Van Gogh (42 page)

T
HEO HAD ALWAYS ENCOURAGED VINCENT’S DRAWING, IN THE SAME
way their parents encouraged it: as one of Vincent’s few remaining social graces, a connection to the bourgeois world that he seemed determined to reject in every other way. In fact, as he headed off to the Borinage, Vincent was prepared to jettison even this last remnant of his former life. “I should like to begin making rough sketches of some of the things I encounter,” he wrote on the eve of his departure from Brussels, “but as it would probably keep me from my real work, it is better not to begin.” The prohibition did not apply, apparently, to four maps of the Holy Land that his father asked him to make soon after his arrival in Petit Wasmes. But after that, he stuck to his vow of artistic abstinence through all the crises of the winter and spring of 1878–79. It was only after his world began to fall apart in May that he promised his parents “he would do his best” to take up drawing again.

Theo joined in encouraging him. “I should have some drawings to show you,” Vincent reported on the eve of his brother’s visit in August 1879, clearly responding to inquiries. “Often I draw far into the night.” He made drawings of the miners’ “costumes and tools” and tiny panoramas of the coal mines—his new home. Probably at Theo’s prompting, Tersteeg sent Vincent a set of watercolors with which he could wash his maps and sketches with a thin glaze of color. He called the results “souvenirs.” They captured “the aspect of things here,” he said. On his trip to see Reverend Pieterszen, he took some of his drawings to show the preacher, a recreational watercolorist himself.

But neither Vincent nor Theo thought much of these scraps. “It wouldn’t be worthwhile for you to leave the train for those alone,” Vincent wrote defensively before his brother’s arrival. After seeing them, Theo apparently agreed. Throughout their detailed conversation about Vincent’s future—a talk that
touched on bookkeeping and carpentry as possible career choices—Theo apparently never broached the idea that his brother might become an artist. In the months of darkness that followed, Vincent easily “cast aside” his sketchpad and watercolors, along with all the other undeserved bourgeois comforts of food, bed, and clothes.

When Vincent emerged the following July with his long, pleading letter, Theo urged him to resume drawing as a “handicraft”—a healthy preoccupation to keep his mind and his hands busy, prevent him from obsessing over his problems, and reconnect him to the world. He might even sell his maps, sketches, and watercolors to help support himself, Theo suggested.

At first, Vincent rejected the idea. “I thought it very impractical and would not hear of it,” he recalled. But the proposal sounded far more plausible and attractive than it would have the previous summer. Vincent had, in fact, sold some of his drawings in the meantime. His father had paid ten francs apiece for his maps of the Holy Land, and Pieterszen had bought one or more of his miner sketches. (Unbeknownst to Vincent, Dorus had sent the purchase money to Pieterszen with instructions to use it to “nurse [Vincent] back to health without letting him know it came from me.”) It wasn’t much, but it was enough to stir ambitions to self-sufficiency. “I have wasted time when it comes to earning a living,” he admitted in his July letter.

In addition, Vincent had discovered new pleasures in drawing. After months of eliciting only insults and mockery in public, he could now go out with a sketchpad, not a Bible, and draw unmolested. “He made pictures of women picking up coal,” one local recalled, “but no importance was attached to it. We didn’t take it seriously.” For a man fearful of people yet starving for human companionship, the opportunity to quietly observe others proved exhilarating. And the chance to dominate a social encounter—by recruiting and posing models—proved intoxicating. Within weeks, he had begun the search for “models with some character … male and female.”

After the bitter trials of the winter, the former pastime of drawing now satisfied deeper needs as well. The final collapse of Vincent’s evangelical ambitions left art as his sole remaining claim to a higher calling. He immediately resumed the arguments of Amsterdam, trumpeting the unity of art and religion. “It is the same with evangelists as it is with artists,” he insisted. “Try to grasp the essence of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces, and you will again find God in them.” “Everything that is really good and beautiful … comes from God.” By taking up drawing, Vincent could continue his work as a missionary of “inner, moral, spiritual and sublime beauty.” He had not abandoned his ambitions. He had not changed course. He had not failed. His troubles had been the fault of “odious and tyrannical” evangelists, he maintained,
who, like the “old academic schools” of artists, “exclude the man with an open mind.”

