Vincent Van Gogh

by Jan Greenberg

  Jo gave birth to a son, naming him Vincent Willem after his uncle, and Theo asked Vincent to be the godfather. Vincent didn't feel up to traveling, but he painted a beautiful canvas of almond branches against a blue sky for the new baby, as if the child lying in the cradle were looking up through flowering arms.

  Almost as soon as he'd finished the canvas, he had another attack and was “down like a brute … Difficult to understand things like that,” he said, “but alas.” Practically overnight he recovered and was back at his easel Purple irises, olive orchards, and later the mountains occupied him as well as a few portraits, including Mrs. Roulin (from memory) and Trabuc, the asylum's head attendant. Theo sent him prints by Daumier and Millet to copy. Millet's painting The Sower, with its theme of peasant life, inspired more than twenty works. Vincent wrote, “I am trying to do something to console myself, for my own pleasure.”

  Just as the Sower paintings symbolized a life-giving force, his paintings of the Reaper stood for death. “I see in this reaper—a vague figure fighting like the devil in the midst of the heat to get to the end of his task—I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping.… But there's nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold.”

  Like many artists or writers who have felt exiled from their own countries, Vincent was highly sensitive to his surroundings. In St.-Rémy his paintings of the cypress trees, the olive groves, and the mountains were meant to express the essence of the south, offering “at best a sort of whole, ‘Impressions of Provence.’” During his year in the asylum, between some debilitating attacks, he averaged two paintings a week, along with detailed descriptions in letters to Theo about his progress.

  In the winter of 1890 a brilliant young critic, G. Albert Aurier, saw Vincent's paintings at Père Tanguy's shop and at Theo's apartment in Paris. Dazzled by Vincent's powerful style, Aurier wrote a glowing article about him in an avant-garde magazine, Mercure de France, calling him “a terrible maddened genius, often sublime, sometimes grotesque.” This was the first published article written about Vincent, who, instead of rejoicing, wrote Theo, “Please ask M. Aurier not to write any more articles on my painting… it pains me more than he knows.” But it wasn't being called “maddened” that upset him. Vincent thought Aurier had been too flattering and that others, such as Gauguin, deserved more praise.

  Because of Aurier's article, six of Vincent's paintings were sent to an exhibition in Brussels. There The Red Vineyard was purchased for 400 francs. Even though Vincent traded paintings and sold a few drawings during his lifetime, The Red Vineyard is often referred to as the only real sale he ever made. His friend Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as Renoir and Cézanne, had paintings in the exhibition. When a Belgian artist called Vincent's pictures the work of an ignoramus, Toulouse-Lautrec challenged him to a duel, but the French contingent stepped in to stop him.

  Almost immediately after the sale, Vincent suffered a relapse. “As soon as I heard that my work was having some success, and read the article,” he wrote to his mother, “I feared at once I should be punished for it.… Success is the worst thing that can happen in a painter's life.” This reaction to praise echoes his behavior as a little boy when he tore up a drawing his mother admired.

  Spring arrived, marking a year since he had admitted himself to the asylum. Now he obsessed about leaving. “I must make a change, even a desperate one.” He knew he couldn't risk living alone, so letters went back and forth between him and Theo about his various options. Gauguin, who was living in Brittany, politely refused to offer him a room, telling friends later, “Not that man! He tried to kill me!” Perhaps, Vincent wrote Theo, he could stay with the painter Camille Pissarro, who had been so kind to him in Paris, But Pissarro's wife, the tougher of the couple, said she was afraid to have him around her children.

  The fatherly Pissarro came up with a solution. He knew of a small town about twenty miles from Paris called Auvers-sur-Oise where a physician named Dr. Gachet resided. This doctor, he said, was sympathetic to artists and knew a little about psychiatry. So it was decided that Vincent would go north again. This move proved to be his last.

  Welly the truth is, we can only make our pictures speak.

  —LAST LETTER TO THEO, JULY 1890

  ON HIS WAY to Auvers, Vincent stopped in Paris to meet Theo's wife, Jo, and his new nephew for the first time. Jo presumed Vincent would be frail and was surprised to see “the sturdy, broad shouldered man, with healthy color, a smile on his face, and a very resolute appearance.” In fact, she thought Vincent looked healthier than her husband.

  Theo brought Vincent into the room where his namesake lay sleeping in a cradle. The two brothers, who had been through so much, stood side by side looking down at young Vincent with tears in their eyes. Then Vincent turned to Jo and pointed to the crocheted coverlet. “Do not cover him up with too much lace, little sister,” he said.

