Vincent Van Gogh

by Jan Greenberg

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  DELL YEARLING BOOKS are designed especially to entertain and enlighten young people. Patricia Reilly Giff, consultant to this series, received her bachelors degree from Marymount College and a masters degree in history from St Johns University. She holds a Professional Diploma in Reading and a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hofstra University. She was a teacher and reading consultant for many years, and is the author of numerous books for young readers.

  For Benjamin, Lilly, and Alexander.

  J.G.

  For Kathryn Bondi. Miss you.

  S.J.

  With special thanks to Cornelia Homburg,

  Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs

  at the Saint Louis Art Museum

  Map

  Prologue

  A Brabant Boy, 1853-75

  Vincent in England, 1876-77

  The Missionary, 1879-80

  In Love, 1881-83

  Vincent the Dog, 1883-85

  A Country Bumpkin in Paris, 1886-87

  Vincent and Friends, 1887-88

  Vincent in Arles, 1888-89

  Arles: “A High Yellow Note,” 1888-89

  St.-Rémy: The Asylum, 1889-90

  Auvers-sur-Oise: The Last Refuge, 1890

  Postscript

  Biographical Time Line

  Museum Locations

  Glossary of Artists and Terms

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Photography Credits

  HUNCHED LIKE A PORCUPINE from the weight of his easel, brushes, tubes of color, and folding stool, Vincent headed out of Arles at dawn—too early for the gang of street boys to chase after him, to call him crazy. In the pocket of his workman's smock he carried lunch, a piece of bread and a bottle of milk. That was all he needed. He would catch the sun as it poured its first light on the glistening wheat fields.

  In front of him lay the wide plain called the Crau, laden with ripe grain. It reminded him of the flat landscape of Holland, where he grew up—land that stretched out to the horizon, as beautiful and infinite as the sea. But instead of the soft, clear northern light, the fierce Provencal sun cascaded bright yellow rays on the rooftops, trees, and fields. Everywhere he looked shimmered old gold, bronze, and copper against the greenish azure of the sky.

  Vincent braced the legs of his easel with rocks to steady it against the strong winds that blew down the valley. He squeezed paint onto his palette: emerald green, Prussian blue, crimson lake, chrome yellow, cobalt violet, orange lead. The mental labor of balancing the six essential colors strained his mind, as though he were a stage actor playing multiple parts.

  He brought out his largest canvas, a size thirty, twenty-nine inches by thirty-six inches. Early in his career a blank white canvas had challenged him to fill it, mocked his limitations, dared him to bring it to life. Now he didn't hesitate. He picked up his brush and began to paint.

  The rhythmic hiss of the farmers' scythes through the grain matched his strokes. Dust from the cut wheat filled the air. Spanish flies, gold and green, swarmed around the olive trees. The grasshopper-like cicadas sang in the field, as loud as frogs. Mosquitoes buzzed and bit. Vincent painted on.

  In the foreground of the canvas, a fence sheltered fruit trees from the wind. Across the middle stretched flat rectangles of fields colored citron, yellow, tan, and ochre; a towering haystack balanced the white farmhouses with their red tile roofs. Harvesters bundled the cut grain, stacked the wheat, handed it up into the high window of the mill. A man drove a cart. Each person went intently about a task as Vincent drew them with a few strokes of his brush. In the distance stood the pale violet of the hills and the ruined abbey of Montmajour. Overhead spread the blue-green sky, bleached pale by the bright, shadowless light. And in the center of the painting, cool and unobtrusive in all the vibrant yellowness of the scene, sat an empty blue farm cart, its spoked wheel the hub around which the painting revolved.