Declaring himself an artist also sustained another hope for reconciliation: the dream of the Rijswijk road—two brothers “bound up in one … feeling, thinking and believing the same.” Once the long winter of estrangement was broken, old feelings of solidarity flooded back. Only the “magic force” of brotherhood could unlock the cage in which he felt imprisoned, Vincent said. Protesting his “homesickness for the land of pictures,” he insisted that his enthusiasm for art had not waned during his wandering in the Borinage. He framed his new artistic ambitions emphatically as a response to Theo’s guidance (“I think you would rather see me doing something good than doing nothing”) and called for the restoration of their fraternal
“entente cordiale”
in order to “make us of some use to one another.”

Vincent even chose to resume their correspondence in French, as a tribute to his brother’s successful new life in Paris, and to their shared citizenship in the francophone “land of pictures.”

In the service of this new mission, Vincent’s powerful imagination, which had lured him to the black country, and kept him alive there, now began to reshape his experience there. When Theo wrote about the inspiration many French artists had found in Barbizon, a village in the Fontainebleau Forest south of Paris, Vincent recast his grueling trip the previous winter into a parallel artistic quest. “I haven’t been to Barbizon,” he wrote, “[but] I did go to Courrières last winter.” In Vincent’s imagination, the hellish, hopeless, wandering trek six months earlier was transformed into a pilgrimage in search of
it
—an inspirational “walking tour” as well as a chance to visit the great Barbizon painter Breton, for whom Theo shared his brother’s reverence.

In Vincent’s vision, an idyllic countryside of haystacks, thatched-roof farmhouses, and “marled earth, almost coffee-colored” erased the smoking slagheaps that dominated the French mining district around Courrières no less than the Belgian one around Cuesmes; and a “fine, bright” French sky replaced the choking smog of the Borinage, only a few miles away. He peopled his fantasy with picturesque peasants right out of the prints on both brothers’ walls: “all manner of workmen, diggers, woodcutters, a farmhand driving his wagon and a silhouette of a woman in a white cap.” Vincent even reimagined his ordeals of hunger and cold as the transformative trials of Bunyan’s Christian. “I do not regret it,” he said, passing revised judgment not just on the trip but on his whole time in the black country, “because I saw some interesting things and the terrible ordeals of suffering are what teach you to look at things through different eyes.”

Despite the winter of deprivations, he seized his new calling with furious new energy, combining his usual cyclonic enthusiasm for fresh starts with a desperate
determination to put the past behind him. From the house in Cuesmes, he dunned Theo and others with demands for “models” from which to learn his new gospel. He especially wanted Charles Bargue’s two-part home study course on figure drawing,
Exercices au fusain
(
Charcoal Exercises
) and
Cours de dessin
(
Drawing Course
), and Armand Cassagne’s
Guide de l’alphabet du dessin
(
Guide to the ABCs of Drawing
), a similar how-to manual on perspective drawing. He devoured these big books, with their graduated exercises and promise of sure success to the diligent—page by page, over and over. “I have now finished all sixty sheets,” he reported after the first of many times he completed the
Exercices au fusain
. “I worked almost a whole fortnight on [it], from early morning until night … it invigorates my pencil.”

He worked with astonishing intensity, squatting on a camp stool in the little second-floor room that he shared with the landlord’s children, hunched over a large sketchpad balanced on his knees, with the full-sized Bargue and Cassagne propped next to him. He worked as long as the light allowed—outside in the garden if the weather permitted. In a single two-week period, he reported finishing a hundred and twenty drawings. “My hand and my mind are growing daily more supple and strong as a result,” he reported. He found the exercises “demanding” and sometimes “extremely tedious,” but dared not slacken his frantic pace. “If I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost,” he wrote. “That is how I look at it—keep going, keep going come what may.” He told Theo of a “great fire” that burned within him.

