Vincent's relationship with his family was improved by an accident. Mrs. van Gogh stepped off a train, fell, and broke her leg just below the hip. The nursing skills Vincent had learned in the Borinage surprised his parents and bettered their opinion of him. While the most personal nursing duties fell on Vincent's youngest sister, Wil, his tender and competent care of his ailing mother astounded everyone.
He had reached a truce with his parents, but his relation-ship with Theo was now rocky. Vincent attacked his brother about their monetary arrangements and accused him of making no attempt to sell the paintings and of breaking up the relationship with Sien “with a little tug at the financial bridle.” He wrote angrily, “A wife you cannot give me, a child you cannot give me, work you cannot give me. Money, yes. But what good is it to me if I must do without the rest?”
The quarrel finally led to a new understanding. Theo sent Vincent 150 francs per month as a salary. Vincent was free to spend the money any way he wished. In return he sent Theo his paintings, to sell or keep as he chose. From that point onward Vincent regarded Theo as a business partner as well as his closest friend. Theo's job was to provide support and art materials, Vincent's to make paintings.
The area around Nuenen offered plenty of subjects to interest him. He had first been fascinated by weavers while he was living in the Borinage. Now he spent days crouched in the corners of the local weavers' huts, drawing. He identified with the humble, solitary craftsmen who looked trapped inside the intricate wooden looms. Their livelihood was vanishing as more and more fabric was manufactured with new power looms in large, industrialized mills.
With his finances stabilized, Vincent moved his studio from the family laundry room to two larger rooms rented to him by tlie sexton of the village's Catholic church. This annoyed his father, who got along fine with his Catholic neighbors but didn't wish his son to be so closely associated with them. And it equally annoyed the priest, who didn't like having an artist's studio so near the church.
The painting went well in the new space until Vincent unwittingly created a fresh uproar. Next door to the parsonage lived the very respectable Begemann family, including the never-married forty-five-year-old daughter, Margo, a hopeless spinster by the standards of the time. She worked in the family linen business but found time to help out most of the neighbors, including Mrs. van Gogh with her broken leg. Vincent, poor, outlandish, and more than ten years younger than Margo, hardly qualified as Prince Charming, but the two lonely people cared for each other. They agreed to marry.
Margo's three sisters and sister-in-law ruthlessly objected to her romance with the pastor's peculiar son, humiliating her past the breaking point. Margo snapped. While she and Vincent were out walking in the fields, she sank to the ground, exclaiming, “I too have loved at last!”
At first Vincent thought Margo had fainted, and then, fearing the worst, demanded to know if she had swallowed something. She screamed, “Yes!” and admitted she had taken poison. He promptly ordered her to put her finger down her throat. Then he found her brother and rushed to the nearest town for a doctor. Margo went away for a long rest. Vincent visited her, but given Margo's fragile emotional condition, marriage didn't seem wise. He said that she had spent too long under the domination of her dispiriting family, and he compared her to a valuable old violin that had been abused and badly mended.
Most of the neighbors blamed Vincent for the drama and refused to visit the parsonage as long as he lived there, which upset his mother. He was too busy to worry about it. To help his finances, he accepted three pupils, who paid him in tubes of paint so that he could work from morning till night without running out of materials. His students found him an unusual teacher. He planned his canvas carefully, and then, without drawing, painted quickly and confidently from one side of the canvas to the other, using a large brush, his fingers, and even his fingernails to get the effects he sought. When his pupils commented that what he did was contrary to academic technique, he shouted, “I scoff at your technique.”
His chaotic studio was crammed with paintings and drawings mounted on every available wall space, many of them strong heads of men and women with clownish turned-up noses, protruding cheekbones, and large ears. There were a few frayed chairs, all kinds of mosses and plants, stuffed birds, farm tools, costumes for his models, a stove surrounded by a heap of ashes that went untouched, and a cupboard full of at least thirty different birds' nests. He paid the boys in the neighborhood to bring him the nests, which he painted and compared to the small, cozy peasants' houses.
