Van Gogh (14 page)

The deal was an extraordinary coup for the forty-year-old parson’s son from Brabant. While technically a partnership (with Goupil holding a controlling 40 percent stake, Cent 30 percent, and Goupil’s partner, Léon Boussod, 30 percent), the agreement relieved Cent of all managerial duties, creating for him a lifetime seigneury of privilege and influence that propelled him instantly into the aristocracy of the new age.

By the end of the year, the store in The Hague had moved from the narrow Spuistraat to sumptuous new quarters on the busy Plaats, and changed its name again—to Goupil & Cie. Still nominally under the management of a Van Gogh (Hein had sold his Rotterdam bookshop in 1858 and come to work for his successful brother), the new store began to stock more French paintings—Gérôme’s orientalist fantasies and Bouguereau’s sad-eyed girls—alongside the low-priced Dutch landscapes and genre paintings that had long been its mainstay. And, of course, it offered “a complete inventory of prints from the [Goupil] catalogue,” Cent reassured his clients in a farewell letter. A few months after opening the new store, Cent and his wife left The Hague and moved into the grand Goupil
appartement
in Paris.

He still traveled, acting as ambassador-at-large for Goupil’s international empire. When the company’s reproductions won a gold medal at the 1867 World’s Fair, Cent presented a copy of the winning prints to Willem III, King of the Netherlands. When Queen Victoria entertained the purchase of a painting, it was Cent van Gogh who traveled to Balmoral Castle to represent the Duchy of Goupil. Only his frail health prevented him from visiting the firm’s busiest new branch, in New York. When business or family took him to Holland, he held court at the new store on the Plaats, which locals continued to refer to as “the house of Van Gogh.” In 1863, he prevailed on his new partners to open another Goupil branch in Brussels and appointed his brother Hein its
gérant
(manager).

More and more, Cent occupied himself with the habits of wealth and leisure. True to the social class that had made him rich, he started an art collection.
Before, he had bought paintings to support artist friends, to secure reproduction rights, or just to add to stock. Now he bought for the sheer pleasure of owning and showing. He fussed endlessly over hanging his growing collection and changed its arrangement frequently in a succession of grand domiciles. In 1865 he found a palatial city house on the avenue de Malakoff, just off the grandest of Haussmann’s grand new boulevards and the city’s most fashionable promenade, the avenue de l’Impératrice. Located halfway between the towering Arc de Triomphe and the Bois de Boulogne, Cent’s new home offered a front-row view of the famous
tour du lac
, the daily procession of all Paris’s “finest people.”

But even Paris wasn’t perfect in every season. So in the winter of 1867–68, Cent went south—as his nephew would do exactly twenty years later—in search of a winter home, and relief from the respiratory problems that increasingly clouded his glittering leisure. He found both in the little coastal resort town of Menton, just beyond Nice, overlooking the blue waters of the Côte d’Azur. Over the next two decades, he and Cornelia would return there almost every winter, so enamored of the service at the town’s grand hotels that they never bothered to buy a house.

For a summer place, Cent returned to the land of his childhood. In Prinsenhage, a wealthy enclave on the outskirts of Breda, he built a splendid villa as stout and solid as the nearby Zundert town hall, only bigger. With its huge English-style garden, conservatory, stables, coachman’s house, and the latest baronial accessory, a “picture gallery,” Huize Mertersem far outshone the country houses of the old aristocracy that it was designed to emulate.

In November 1867, prematurely frail and winded, but still only forty-seven, Cent received one of his country’s highest honors. King Willem III, descendant of the Princes of Orange, conferred on Vincent van Gogh, descendent of gold thread-drawers, a Knighthood of the Order of the Eikenkroon (Oak Crown).

ONLY FOUR MONTHS
after Cent was knighted, his nephew and namesake Vincent abandoned school in Tilburg and returned to the Zundert parsonage in defiant disgrace. For his parents, the contrast could not have been more crushing. If Vincent could not carry on the family’s best name and highest purpose by serving God—as it increasingly appeared he could not, or would not—then the only face-saving alternative was to honor the family’s newly gilded name in commerce.

Vincent himself dithered. “I had to choose a profession,” he later wrote of this period, “but did not know which.” He spent the rest of the year (1868) in obdurate paralysis (“moving is so horrible,” he once said): clinging to the familiar parsonage from which his parents had tried repeatedly to oust him. He
wandered the moors, gathered bugs, and pored over his collections in his attic redoubt, ignoring the growing embarrassment as parishioners and townspeople began to talk about the parson’s strange, indolent son.

Every success of his uncle Cent’s only added to the weight of expectation and impatience. With each honor, the legacy of his childless uncle—long considered Vincent’s to claim—grew richer, and Vincent’s refusal to grasp it grew more and more confounding. No one doubted that Cent was prepared to be generous to his family. The point was driven home the year before Vincent’s long idyll when the manager of the Hague store died unexpectedly and Cent bestowed the prize position on a twenty-three-year-old employee from outside the family. The appointment of the young, energetic outsider sent a clear message—to all, apparently, but Vincent: Uncle Cent was prepared to elevate, early and decisively, the first young Van Gogh to prove himself worthy.

Finally, in July 1869, sixteen months after he left school, Vincent relented. Whether it was the cumulative weight of embarrassment and enticement, or the intervention of the persuasive Cent himself (who visited Zundert frequently during those sixteen months), probably not even Vincent knew. Ensuring that his recalcitrant, unpredictable son did not have last-minute second thoughts, Dorus accompanied him on the train trip to The Hague. There, on July 30, he registered Vincent, just recently turned sixteen, as an “office clerk” at Goupil & Cie and left him with a blessing that no doubt mixed encouragement, admonition, and weary apprehension.

