Van Gogh (118 page)

He took long walks at night, peering into the sky and pondering the new reports of distant planets and unseen worlds, imagining a paradise that he seemed unable to make in his own world. “I always feel I am a traveler,” he wrote, “going somewhere and to some destination. If I tell myself that the somewhere and the destination do not exist, that seems to me very reasonable and likely enough.” He compared life to “a one-way journey in a train”: “You go fast, but cannot distinguish any object very close up, and above all you do not see the engine.”

Caught in a maelstrom of dark musings, Vincent grasped for the only sure consolation he knew. On a large canvas, he sketched out a familiar image more comforting than any promise of paradise: a sower. The idea came to him during his work on harvest paintings in the Crau. It came as a vision, not as a vignette. In June, the fields were filled with reaping, not sowing, which would not start until the fall. Like his views of the Langlois Bridge, it sprang from a deep, burning nostalgia. “I am still enchanted by snatches of the past,” he wrote at its conception, “and have a hankering after the eternal, of which the sower and the sheaf of corn are the symbols.”

With no one to pose, he was forced to rely on his memory of Millet’s iconic version of the subject, which he had seen only as a print and, briefly, in a pastel rendering. But no matter. The image of the proud, striding figure with the sack of seeds slung over his shoulder and his arm outstretched had haunted
him with hope since the depths of the Borinage. In the years since—in Etten, in The Hague, in Drenthe, in Nuenen—he had tried again and again to express the promise of redemption through persistence that his father preached, that Millet gave form, and that all the heroes of his imagination, from Eliot to Zola, confirmed. But every attempt had failed. “I have been longing to do a sower for such a long time,” he lamented as he watched the harvest finish in Arles, “but [it] never comes off. And so I am almost afraid of it.”

He attacked and retreated from the harrowing image in a struggle as furious and fraught as the parallel struggle with Gauguin and Theo over the future of the Yellow House. The battleground canvas recorded every surge and every rout of confidence. It began, like
The Boats at Saintes-Maries
, as another affirmation of the new Cloisonnist gospel, as he described to Bernard: in the foreground, “a definite purple” of plowed earth; at the horizon, a line of ripe wheat of “yellow ochre with a little carmine”; a giant sun in a sky “chrome yellow, almost as bright as the sun itself”; and a single sower in “blue smock and white trousers.” Only a week later, his hopes for the image had spiraled upward toward something “done completely differently.” Invoking the older complementary gospels of Blanc and Chevreul, and their messiah, Delacroix, he imagined painting his sower just as Delacroix had painted Christ on the Sea of Galilee: an icon of calm in the storm, of serenity in rejection, of reincarnation through suffering. “I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken,” he struggled to explain, “and therefore utterly heartbreaking.”

He thrust himself deeper into the image with a vision of Christ as a “great artist” who spread the light-filled art of redemption just as the striding figure in the field spread the seeds of rebirth. “What a sower,” he exclaimed, “what a harvest!” Around the same time, he painted a strange, impossible self-portrait depicting himself “on the sunny road to Tarascon”—the path to eternity—striding confidently and shouldering his load of sketchpads, canvases, pens, and brushes: the seeds of his new faith. “I consider making studies like
sowing,”
he once said, “[and] I long for a harvest time.”

Driven by such metaphysical ambitions, Vincent worked and reworked the simple image he described to Bernard. Channeling all his frustrations with the present and expectations for the future, he cast and recast the pose of the lone sower, bringing it more into line with his memory of Millet’s talismanic figure. He layered and relayered the canvas with new colors, dashing green into the yellow sky to brighten the sun and accent its radiations; adding orange into the purple field, laying on thick shingles of paint in a votive obsession of Impressionist brushwork. He claimed for all these worried reworkings the same mandate he claimed for his worried dreams of the Yellow House: Corot’s deathbed summons to a deeper truth. “I couldn’t care less what the colors are in
reality,”
he boasted to Bernard, as long as they satisfied his “hankering after the eternal.”

Sower with Setting Sun
, A
UGUST
1888,
REED PEN AND INK ON PAPER, 9⅝ × 12⅝ IN
. (
Illustration credit 31.7
)

But the image continued to confound him. He dismissed the result of all his hard work as merely an “exaggerated study”—yet another seed that failed to take root. He set it aside in his studio, “hardly daring to think about it.” But it continued to “torment” him, he confessed, “making me wonder if I shouldn’t attack it seriously and make a tremendous picture of it. My Lord I want to. But I keep asking myself if I have vigor enough to carry it off.” In letters to Theo, he taunted himself with his own cowardice: “Could one paint the Sower in color … yes or no? Why,
yes
. Well, do it then.” Finally, with a great heave of frustration, he consigned the image to the same uncertain fate as his dream for the Yellow House. “There is certainly a picture of this kind to be painted of this splendid subject,” he wrote, “and I hope it will be done someday, either by me or by someone else.”

IN MID-AUGUST
, the terms of Uncle Cent’s will were revealed. As expected, the old man left his impoverished nephew Vincent not a cent. Indeed, he had taken the opportunity to lash out one last time at his ne’er-do-well namesake. Even as he lavished large sums on family retainers and distant relatives, he disinherited Vincent not once, but twice. And not by discreet omission. “I want to make the
clear statement that it is my intention that Vincent Willem van Gogh, oldest son of my brother Theodorus van Gogh, will have no share of my estate,” he scolded from the grave. Elsewhere, he excluded Vincent “and his progeny”—a spitting expression of the family’s undying suspicion that Vincent had fathered Sien’s infant son.