Vincent's painting and his confidence had improved tremendously, but his disposition had not. Both parents complained of his behavior. In March 1885 Mr. van Gogh wrote to Theo, “This morning I talked things over with Vincent; he was in a kind mood and said there was no particular reason for his being depressed. May he meet with success anyhow.” These were his last written words about his son. Three days later he went out for a walk on the heath, came home, and collapsed in the doorway of the house. He was carried inside, but it was too late. There was nothing anyone could do. Vincent's father was dead at age sixty-three.
The van Goghs had been a devoted couple for forty-four years. The grieving Mrs. van Gogh was allowed to stay on in the parsonage for a year, but Vincent's sisters asked him to move out and leave their mother in peace, Vincent, not ad-mitting how hurt he was, took up residence in his studio by the Catholic church.
As usual, he kept busy working. He put his faith in a large painting that had preoccupied him for months, one that he felt had “energy.” The scene depicted a peasant family sitting around a table in a dark room lit by a single overhead lamp. Vincent wanted to represent an attitude and a way of life, not an individual family, so he named his painting The Potato Eaters, after the evening meal that waited in front of them.
He painted it in less than a month but said he had spent the whole winter on studies of the hands and heads, completing several oil sketches and a lithograph before beginning the final canvas: “I have such a feel of the thing that I can literally dream it.” Vincent's sense of identification with these laborers, his belief in their simplicity and goodness, is evident in the work. “I have tried to emphasize that these people eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labor and how they have honestly earned their food.”
The color scheme was dark, his favorite bistre and bitumen heightened with gold. The heads he painted “the color of a very dusty potato, unpeeled of course.” He left the brushwork purposely rough. “It would be wrong to give a peasant picture a certain conventional smoothness. If a peasant picture smells of bacon, smoke, potato steam—that's not unhealthy … to be perfumed is not what a peasant picture needs… We must continue to give something real and honest.”
Vincent sent Theo a preliminary print of the painting and many sketches, encouraging him to hold on to all of the drawings and studies—otherwise they'd have to buy them back when he became famous. He also advised retaining the best paintings for what he referred to as his oeuvre, the body of work on which he expected to be favorably judged.
The Potato Eaters now is considered one of the great paintings of the nineteenth century, but at the time Theo and others who saw it did not respond to it with the praise Vincent knew it deserved. In spite of a few faults in composition, which he readily admitted, he had painted a masterpiece. But with lukewarm enthusiasm Theo informed him that the Impressionists had introduced a much lighter palette than Vincent's blacks and “soapy greens.” To be a success in Paris, he was going to have to lighten his colors. Vincent wrote back that he had heard of the Impressionists, although he had never seen any of their work. He couldn't visualize what Theo was talking about.
In Nuenen he faced a new dilemma. The local priest, who had never liked Vincent or his studio, denounced him as a bad influence and forbade the parishioners to pose. In fact, the priest offered to pay them not to. Vincent hadn't done anything w
rong, but with his models no longer available, it was time to move on. He had learned much in the country; now he needed the city—to see paintings and to talk to other artists.
Before leaving Nuenen, Vincent gave one of his favorite paintings, an autumn landscape, to a friend and pupil, Anton Kerssemakers. When Anton pointed out that he hadn't signed the painting, Vincent said he might someday, but “actually it isn't necessary, they will surely recognize my work later on and write about me when I am dead and gone.”
Vincent relocated to the bustling city of Antwerp, Belgium, where he anticipated a market for his work. Here he took a room over a paint dealer's shop for twenty-five francs a month. He rented a stove and a lamp and settled in to explore big-city life. Antwerp was a busy international port on the river Schelde. Vincent never got tired of walking the streets and looking at the people. With Antwerp's museum, full of great art, as well as its entertaining cafés, music halls, and bars, there was plenty to catch Vincent's attention. In a shop near the waterfront he discovered inexpensive Japanese prints for the first time. The simplicity of their flat shapes seemed very modern to him, and he decorated the walls of his small room with these exotic images of life in Japan.
