Van Gogh (46 page)

A
NTHON VAN
R
APPARD
,
The Passievaart Near Seppe
(
Landscape Near Seppe
), J
UNE 1881, PENCIL ON PAPER, 4⅝ × 6¾ IN
. (
Illustration credit 14.3
)

Once Rappard joined him, Vincent set aside his long obsession with figure drawing and turned his full attention, for the first time, to landscape. Both drew views of the road to Leur, with its rows of stunted pollard willows on either side; both drew the forest’s edge at Liesbosch. Both drew the Passievaart swamp with the town of Seppe on the horizon.

Despite their shared subjects, shared métier, and even shared vantage points, the images that emerged from these joint sessions differed as much as the two men who created them. From the spot they had picked on the edge of the Passievaart, Van Rappard looked across the watery marshland and drew the distant town as an island of heavy pencil shadings floating in the middle of a sheet of white paper barely bigger than a postcard. He suggested the marsh with just a few random pencil strokes of reeds and weeds, and clouds with the lightest grazing of gray. Vincent looked out across the same swampy vista and cast his eyes downward. Pushing the horizon almost to the top of his much larger sheet, he relegated the town to insignificance and fixed his gaze on the teeming water
at his feet: a tangled world of reeds, flowers, lily pads, and leaves, each with its own slant or arc, its own shape and shade, its own cross-hatched reflection on the still surface of the sunlit bog. With a manic vehemence not taught in any exercise book, he filled the bottom of the sheet with clusters of dots, random dark spots, floating circles, and meandering lines in an effort to render the bottomless fecundity that he knew so well from the banks of the Grote Beek. He added a bird, a visitor from his childhood, swooping low over the water in search of the life squirming unmistakably beneath the pencil marks.

Marsh with Water Lillies
, J
UNE 1881, PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER
, 9⅜ × 12⅛
IN
. (
Illustration credit 14.4
)

In another drawing that summer—while Rappard continued to make spare, correct renderings of tree-lined country roads and vistas of heath—Vincent explored an even more exotic, unexpected landscape. Probably after his companion had left, he wandered into the garden behind the parsonage and focused his intense gaze on the wooden arbor against the back wall. He had often done drawings of his family’s houses, or details of them, to give as mementos or keep as aides-mémoires. The sketch that he started that summer day may have begun that way, as a gift for Rappard or for his sister Wil, who left Etten around the same time.

The wooden bench against the vine-covered wall looks recently deserted, its curvilinear sides drooping as if downcast. Facing it, a metal chair is pushed far away, beyond the shade of the overhanging pergola, where it sits in unnatural
isolation. On the ground between them, a basket and gardening glove lie abruptly abandoned. Around this drama of ghosts, Vincent’s manic imagination spun a web of life even more dizzying than the swampy margins of the Passievaart—as if, by looking intensely enough, he could mitigate the pain of loneliness. Vines vein the wall like cracks, grasses bristle underfoot, flowers spring from dense thickets of spiky leaves, pine bushes explode, leaves blot out the sky in a blizzard of dots and dashes. But instead of comforting the observer, the skein of boisterous, indifferent life only intensifies the emptiness of the abandoned pergola. It was a painful contradiction in nature to which Vincent would return again and again in the years to come.

The end of Rappard’s twelve-day visit left Vincent lonelier than before, and hungrier than ever for the reconciliation due the Prodigal Son. After so much searching and suffering, did he not deserve the unreserved embrace that Rappard enjoyed from his patrician family—especially his lawyer father? In his renewed ambition to win the hearts so long set against him, Vincent must have drawn strength from the portrait of unstinting paternal solicitude and forgiveness he found in Balzac’s
Le père Goriot
, which he read that summer. Theo’s visit in July—for which Anna, Wil, and Lies all returned to Etten—demonstrated the joys of family favor in such unbearable contrast that Vincent claimed illness and took to his bed. On leave from his new job as
gérant
of one of Goupil’s three Paris stores, Theo, in his elegant suits and Parisian manners, served as a vivid reminder of the distance Vincent had yet to travel to recover what he had lost.

Then, only weeks after Theo left, Vincent thought he saw an opportunity to close that gap and end his years of loneliness in a single stroke. In August, he asked Kee Vos to marry him.

V
INCENT HAD NOT SEEN HIS COUSIN SINCE THE LAST TIME HE VISITED
the Vos house in Amsterdam in 1878. In the three years since, both their lives had changed irreversibly. Kee’s sick husband, Christoffel, had died later that same year—right before Vincent failed at evangelical school and headed for the black country. They may have just missed each other when Kee visited Etten in the late summer of 1879—about the time Vincent showed up unexpectedly from the Borinage for the fateful confrontation with his father. Apparently, they had not corresponded.

