Van Gogh (51 page)

In February, the arguments exploded into personal vitriol. Vincent set the fuse by sending Tersteeg a letter accusing him of being complicit in the blowup with Mauve. After Theo missed a monthly payment, he also suspected that the sly
gérant
, just returned from a trip to Paris, had poisoned his brother against him. “Is it possible that you have heard something from Tersteeg that has influenced you?” Vincent inquired afterward. When the payment still did not come, Vincent marched to Goupil and confronted “His Honor.” He demanded that Tersteeg make good on his brother’s obligation by giving him ten guilders. Tersteeg responded with “so many reproaches—I might almost say insults,” Vincent sputtered, “that I could hardly control myself.”

Tersteeg renewed his charge of the previous spring that Vincent’s artistic “calling” was nothing more than fakery and laziness, and that he should give it up. “You must earn your own living,” he said: get a job and stop “taking money” from Theo. He told him point-blank, “You started too late.” As for his chances of ultimate success, Tersteeg vehemently restated his opinion of the previous spring: “Of one thing I am sure, you are no artist.” He dismissed Vincent’s efforts since then with a blithe
“ni fait ni à faire”
(neither done nor to be done). But this time, he went further, using his unique position as a family friend who had known Vincent since Zundert to pronounce a devastating judgment: “You failed before and now you will fail again … This painting of yours will be like all the other things you started, it will come to nothing.”

Vincent was crushed. Tersteeg had said “such things [as] pierce the heart and grieve the soul,” he wrote Theo bitterly. He accused Tersteeg of an unreasoning personal antipathy going back to their earliest days. “For years he has considered me a kind of incompetent dreamer,” he wrote. “[He] always starts with the fixed idea that I can do nothing and am good for nothing.” Although he fiercely rejected Tersteeg’s judgment about his future as an artist—“I do indeed
have the artistic sense in the very marrow of my bones,” he insisted—he also wondered plaintively why the
gérant
didn’t “ask for things that
I
can
make
, instead of asking for impossible things.” But then the anger returned and he longed for the good old days when men like Tersteeg could be sent to the guillotine with the other villains of the ancien régime.

When Theo tried to calm the tempest by urging Vincent to “remain on good terms with Tersteeg [because] he is almost like an elder brother to us,” Vincent exploded in a rage of sibling rivalry. The thought of his younger brother making common cause with the dandy parvenu usurper propelled him to new heights of antipathy. He listed in obsessive detail all the ways in which Tersteeg had betrayed him over the years. When Theo demanded that he take back his harsh words, Vincent flatly refused. Instead, he escalated his attacks to include
all
art dealers, and strove relentlessly to drive a wedge between his brother and the “Satan” Tersteeg. For a few delusional weeks, he even tried again to persuade Theo to quit his job and become an artist, challenging him to renounce the perfidious
gérant
and declare his solidarity with his true brother. “Remain something better than H.G.T.!” he exhorted. “Be a painter!”

At one point, Vincent agreed to stay away from Tersteeg for six months. At another time, he claimed utter indifference to him (“Tersteeg is Tersteeg, and I am I”) and pledged to “absolutely forget him.” Only days after Vincent assured Theo he was “done with him for good and all,” Tersteeg paid an unannounced visit to Vincent’s studio that set off yet another frenzy of anger and defiance. “I must make him understand that he judges me too superficially,” Vincent fumed.

This was the pattern that would mark Vincent’s relationship with Tersteeg for the rest of his life: periodic fits of rage, followed by grudging efforts at reconciliation, followed by meaningless vows of indifference, in a rondo of obsession that never stopped. After years of rancor, the events of the winter and spring had transformed the elegant
gérant
into Vincent’s implacable nemesis—as unappeasable in art as his father was in life. His letters would return again and again to this unhealing wound, drawn by the irresistible desire to make salable art, to which Tersteeg seemed always to hold the key; or by the inevitable but intolerable alliance between Tersteeg and Theo, siblings in the Goupil family from which Vincent had been expelled; or by the echo he heard in Tersteeg’s criticism of his own secret self-doubts.

MAUVE AND TERSTEEG
were hardly the exceptions. Vincent fought with everyone. He rarely reported his fights to Theo, but they echo throughout his letters in the names of fellow artists who appear briefly then are never mentioned again, leaving the traces of a quarrel only in their sudden and unexplained disappearance.
Names like Jules Bakhuyzen, Bernard Blommers, Piet van der Velden, and Marinus Boks, often introduced with a burst of hopeful enthusiasm, bear witness to the doomed project of friendship.

Claiming that he did not need friends, Vincent dismissed his fellow artists as tedious, lazy, stupid, and “inveterate liars.” Even those he admired could not withstand his attentions for long. In February, he visited the studio of Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch, a senior member of the Hague School whom he had met almost a decade earlier as a Goupil apprentice. An affable, elderly eccentric (known as the Merry Weiss), Weissenbruch offered some welcome encouragement to mitigate the pain of Mauve’s withdrawal. He thought Vincent drew “confoundedly well,” he said (according to Vincent), and offered to take Mauve’s place as Vincent’s tutor and guide. “I think it a great privilege to visit such clever people,” Vincent wrote Theo after the visit. “That is just what I want.” But he never reported another trip to the Merry Weiss and, by summer, talked about him only in fond recollection.

