Van Gogh (66 page)

In July, using black ink, he painted a potato field nestled between dunes, its rows of plants converging toward a layered horizon of fields, brakes, and hills—as serene and embracing a vision of nature as he had ever rendered. In another painting, known only by a hasty sketch in a letter to Theo, he drew a line of bushes “tangled by the sea wind” along a path by the shore. The six battered bushes almost fill the image, bending and trembling like flames in a wind. Freed by the inconsequence of this “scratch,” Vincent captured the scene in swirling pen strokes that lacked only the color of the brushstrokes to come.

On the eve of Theo’s arrival, Vincent announced elaborate plans to stockpile paint supplies, and hurriedly rehung his studio, replacing the ubiquitous figure studies with some of his painted sketches from the previous summer’s fervor. “It struck me there was something in them after all,” he reassured his brother.

In lieu of the agreeable images that Theo wanted, Vincent flooded his brother with agreeable words. His letters accelerated from one a week in April to one a day in the weeks leading up to the fateful visit, as Vincent hurried to frame his modest images in gilded rhetoric. “A revolution has taken place in me,” he
claimed; “the time is ripe … I have loosened the reins.” He assured Theo again and again that he was only a few days, a few models, a few sketches away from “something broad and audacious,” “something comforting, something that makes one think.”

Path to the Beach
, J
ULY
1883,
LETTER SKETCH, INK ON PAPER
,
3 × 5¼ IN
. (
Illustration credit 19.1
)

He pointed to his latest group drawings as proof that “the moment” when he would produce a salable image was close at hand, and he predicted confidently that “people will alter their opinion about my doing or planning absurd things.” In addition to promising a bright future if Theo showed patience, he warned of dire consequences if he did not. “I don’t care for anything but the work,” he said, waving again the red flag of mental instability. “I become melancholy when I can’t go on with my work.” The prospect of having to quit, Vincent hinted leadenly as Theo’s visit approached, “makes me sorry that I didn’t fall ill and die in the Borinage that time, instead of taking up painting.”

The looming visit also roused Vincent to the one activity he hated most: socializing. After more than a year of Robinson Crusoe isolation on the Schenkweg, he reported friendly encounters with dealers and other artists. He exchanged books and studio visits with Breitner, who had returned to The Hague for the
summer. On a trip to Scheveningen, he called on Bernard Blommers, the successful Hague School painter who had disappeared from Vincent’s life about the same time as Anton Mauve. In July, Vincent braved those memories to show Blommers his recent work and reported brightly afterward, “He wants me to keep it up.”

He also paid a visit to Théophile de Bock, the Mesdag protégé with whom he had already fallen out several times. De Bock had rented a house just off the road that ran from The Hague to Scheveningen. In his report to Theo, instead of mocking De Bock’s bourgeois pretensions (as he had often done), or criticizing his failure to use models more, Vincent pointedly admired the artist’s “pretty,” “blondly brushed” landscapes and retreated somewhat from his fierce attacks on Impressionism. “I don’t mind its being unfinished,” he said of one De Bock work. “[It’s] half romantic, half realistic—a combination of styles that I don’t dislike.” He even arranged to use a room in De Bock’s house as a pied-à-terre where he could store his materials, making trips to the beach much easier—an arrangement he presented to Theo as a virtual guarantee of more landscapes.

To demonstrate his commitment to selling his work, Vincent reversed months of rhetoric and reached out yet again to his estranged family. He sent Uncle Cor in Amsterdam two of his group drawings accompanied by a wan hope that “they might be the means of finding new connections, and perhaps of reestablishing relations.” He reassured Theo that he was “very anxious to be on good terms with Mauve again.” In an especially delusional moment, he asked Theo to persuade Mauve to offer him “a helping hand” again.

