Van Gogh (57 page)

Carpenter’s Yard and Laundry
, M
AY
1882,
PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 11⅛ × 18½ IN
. (
Illustration credit 17.2
)

When he left his studio and went out into the world, Vincent took his window with him. He had first heard about perspective frames in the writings of Armand Cassagne, a French draftsman who authored a number of books for both artists and amateurs. Vincent had read Cassagne’s book for children,
Guide de l’alphabet du dessin
(
Guide to the ABCs of Drawing
), when he first emerged from the Borinage. Cassagne recommended the use of a
“cadre rectificateur”
(correcting frame), consisting of a small rectangular frame of cardboard or wood divided by threads into four equal rectangles. By holding the frame up to a view, a draftsman could isolate the image to be drawn and better gauge its proportions.

It wasn’t until Vincent arrived in The Hague more than a year later, however, that he arranged for a carpenter to make such a device for him. Always eager for simple solutions and long frustrated by the “witchcraft” of proportion, he saw in Cassagne’s suggestion the key to taming his unruly hand and unlocking the mysteries of salable art. The frame he had made was still small (11½ inches by 7 inches), but hardly Cassagne’s pocket-sized
cadre rectificateur
. And instead of two intersecting wires, Vincent’s had ten or eleven, creating a grid of little squares like windowpanes through which he could peer and peer and painstakingly transfer every contour onto the same grid traced on his paper.

Despite the balancing act required to simultaneously secure the frame, a sketchpad, and himself, Vincent took his little rectangle everywhere: around his
Schenkweg neighborhood, onto the city streets, into the dunes at Scheveningen, and throughout the countryside in between. Everywhere, he held up his frame and “corrected” the world. He called it his “spy-hole.” “I think you can imagine how delightful it is to focus my spy-hole on the sea, on the green meadows,” he exulted. “One can look through it
like a window”
(his emphasis). To shut out the world beyond the frame, he squinted his eyes—a trick Mauve may have taught him—until only the blurry, crisscrossed scene in his spy-hole was visible.

In drawing after drawing, the results thrilled him. “The lines of the roofs and gutters shoot away into the distance like arrows from a bow,” he boasted to Theo of one successful effort. He took his frame into the attic to draw the view of the busy yards out back and the “infinity of delicate, soft green, miles and miles of flat meadow” beyond. He liked it so much that he had two more frames made, larger and sturdier, the last one a deluxe affair with iron corners and special legs for uneven ground—“a fine piece of workmanship,” he called it. He even took it into his studio where he peered through it at Sien and his other models, drawing them “faithfully and with love,” he said, “by calmly looking through my little window.”

IN THE MONTHS BEFORE
the birth of Sien’s baby, Vincent saw only one image: family. After years of trying—with his own family and others—he had finally found a family that would have him. “She sees that I am not rough,” he wrote of Sien, almost in amazement, “and she wants to stay with me.” Images of motherhood had riddled his letters to Theo, even as he continued to withhold the key that would have unlocked their meaning. Every day in the studio, he posed his models in a preenactment of the vision in his head: Michelet’s “triple and absolute tie” of man, woman, and child.

With that vision firmly in his spy-hole, Vincent shut out everything else. Even as the feuds with Mauve and Tersteeg threatened to undo Theo’s support, he spent lavishly on his imaginary family: medicine for Sien, rent for Sien’s mother, clothes for the coming baby. He used the rent money Theo sent to pay Sien’s doctor, precipitating a desperate crisis when the landlord threatened to evict him. Even before that storm had passed, he began lobbying Theo to move to a bigger apartment next door, deepening the deception with each letter.

Gripped by the same fever of caring as in the Borinage, Vincent threw himself into “rescuing” the fallen woman on whom he had staked everything. He made her take baths and long walks. He administered “restoratives.” He ensured that she ate “simple food” and got plenty of fresh air and rest. “I have taken her up and have given her all the love, all the tenderness, all the care that was in me,” he wrote, framing their relationship as a model of Christian charity. When she went to register at the maternity hospital in Leiden, he accompanied her. A
frustrated doctor, like his father, Vincent represented Sien in discussions with the hospital staff and acted in every other way like a husband.

So single-mindedly did he focus on bringing “the poor creature” back to life that he neglected his own deteriorating health. After complaining ominously in January about headaches, fever, and weakness (lamenting, “my youth is gone”), he barely mentioned his condition through a flood of letters that spring and dismissed any problem with a defiant “I haven’t given in to it.”

Theo must have been surprised when a letter arrived in early June announcing, “I am in the hospital … I have what they call the ‘clap.’ ”

But not even illness could shake Vincent’s life in images or his new vision of family. Despite Sien’s likely role in putting him there, he entered the hospital in extraordinarily good spirits for a twenty-nine-year-old man who had never been seriously ill in his life. The indignities of a common ward with ten beds, overflowing chamber pots, and abrupt male nurses struck him as “no less interesting than a third-class waiting room,” he said. “How I should love to make some studies of [it].” The doctors assured him that his gonorrhea was a mild case that would require only a few weeks of treatment (quinine pills for fever and sulfate irrigations to quell the infection). Although confined to bed, he had brought Dickens novels and his books on perspective to study. When the nurses left the ward, however, he sneaked from his bed to look out the window. “The whole is a bird’s-eye view,” he wrote.

Vincent always found pleasure in the company of doctors. (Years later, in Arles, he said that painting “consoles me up to a certain point for not being a doctor.”) At first, he also had visitors to buoy his spirits: his old Goupil colleague Iterson; his cousin Johan; even the gallingly proper Tersteeg. But the visits that truly sustained him were Sien’s. “She came to visit me regularly,” he told Theo proudly, “and brought me some smoked beef and sugar or bread.” On one such visit, on June 13, while waiting in the hospital lobby for visiting hours to begin, Sien crossed paths with a short, silver-haired preacher striding toward the wards on clerical privilege. It was Vincent’s father.