The friendship with Théophile de Bock, which Theo had tried to spark the previous summer, also flamed out quickly. The two had much in common: both were late starters in their art careers (the thirty-year-old De Bock had been a railroad clerk); both worshipped Millet. But from the very start, Vincent doubted the other’s true commitment. When De Bock expressed admiration for the Barbizon landscapist Camille Corot, Vincent attacked him for betraying Millet and accused him of “having no backbone.” He complained that De Bock refused to accept his advice. “He gets angry when one says some things which are only the ABCs,” Vincent wrote. “Every time I go and see him I get the same feeling: the fellow’s too weak.” After one visit, Vincent concluded bitterly: “He’ll never make good—unless he changes.” Thereafter, the two saw each other only by accident in the street.

For the first half of 1882, Vincent even declared himself
“en froid”
(in a chill) with the distant Anthon van Rappard, who had refused to concede defeat in their epistolary battle over academic drawing. When Rappard wrote him a stout rebuttal around New Year’s Day, Vincent promptly terminated their correspondence. “Nothing, or hardly anything, in your letter holds water,” Vincent huffed. “I have more serious things to do than write letters.” Only the insulation of distance and silence kept the name Van Rappard off the growing list of friendships failed or forgone.

Besides, Vincent had found a replacement. George Hendrik Breitner was twenty-four, exactly Theo’s age, when he and Vincent began to make joint late-night forays into the Geest, The Hague’s red-light district, in early 1882. Expelled from art school two years earlier, Breitner was already developing into a Hague School iconoclast, despite his friendships with both Willem Maris and the powerful Mesdag, for whom he had worked on the
Panorama
. He had nothing
to lose from associating with the outcast Van Gogh. (Like Rappard, Breitner had previously known Theo.)

As with Rappard, Vincent immediately launched an extravagant campaign of comradeship. Within the first week or two, they went on multiple sketching trips and exchanged several studio visits, while continuing their nocturnal outings. As with Rappard, Vincent put fraternal solidarity ahead of artistic imperative and followed the younger man’s lead. Breitner had largely shaken off his classical training and embraced the gritty naturalism of French writers like Zola and the Goncourt brothers. Whereas Vincent went to the Geest to recruit models that he could pose for his Millet scenes of country life, Breitner went because the city itself was his subject. Modern artists should find their inspiration not in some mythic rural past, he argued, but in the dark immediacy of contemporary urban life. He fashioned himself a “painter of the people.”

Vincent eagerly followed his young companion into soup kitchens, train station waiting rooms, peat markets, lottery offices, and pawn banks. At first, he used these expeditions only as a way to find new subjects for figure studies to be done later, in his studio, with a model. But soon he joined Breitner in directly sketching vignettes of street life—a bakery storefront, a chaotic road excavation, a lonely sidewalk—all subjects in which he had never before shown any interest. The results were hardly encouraging. Eager to capture the bustle of city life that fascinated Breitner, but unable to abandon his own fixation on solitary figures, Vincent produced at least one bizarre street scene showing a toddler crawling beside an open trench and an old woman with a cane colliding with a ditch digger.

All Vincent’s efforts at friendship were similarly doomed. By the time Breitner entered the hospital in early April (for venereal disease), Vincent was already chastising him for being “afraid to take models.” Vincent visited his sickbed, but when Vincent was hospitalized two months later, Breitner felt no obligation to return the favor. In fact, they did not speak again for a year. Admitting that Breitner had “broken contact completely,” Vincent burst into wounded recriminations, dismissing his paintings as “tedious,” “dull,” and “haphazardly smeared,” and insinuating that his failure to take more models showed a lack of virility.

What was it like to fight with Vincent van Gogh? His uncle Cor found out when he visited in early March. Vincent had not seen his other art-dealer uncle since they argued over Vincent’s decision to quit his studies in Amsterdam. After a year of bitterly denouncing Cor’s failure to support his fledgling career, Vincent had swallowed his pride and invited his rich uncle to see his new studio. He dreaded the visit, and steeled himself against another debacle like those with Mauve and Tersteeg, vowing in advance to stop “running after” dealers, “no matter who they are.”

By the appointed day, this reservoir of resentment was poised to break.
When Cor mentioned that Vincent needed to “earn his own bread,” he reaped the flood. “Earn bread?” Vincent demanded.

Torn-Up Street with Diggers
, A
PRIL
1882,
PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 16⅞ × 24¾ IN.
(
Illustration credit 16.2
)

When friends and family complained about Vincent’s quick temper, this is what they meant. Arguments seemed to materialize out of nothing. By Vincent’s own account, he could walk into another artist’s studio and “immediately, sometimes in less than five minutes,” burst into a dispute so intense that “neither party can go forward or back.” A word, a gesture, even a look could set off a storm of heated words, leaving listeners like Uncle Cor startled and speechless, feeling as if they had interrupted a fierce internal debate. Disagreements quickly escalated, as Vincent’s proselytizing fervor and open-wound defensiveness merged into a frenzy of argument that knew neither reason nor restraint.
“I do not always speak justly,” he admitted later, “but let my imagination roam without regard to reality, and see things in a very fantastic way.” Swept up in these delusions of rhetoric, he pursued his positions to absurd extremes, reduced all relatives to absolutes, conceded nothing, and lashed out bitterly at his attackers in language he often regretted later.

No one understood this self-defeating vehemence better than Vincent himself. Sometimes he attributed it to “nervous excitement” or “passion aggravated by temperament.” “I am a fanatic!” he explained. “I am going in a definite direction, and I want others to go along with me!” He protested that “those who are serious at heart … often have something disagreeable about them.” But in a moment of candor—rare for this period—he acknowledged the truth. “I am often terribly melancholy, irritable, hungering and thirsting, as it were, for sympathy; and when I do not get it, I try to act indifferently, speak sharply, and often even pour oil on the fire.”