  Jo wrote that the three-day visit was a happy occasion, but Vincent's letters afterward tell a different story, focusing on some unresolved issues. Nothing had been settled about his allowance. And seeing his paintings stored in the “bedbug infested hole” at Père Tanguy's upset him. On some of his canvases the swirling paint was half an inch thick, and stacking them in Tanguy's small spare room caused the paint to stick and crack. “By keeping them in good condition, there would be a greater chance of getting some profit out of them,” Vincent wrote.

  From Theo's letters to Vincent, it is clear that he believed strongly in his brother's talent, but he was careful, almost reticent, about showing the work outside his apartment. There was no way Vincent would have exhibited at Goupil, Theo's gallery. After all, its stuffy director had once fired him. In addition, Theo, who was committed to the Impressionists, did not fully appreciate Vincent's generation of painters. Their raw colors and bold imagery put him off. Vincent, concerned about the sale of his paintings, told his brother not to compromise if he didn't feel the work was ready. Yet with practically every batch of canvases that Vincent sent to Paris he included a note about their commercial prospects, indicating how aware he was of the business of art.

  Unsure of his finances, Vincent arrived in Auvers in late spring, settling into a little room on the third floor of an inn owned by the Ravoux family. Vincent described Auvers as “very beautiful, having among other things a lot of old thatched roofs.… It is real country, characteristic and picturesque.” The first day he set off down the long slope dotted with cottages to the Oise River to draw. The sky was filled with crows circling the wheat fields, and the pink-and-white almond trees were in bloom. Looking around, Vincent could understand why Auvers had attracted other artists, such as Cézanne and Pissarro.

  Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, the physician recommended by his friend Pissarro, lived with his teenage son and daughter in a large villa “full of old things, black, black, black except for some impressionist paintings … a strange little fellow,” wrote Vincent. In his sixties with a mane of thick red hair and a long, sad face, Gachet fancied himself an artist and made etchings on his own press. Vincent's first impression was that the doctor seemed as distraught as his patients. Gachet invited Vincent for dinner and, much to his relief, offered to treat the fidgety artist if he should feel ill or depressed. Vincent complained that Gachet served too much rich food but found himself enjoying their conversation about art and literature. Over brandy Gachet invited him to paint in his home. This appealed to Vincent, who started the next day on a portrait of the doctor, in whose face he saw “the heartbroken expression of our time.”

  This would be a modern portrait, said Vincent, one that didn't glorify the sitter as traditional portraits did. “I should like to paint portraits which would appear after a century to the people living then as apparitions. So I do not endeavor to achieve this by photographic resemblance, but by means of our impassioned expressions, using our knowledge of and our modern taste for color as a means of arriving a
t the expression and intensification of character. So the portrait of Dr. Gachet shows you a face the color of an overheated brick, and scorched by the sun.”

  His deep blue suit and the lighter blue sky emphasize the doctor's pale face as he leans on his elbow at an angle, his expression melancholy. The yellow novels on the table represent the doctor's intellectual side, and the purple flower of a foxglove, a medicinal herb used to treat disorders of the nerves, indicates his profession.

  Vincent said that he and the doctor were very much alike; Vincent not only related to Gachet's suffering and vulnerability but also had grown fond of him.

  Vincent quickly discovered other subjects in Auvers. With his shoulder bent slightly toward his wounded ear, he set off to paint each day just as the sun rose, returning late in the afternoon to the inn. The Ravoux family, who called him Monsieur Vincent, found him quiet and polite, with a gentle manner. After his evening meals, he played with their two-year-old daughter, drawing pictures of the sandman on a slate before she went off to bed. He also made a portrait of the family's thirteen-year-old daughter, Adeline. He painted it in one sitting, smoking his pipe, not saying a word until he finished. Although the Ravouxes were not very enthusiastic about the painting, Vincent gave it to them. In 1988 one of the two portraits Vincent did of Adeline was sold at auction for $13.5 million.

  As his room was too small to use as a studio, Vincent mainly painted landscapes outdoors. He produced a remarkable amount of work, some seventy to eighty studies, during his stay in Auvers. A Dutch painter, Anton Hirschig, who also lived at the inn, recalled that Vincent piled his finished canvases casually in the corner of a hut where the goats were usually kept. No one seemed interested in looking at them. Vincent talked to Hirschig of his plans to exhibit the work in Paris and the possibility of taking a trip with Gauguin. Considering the fact that Gauguin had abandoned him in Arles after that terrible night, the idea was a credit to Vincent's good heart and his spirit of forgiveness.