O
NCE THE DIE WAS CAST, VINCENT EMBRACED HIS NEW LIFE. AS IF
to redeem himself for years of isolation and months of indolence, he seized his new role with the single-minded determination that would come to characterize all his endeavors. Overnight, the rough provincial boy with the battered shoes and fishnet full of bugs transformed himself into an up-and-coming business apprentice, a cosmopolite in the most cosmopolitan of all Dutch cities. He donned the summer wardrobe of a young gentleman (white socks, straw hat) and spent his Sundays not at the Grote Beek but with the other fashionable people strolling the beach at Scheveningen, a nearby bathing resort on the North Sea. At work, he submerged himself in his role as “protégé” (his word) of the firm’s eminent founder, Uncle Cent, displaying “a certain proper pride,” he confessed, in their shared name.

If Vincent needed a model to emulate—or a glimpse of what his future held—he had only to look to his boss, Hermanus Gijsbertus Tersteeg (known to all as H.G.). Handsome, hardworking, and poised far beyond his twenty-four years, Tersteeg was a new kind of man. He had risen to the top of his trade at such a young age not the old way, through family connections, but the new way: on his merits. Even as a teenage apprentice in an Amsterdam bookshop, Tersteeg had demonstrated the unsentimental pragmatism and levelheadedness so prized by the Dutch. And he dressed well. All of that, combined with a phenomenal memory, an eye for detail, and a “refined manner,” had quickly won the confidence of Cent van Gogh, who no doubt recognized some of himself in the smooth, sharp-witted younger man. Only six years after starting, Tersteeg was promoted to
gérant
of the flagship store.

The young boss showed the firm’s newest employee special solicitude. He invited Vincent to join him for coffee in the apartment over the store where he
lived with his young wife, Maria, and their infant daughter, Betsy. Vincent found much to admire in his new boss. Like Vincent, Tersteeg read voraciously in multiple languages. Already a leader in The Hague’s bustling literary community, Tersteeg loved to talk about books—he “radiated poetry,” Vincent said—and Vincent loved listening to him. “He made a strong impression on me,” Vincent later recalled. “[I] looked upon him as a being of a higher order.”

H.G. T
ERSTEEG
(
Illustration credit 5.1
)

With Tersteeg as a model, Vincent threw himself into his new work. “I am very busy and glad of it,” he wrote Theo, “for that is what I want.” Most of his time was spent in the stockroom, out of the public eye, where the vast majority of the store’s business was done and most of its money was made fulfilling orders for prints. After locating the requested images in the store’s vast inventory, he carefully mounted, wrapped, and packed them for posting. Occasionally he helped box a painting in the shipping room or assisted a customer in the artists’ supplies store (the sole remnant of Cent’s original enterprise).

As a full-service “department store” of art, the house also included a restoration
studio, a framing department, and even an auction service, all of which might call on the services of an apprentice. In the store’s sumptuous public gallery space, there were always exhibitions to be arranged, paintings to be hung or taken down or brought out for private viewing. To keep expenses down, Tersteeg (like Cent) operated the store with a minimum of staff. Vincent was one of only two apprentices on duty, working from daybreak until after dark most days, including Saturday. Of course, the store had servants (ubiquitous and invisible in this era) to do the menial chores like scrubbing and sweeping, but in the hubbub of a busy day, an apprentice like Vincent could be found doing everything from dusting picture frames to arranging window displays.

In his enthusiasm for his new job, Vincent took a characteristically sudden, feverish interest in a subject toward which he had shown no particular inclination before: art. He “devoured” books on artists, on art history, on art collections in Holland and elsewhere. He devoted himself to the latest art journals—available in abundance in The Hague’s literate, international society. He paid frequent visits to the Dutch royal collection at the Mauritshuis, only steps from the Plaats, with its walls of Golden Age paintings like Vermeer’s
View of Delft
and Rembrandt’s
Anatomy Lesson
. He made pilgrimages to Amsterdam to see Frans Hals’s
The Merry Drinker
, and, of course, Rembrandt’s
Night Watch;
to Brussels to see the jewels of the great Flemish “primitives” (as Vincent called painters like Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling); and to Antwerp to see Rubens. “Go to the museum as often as you can,” Vincent advised his brother; “it is a good thing to know the old painters.”

He studied “new” painters, too—that is, contemporary Dutch artists such as Andreas Schelfhout and Cornelis Springer, whom his uncle favored. He found them not just on Goupil’s walls, but in other galleries; in local art “bazaars,” usually displayed amid a jumble of antiques and bric-a-brac; and in the just-opened Museum van Moderne Kunst (Museum of Modern Art) only a few blocks from the house where Vincent boarded.

It was probably at places like these that Vincent saw the first signs of a revolution coming in art. Here and there among the ranks of windmills, townscapes, storm-tossed boats, and idyllic skating scenes that had been the grist of Dutch artists for more than a century, he found a few paintings—landscapes, mostly—with vague forms, loose brushwork, muted colors, and gauzy light—paintings that looked nothing like the precisely detailed, intensely colored works around them. To Vincent’s unaccustomed eye, they probably looked unfinished, as they did to so many at the time. Before long, however, Tersteeg began buying them, and the artists who painted them began coming into the store to purchase supplies and meet the new apprentice with the famous name. Over the first years of the 1870s, Vincent saw the work of, and almost certainly met, Jozef Israëls,
Jacob Maris, Hendrik Willem Mesdag, Jan Weissenbruch, and Anton Mauve, all of whom were painting in the new style—soon to be dubbed “the Hague School”—that would finally free Dutch art from the grip of the Golden Age.