Van Gogh (60 page)

Sometimes the brooding took him to the darkest possible places, as his reading in Zola’s saga of family degeneration planted thoughts of genetic curses and inescapable fates. “What am I in the eyes of most people,” he lamented, “a nonentity, an eccentric or an unpleasant person—somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.” Again and again, his thoughts returned for consolation to the story of Robinson Crusoe, the shipwrecked mariner, “who did not lose courage in his isolation.”

Even when he walked the narrow streets of his beloved Geest, away from the bourgeois sensitivities of family and fellow artists, Vincent could not find belonging. With his shabby clothes, odd manner, and strange burden of equipment, he attracted unwanted attention, not just from the fearless street urchins who harassed him relentlessly, but even from passersby, who freely offered their judgments. “That’s a queer sort of painter,” Vincent heard one of them say. In public places like soup kitchens and train stations, he often created such a scene, with his big sheets of paper and “vehement scratching,” that he was asked to leave. Once, on a visit to the potato market, someone in the jostling crowd “spat his quid of tobacco onto my paper,” Vincent reported miserably. “[They] probably think I am a lunatic when they see me making a drawing with large hooks and crooks which don’t mean anything to them.”

Eventually, the mere proximity of people unnerved him. “You cannot imagine how irritating and tiring it is when people always stand so close to you,” he wrote. “Sometimes it makes me so nervous that I have to give up.” Eventually, he did give up: avoiding public places except in the very early morning hours (as early as four in the summer) when he shared the streets only with the sweepers.

His own family offered no comfort. Cast adrift on a raft of lies, Vincent saw
his hope for reconciliation with his parents fade with each passing day. “This is worse than having no home at all, no father, no mother,” he wrote. “It is a great sorrow.” In August, the family moved to Nuenen, a town forty miles east of Etten where Dorus had accepted a new position—putting even more distance between Vincent and his dream of returning to the Zundert parsonage. He tried to reopen a correspondence with them, but his secret weighed on every exchange of pleasantries. Nor could he talk with them about his work. “I am afraid that Father and Mother may never really appreciate my art,” he concluded forlornly. “It will always be a disappointment to them.”

The gulf only widened when Vincent’s father paid a surprise visit to the Schenkweg in late September. Unable to hide Sien and the baby, Vincent pretended that she was merely a poor, sick, pitiful mother whom he felt duty-bound to help. No talk of love or marriage—just Christian obligation. When he returned to Nuenen, Dorus sent a parcel that included a woman’s coat—an apparent show of support for Vincent’s latest charitable project. But neither father nor son was fooled. Almost a year later, Vincent admitted that the visit had left no doubt about his parents’ attitude: “They were more or less ashamed of me.”

Vincent’s pledge of silence about Sien not only delegitimized his life with her, it alienated him from the only person who cared: Theo. Weighed down by prohibitions, his letters lapsed into superficiality, coded references, and unfathomable circumlocutions. Or he simply wrote less often. Every unaccounted guilder that he spent on Sien (or her baby, her daughter, her sister, her mother) only added to the burden of guilt he always felt in taking Theo’s money. To that unseen debt, Vincent now added the costs of oil painting, a frightening new level of expenditure far exceeding the paper, pencils, and charcoal he was used to. “Everything is so expensive,” he complained soon after starting, “and is so quickly used up.” It didn’t help that he brought the same manic, trial-and-error method to painting that he had come to rely on in drawing. “So many things that I start turn out wrong,” he explained, “and then one has to begin anew, and all the trouble has been in vain.”

The final blow came in late September when Theo asked to see one of the new oil studies for which Vincent had expressed such enthusiasm. At first he refused to send anything, cloaking his refusal in a vague argument about the difference between studies and finished pictures. “Making studies is like sowing,” he said, “and making pictures like reaping.”

But no argument could conceal the truth: his confidence had collapsed. When he finally relented and sent Theo a study (of tree roots), it came accompanied by a letter filled with apology and self-criticism. Only five weeks after boasting “no one would guess that these really are my first painted studies,” Vincent desperately pleaded his inexperience. “I have been handling the brush for too short a time,” he wrote. “If it is a disappointment to you, you must remember
that it is such a short time since I began painting.” He begged Theo “not to judge the future from the one” and ended with a pathetic plea for continued indulgence: “If when looking at it … you do not regret having enabled me to make it, then I shall be satisfied and shall continue with good courage.”

Mocked in public, scorned by his fellow artists, alienated from his brother, and facing the challenges of a new family and a new medium, Vincent escaped into the past on a wave of nostalgia. He blamed his ostracism on the “skepticism, indifference, and coolness” of modern life: its decadence, its dullness, its lack of passion. With a poignancy striking for a twenty-nine-year-old man, he mourned his lost youth and cursed the factories, railways, and agricultural combines that were robbing the Brabant countryside of its “stern poetry.” “My life,” he wrote Theo, “is not as sunny now as it was then.”

As always, his imagination followed his longing into the past. He reread Andersen’s fairy tales, the lodestar of his childhood. He put aside his Zola and returned to the Romantic potboilers of Erkmann-Chatrian, a leap backward of a hundred years in time and even further in sensibility. The French Revolution had always loomed in Vincent’s imagination as a lost paradise of heroic men and noble ideas, and once again he seized on it as his true home in time. “There was definitely something warmer about those days,” he wrote, “more light-hearted and alive than today.”

In art, too, he surveyed the previous century and concluded that he had arrived too late; that the parade had passed. Even as Impressionists like Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro were celebrating their seventh group show in Paris, even as Gauguin was laying plans to best them and Manet was nearing death, Vincent pined for the days of Millet, Corot, and Breton. Art had gone into a “sharp decline,” he said; “capriciousness and satiety” had replaced passion. Artists had betrayed the spirit of the Revolution—“the honesty, the naïveté,” and especially the
fraternité
. “I had imagined that the painters formed a kind of circle or society in which warmth and cordiality and a certain kind of harmony reigned,” he wrote. As a result, art would never again rise to such heights. “Higher than the top of the mountain one cannot climb … The summit has been reached.”

