Van Gogh (17 page)

But nothing anyone said could fool or console Vincent. So bitter was the news of the transfer that he waited more than a month to tell his protégé in Brussels. “I suppose you have heard that I am going to London,” he finally wrote Theo in mid-March—more than a month after Theo had heard the news. “I am sorry to leave this place.” He took up smoking a pipe—his father’s balm for melancholy—and advised Theo to do the same. “It is a remedy for the blues,” he wrote, “which I happen to have had now and then lately.” He put on a brave face for his brother, vowing “not to take things too hard”; and stoutly reassured his mother: “I plan to enjoy everything and take on everything.” But his “blues” were exacerbated by the continuing vagaries of the transfer. Originally scheduled for summer, his departure was moved up to “very soon”—as if Cent and Tersteeg could not wait to remove him from their sight—then rescheduled for May, then sped up again. At first he was to go straight to London; then to London via Paris. It wasn’t until the last week that the details were finally set: he would take a train to Paris on May 12.

The months of uncertainty were filled with lingering dread as Vincent anticipated the loneliness and homesickness to come. “I shall probably have to live alone,” he speculated darkly. “Imagine how sorry I am to have to leave.” He wandered through the city and into the countryside with a sketchpad, memorializing his “home” in anticipation of leaving it. He made quick pencil sketches that he later tenderly elaborated with pen lines and soft pencil shadings before giving them to his parents and brother. The ritual offerings no doubt comforted him: one showed the streetscape outside the Goupil store; another, a canal and towpath like the one he and Theo had walked that day to Rijswijk; another, a long road with a carriage in the distance—like his parents’ carriage in Zevenbergen—heading away.

Vincent continued to work, with only a brief leave at Easter, right up until two days before his departure. Then he packed his single trunk (leaving much behind, as if hoping for a quick return) and traveled to Helvoirt for a final farewell with his family. But no consolation awaited him there. Only a shadow of the parsonage of memory remained. Sister Anna was away at boarding school;
Theo, in Brussels. He found his father staggering beneath a surfeit of cares. Dorus’s worst nightmare had come true: Vincent had drawn a low number in the draft lottery, forcing the parson to dig deep into his meager nest egg to pay 625 florins—almost a year’s salary—for a substitute, a bricklayer, to fight in his son’s place.

By a strange coincidence, the Sunday that Vincent spent in Helvoirt was Saint Job’s Day—the day that honored the much-suffering Old Testament patriarch. Dorus made time for a brief “chat” with his son; Anna asked only, “Did you leave everything behind in good order?” and seemed surprised when Vincent choked up with emotion and couldn’t answer.

HE STAYED IN PARIS
only a few days, barely long enough for the kaleidoscopic city to register. “Too large, too confused” were the only impressions he later recalled. He managed to cram the days with images: more than four thousand paintings at the recently opened Salon; a tempest of Rubens at the Luxembourg; and, of course, the Louvre, home to so many of the images that he had carefully wrapped and packed over the last four years. He toured Uncle Cent’s world: the grand limestone
hôtel
on the rue Chaptal, the opulent gallery, the print shop, the huge stockroom; the old store on the boulevard Montmartre; and the vast new store (“much bigger than I had thought,” he reported to Theo) in the shadow of Garnier’s gargantuan new opera house. He dined at Cent’s elegant townhouse, where he met artists and his uncle’s fashionable friends.

Then he was gone. The only reason, apparently, for the trip to Paris was to ensure that Uncle Cent and his wife could accompany Vincent on the crossing to England—the family rallying yet again. So when they left, he left: a train to Dieppe, a boat to Brighton, a train to London.

For Vincent, it all went by in a blur—“pleasant” was the only thing he could think to say about the trip when he wrote Theo—all preempted by the drama of alienation and self-reproach that he had brought with him. “When I saw [Paris] for the first time,” he later confessed, “I felt above all a dreary misery which [I] could not wave away.” The more Cent showed him, the more glittering dinner parties he attended, the more artists he met, the more comments they made about his distinguished name, the more misery and regret he must have felt.

For it was surely clear by now, as Vincent looked around, that this was no longer his future. He would never be the son that Cent never had. The path to that life lay back in The Hague, or there in Paris, not at the order fulfillment desk in a London backroom. He had already been evicted from that path. His long exile had already begun.

I
N 1873, LONDON WAS THE BIGGEST CITY IN THE WORLD. WITH A POPULATION
of four and a half million people, it was more than twice the size of Paris and forty-five times bigger than The Hague. A contemporary critic described it as an “immense black spot” spilling across the countryside in a cartographer’s nightmare of narrow, knotted streets. In The Hague, Vincent could find virgin
pastures only minutes from the doorstep of his boardinghouse; in London, a trip to the country took “several days and a succession of cabs,” according to one visitor. Henry James reported being “crushed” by London when he arrived four years earlier. Of course, Vincent had seen cities before: Amsterdam, Brussels, and even Paris. But nothing in those brief excursions could have prepared the country boy from Brabant for what James called the
“inconceivable immensity” of the capital of the world.

Where the streets of The Hague hummed with orderly activity, London streets exploded in chaos. From the first day he reported for work at the Goupil office on Southampton Street, just off the Strand, Vincent was thrown into a roiling sea of humanity unlike anything he could have imagined. The roads were so choked with traffic that a person could cross the street without touching the ground. Great winding columns of pedestrians filled the sidewalks, clogged the bridges,
and thronged the squares, especially at day’s end. Here and there the fast-moving currents were interrupted by beggars, shoeblacks, prostitutes, mimes, crossing sweeps, barefoot street boys turning cartwheels for a penny, and hawkers selling every kind of good or service in a bawling language never heard in the schools of Holland.

