Van Gogh (103 page)

Despite his gregarious nature, however, Signac did not pursue the connection with any apparent vigor. By his own account, he saw Vincent only “several times” over the rest of the spring: a morning of painting outdoors, lunch at a local bistro, perhaps, and at least once a long walk back to the city. His brief reminiscence portrays Vincent as a somewhat clownish and not necessarily welcome companion on his country excursions. “He shouted, gesticulated and brandished his big canvas which was still quite wet,” Signac recalled, “smothering himself and passers-by with paint.” Once they reached the city, their paths parted. Signac never introduced Vincent to any of his wide circle of friends nor invited him to the soirées he hosted every Monday night at his residence, just a short walk from the rue Lepic apartment.

Of course, Vincent didn’t need the young Signac to show him the “new” Impressionism. He had seen it scores of times, starting with the
Grande Jatte
itself,
probably at both its exhibitions in 1886. Like many young artists, Vincent’s Cormon classmates Anquetin and Lautrec had fallen under Seurat’s Pointillist spell that same summer. Their works, as well as those by Signac and other acolytes, were on view throughout the following winter and spring. Even those who resisted the new style, like John Peter Russell, argued about it endlessly.

So Vincent had undoubtedly seen the art and heard the ideas many times before he encountered the cocky young painter on the banks of the Seine. But Signac was a charismatic spokesman, an incorrigible explainer, and Vincent was a man bereft of companionship for whom a hands-on demonstration, a word of encouragement, or a cordial compliment could work wonders. Their interaction, however brief or awkward, touched his imagination in a way no exhibition could. Vincent expressed his gratitude in paint. Whether in Signac’s company or merely for his approval, he painted at all the Neo-Impressionists’ favorite spots along the Seine, including the Île de la Grande Jatte itself, eagerly mimicking the dense
pointille
, strict color rules, and radiant light of his young mentor. Finally, he sealed their connection with a self-portrait done exactly as Signac would have done it—all disciplined dots and color juxtapositions.

But as soon as his occasional companion left Paris at the end of May, Vincent’s brush abandoned the strictures of Pointillism and returned to the goal that had driven him out of the city and into the countryside in the first place. In a series of shady, close-up vignettes of forest floor and rural path, he cast aside Signac’s rules, Monet’s subjects, even Blanc’s complementaries, and returned to the intimacies of his earliest landscapes—the cozy glimpses of nature that had always pleased his brother most: a lush carpet of undergrowth at the base of an ivy-laced tree; a sunlit clearing seen through a dense latticework of young saplings; a field of summer wheat at the moment when a gust of wind churns the stalks into waves and startles a partridge from its hiding place.

After the silk cravats and smart felt hats of his self-portraits, after the glowing reports of advantageous relations with the young gentleman Signac, these affirmations of nature’s reparative powers touched the final talisman of Van Gogh family amends, capping Vincent’s months-long push to win back his brother’s lost devotion.

But it wasn’t enough. Theo certainly recognized the change in his brother’s art and welcomed his long-overdue embrace of Impressionism. “[Vincent’s] paintings are becoming lighter,” he reported to sister Lies in May; “he is trying hard to put more sunlight in them.” And the images of nature worked their parsonage-garden magic, moving Theo to flights of poetic appreciation for “nature’s vast magnificence.” Vincent’s long absences from the apartment, combined with the ministrations of a new doctor, had also revived Theo’s health, at least temporarily. Whether because of the changes in Vincent’s art, or the improvements in his spirits, or just the coming of spring (“man, just as nature,
thaws out sometimes when the sun shines,” he wrote), Theo reached out to his brother. “We have made our peace,” he reported to sister Wil in April. “I hope it will last … I have asked him to stay.”

But on the most important judgment of all, Vincent had failed to win a reprieve. If anything, the trials of the winter had only redoubled Theo’s determination to marry. The months of ominous illness and battles with Vincent had turned his natural melancholy into a deep dread of living out his remaining years deprived of “interaction with sympathizing souls.” In letters to his sisters, he poured out his loneliness and desperation. He complained of “difficult days” when it would “mean so much to know that there is somebody who wants to help”; of times when he felt “all alone,” facing impossible challenges with “no way out.” He exhorted them, and himself, to “find what your heart desires so that you may always feel warmth around you.” He warned them, and himself, that “perfect happiness is not of this earth.” For him the answer was plain enough. “I intend to ask for Jo Bonger’s hand,” he declared. He had not seen her since the previous summer—had not even written her—but “she could mean oh so much to me,” he imagined. “I could trust her in a very special way, like nobody else.”