To recover this lost Eden of passion and solidarity, Vincent turned inevitably to his portfolios of prints. Just as they had long defined his reality, now they defined his ambitions. In these carefully organized, lovingly mounted, and comforting black-and-white images, he found a community of artists that welcomed him, even if only in his imagination. His collection ranged from Dürer’s Renaissance allegories to modern surrealist cityscapes, but the campaigns and tribulations of the previous months had conferred a special status on one group of artists in particular: the English illustrators.

—

AS EARLY AS THE
1840s, London newspaper publishers began recruiting artists to enliven their pages with eye-catching imagery. The same newly affluent public that made art prints a huge business also eagerly consumed illustrations of current events, public figures, exotic locales, and the latest fashions. By the time Vincent arrived in London in 1873, weekly illustrated magazines had become the rage. As the audience for them grew bigger and more sophisticated, so did the images. Thanks to the same advances in printmaking that made Adolphe Goupil and Cent van Gogh rich, publishers could achieve a subtlety of detail and tone unthinkable in the early years when drawings had to be painstakingly carved, in reverse, onto boxwood boards. Better printing techniques also made it possible to insert two-page foldout images—a startling visual experience in an era weaned on tiny books and stamp-sized illustrations.

L
UKE
F
ILDES
,
Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward
, 1874,
OIL ON CANVAS, 53⅞ × 95⅞ IN.
(
Illustration credit 18.1
)

As the social cost of bourgeois affluence began to make itself felt, the illustrated magazines also recorded the sins and shames of the new economic order, as well as the easy Victorian remedies of charity and faith. When working as an apprentice at Goupil, Vincent had witnessed the massive public interest generated by these images of society’s castaways, but he rejected them as art. At the Royal Academy show in 1874, he saw Luke Fildes’s painting
Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward
, a somber, dark-hearted depiction of London’s poor lining up outside a shelter on a freezing night.
Applicants
stirred such a public sensation that barricades had to be erected to control the crowds clamoring to see it. But Vincent’s only comment on the show concerned some paintings of young girls that he thought “beautiful.”

Now, a decade later, alienated and abandoned himself, Vincent proclaimed these dramatic images, and their creators, the true heirs to the spirit of 1793: “For me the English black-and-white artists are to art what Dickens is to literature. They have exactly the same noble and healthy sentiment.” He called them “artists of the people” and praised their work in the same moralistic terms that he used to defend his own work—and, indeed, himself: “solid and substantial,” “rough and audacious,” “full of feeling and character,” “unpolished.” “These are pictures,” he said, “in which there is nothing,
and yet everything.”
The fact that art-world sophisticates like Mauve and Tersteeg (and Theo) considered them crass and passé, or that his fellow artists at the Pulchri Studio dismissed them as café
divertissement
, only inflamed Vincent’s passion for them. He would rescue them from cruel neglect and unjust condemnation just as he had rescued Sien. Who better to champion a rough, repudiated art than a rough, repudiated artist?

Vincent began collecting the work of English illustrators almost as soon as he arrived in The Hague in January 1882, after years of ignoring them in favor of French and Dutch prints. They were not only affordable, they also embodied an attainable artistic goal. Certainly nothing else in his experience remotely resembled the “clumsy and awkward” sketches that he brought with him from Etten and the Borinage. In The Hague, he quickly found booksellers who provided him with a bottomless supply of both individual prints and old copies of magazines such as
The Graphic, Punch
, and
The Illustrated London News
from which he could cut and mount the illustrations.

By the summer of 1882, the search for works by these artists had turned into a full-scale obsession, temporarily supplanting even Millet and Breton in the gallery of Vincent’s autobiographical manias. “They are great artists, these Englishmen,” he explained in terms that amounted to a plea on his own behalf. “They have quite another way of feeling, conceiving, and expressing themselves, if only you take the time to understand them.” Eventually, Vincent bought an entire decade’s worth of
The Graphic
—1870 to 1880—more than five hundred issues in twenty-one volumes. He called them “something solid and substantial that one can hang onto in days when one feels weak.”

In May, Vincent’s old friend Anthon van Rappard stopped in The Hague prior to his annual summer sketching expedition. The two had always shared an interest in engravings; both had long collected prints and illustrations. But much had changed in the five months since Vincent summarily broke off contact, officially declaring himself
“en froid”
with his friend. He had been rejected by Kee Vos, expelled by his parents, estranged from his powerful uncles, excommunicated by Mauve, and denounced by the influential Tersteeg. After so much humiliation and rejection, the possibility of renewed friendship with Rappard offered a lifeline of good repute. And it came at precisely the right moment: only weeks
before Vincent planned to confess to Theo his long, secret affair with Sien—a confession that threatened to unravel his sole remaining tie to the world.

After Rappard’s visit, Vincent was overcome by feelings of solidarity unequaled since his Bible-reading sessions with Harry Gladwell in Paris seven years before. This time, the shared gospel was black-and-white; the saints, illustrators. He sent long lists of his favorite images and artists, and begged his friend to respond in kind. He labored over encyclopedic letters showing off his astounding knowledge of engravers, periods, styles, and schools. He invited Rappard to test his knowledge with aficionado games of identifying prints and deciphering signatures. They exchanged books by and about draftsmen. Vincent repeatedly searched his portfolios for duplicates that he could send his confrère. When he ran out of duplicates, he combed through bins of old magazines hoping to find more. He wanted their collections to match exactly.