Van Gogh (109 page)

If he had come looking for the “brilliant Midi light” promised by Lautrec and Signac, he wouldn’t have picked as the subject of his first painting a butcher shop on an Arles side street—a sunless, skyless urban vignette that he could have found anywhere in Montmartre. If he had come just for the women—the beautiful “Arlésiennes” celebrated in the writings of Michelet and Multatuli and everywhere in popular entertainments—he would have moved on to Marseille, only fifty miles farther down the track: the kind of raucous port town, like Antwerp, where women of every kind were always available.

Instead, he went straight to work. Neither the bitter cold nor the wild mistral wind could deter him from his interrupted task. By leaving Paris, Vincent had let go of his brother, but not his vision of
les frères
Van Gogh. If anything, the distance he put between them only intensified his devotion to the joint enterprise begun on the
entresol
and the rue Lepic. “I ask nothing more,” he wrote Theo soon after arriving in Arles, “than that the business you began in the shop on the boulevard should go on and increase in importance.” This task required no sun or sky, only paper and pen.

No sooner had he secured a room above the Restaurant Carrel than he launched a campaign of solidarity as furious as the wind that whistled at his
window. Writing in French—the language not just of art, but of commerce—he bombarded his brother with advice on their budding venture. In arguments alternately vehement and cynical, he deplored the soullessness of competing dealers and offered elaborate, Machiavellian plots to best them. He coached the young
gérant
in the minutest details of buying and selling, lecturing him on the fickleness of public tastes and urging him to stealth and ruthlessness in the search for competitive advantage.

Casting himself as Theo’s
conseilleur extraordinaire
, he speculated on the effects of current events, like Kaiser Wilhelm’s death, on the art market. He advised that the war with Germany that France’s belligerent General Boulanger seemed bent on “might have a favorable influence on the picture trade.” He borrowed the bellicose talk filling the papers and cafés to rally Theo to their shared mission. Other dealers “will steal a march on you,” he warned, as he introduced his “plan of attack” and vowed to “return to the charge,” assuring his brother of ultimate “victory.”

Only hours after arriving, he struck out through the snow in search of “bargains” for the
entresol
, especially paintings by the brothers’ favorite, Adolphe Monticelli. He pledged to make a trip to Marseille, Monticelli’s hometown, to plant the Van Gogh flag before others could beat them to it. He reveled in news that Theo’s old colleague Alexander Reid resented Vincent’s preemptive strike in the Midi, and gloated that Reid’s enthusiasm for Monticelli had driven up the prices of the five paintings Theo already owned. To help him capitalize on that windfall, Vincent vehemently pressed John Peter Russell, his former Cormon classmate, to buy a Monticelli from Theo. He compared the recently deceased artist to no less a figure than Delacroix, the giant of color. “[He] gives us something passionate and eternal,” Vincent wrote Russell, promoting both the Marseille painter and himself, “the rich color and rich sun of the glorious South.”

In addition to long, fawning letters to Russell, he sent salvos of advice and encouragement to “comrades” in the
frères
Van Gogh circle, especially Émile Bernard. He kept them closely informed of Theo’s sales of Monet’s works on the
entresol
, hinting that he could do the same for them. He used the promise of Theo’s favor to solicit exchanges for his own works according to elaborate calculations of relative value and strategic placement. When he wrote his other Cormon classmate, Lautrec, he enclosed the missive in an envelope to Theo and asked him to hand-deliver it—a tactic that put the stamp of the Goupil
gérant
on every letter he sent. He also wrote to the brothers’ young Dutch friend, Arnold Koning, exhorting him to “tell those fellows in Holland about what you’ve seen in Paris.” Even in letters to his sister Wil, he reflexively flogged the brothers’ joint venture. “Theo is doing his best for all the impressionists,” he wrote. “He is quite different from the other dealers, who do not care the least bit about the painters.”

Vincent’s new mercantile zeal carried his thoughts inexorably to The Hague and the little back office of H. G. Tersteeg, scene of so many previous humiliations. In the chilly isolation of his hotel room, the prospect of reversing the judgments of the past once again seized his imagination. In a fever of enthusiasm, he imagined enlisting his former nemesis in a three-pronged “offensive” to extend the brothers’ new business across the entire continent. With Tersteeg’s help, he and Theo could organize a network of sympathetic dealers—dealers who “have the artist’s interests at heart”—in England, Holland, and France. Tersteeg would introduce the painters of the Petit Boulevard in London and The Hague, Theo would showcase them on the
entresol
, and Vincent himself would push on to Marseille and “get hold of a window to show the impressionists.”