  Vincent had drawn several preliminary studies, preparing for this moment. Now he worked quickly, with feverish energy, to finish the painting in a day. Later, in the studio, he might touch up a few details, but here existed the feeling he wanted to portray. Drenched with sweat, he labored as intently as the harvesters he painted. And standing before Harvest at Le Crau, palette and brush in his hand, he lost all sense of time and space. He hardly noticed the heat or his thirst. As the light faded he studied the canvas. His eyes, though bloodshot and tired, did not deceive. A masterpiece, at last! A painting his brother Theo would be proud to show in Paris! After years of struggle he had captured what he called “the high yellow note,” vivid color and emotion in per' feet harmony. To reach it, he had pushed himself over the edge. But, for now, all that mattered was the intoxication of this moment.

  I have nature and art and poetry. If that is not enough what is?

  —LETTER TO THEO, JANUARY 1874

  ON MARCH 30, 1853, the handsome, soberly dressed Reverend Theodorus van Gogh entered the ancient town hall of Groot-Zundert, in the Brabant, a province of the Netherlands. He opened the birth register to number twenty-nine, where exactly one year earlier he sadly had written “Vincent Willem van Gogh, stillborn.” Beside the inscription he wrote again “Vincent Willem van Gogh,” the name of his new, healthy son, who was sleeping soundly next to his mother in the tiny parsonage across the square. The baby's arrival was an answered prayer for the still-grieving family.

  The first Vincent lay buried in a tiny grave by the door of the church where Pastor van Gogh preached. The Vincent who lived grew to be a sturdy redheaded boy. Every Sunday on his way to church, young Vincent would pass the headstone carved with the name he shared. Did he feel as if his dead brother were the rightful Vincent, the one who would remain perfect in his parents' hearts, and that he was merely an unsatisfactory replacement? That might have been one of the reasons he spent so much of his life feeling like a lonely outsider, as if he didn't fit anywhere in the world.

  Despite his dramatic beginning, Vincent had an ordinary childhood, giving no hint of the painter he would become. The small parsonage, with an upstairs just two windows wide under a slanting roof, quickly grew crowded. By the time he was six he had two sisters, Anna and Elizabeth, and one brother, Theo, whose gentle nature made him their mother's favorite. The youngest van Goghs, Wilhelmien (called Wil) and Cornelius, were born after Vincent went away to school.

  Their mother, Anna Carbentus van Gogh, herself one of eight, came from an artistic background. Her father had been a bookbinder to the royal family. A gifted amateur artist who filled notebooks with drawings of plants and flowers, she thought Vincent had a pleasant talent that might be useful someday. She didn't suspect he would develop into a great artist. In fact she recalled only that he once modeled an elephant out of clay but smashed it when she and his father praised it more than he thought they should. For the same reason he tore up a drawing of a cat climbing a tree. It wasn't his artistic ability but his obstinate personality that left the biggest impression on his mother. That willful stubbornness turned up again and again as he grew older.

  With a big family and a little house, the children spent a lot of time out of doors. The freckled, red-hair
ed Vincent, solitary by nature, often wandered by himself in the fields and heaths that surrounded the parsonage. He became familiar with the seasons of planting and harvest and with the hardworking local farm families whose labors connected them to the soil The strong feeling he developed for the rural landscape of Brabant and the lives of its peasants would be one of the major influences in his life.

  Mostly he did what boys like to do. He collected bugs and birds' nests. He teased his sisters. He built sand castles in the garden with Theo. Sometimes he invented games for all of them to play. After one exciting day his brothers and sisters thanked Vincent by staging a ceremony, and, with mock formality, presented him with a rosebush from their father's garden.

  Theodorus, Vincent's father, a pastor from a long line of pastors, was one of eleven children. His family had been members of the bourgeois for generations, with middle-class connections all over the Netherlands. People in Groot-Zundert called Mr. van Gogh the “Handsome Pastor” for his good looks but found his long sermons boring. The province of Brabant, where the village was located, was a farming district populated mainly by Catholics. The pastor's Dutch Reformed congregation had only 120 members, and as a result, he didn't make much money. Family finances were tight. Vincent attended the village school until his parents, worried that the peasant children were making their son rough, hired a governess to teach the children at home.