But he had also left special bequests to both Theo and his mother, as well as more than a quarter of his sizable estate to Dorus’s children upon the death of Cent’s wife Cornelia. The double legacy relieved Theo of both current and future financial burdens. But it also left him with a great weight of guilt. “It’s a pity,” he wrote to his mother on behalf of his rejected brother. (Anna was unmoved.) Within days, he wrote both Vincent and Gauguin promising to use Cent’s legacy to “carry out [their] combination.” He offered Gauguin the same favorable terms he had long provided his brother: a monthly stipend of one hundred and fifty francs in exchange for twelve paintings a year. He would also pay Gauguin’s debts and travel expenses. Only a few days later, a letter arrived in Arles. “I have had a note from Gauguin,” Vincent reported ecstatically. “He is quite ready to come South as soon as the opportunity arises.”

By the twisted, hidden currents of Van Gogh family hearts, the unforgiving old dealer had thrown a lifeline to Vincent’s most improbable bid for rehabilitation, and brought him within sight of his
Paradou
.

T
HE PETALS CAME LAST. WITH A FULL BRUSH AND A TURN OF THE WRIST
, he applied the twisting yellow and orange strokes one at a time, one after the other. The pan-sized composite flowers, with their sunburst aureoles of ray florets and densely packed centers of multihued disc florets, opened the floodgates of Vincent’s fevered imagination and manic brush. At their last blooming, a year before in Paris, he had brooded obsessively over the details of these giant flowers listing on their rigid stalks. But now, in Arles, on the eve of Gauguin’s arrival, he saw only extravagant form and brilliant color.

Against a background of the most intense turquoise—a hue pitched perfectly between acid green and sublime blue—he sketched three huge flower heads. In a squall of tiny strokes, he transformed their spiraled discs into color wheels of complementaries: dashes of lavender for the yellow petals, cobalt for the orange. A slashing sortie draped a great floppy leaf over a lime-green vase, glazed and glistening in the bright light of his new studio. Another sortie, another leaf. He jabbed at the tabletop in a blaze of reds and oranges and then polished it with glancing strokes in every color on his palette.

He painted the way he talked: thrust and parry, assault and retreat. Barrages of brushwork swept across the canvas again and again, like summer storms. Furious exhortations of paint, as intense as fireworks, were followed by wary, ruminating reassessments as he recoiled from the image, arms folded, plotting his next volley. Then, just as suddenly, his brush would dart to his palette, dabbing and stirring, dabbing and stirring, searching for a new color; then rush to the canvas, bursting with new arguments and fresh fervor. “[He] became a fanatic as soon as he touched a paint brush,” recalled the Zouave Milliet disapprovingly. “A canvas needs to be seduced; but Van Gogh, he, he raped it.” Another witness described how Vincent attacked the canvas with both paint
and
words—muttering
and sputtering, coaxing and cajoling, bullying and railing—giving voice to his arguments even as his hand gave them form, texture, and color.

In both debates, he thrived on confrontation. If critics like Kahn and painters like MacKnight thought his colors too bright, he made them brighter. His wildflowers demanded a yellower yellow than the one in his tubes—a cruder, sunnier, “savage” yellow—and he searched his palette for just the right touch of green to make it shriek, or a deep complementary to make it pop. His goal, he said, was “to arrange the colors in a way that makes them vibrate.” And if Theo criticized his work as too hasty, too “haggard,” and urged him to slow down, he painted even faster—impossibly fast. He compared his painting style to the eating style of a local
paysan
ravenously slurping bouillabaisse, and claimed that the faster he worked, the better the results. Describing himself as a man “driven by a certain mental voracity,” he despaired of “ever painting pictures that are peaceful and quietly worked out.…” “It will always be headlong,” he lamented.

But, of course, it never was. Just as his campaigns of persuasion unfolded over many letters, and his letters sometimes went through multiple drafts, his paintings often gestated for weeks or months or even years before brush touched canvas. The image of a vase of sunflowers had been in his head since at least a year earlier, when he saw a bouquet of the huge flowers in the window of a Paris restaurant near Theo’s gallery. At the time, he had painted a series of individual blossoms, arranged in a morbid narrative and depicted in the descriptive, backward-looking draftsman’s style of The Hague. In the year since, however, Vincent had discovered the new testament of Cloisonnism, and the image of sunflowers in his head took new form and new color.

He practiced this new vision on a jug of early-blooming wildflowers in May, and then rehearsed it again in June with the boats on the beach at Saintes-Maries—“so pretty in shape and color that they make one think of flowers.” All summer, as he raced from field to field in search of imagery and hunted from brothel to brothel for models, this vision of simple flowers haunted him. “I reproach myself for not painting flowers here,” he wrote in early August. “Under the blue sky, the orange, yellow, red splashes of flowers take on an amazing brilliance, and in the limpid air, they look somehow happier, more lovely than in the North.” When the first sunflowers appeared soon thereafter, the plan sprang back to life. “I am thinking of decorating my studio with half a dozen pictures of ‘Sunflowers,’ ” he announced to Émile Bernard.