But nothing would have struck Vincent as more alien than the filth. Compared to The Hague with its polished windows and pristine streets, London was one gigantic cesspit—“that great foul city,” John Ruskin called it, “pouring out
poison at every pore.” Greasy black soot coated everything—from the Victorian office fronts of Southampton Street to St. Paul’s and the British Museum. Especially in summer,
when Vincent arrived, a urinous stench wafted up from drains and gutters throughout the city, driving the rich to the country and everyone else to drink.

Like hundreds of thousands of other newcomers overwhelmed by the increasingly unlivable city, Vincent sought refuge in the ersatz country life of the suburbs. By the time he arrived, waves of “villas”—identical houses arranged in interminable rows—lapped at the city on every side. In one of these new communities (probably southeast, around Greenwich), Vincent found a boardinghouse. He described the neighborhood as “so peaceful and
pleasant that you almost forget you are in London.” The house, in the fashionable Gothic style, with a “lovely garden in front,” was large enough to accommodate the landlady, her two daughters, and four boarders. In exchange for this facsimile of village life, Vincent had to begin his commute every morning at 6:30. He walked to a pier on the Thames, took an hour-long steamboat ride, then fought his way through the crowded streets to Goupil’s doorstep.

Once in the city, he gravitated to the green spaces. “Everywhere you see charming parks,” he wrote Theo. On lunch breaks and after work, he repaired to the quiet and relative solitude of these great fragments of countryside, especially Hyde Park, with its ancient trees, sheep meadows, and duck ponds, where he could imagine himself back on the banks of the Grote Beek.

CHASTENED BY HIS EXPULSION
from The Hague, Vincent tried again to make a fresh start. With the scolding voices of his parents and uncle no doubt in his ear, he began his London stay with a flurry of socializing. Uncle Cent himself kicked it off by inviting Vincent to dinner with some of Goupil’s most prominent London clients. He spent a “glorious” Saturday with his gallery colleagues boating on the Thames. He also
reported “pleasant evenings”
¹
with his fellow boarders—a hearty trio of Germans—singing at the parlor piano and taking long weekend walks in the country.

In June, Vincent’s new boss, Carl Obach, invited his well-connected new employee on a Sunday outing to Box Hill, a soaring chalk escarpment south of the city. The view from the windy heights—on a clear day, the panorama embraced
all of southeast England, from London on one side to the Channel on the other—made it topographically clear just how far from his lowland home Vincent had been banished. “The country is beautiful
here,” he wrote Theo, “quite different from Holland.”

Vincent set his parents’ minds at ease by writing them that he had started attending church again. To prove it, he sent a small pen drawing of London’s Dutch Reformed church, Austin Friars. But perhaps the most welcome bit of news at the Helvoirt parsonage was that Vincent had bought a top hat. “In London one could not do without it,” Anna crowed.

In all these ways, Vincent was trying yet again to see himself in the class to which his mother aspired on his behalf. He reported breathlessly on his visit to “Rotten Row,” Hyde Park’s tree-lined royal bridle path, where every afternoon the equestrians of London turned out in their finest fashion and most splendid equipage. “One of the finest sights I have seen,” Vincent wrote. His taste in art, too, seemed guided by new imperatives.
After ranging virtually unchecked for four years, his critical eye narrowed to a tight, commercial focus. Of all the British artists he discovered, he found only two worthy of serious praise: George Boughton and John Everett Millais—both commercially successful painters squarely within the conventional taste. (Indeed, Boughton was under contract with Goupil.) He gave passing nods to a few other artists, expressing admiration for their sentimental appeal, nouveau riche display,
and “value for money”—in short, their salability.

Controversial images, like the new social-realist depictions of homeless mothers, huddling poor, abandoned babies, and grieving widows, held no interest for him. Instead, the works he singled out in letters home celebrated the lifestyle and the values that lay at the heart of Goupil sales and Van Gogh expectations: a fashionable young couple caught in a moment of sweet boudoir intimacy in
The Honeymoon;
a well-dressed young mother tenderly carrying her new baby
to church in
The Baptism;
two young women in elaborate party gowns stealing up a grand staircase to share a secret in
Devonshire House
. Images like these, Vincent maintained, show “modern life as it really is.”

He attended the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy but came away in an uncharacteristically uncharitable mood, mocking several works specifically and dismissing English art in general as “very bad and uninteresting.” The revolution in mass-produced woodcuts under way in magazines like
The Graphic
and
The Illustrated London News
did not register at all on Vincent’s commercial scale, even though it was taking place virtually next
door on the Strand. Every week he joined the crowd that gathered outside the papers’ printing offices to get a first look at the new editions. But the stark black-and-white images he saw in the windows seemed “quite wrong,” he later admitted. “I didn’t like [them] at all.”

After a tour of the National Gallery, he commented only on a Dutch landscape he saw there. In the Dulwich picture gallery some “splendid” Constables on display only reminded him of Barbizon favorites from The Hague. He seemed genuinely moved only by a traveling exhibition of familiar Belgian artists (“It was a real pleasure to see those Belgian pictures,” he wrote), and he begged Theo impatiently for news of the Paris
Salon.

But nothing was lost. The Leonardos and Raphaels at the National Gallery, the Gainsboroughs and Van Dykes at Dulwich, the Turners at the South Kensington museum (forerunner of the Victoria and Albert)—all were stored in the seemingly limitless museum of Vincent’s memory, to be summoned up, often in astonishing detail, years later. The “crude” magazine illustrations of beggars and foundlings in
The Graphic
, for example, would
resurface after a decade to become a defining obsession. At the time, however, the single image that seized Vincent’s imagination that summer was a painting by Boughton of a young gentleman walking the family estate with a woman who looks to be his mother. It was called
The Heir
. He liked it so much that he made a sketch of it and sent it home.