He had several schemes for making money—painting portraits, selling drawings—that came to nothing. A hundred and fifty francs a month didn't go far in an expensive town, and he came very close to starvation. As usual, he splurged on art supplies and survived on bread and coffee. His health deteriorated so much that it affected his painting, and he began to lose his teeth. And while he found people to draw, nude models still eluded him. They had been out of the question in straitlaced Nuenen, but in Antwerp, hoping for an opportunity, he enrolled in the art academy, where luckily classes were free.
He must have been a strange sight. Other students recalled a laughable figure with paint-stained workman's clothes and a ratty fur cap worn indoors and out. Vincent didn't care about their laughter. He had rejected everything about the life he had been born into and was pleased when people mistook him for an ironworker or a bargeman just off the river. In class he flung himself down in front of the canvas and put on the paint so quickly and heavily that it dripped on the floor. The outraged teacher asked who he was. “Vincent, a Dutchman,” he replied. The teacher refused to correct such sloppy work and demoted him to a lower class.
Vincent went quietly. He was there to paint the models, not to have arguments. He claimed he learned more from watching the other students than from the faculty. He didn't respect his teachers' methods, and he painted as he wished, not as they instructed. Unimpressed by his originality, the school once more demoted him, this time into the beginners' class. He left before he found out.
Desperate to see the artistic developments in Paris, he kept badgering Theo to let him come. His brother put him off, asking Vincent to wait until he moved to a bigger apartment. In the meantime, Theo suggested, their mother and sisters in Nuenen needed help moving to their new home. Vincent refused. Visiting Nuenen would be money badly spent. “In a time of financial crisis like the present, money is what ammunition is to a soldier in a hostile country—don't let's waste our powder.” He translated his point of view into action. Leaving a stack of unpaid bills behind, he boarded the night train to Paris.
I am not an adventurer by choice as by fate and feeling nowhere
so much myself a stranger as in my family and country.
—LETTER TO ENGLISH ARTIST HORACE LEVENS, SEPTEMBER 1886
ON A SCRAP of paper torn from his sketchbook, Vincent dashed off a note to Theo. “My dear Theo, Do not be cross with me for having come all at once like this: I have thought about it so much, and I believe that in this way we shall save time.… We'll fix things up, you'll see.” He probably avoided going straight to Goupil et Cie, where Theo worked, for fear of running into his former bosses, so he sent an errand boy with the message. Then he settled into a gallery of the Louvre to wait for his brother. He chose to meet Theo in the room where the most important paintings were hung, to let him know he was determined to be taken seriously as an artist.
Vincent arrived in Paris a country bumpkin and found hinv self in the red-hot center of the art world. The older artists working there, such as Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Degas, were the recognized leaders of Impressionism, a movement that had burst on the Paris art scene in the 1870s. Vincent thought himself an expert on painting, but when he saw what the Impressionists were doing, he realized how much he had to learn. Their light-filled, color-drenched canvases soon would turn the sober Dutch palette of The Potato Eaters upside down.
Theo's apartment was only a ten-minute walk from the gallery. That it was too small may have been the reason Theo wasn't overjoyed when his brother showed up so unexpectedly. At the same time, Theo felt lonely and out of place in sophisticated Paris. Like Vincent, who described himself as a boy from Brabant, Theo was happier in the countryside than in the big city. So having his brother and best friend around to share his life might have been a relief. At least now there would be only one rent to pay. After several months they moved to a larger apartment on boulevard Montmartre, even closer to Goupil and near the artist Fernand Corman's studio, where Vincent immediately enrolled to study figure drawing.