To feed that fire, he needed more than exercises. He sent Theo sweeping calls for other images to copy, starting with Millet’s iconic
Les quatre heures de la journée
(
Four Hours of the Day
) and
Les travaux des champs
(
Workers in the Fields
), images that had hung on his walls for years and that he would continue to copy for the rest of his life. At first, laboring tirelessly over his course books, he requested only etchings by “masters” of figure drawing like Millet and Breton. “These are the things I want to study,” he insisted. But soon he demanded landscapes, too: from Golden Age giants like Ruisdael to Barbizon heroes like Charles Daubigny and Théodore Rousseau.

No matter how many images Theo sent, however, Vincent could not resist the impulse to leave his cramped “studio” and find images of his own. Despite repeated pledges to complete his exercises before attempting to draw “from nature,” he wandered the town sketching portraits and vignettes: women carrying sacks of coal, a family harvesting potatoes, cows in a pasture. He even persuaded some locals, including his former landlady, Esther Denis, to pose for him.

He took his folding stool to the mine entrance and made crude, childlike records of what he saw—unschooled attempts that even he dismissed as “clumsy.” (He later admitted destroying all his work from this period.) Still, he laid elaborate plans for a pair of large drawings: one, of the miners going to work in the morning
(“passing shadows, dimly visible in the twilight”), and the other, the pendant, showing their return (with “an effect of brown silhouettes, just touched by light, against a mottled sky at sunset”). Long before he had finished the
Cours de dessin
, he committed the first of these images to paper. “I could not keep from sketching in a rather large size the drawing of the miners going to the shaft,” he confessed to Theo.

Miners in the Snow at Dawn
, A
UGUST 1880, PENCIL ON PAPER, 5⅛ × 8 IN
. (
Illustration credit 13.1
)

But in this fury of work, this resurrection of hopeful enthusiasm, he returned again and again to one image in particular. “I have already drawn ‘The Sower’ five times,” he wrote in September, “and I will take it up again, I am so entirely absorbed in that figure.”

IN OCTOBER
1880, only two months after declaring himself an artist, Vincent abandoned the Borinage. He had slightly less than a decade—just one-quarter of his life—left to live. He departed for Brussels from the train station in Mons where, almost two years before, he had arrived from Brussels. Only now, instead of a portfolio of sermons, he carried a portfolio of drawings. He complained that he had “undergone some misery in the Belgian ‘black country,’ ” and needed a better studio, the company of other artists, and “good things to look at” in order to forget those miseries and “make good things myself.”

In fact, the trajectory of Vincent’s brief, incandescent artistic enterprise had already been set. Figure drawing would always energize him, even as success
at it always eluded him. As a way of touching the sentiments he prized and of making the human connections he longed for, he never found any subject as satisfying as figures, even as he created some of the most sublime landscapes in Western art. The same deep belief in the transformative power of work—his mother’s religion of “keeping busy”—that had propelled him through the impossible hardships of England, Amsterdam, Brussels, and the Borinage would now be turned on the virtual impossibility of artistic success. The friction of this blind push would continue to produce the same self-inflicted anguish that it did on the blighted heaths of the black country.

He would continue to alternate between ambitious pledges to learn the fundamentals of his new craft and cries of exasperation when progress proved slow. He repeatedly laid grand plans for self-improvement that, like his pursuit of a religious calling, quickly foundered on his impatience, peripatetic interests, and fears of failing. Just as he started far more drawings than he completed (he found the process of turning a sketch into a finished drawing difficult as well as deadening) he littered his career with half-completed projects undertaken in fevers of enthusiasm that always rejected half-measures.