In May, just after his thirtieth birthday, Theo announced his intentions. He would go to Amsterdam “as soon as possible” and beg Jo Bonger to marry him.

The news, expected though it was, plunged Vincent into despair. Even as his palette and brush continued to capture the bursting sunshine of the Paris summer, his spirits sank into darkness and depression. He talked of suicide, and suffered paralyzing nightmares. He ruminated on death in two painted studies of a stark, Yorick-like skull. As in Nuenen, where he never left the studio without a flask of cognac, he found solace in drink. The route to and from Asnières was lined with cafés and bistros where he could end the long, hot workdays, as so many Parisians did, in the cool, sweet-green oblivion of absinthe.

Like Theo, he had only his sisters to tell his misery. In a letter so bitter and cynical that it must have alarmed the naïve twenty-five-year-old Wil, he lamented his “lost youth” and cursed the “diseases” of “melancholy and pessimism” that tormented him. He responded to some poetry she had sent for his review with a coruscating denunciation of all artistic aspirations. Down that road, he warned, lay nothing “sacred or good,” but only futility and disillusionment. As if on cue, word arrived from Nuenen that everything he had left behind in the Kerkstraat studio, including studies and drawings and even his precious portfolios of prints, were to be sold at auction to pay the debts he had also abandoned.

He agonized over the source of his misfortune and misery. He claimed his plight as the curse of neglected artists everywhere, doomed to suffer the fate of “a grain between the millstones”—a seed snatched from the soil before it could
ripen or germinate, or a flower “trampled underfoot, frozen or scorched.” He brooded on his own culpability, invoking Zola’s theories of degeneracy and determinism to defend himself from unspoken reproaches. “Evil lies in our own nature,” he protested, “which we have not created ourselves.… Vice and virtue are the products of chemistry, like sugar and bile.” But ultimately he couldn’t hide the true source of his terror. “If I didn’t have Theo,” he wrote, “it would not be possible for me to achieve with my work what I ought to achieve.”

If the brilliant landscapes of summer masked his despair, the self-portraits unmasked it. In quick succession, he produced another series of confessions in paint, all full-sized and all on canvas—as if the smaller, paper images of spring couldn’t contain his guilt or his grievances. Stripped of silks and satins, the figure in the mirror appears in the limp, tattered smock of an artist, his hair cropped short, his cheeks sunken, his gaze colorless, unfocused, affectless. For all the sun flooding into his Montmartre studio, he stands against the dark, murky background of a prison cell. The hollow-eyed criminal of Antwerp had returned. In his letter to Wil, Vincent, now thirty-four, reported “making swift progress toward growing into a little old man—you know, with wrinkles, a tough beard, a number of false teeth, and so on.” To Theo, he put it even more bluntly: “I already feel old and broken.”

Vincent had dealt with the threat of a woman disrupting their perfect brotherhood before. In Drenthe, he proposed that Theo’s mistress Marie join the two painter-brothers in their cottage on the heath. “Of course she would have to paint too,” he encouraged; “the more the merrier.” In Antwerp, he responded to Theo’s talk of marriage by declaring, “I wish both of us might find a wife.” The following summer (1886), when Theo left for Amsterdam with engagement on his mind, Vincent had offered not just to take the mistress S “off his hands,” but to
marry
her—“if worse comes to worse.” In Vincent’s estimation, these were the only two circumstances in which marriage was thinkable, for him or Theo: either one woman married them both, or they both married. Anything else would upset the perfect balance of their brotherhood.

But Vincent had not yet even met Jo Bonger, the woman of whom Theo said, “I cannot put her out of my mind; she is always with me.” Jo was still a stranger to Vincent; and she to him. In fact, as Vincent either knew or suspected, Theo had not yet told his inamorata
anything
about his troubled brother—a hint of the shame he felt and a preview of the inevitable exclusion to come.