One section of Montmartre, at the foot of the famous hill known as the Butte-Montmartre, was covered with vegetable gardens and a few disused windmills. The construction of the white church Sacré-Coeur was just under way. The other section pulsed with lively bistros and cafés, including the popular dance hall Windmill of the Galette, which Vincent soon painted. From the brothers' third-floor apartment he could look out over the tiled rooftops of Paris with their orange chimneys and glass skylights.
Vincent and Theo's new home had three large rooms, a small side room, where Vincent slept, and a kitchen. The living room was decorated with an antique wood cabinet belonging to Theo, a sofa, and a big stove, since both brothers disliked the cold.
Vincent adjusted to life in Paris with renewed energy and enthusiasm. He was eager to leave behind the conservative rules and taboos of his Dutch homeland and to embrace the freedom and daring that France offered him. He wrote his letters in French and replaced the old blue smock and fur cap he had worn in Antwerp with an artistic felt hat, a colorful scarf, and a suit. He painted himself in this new outfit, looking out at the viewer with a steady gaze. Vincent did twenty-five self-portraits in Paris, more than in any other period of his career. His studies of his own image, seen in a mirror, show his preoccupation with self-examination. He would try on different roles, from coarse peasant to urbane gentleman, from plain farmer to solemn artist.
His health, both mental and physical, continued to worry his family. To his mother's relief, he had some much-needed dental work done, as he had lost almost all his teeth. Theo wrote to Mrs. van Gogh, “You would not recognize Vincent, he has changed so much.… The doctor says he has quite recovered.”
Theo's position as an art dealer and patron of the Impressionist painters gave Vincent access to the art world of Paris. He also met many of the younger artists then considered avant-garde—Paul Signac, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Gauguin, to name only a few. In the galleries and cafés around Montmartre they gathered to smoke their pipes, listen to les chanteuses, the female ballad singers, and drink absinthe, a strong toxic liquor. Theo told the family that not a day went by without an invitation for Vincent to visit a well-known painter's studio.
The French Impressionists totally changed Vincent's way of thinking about painting. Impressionism, with its pastel colors and disconnected brushstrokes, aimed to convey a sense of spontaneity, to be a record of a fleeting scene. At first Vincent wasn't sure he liked their bright colors. He preferred the gray tones of painters such as Mauve, with whom he was more familiar. But gradually over the course of the summer he began to replace the dull grays with stronger colors, experimenting by painting a series of flowers. Since he couldn't afford to pay models, friends in the neighborhood would bring him fresh bouquets
to paint instead.
In his first months in Paris, he studied figure drawing at Corman's studio, where an artist he'd met in Amsterdam had trained. Vincent gave up the peasant themes he'd committed himself to in Holland and joined Corman's other students in working from live models as well as drawing from plaster casts. He had come a long way from the young man who had smashed Mauve's casts rather than copy them. Now he admitted that there were things to be learned from studying classical models.
Corman, a little man with a long, thin face and a pointy chin, stood on a ladder at the front of the studio, working on his large historical canvases of prehistoric lake dwellers and cavemen, while the students sat at their easels at the other end, painting the model. Vincent's new friend, the eighteen-year-old painter and poet Emile Bernard, would find him there long after the rest of the students had left, patiently trying to draw the contours of a plaster cast. Vincent worked with such intensity that he rubbed holes in the paper from erasing over and over. He disciplined himself for the sake of his craft, but he was far from mellow. His frequent outbursts, as well as the odd color combinations he preferred, caused the younger students to make fiin of him behind his back. But they were civil to him; after all, his brother Theo was a well-known art dealer When Vincent became excited, he had a way of spitting out a string of sentences in French, Dutch, and English, looking back at people over his shoulder and hissing through his remaining teeth. The students admitted being impressed by his painting of a pair of worn workman's boots against a drab background. Vincent said he didn't need to paint figures to express the sadness he saw in the world.
Not too surprisingly, Vincent wasn't a fan of Corman's work, and after a few months he abruptly quit. For the time being he gave up on painting nudes from live models. What did come out of that brief experience was two new artist friends—Emile Bernard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Vincent Van Gogh Page 4