  When Vincent was only eleven, his parents sent him away to Mr. Provily's school in the nearby town of Zevenbergen. Waving goodbye on the steps of the school, he watched his mother and father's little yellow carriage drive down the road until it disappeared. The gray autumn sky matched his mood. His parents noticed how sad he looked. A few weeks later, as Vincent stood in the corner of the playground, someone told him he had a visitor His father had come back to check on him. Overcome with emotion, Vincent fell on his father's neck, but still he had to remain in school. Though he would visit and even live at home in the years to follow, it was the beginning of what he felt to be a life of exile.

  Vincent's schoolmasters didn't consider him an outstanding student. He was intelligent but no scholar. Still, after two years at Mr. Provily's, Vincent moved up. His parents valued education, and they sent their eldest son to an impressive new school in the nearby town of Tilburg—King Willem II State Secondary School.

  The school had nine teachers for only thirty-six pupils, so Vincent's days were busy. He took a long list of courses: Dutch, German, French, English, arithmetic, history, geography, geometry, botany, zoology, gymnastics, calligraphy, linear drawing, and freehand drawing. The drawing classes were considered part of a well-rounded gentleman's education, not preparation for a career. He ended his first term well enough to be one of five boys in his class of ten who were promoted. However, in March of the following year, the family took him out of school, probably for financial reasons. He left with a passion for novels and poetry and a working knowledge of four languages. In that era many children finished school at fifteen and apprenticed in a trade, but Vincent sat at home for more than a year before the family reached a decision about his future.

  Three of his father's five brothers—Uncle Vincent (whose nickname was Cent), Uncle Cor, and Uncle Heim—owned flourishing art galleries, the charismatic Uncle Cent being the most successful of the three. The French firm of Goupil et Cie, with headquarters in Paris and branches in London, Brussels, and The Hague, had purchased his gallery and made him a partner. Cent, now semiretired for health reasons, maintained an interest in the firm. Married but with no children of his own, he took an active role in the lives of his young nephews and nieces. So Vincent, his namesake, was offered an opportunity to learn the art business.

  In July 1869 Vincent began his apprenticeship in The Hague, an elegant and historic town that was the center of the Netherlands government. The Goupil gallery branch there looked like an upper-class drawing room, not a commercial establishment. Doorways between the rooms were draped with swags of heavy fabric trimmed with fringe. Oriental rugs covered the floors. On the brocaded walls, gold-framed pictures hung all the way to the ceiling. Customers at Goupil could see for themselves how the paintings would look in their own richly decorated houses.

  The town might have seemed overwhelming to a sixteen-year-old fresh from the countryside, but Vincent's mother had grown up in The Hague and still had many connections there. Vincent boarded with cousins who could be counted on to look after him. He enthusiastically set about learning his new trade and spent his free hours looking at art, rather than socializing. In nearby Amsterdam, only thirty-three miles away, he visited his uncle Cor's gallery and happily spent hours in Amsterdam's old art museum, whose crowded walls glowed with the great Dutch and Flemish painters of the past, including Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals.

  In August 1872, after he had been in The Hague for three years, his brother Theo, still a schoolboy, came to see him. The two boys went sight-seeing one afternoon, walking to a mill on the outskirts of town. There they took shelter from a sudden rainstorm and talked of their dreams for the future. Over a pitcher of milk, the brothers vowed eternal friendship, an extraordinary bond that lasted the rest of their lives. A few days later Vincent wrote to thank Theo for coming, and sympathized with his long trek to school in the August heat. This simple note began a correspondence of more than six hundred letters, in which Vincent chronicled almost every aspect of his life and art.

  Four years after Vincent joined Goupil, Theo also apprenticed at the firm, starting in the branch in Brussels, Belgium, since the company's managers didn't want two brothers in the same office. Vincent regretted that they couldn't work together, but he didn't have long to grieve about it. Goupil transferred him to the London office to learn the English part of the business. The promotion marked the firm's confidence in Vincent's future. He had done well in The Hague, and the director, Mr. Tersteeg, wrote to his parents that clients as well as painters enjoyed dealing with their son, and that he was certain Vincent would be a success in his profession.