Painters of all kinds would rally to this enlightened venture, Vincent imagined, merging his bold new entrepreneurial project with his old dream of a “combination” of artists. Out of “moral obligation,” established painters of the Grand Boulevard, such as Degas and Renoir, would contribute paintings to their joint initiative, providing a stock of salable works that could be used to support the “lesser impressionists”—a term he now applied to himself and all the artists who aspired to the
entresol
. He imagined, for instance, that Georges Seurat would contribute three paintings: one for each of the three new permanent exhibition sites he planned in Paris, London, and Marseille.

But everything depended, as it always did, on the approval of the implacable
gérant
on the Plaats. “Tersteeg must be in it,” he insisted. Tersteeg could act as a powerful ally in selling the new art in Holland and England, and his reputation would attract others to the brothers’ cause. Vincent drafted a letter to his former boss and laid out his sweeping fantasy, including detailed advice on how to outmaneuver Reid in the English market and bold predictions of commercial success. “[You] could easily dispose of fifty or so [pictures] for us in Holland,” he wrote, “in view of the low prices compared with the interest the pictures offer.” He sent Theo the letter with instructions to add his own encouragements before passing it along. When he learned that Tersteeg would soon visit Paris, he urged Theo to press the plan by arranging a “grand tour” of the artists’ studios, where Tersteeg would “see for himself that next year people will start talking, and will go on talking about the new school.”

After sending his letter, Vincent sat in his freezing hotel room boiling with anticipation. “Has that confounded Tersteeg written you yet?” he demanded of Theo after only a few days. When two weeks went by without a word, he began plotting an elaborate scheme to force the wily
gérant’s
hand. “If he doesn’t answer,” Vincent vowed darkly, “he will hear of us all the same.” He convinced himself that Tersteeg could be won to their cause if he saw one of Vincent’s paintings. To that end, he proposed dedicating a picture to Anton Mauve, who had died recently, and giving it to Mauve’s widow Jet, Vincent’s cousin. Not only
would Mauve’s dear friend Tersteeg be likely to see the painting, but the gift would also give the brothers an opening to complain about Tersteeg’s inaction. “We do not deserve to be treated as if we were dead,” he grumbled.

Finally, after three weeks of waiting, Theo received a letter from Tersteeg, but it made no mention of Vincent, his letter, or his art. Biting his lip against the injuries of the past, Vincent brushed off the rebuff. “You’ll see that he’ll write me a line as soon as he has seen what I’ve done,” he assured Theo. Reaffirming his vision of ultimate victory, he urged Theo to send Tersteeg one of his Paris paintings—a study from the previous spring in Asnières—and promised better to come. “We must get our place in the sun,” he rallied his brother. “When I think of that, I get into a mercenary frenzy.”

In March, when the snow melted and the trees began to bud, that frenzy burst onto canvas.

THEO HAD REIGNITED
Vincent’s commercial ambition in late February with an offer to submit some of his paintings to the fourth annual Salon des Indépendants, a premier showcase for avant-garde art. Coming so soon after the brothers’ abrupt parting, the offer may have been prompted by guilt, or gratitude, or both. Theo may have hoped to make amends for not including any of Vincent’s work in the show he mounted on the
entresol
in December and January—a show that included fellow Petit Boulevard painters like Pissarro and Guillaumin, as well as Gauguin, a newcomer to the brothers’ circle.

He followed through on his offer not only by carefully selecting the paintings to be submitted, but also by showing Vincent’s work—discreetly—to select customers in his gallery. One visitor to the
entresol
around this time recalled Theo “telling us that he had a brother who was a painter and who lived in the country.… He brought some unframed pictures from another room [and] stood modestly aside, observing the effect these canvases made on us.” Such efforts were already promising fruit. A few months later, Theo received a note from a collector who had been to Tanguy’s shop and wanted to see more of Vincent’s paintings—perhaps even to buy one or two of them. He knew so little about this new artist that he referred to him in his note to Theo as “your brother-in-law.”