Dorus van Gogh no doubt looked past the humble pregnant woman waiting in the lobby as he went to see Vincent for the first time since their fateful Christmas Day argument. He had traveled from Etten as soon as he heard of Vincent’s hospitalization, to make peace with his sick son. “I invited Vincent to come stay with us for a while after he leaves the hospital,” he reported to Theo, “so he can regain some strength.” At an earlier time, Vincent would surely have succumbed to yet another hope for reconciliation. Or a misplaced word might have reignited the bitter antagonisms that had scorched so many previous encounters. But now his vision was firmly fixed on his new family, not the old one.

Throughout their conversation, Dorus noticed that Vincent kept “restlessly
looking at the door, as if he expected a visitor that he would rather not have me meet.” Vincent declined the invitation to return home, saying only, “I want to go back to work.” Afterward, he dismissed his father’s surprise visit as an unwelcome spectral visitation out of a Dickens tale. “It was very strange to me,” he told Theo, “more or less like a dream.”

But Sien could not continue to visit. On June 22, she herself checked in to a different hospital, in Leiden, preparing for a delivery that the doctors predicted would be difficult and dangerous. Almost as soon as she stopped visiting, Vincent suffered a relapse. Overcome by sentiment, he attributed his worsening condition to their separation. He was moved to a different ward for more intensive care and put on a new regimen to fight the resurgent infection. To drain his bladder and irrigate the inflamed canal, doctors inserted catheters of increasing size into his penis. Infection and irritation made the insertion difficult and painful. The process of “stretching” the canal was so excruciating that it left him lame with soreness for days.

Still, he barely uttered a complaint. His imagination was obsessed with a much more vivid pain. “What are the sufferings of us men,” he wrote from his hospital bed, “compared to that terrible pain which women have to bear during childbirth.”

Soon, the image of Sien giving birth overwhelmed him. In late June, he received a melancholy letter on the eve of her final confinement. “She has not been delivered yet,” Vincent reported to Theo; “the waiting has lasted for days. I am very anxious about it.” Her bravery and patient suffering only inflamed him more. He had to go to her. On July 1, still uncured, still “faint and feeble” from his own treatments, he left his sickbed and went to Leiden. Leading Sien’s mother and nine-year-old sister, he arrived just in time for the weekly visiting hour. “You can imagine how very anxious we were,” he wrote Theo the same day,

Sien lay in the old maternity ward of the University Hospital in Leiden, a bleak Dickensian building that shared a lightless, airless courtyard with the hospital’s autopsy room. Now and then, an autopsy helper would empty a bucket of dark effluvia into the courtyard drain. Even in daylight, the maternity ward was gloomy, with its high ceiling and heavy drapes. In July, the tall windows were
pivoted open, but breezes were rare. Beds lined the walls on both sides—two patients to a bed: a pregnant woman and a new mother. A crib for dirty linens hung beside each bed; a baby crib sat at the foot.

It was not an easy place to enter life. According to one earlier account, “the nurses were rough and indifferent; they only helped new mothers if they got a tip; and they often kept back drugs and extra food. The food was slop.” Some conditions had improved. Better understanding of bacteria and antiseptics had at least eliminated the kind of epidemics that used to sweep through the ward unchecked, killing one out of every ten new mothers. Still, horrendous conditions continued to keep “good women” at home with their midwives, leaving maternity wards like this one filled with the “unmarried, ignorant, and shamed,” according to the hospital’s director, “[those] exhausted by poverty and deprivation.”

By the time Vincent arrived, the baby had finally appeared in the birth canal after a long labor complicated by uterine infection and nervous exhaustion. For the next four and a half hours, it remained there, “stuck fast,” according to Vincent’s account, as five doctors in succession tried to dislodge it with forceps, while Sien writhed in pain. They gave her chloroform, but she never lost consciousness. Finally, the baby emerged: a seven-and-a-half-pound boy, “shriveled” and suffering from jaundice. Twelve hours after the delivery, Sien was still disoriented with pain and “mortally weak.” The shock to her system had been so great, her doctor reported, “it will take years before she completely recovers her health.” The baby’s survival remained in doubt.

But Vincent’s euphoric account paints a very different picture. Instead of a grim autopsy courtyard, he saw “a garden full of sunshine and greenery” outside the ward window, and Sien’s pain seemed like nothing more than a touching “drowsy state between sleeping and waking.” Her suffering had “refined her,” he said, given her “more spirit and sensitivity”; and the sick, jaundiced baby at the foot of her bed had a “worldly-wise air” that enchanted him. In Vincent’s eyes, everything—the bleak room, the pale mother and yellow child, the tortured past, the hellish night—were all transformed into an image of love triumphant. “When she saw me, she sat up in bed and became as cheerful and lively as if nothing had happened,” he wrote, confirming the success of his mission of rescue. “Her eyes were radiant with love of life and with gratitude.”

Whether out of gratitude or calculation, Sien chose to give her new son a name that had no precedents in her own family: Willem—Vincent’s middle name. The events of the day, he wrote Theo, “made me so happy that I cried.”

He returned to The Hague in a rapture. He saw nothing but the image of family now framed in his imagination: “a household of my own.” In twenty-nine years of blinding enthusiasms, none had rivaled this one. While Sien and the baby recovered in Leiden, Vincent set out to create a home for his new family. Without a word to Theo, he rented the apartment next door that he had long coveted. In
a frenzy of decorating (famously reprised six years later at the Yellow House in Arles), he filled it with furniture, including a wicker easy chair for the convalescing patient, a big bedstead for the parents, and an iron cradle for the baby.