  In 1873 Queen Victoria sat on the throne of an England that was undergoing a tumultuous shift from a rural farming economy to an urban manufacturing one. The prosperous city of London bustled with contagious energy. Vincent celebrated his promotion by purchasing a new top hat and a pair of gloves. Such items of clothing, he solemnly assured his parents, were necessary in England. In his first enthusiastic rush, he approved of almost everything he saw—the flowers, the people riding their horses in the park, the poor children playing in the streets.

  He rented a room a brisk forty-five-minute walk from the Goupil offices and happily settled in. His lodgings had “a room such as I always longed for, without a slanting ceiling and without blue paper.” The landlady of this suburban boardinghouse was a clergyman's widow, Ursula Loyer. Vincent, alone in a strange country for the first time, found her warm, motherly manner attractive. Even more appealing to him was Ursula's nineteen-year-old daughter, Eugénie. A slim, dark-haired girl with charming manners, Eugénie Loyer helped with the boarders and ran a small nursery school on the property.

  When Vincent met Eugénie she was secretly engaged to one of their former boarders, the man she ultimately married. She might have flirted with Vincent, but she never seriously considered him as a suitor. Unfortunately, it didn't take much to captivate his lonely heart. The shy twenty-year-old with a thick Dutch accent had almost no experience with women.

  Vincent's infatuation with Eugénie was apparent to his sister Anna, who had moved to London and lived with Vincent at the Lovers' while looking for a teaching job. Vincent claimed he regarded Eugénie as another sister, but Anna told the family her brother was in love, whether or not he admitted it. He apparently proposed several times, and when he couldn't change Eugénie's mind, the two van Goghs moved to a new place. Instead of confiding in Theo, Vincent stopped writing for almost six months, one of only three major breaks in their correspondence.

  His family believed him brokenhearted, blaming that for the dramatic
change in his work and personality. The cheerful Vincent who had written to a friend that he was happy “having nothing, yet possessing all” turned silent, moody, and difficult. He refused to go out, preferring his own company. For the first time people called him eccentric, a word often used to describe him as time passed.

  In 1875, hoping that a change of scene would improve his outlook, Goupil transferred Vincent again, this time to one of their Paris offices. Uncle Cent assumed that a single man of twenty-two would find the lively capital of France a perfect place to leave his disappointing love affair behind. Vincent appreciated the museums and galleries, particularly the Louvre and the Luxembourg Palace, but life in Paris held no special charm for him. Instead of sampling the Parisian nightlife, he began attending church regularly for the first time since he had left home.

  At some point Vincent may have fallen under the spell of one of the evangelistic preachers he went to hear on Sundays. He and his roommate, a fellow worker at Goupil, spent all their free time reading the Bible. Vincent's letters to Theo and his parents brimmed with mention of texts, hymns, and sermons he had attended. He even advised his brother to destroy all his books except the Bible. This, too, was new from Vincent, who always had written fervently about paintings, novels, and scenery, but not about religion. To his alarmed family, his behavior bordered on the fanatic.

  At Christmastime Vincent couldn't wait to go home. A crisis loomed, and he needed to consult his father. Despite caring deeply about art, he could no longer tolerate the art business. He spoke rudely to customers, challenging their taste and criticizing their purchases. His employer discouraged him from taking time off—the holidays were the busiest sales time in the Paris offices—but Vincent could be recklessly persistent. His father had a new parish in Etten, yet another small town in Brabant, and to Etten he went.

  When he returned after Christmas, Vincent commented to his boss, Mr. Boussod, the head of the Paris branches of Goupil, that he trusted there were no complaints about his work. If he had not initiated the conversation, Mr. Boussod would have. As Vincent said, “When the apple is ripe, a soft breeze makes it fall from the tree.” After an unpleasant conversation that touched on Vincents absence, his unusual choices of clothing, and his tactless handling of clients, Mr. Boussod fired him. Vincent was out of a job.