The road to Uncle Cent’s favor, however, ran through the Plaats, Goupil & Cie, and the little back office of H. G. Tersteeg. This was a much harder reversal to negotiate. Only the month before, Vincent had laid all the tribulations of the previous year at Tersteeg’s feet and vowed “I will not cross his path again.” Initially, Vincent hoped that Theo would “write a little word” and “make some arrangement” with the implacable
gérant
. He proposed that his brother broker a rapprochement.

After a month passed without a response, emboldened by his new drawings and desperate to “thaw the ice” between them, Vincent returned to the Goupil gallery for the first time in more than a year and confronted his nemesis face-to-face. Tersteeg received him formally. Quick to take offense, Vincent read in his manner a frigid greeting: “Here you are, bothering me again—do leave me alone.” He had brought one of his drawings of group labor showing a row of diggers, and he offered it to Tersteeg as a gift. “I understand perfectly well that this sketch could not be anything for you,” he said as he spread the big drawing out on Tersteeg’s desk, “but I came to show it to you because it has been so long since you have seen any of my work and because I wanted to prove that I do not feel any ill will about what happened last year.”

“I do not hold a grudge, either,” Tersteeg said wearily, barely looking at the image laid before him. “As to the drawing, I told you last year that you ought to make watercolors … This is not saleable and saleability must come first.” Again, Vincent read in the
gérant’s
manner a far sterner message: “You are a mediocrity and you are arrogant because you don’t give in and you make mediocre little things: you are making yourself ridiculous with your so-called ‘seeking.’ ”

Fighting despondency, Vincent ran home and spent the rest of the day redrawing the image “to finish the figures better.” He wrote his brother a detailed account of the debacle: a tale torn between fury, pain, and despair, spread over several long, plaintive letters. “Sometimes one is depressed by it and feels miserable and almost stunned,” he wrote. “Life sometimes becomes gloomy, and the future, dark.” He cursed Tersteeg and all those like him—“the fatuous-minded, the impotent, the cynics, the idiotic and
stupid scoffers.”
“He persists in thinking everything I do is wrong.… I should not be in the least surprised if he considered my work crazy.”

Stoically, he vowed to ignore the doubt that swirled around him and work on steadily—to “take it in stride and go my own way.” But in all of the brave rhetoric, one can hear a single rising fear: that Tersteeg’s poisonous words might be only a foretaste of the bitter medicine Theo would bring in August.

EVEN AS VINCENT
protested Tersteeg’s
“everlasting
no,” his case for a viable life in The Hague—the case he would put to Theo—was falling to pieces around him.

His debts continued to mount. By the end of July, creditors were pounding at the door. Vincent reported one especially nasty “skirmish” with a debt collector—by now a common occurrence on the Schenkweg:

Vincent had also ignored months of tax summonses. When the assessors came to collect, he told them defiantly: “I lit my pipe with your summonses.” But when they returned and threatened to seize all his possessions for auction, he protested with howls of righteous indignation (“Millet and the other masters worked on till writs were served on them, or some have been in prison”) and pleas of poverty. But at the same time, he rushed to confirm Theo’s ownership
of all his work (putting it beyond his creditors’ reach) and considered declaring bankruptcy with his feet: first by hiding out at his pied-à-terre in Scheveningen; then, if necessary, by moving to the country.

After months of resisting his brother’s pleas for more money, Theo finally sent an extra fifty francs to help tide Vincent over until their reunion in August. Only days later, Vincent announced that he had bought a new easel.

At the same time his debts mounted, he fell deeper and deeper into isolation. In June, he was refused permission to draw in the almshouse, cutting him off from Zuyderland and the other almshouse residents. Soon after that, he broke off with another source of models, the neighborhood carpenter. His friend Van der Weele left for the country in mid-July, and his ambitious promises to visit De Bock and Blommers evaporated in the heavy summer air, leaving him alone on his long walks through the dunes.

Meanwhile, on the Schenkweg, Vincent’s “family” spiraled toward the inevitable break. Under the strain of isolation and scarcity, Sien increasingly rebelled at the bargain she had struck. “At times her temper is such that it is almost unbearable,” Vincent admitted. “I am sometimes in despair.” Desperate to preserve his fantasy of rescue, he cast everywhere for villains to explain Sien’s laziness, slovenliness, and increasingly violent fits of temper. Chief among them was her mother, Maria Wilhelmina Hoornik, who had moved into the Schenkweg apartment during the winter and almost immediately begun to make trouble.

In his paranoia, Vincent saw treachery everywhere. Maria did not act alone, he insisted, but as the instrument of a “meddlesome, slandering, aggravating family
”—“wolves,”
he called them. He accused them of sowing discontent and distrust; of “trying to draw [Sien] away” and drag her back to her former life. He imagined them whispering in her ear: “He earns too little,” “He is not good for you,” “He will certainly leave you someday.” Even after Maria departed in May, Vincent continued to blame the family for Sien’s “backsliding.” He pleaded with Sien to cut off contact with them. But she never did. “She prefers to listen to and believe people who told her that I would desert her,” he lamented. But still Vincent clung to her—and especially to her infant son, Willem. “He often sits with me in the studio, and crows at the drawings,” he wrote in yet another reverie of family. “[When he] comes crawling toward me on all fours, crowing for joy, I haven’t the slightest doubt that everything is right.”

While both his finances and his family life fell apart, his physical health also continued to deteriorate.

Vincent’s ailments seemed never to subside, only to accumulate. Reports of nervousness, feverishness, faintness, and dizziness continued throughout the spring and summer, rising in a defensive crescendo—as they always did—in advance of his brother’s arrival. The complaints ranged from the specific (upset stomach, “a pain between the shoulders”) to the general (“a feeling of prostration,”
or simply “I feel miserable”). Most came down to money, as Vincent turned his suffering into yet another indictment of his brother’s stinginess. “I have a faint feeling in my stomach because there isn’t enough to eat,” he wrote—at a time when he had enough money for models’ costumes and studio improvements. Yet the ailments were real enough. Even when he ate properly, his stomach rebelled, triggering headaches and dizzy spells that lingered for long periods.

For Vincent who, like his father, believed in a link between physical and mental health, these persistent ills stirred the darkest fears. Half in threat and half in dread, he began to speculate about the effects of “overwrought nerves,” the danger of melancholy, and the fatality of madness. Such forebodings sprang to terrifying life in July when Vincent visited the studio of George Breitner. From the moment he entered Breitner’s garret room, furnished only “with a razor and a box with a bed in it,” Vincent sensed a soul in torment. Around the walls, he saw paintings in various states of completion—tenebrous images painted in broad, hurried strokes—looking, he said, “like patches of faded color on a bleached, moldering and mildewy wallpaper.”

In a rare fit of criticism, he dismissed all of Breitner’s paintings as “absurd,” “ridiculous,” “clumsy,” and “weird”—“impossible and meaningless as in the most preposterous dream.” To produce such images, he declared, an artist would have to be “in a fever”—if not outright insane. He speculated that Breitner had “strayed far from a composed and rational view of things,” and that nervous exhaustion had rendered him “unable to produce a single composed, sensible line or brushstroke.” He layered onto this vision of artistic and mental breakdown a painting by Émile Wauters,
La folie d’Hugues van der Goes
(
The Madness of Hugo van der Goes
), a chilling depiction of the famously insane fifteenth-century painter sitting coiled and wide-eyed, seized by invisible demons.

Vincent returned from Breitner’s studio “overcome by a depression I cannot exactly explain,” and immediately wrote Theo a detailed account, as both a cautionary tale and a cry of fear on the eve of his brother’s visit. It was all he could do, he protested, to fight off the “difficulties [that] rise like a tidal wave,” and “the doubt that overwhelms me.” Should he lose that battle—or be discouraged from it—the consequences could be devastating. “One must not believe that things are really as gloomy as one supposes,” he warned. “If one did, it would make one mad.”