. However, looking back, I wonder if these conversations were ever true exchanges or just Vincent’s attempts to seek confirmation for what he already believed. And I have wondered, in the years since then, whether Vincent perceived the people he knew as individuals. He had a great love for humankind—he spoke often about the suffering in the world, and I do believe that he felt it deeply. What he did not seem to feel was the suffering of the particular human beings around him. Or, for that matter, their anxiety, their impatience, their satisfaction, their longing. Certainly this inability affected his relations with Theo. It also explained the unfortunate episodes of his attachments to women, as Theo had described them to me. It was a mark of the extent of his mental alienation, but, alas, I did not recognize it until much later.

When I arrived at this conclusion, I felt somewhat disillusioned, I must confess. I had become accustomed to thinking of him as a man of wisdom. I preferred not to see his limitation: he had compassion for mankind but not for individual men. I felt that, in sitting for a portrait, I had trusted him to plumb my soul, much the way he had trusted me when he first arrived in Auvers. And indeed, he had done that in a way, by seeing the grief that I carried around as an invisible burden. He saw it, and he used it in my portrait as an emblem. He did not, I realized, understand it. He knew what my grief looked like, but not what it was to suffer it.