Chasing this latest hope of success, Vincent had rushed into the blanched landscape even before the snow melted, in search of imagery. But “the gray days offer him little subject matter,” Theo reported to Wil, and “the cold makes him sick.” When he did find something to paint—a muddy, rutted road, or the Arles skyline from a distance—he reverted to the cool colors and stippled strokes of Signac and Seurat. At almost the same time, Theo made overtures in Paris to the same two artists. In March, he paid a visit to Signac’s home, and later the same month, he purchased a Seurat painting. “I congratulate you,” Vincent wrote
when he heard of the purchase; “with what I shall send you, you must try to arrange an exchange with Seurat as well.”

But the real star of the
entresol
that winter and spring was Claude Monet. Boussod, Valadon & Cie had already begun to profit lavishly from their huge investment in Monet’s series of rocky seascapes from Belle-Île the previous year. That success emboldened Theo to pursue further opportunities with the artist, who had gone for the winter to Antibes, on the Côte d’Azur near Nice, about a hundred miles east of Arles. From there, Monet sent reports of his work on a series of views of the Mediterranean coast, with its wind-twisted trees and shimmering sea. By March, Theo was already laying the groundwork for a large-scale purchase of the Antibes paintings and a solo exhibition on the
entresol
in June, the artist’s first in a decade. Theo’s anticipation of this show, his admiration for Monet’s shrewd choice of subjects, and reports of their commercial success undoubtedly reached Vincent.

Long held at bay by snow and record-setting cold, spring came to Arles in a great rush that year. Color swept across the countryside in a wave of blooming. Orchards of apple, pear, peach, and plum trees exploded almost simultaneously into flower. A tide of buttercups and daisies spilled over the meadows. Hedgerows sprouted roses and roadsides, irises. It was a spring like none Vincent had ever seen—a sudden spectacle of fecundity compared to the parsonage garden’s slow slip from winter’s grip.

In this bounty of imagery, Vincent saw possibilities for paintings everywhere. The receding rows and endless variety of fruiting trees offered a perfect opportunity for the kind of signature series that had proved such a success for Monet. Every day that the changeable weather allowed, he carried his heavy load of equipment down the tree-lined road that led out of town into the flat, surrounding fields. With a discipline and deliberateness exceptional even for the methodical Vincent, he set his easel in front of every kind of fruit tree he could find, as if embarking on a horticultural survey of Provence. He painted the willowy apricot trees with their sprinkling of tiny pink blossoms, the wiry, blushing plum trees, and the stately pears with their clouds of yellow-white flowers. He painted apple and peach trees in their vast outdoor enclosures of cane fencing and tall cypresses—protection from the brutal mistral. He painted the densely flowered cherry and the elegantly spare almond.

To capture this catalogue of fruiting trees, Vincent mustered a catalogue of painting styles. All of the fierce “isms” circulating in Paris made an appearance in the orchards of Arles. In addition to the feathery impressionism of Monet and acolytes like Guillaumin, he employed the thin, chalky paint and moody tonalities of his Cormon classmate John Peter Russell. Russell had painted a series of orchard scenes on a trip to Sicily the previous year, and Vincent invoked that commonality to lure the rich Australian to the brothers’ venture. “[I] am working
at a series of blooming orchards,” he wrote Russell in April, “and involuntarily I thought often of you because you did the same in Sicily. Some day I shall send some work to Paris and I hope you might exchange a Sicilian study with me.” Nothing could have been further from Russell’s Whistlerian tone poems, however, than the fevered dots and dashes that Vincent applied to a stand of peach trees that same month. Following the procedure (if not the theory) of Signac, Pissarro, and other devotees of Seurat’s scientific color, he peppered the sky with blue and the trees with tiny pink blossoms.

For Bernard, Vincent painted the orchards as stained-glass windows—mosaics of pure color and dark outline—and dutifully documented his adherence to the Japonist gospel of primitive simplicity, recently dubbed “Cloisonnism,” with elaborate descriptions and explanatory illustrations. “Here is another orchard,” he wrote in April in a letter that included an outline sketch with color designations. “The composition is rather simple: a white tree, a small green tree, a square patch of green, lilac soil, an orange roof, a large blue sky.” He accompanied these descriptions with earnest manifestos, pledging his allegiance to Bernard’s revolt against Impressionist dogma: