Van Gogh (80 page)

The risk demanded speed. Painting image after image, he learned an extraordinary economy of brushstrokes—a perfect match to his furious pace. Shawls and collars could be suggested in a few bold streaks; lips and chins and dimples and brows in short single strokes. Any lingering contact with the canvas could only spell disaster, so he fell back inevitably on the parallel hatching of his pen drawings and the shorthand of letter sketches, motions that came as naturally to him as writing. On the women’s convoluted white bonnets especially, he worked as if the canvas were hot to the touch, fragmenting their interplays of light and shadow into fewer and fewer sorties of paint in order to save the delicate tones on which he had staked his latest bid for success. “At last my color is becoming more solid, and more correct,” he reassured his brother. “I have a notion of, and sentiment for, color.”

Pushing himself to go faster and faster (“I must paint a lot”), Vincent learned to complete an entire portrait in a single morning. He reached his goal of fifty heads by the end of February 1885 and still continued doing them—a record of monomaniacal labor unmatched since the orphan man Zuyderland stepped before his relentless pencil in The Hague.

Not since The Hague, either, had he found such a compliant family of models. They came not only in the mornings for painting in the precious daylight, but in the afternoons and evenings, too, to sit in the lamplight for a parallel campaign of drawn heads. To satisfy this ravenous demand, Vincent cast his net as widely as possible. Respectable people like Adriana Schafrat, wife of the sexton from whom he rented his studio, found the invitation to model “inappropriate.” And nobody would sit for the strange
schildermenneke
without pay. “People do not like to pose,” Vincent complained. “If it weren’t for the money,
nobody
would.” In Nuenen’s long, cold winter, however, the single guilder Vincent spent each day on models found many takers: idled farm workers, unemployed tradesmen, weavers out of work.

As in The Hague, however, Vincent preferred to attack the same problems over and over rather than seek out new ones. More and more, he focused his manic attentions, and his money, on a small group of regular visitors to the studio, and on one model in particular: Gordina de Groot—the one he called Sien.

His letters soon rang with familiar cries: “I must have a model,” “I am continually in want of models,” “I wish I could take even more models.” He sent leering descriptions of “peasant girls” in “dusty blue bodices,” and hints of entanglements well beyond the range of his perspective frame. He spoke of “getting on a sufficiently intimate footing” with his models, “finding compensation for hussies that won’t have me,” and country girls “as fair and clean as some whores.” He composed a fond disquisition on “the subject of women’s heads”: from the proper girls of Whistler, Millais, and Boughton (“girls such as our sister”) to the lusty peasant women of Chardin,
“sale, grossier, boueux, puant”
(nasty, crude, filthy, stinking). He talked longingly of drawing from the nude. In the studio, he painted Gordina again and again, lavishing on her simple features the thick, dark, darting strokes perfected through a winter of ceaseless work.

She stares directly at him, her turned-up nose and thick lips relaxed in familiarity, her bonnet a voluptuous halo brushed in radiant crenellations of gray. She was the crowning achievement of Vincent’s dark new art, a Mater Dolorosa in bistre and bitumen, and he defended her in the same passionate, desperate terms he had summoned to defend the masterwork of a previous delusion,
Sorrow:
“One must paint peasants as if one were one of them,” he declared, “as if one felt and thought as they do, being unable to help what one actually is.”

Defiance, obsession, and delusion had carried Vincent back to the Schenkweg.

—

ONCE AGAIN
, the unseen marriage of emotional need and artistic ambition sent the brothers’ relationship spiraling into acrimony. To support his new family of models, Vincent needed money. Theo had reduced his monthly allowance from one hundred and fifty to one hundred francs during his visit in August, so the stage was already set for a confrontation when Vincent launched his “heads of the people” series, with its extravagant calls for both models and paint. Once again, he sent pleas on behalf of his new life disguised as demands for more money and more sympathy for his art. In the panic that followed Rappard’s visit, he begged his brother to send “something extra,” brushing aside Theo’s complaints of economic hardship with exhortations to “push on”—“What one must have, can be found.” He repeatedly pressed for supplemental payments in the same near-hysterical terms that had masked his commitment to Sien: “I must manage to get an extra 100 francs … Is it absolutely impossible for you to let me have it now?…I must insist, decidedly insist.”

When Theo balked—when he withheld support from Vincent’s application to Mauve and Tersteeg, when he urged Vincent to give up his studio and rent a room in Eindhoven, or when he simply failed to respond promptly—Vincent unleashed a torrent of abuse. “Personally you
aren’t of the slightest use to me,”
he wrote, relentlessly blurring personal and professional injuries. Once again, he accused Theo of sabotaging his art (money without sympathy was mere “protection,” he scoffed) and of joining with their father in a conspiracy against him. He compared Theo to a “hussy” spurning his advances and vowed “not to force you to be affectionate toward me.” Instead, he would throw himself on the sympathies of a world that had never shown him the slightest sympathy. “You have made it clear and unmistakable,” he wrote bitterly in December, “that you are not going to take notice of me personally or of my work except by way of protection. Well, this I utterly refuse to put up with.”

Inevitably, Vincent’s parents were dragged once again into the vortex of anger and abuse. When he lived in The Hague, distance had insulated them from the worst of their son’s outrages. But in Nuenen, there was no escape. Every man, woman, and child in the pews of Dorus’s church on Sunday morning knew something of the pastor’s aberrant son: his studio in the Catholic sexton’s house, his circle of unpresentable models, his inexplicable art. They knew that Margot Begemann had been forced to flee their village on account of the strange, redheaded
schildermenneke
.

Vincent, of course, adamantly denied that his behavior had scandalized their parents. He even argued incredibly that their relations with the Begemanns had not been disrupted at all by the events of September. But Anna and Dorus’s letters to their son in Paris tell a different story. “Because of Vincent
and Margot, our relationship with the people has changed,” Dorus wrote. “They don’t come by to see us because they don’t want to run into him. Our neighbors at least. And we must say that they are right.” Only days after Margot was taken to Utrecht, Dorus gloomily contemplated the possibility of being forced to leave Nuenen. “It would be difficult,” he said, “but if our relationships with people become too difficult, it may come to that. These days, there is more and more chance of it.”

While invoking God’s ultimate protection, the parson and his wife did everything they could to shield their family from the contagion of scandal. Immediately after Vincent’s affair with Margot came to light, they sent twenty-two-year-old Wil to stay with relatives in distant Middelharnis because “it will be good for her to be in different surroundings.” They kept Cor, seventeen, safely in Helmond, where his apprenticeship at the Begemann factory and his friendship with a Begemann cousin might remain unsullied by his brother’s miscreance. They fretted over the effects of Vincent’s troubles on faraway Theo, “who [had] done so much” to prevent just the kind of family embarrassment that now befell them. Theo and all the family worried, in turn, about their parents, especially their frail father, now sixty-two.

Even before his wife’s injury in January, Dorus’s fragile health had begun to fail. In May, he had to resign from his position with the Society for Prosperity for health reasons, severing a Van Gogh tie that traced back to the organization’s founding. Anna’s slow recovery had taxed him in ways both seen and unseen as he coached her from standing in March, to walking in July, to traveling in September. Now, in addition to the worries over his wife of thirty-three years and the indignities of age, Dorus had to manage Vincent’s increasingly unmanageable temper and unpredictable behavior—all within the confines of his own home. “We do our best to calm him down,” he wrote Theo, barely concealing his despair. “But his outlook on life and his forms are so different from ours, that it is a question whether living together in the same place can continue in the long run.”

Still, Dorus resisted for as long as possible the inevitable solution: asking Vincent to leave. He knew better than anyone his son’s wounded, obstreperous heart. “We follow, and we don’t want to show the way,” he wrote helplessly. “One simply has to let some things happen as they may.” So he waited for Vincent to follow through on his oft-discussed plan to move to Antwerp and stoically pledged to “endure and try everything” in the meantime. Too weak to risk a fight, Dorus seriously considered leaving Nuenen himself if Vincent would not. In November, when a call came from his former congregation in Helvoirt, he entered into negotiations—quietly, in order not to alarm his volatile son. “What troubles could have been spared,” he lamented, “if [Vincent] had been more normal. But that is not the way it is.”

As Dorus expected, when Vincent caught wind of the plan to oust or abandon him, he hunkered down in the parsonage and banished any talk of moving. He dismissed as “downright nonsense” Theo’s cautious suggestion that he take rooms in Eindhoven. After almost a year of breathless anticipation, he abruptly dropped his plans to move to Antwerp, even for part of the year. He claimed that Rappard had advised him against it (a complete reversal, if true), and flooded his brother with desperate, defensive, delusive arguments that betrayed how high the stakes had risen (they continued long after Dorus declined the Helvoirt offer). The Kerkstraat studio had been the key to his success, he maintained. Without it, his career “would have been a failure.” “It is certainly not for my
pleasure
that I live here at home,” he protested, “only for my painting.” He warned Theo that it would be a great mistake if the family “robbed” him of this idyllic workplace. “For
my painting
,” he insisted, “I
must
stay here somewhat longer still.” When asked how long, he answered vaguely, “Until I have made more definite progress.”

The more Theo pressed his parents’ case, the more fiercely Vincent resisted it: “I
cannot
give up the studio … and in no event can they demand that I leave the village.” He hurled his brother’s careful, indirect arguments back at him, transforming them into demands for more money and, of course, more models. “I must paint a large number of heads [before leaving],” he wrote, “which will go more smoothly the better I can pay the models.” He escalated their dispute into yet another clash between city (Theo) and country (Vincent), portraying his brother as an effete connoisseur out of touch with the source of all true inspiration, nature. Finally, he struck at his brother’s most sensitive nerve by threatening to take their battle to its source, their father. “My situation here is a bit too tense,” he hinted darkly, “and I do not find it easy to possess my soul in patience.”

Provoked to honesty, Theo finally let slip the doubts he had long harbored about his brother’s enterprise. “I am suspicious,” he wrote. Whatever he meant by it—suspicious of Vincent’s spending, of his reasons for staying in Nuenen, of his intentions at home, of his ultimate success—Vincent took it to mean all these and more: a sweeping indictment of his entire raison d’être. In the charged aftermath of the Begemann affair and Rappard’s visit, this single word—“suspicious”—touched a spark to the dry tinder of Vincent’s sensitivities.

“I don’t give a damn whether you are suspicious or not,” he exploded. Branding
the insinuation
“vicious,”
he charged Theo with “purposely acting this way in order to get rid of me.” His indignation flamed through months of letters as the word burned its way into Vincent’s lexicon of guilt and grievance:

The coming of Christmas, with its cruel promise of family harmony and universal joy, pushed Vincent fully into despair. The traditional Saint Nicholas Day festivities, with a Sinterklaas skit and thoughtfully chosen presents from an absent Theo, only mocked the collapse of all his family relations. He fought now even with his sisters, and withdrew almost completely from parsonage life. “He becomes more and more a stranger to us,” Dorus wrote after the holidays.

Both the Van Gogh family and the world were fraught with woes at Christmastime 1884. The new global economy remained stalled, destroying businesses and sending a plague of economic refugees into cities everywhere, including Amsterdam. News of a cholera epidemic that swept through France prompted worried letters over Theo’s safety. Even Uncle Cent, seeking relief from perpetual ill health in a hotel on the Riviera, was not immune from the alarm. Closer to home, another uncle, Jan the admiral, saw his feckless son Hendrik finally hospitalized for “epileptic seizures” after squandering the family’s fortune and good name and driving his proud father toward an early grave. In the parsonage itself, Anna could walk, but now could not lie still in bed, condemning both her and her attendant husband to long, sleepless nights. Dorus suffered another holiday cold, the bane of the pastor’s busiest season. “It is a very depressed situation everywhere,” he summed up.