When she arrived at the parsonage for an extended visit in August 1881, thirty-five-year-old Kee was no longer the brave, beleaguered mother of the house “where love dwells” that Vincent remembered from Amsterdam. Still bitterly sad over a death she considered unjust, she remained locked in mourning: a severe, unsmiling figure in high-buttoned black satin, forever sealed to her dead husband by grief; and to her timid son Jan, now eight, by their shared loss.

If anything, the death of Kee’s husband only perfected the image that had so enraptured Vincent in Amsterdam. “That deep grief of hers touches and moves me,” he wrote. Now, as then, her sadness cried out for consolation—for Vincent, still the heart’s highest calling—and her tiny, twice-wounded family seemed even more in need of the completion he longed to provide. But he saw her in another way, too. As part of his new ambition to throw off Kempian self-denial and reclaim his family’s favor, Vincent had decided that he needed a wife. “I was set against being alone,” he later recalled. His parents had often expressed their desire to see all their children married, and for Vincent in particular, they believed marriage would both anchor him and “spur him to acquire a social position.”

Vincent had discussed his new ambition with Theo in July before Kee’s arrival, expressing both his long frustration (“Women are the grief of the righteous”)
and his new determination. “A man cannot stick it out in the open sea,” he argued; “he must have a little cottage on the shore with a bit of fire on the hearth—with a wife and children around that hearth.” He bolstered this new imperative with a frenzy of reading in the vast Victorian literature on love and marriage. He consumed Charlotte Brontë’s
Shirley
, an eight-hundred-page novel of courtship and connubial advantage, in three days. He read the same author’s
Jane Eyre
, a story of love (and marriage) triumphing over self-denial, and two novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe,
My Wife and I
and
We and Our Neighbors
, both lengthy testaments to the sanctity of home and family.

K
EE
V
OS-STRICKER AND SON
J
AN, C. 1881
(
Illustration credit 15.1
)

By the time Kee arrived in August, Vincent must have worked himself into a fever of anticipatory infatuation. Within a mere week or two, without waiting for any indication that his feelings were reciprocated—or not caring that they weren’t—he declared his love to Kee. “I love you as myself,” he told her,
and asked if she “would risk marrying me.” The proposal apparently caught his shy, serious cousin off guard—or perhaps Vincent’s fervor offended her. She responded with uncharacteristic “coldness and rudeness.” “Never,” she huffed over his heedless arguments, “never, no, never!”

Soon thereafter, Kee left Etten and returned to Amsterdam with her son.

But Vincent refused to let go. Not even such a vehement rebuff could dislodge the image now in his head. Just as he had come to see marriage with Kee as essential to his bid for a new life, he inevitably saw her rejection as one with the rejections of the past. Over the next months, his obsessive, defensive imagination would combine all his longings into a single, powerful new delusion of redemption: if he could reverse Kee’s “never, no, never,” he could not only comfort the bereaved widow, father her fatherless child, fulfill his parents’ expectations, end his loneliness, and enjoy the reparative union celebrated in books; he could finally overturn the terrible judgment of the past.

As soon as Kee left, Vincent launched yet another manic campaign of letters to prove himself worthy of her hand. More than anything else, that meant proving that he could make money by creating salable art. “You must be sure that I try very hard to change many things in myself,” he wrote Theo, “especially the sad state of my money affairs.” He convinced himself that if he could only make a thousand guilders a year, he could “change minds.”

In pursuit of that goal, he collected his best drawings and set out for The Hague—a trip he had been threatening to make for almost a year. In a whirlwind two days, he saw anyone he thought might help sell his work or make it more salable. No one was more important to that effort than H. G. Tersteeg. Despite their rancorous exchange the previous spring, Vincent braved a call on his former boss at the Goupil store on the Plaats. “Mr. Tersteeg was very kind,” he wrote Theo with evident relief. In response to Vincent’s drawings after the old masters—but
not
his original work—Tersteeg allowed that they showed “some progress.” “He at least attaches some value to my making them,” Vincent reported brightly.

With an introduction from Theo, Vincent visited the studio of Théophile de Bock, a protégé of the most commercially successful of all Hague artists, Hendrik Mesdag. De Bock had returned from Barbizon to assist on Mesdag’s magnum opus, the
Panorama maritime
, a four-hundred-foot-long, 360-degree depiction of the nearby seashore at Scheveningen, housed in its own specially built pavilion. Other artists dismissed the just-opened
Panorama
as commercial and “inartistic,” but when De Bock took him to see it, Vincent praised The Hague’s newest tourist attraction. “It is a work that deserves all respect,” he wrote Theo.