If they could not both marry Jo Bonger, then Vincent would have to find a wife of his own. And indeed, the ghosts of failed attempts to do so haunt his letters that summer. “I still continue to have the most impossible and highly unsuitable love affairs,” he wrote sister Wil, “from which as a rule I come away with little more than shame and disgrace.” One such “unsuitable” affair may have been with an older woman that he met in Asnières. He called her “the
countess” and he courted her with repeated gifts of paintings. “I cannot help thinking of [her],” he later admitted, even as he wondered if their liaison was just “an illusion.” He tried to explain his sad record of similar illusions as the inevitable fate of an artist. “I blame it all on this damned painting,” he wrote. “The love of art is the undoing of true love.” And, as always, he compensated with images for the inadequacies of life. Setting his easel in a lovers’ lane, he painted happy couples strolling arm in arm and embracing on a bench, as if painting it could make it come true for him.

But as the moment of Theo’s departure for Amsterdam approached, a sense of urgency gripped him. Reviving past fantasies, he inquired after the status of Margot Begemann and asked his sister unabashedly, “Did Sien de Groot marry her cousin?” The distorted version of family that he had briefly enjoyed on the heath came back to him in a wave of regret and he acclaimed
The Potato Eaters
, the icon of that time, “the best picture I have done.” He lived in terror that he had waited too long: that love was destined to be the last and greatest in a litany of failures. “In years gone by,” he lamented, “when I ought to have been in love, I gave myself up to religious and socialist affairs, and considered art holier than I do now.” Desperately reassessing the verities of a lifetime, he wondered if “people who only fall in love are more saintly than those who sacrifice their hearts to an idea.”

Only desperation could explain Vincent’s amorous advances on Agostina Segatori.

The two had continued to see each other over the winter. Vincent painted a portrait of the bored-looking
signora
fashionably attired, sitting at one of her distinctive tambourine tables. He continued to patronize Le Tambourin, too, occasionally bringing along the old paint dealer Tanguy, to the horror of his shrewish wife. When Vincent needed money—perhaps to ransom his treasured portfolios in Nuenen—Segatori let him display some of his recently acquired prints on her café walls, alongside his paintings, in hopes of raising quick cash. The relationship seemed cordial enough—she was a professional hostess, after all—but hardly intimate.

Meanwhile, her situation, like his, grew increasingly complicated and untenable. After its auspicious opening, Le Tambourin had fallen under a cloud of disrepute. The manager—whose relationship to Agostina remained suspiciously unclear—had attracted a circle of menacing thugs and pimps. The restaurant’s aura went from fashionably outré to genuinely sinister. At a time of widespread xenophobia directed against immigrant Italians, dark rumors swirled around “La Segatori’s” erotic eatery. Every sensational murder, it seemed, involved Italian villains who had been seen plotting at a tambourine table. Brawls and police raids were common. A Tambourin regular rumored to be one of Agostina’s ex-lovers was convicted of murder and executed. Alarmed customers fled, pushing the café inexorably toward bankruptcy.

But Vincent didn’t care. He needed a woman. And in his limited social circle, Segatori’s flattering sensuality and Neapolitan warmth were no doubt as close as he had come to reciprocity. If the rumors reached him at all, he either ignored them or cast the hapless beauty as the victim of those around her (“she is neither a free agent nor mistress in her own house,” he explained to Theo). With his usual heedless ardor, he courted the aging beauty using the same means of persuasion he always used: art. Reviving the bond of the previous year, he started painting flowers again, filling large canvases with elaborate bouquets, brighter and bolder than ever, brushed in the pure, dappled colors he had practiced all spring in Asnières. Wooing image followed wooing image, including one of a basket of violets, the flower of requited love, set on one of her tambourine tables—an unmistakable gesture of seduction.

After Theo left on his mission of marriage in July, rejection became unthinkable. Even when Segatori refused to accept his courtship bouquet of violets, Vincent persisted. “She didn’t tread all over my heart,” he noted optimistically in a letter to his absent brother. When he heard that she had fallen in love with another man, he condemned the gossipmongers. “I know her well enough to trust her,” he insisted. When she told him to “go away,” he imagined she was only protecting him from the dangerous men who surrounded her. “Appalling things would be done to her if she took my side,” he explained.