  In June Theo and Jo brought the baby to Auvers for a picnic. Vincent met them at the train station with a bird's nest for the baby and insisted on carrying his nephew around to show him all the animals at Dr. Gachet's: eight cats; eight dogs; numerous chickens, rabbits, and ducks; and even a peacock. When the loud crowing of a rooster frightened the baby, Vincent laughed, shouting, “The cock crows cocorico.” They had lunch outside and afterward took a long walk. “The day was so peacefully quiet, so happy that nobody would have suspected how tragically our happiness was to be destroyed for always a few weeks later,” wrote Jo. Vincent, elated by the visit, hoped they would see more of each other now that he lived so close to Paris. Yet there were some warnings in letters to Theo about Vincent's mounting despair. In one he wrote of his little nephew, “I should like him to have a soul less unquiet than mine, which is foundering.”

  What happened in Auvers that sent Vincent on a downward spiral after weeks of productive work? He had been able to dedicate himself to painting without worrying because of Theo's support. Monthly and sometimes weekly checks arrived, along with extra art supplies whenever Vincent needed them. But in June a letter from Theo announced some disturbing news. The baby had fallen seriously ill, and Theo believed the illness was a reaction to the milk in Paris, which he described as poisonous. Jo, he wrote, was exhausted from the baby's crying, and he was beside himself with worry. He went on to tell Vincent that he was angry with his employers, whom he referred to as “those rats,” and was thinking of resigning. He mentioned he was short of money. Vincent responded to Theo's letter by urging him to come to Auvers, where country life would be healthier for his family.

  When the baby's health had improved a little, Vincent insisted on going to Paris to visit Jo and Theo. He found the couple in the midst of marital problems, Jo exhausted from caring for a sick baby and climbing up and down the stairs to their fourth-floor apartment. His conversations with them were tense, and visits from friends left him jumpy. Quickly he returned to Auvers and wrote them a note:

  My impression is that since we were all rather stupefied and perhaps a little overwrought, it matters little to any very clear definition of the position we are in. You rather surprise me by seeming to wish to force the situation while there are disagreements between you. Can I do anything about it—perhaps not—but have I done anything wrong, can I do anything that you would like me to do?

  Jo tried to reassure Vincent that things would be all right, and Vincent replied:

  It is no slight thing when we feel our daily bread is in danger; no slight thing when for other reasons we feel that our existence is fragile. Back here I also felt very sad and continued to feel the storm which threatens you to be weighing on me. I try to be fairly cheerful, but my life is threatened at the very root.… Being a burden to you, you felt me to be rather a thing to be dreaded.

  This last line goes to the root of Vincent's worry, his sense of causing a hardship to Theo and his family. It also is likely that Theo told Vincent about his own health problems. In letters Vincent often expressed concern about Theo's chronic cough and other signs of his delicate condition. Vincent's anxiety grew worse, and he lost confidence in his own doctor. “I think we must not count on Dr. Gachet at all. First of all he is sicker than I am, I think, or just as much. Now when one blind man leads another blind man, don't they both fall into a ditch?”

  Several days after returning from Paris, Vincent showed up at Dr. Gachet's house and flew into a rage for no good reason. A painting he admired of a woman lying on a couch with a Japanese fan had not been framed. In a loud voice he accused the kindly doctor of gross neglect. His abrupt manner frightened Dr. Gachet's children, who wrote later that they stood “rooted to the spot.” After a stern look from the doctor, Vincent turned, leaving the house without another word.

  He threw himself into his work, “though the brush almost slipped from my fingers.” Writing to reassure his mother that he was “in a mood of calmness,” he described his efforts to capture the delicate blue and violet skies and the immense wheat field against the hills.

  Wheatfield with Crows, a dark and somber painting, indicates that his mood was far from calm. In this brooding work, one of his last paintings, there are turbulent skies, crows flying wildly toward the viewer, and a field of overripe wheat bisected by a road seeming to lead nowhere. A dirt path in the foreground curves off the sides of the canvas. The horizon seems to roll forward, as if the world is closing in with no escape. The artist, who in his darkest moments had created optimistic paintings celebrating life, had lost hope.

  In his last letter, possibly a draft of one he'd sent to Theo earlier, he began, “There are a lot of things I might write you about but to begin with the desire to do so has so much left me, and I feel the uselessness of it.” He went on to tell Theo how important his part had been in his painting: “Through me you have your part in the actual production of some canvases that will retain their calm even in the catastrophe.… Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it … but what's the use?” Perhaps knowing the letter sounded too much like a goodbye note, he stuffed it in his smock, where it was found a few days later.

  On the morning of Sunday, July 27, almost ten years to the day since he had begun his artistic journey in the Borinage, Vincent set out for the wheat fields with his easel. At some point he took out a revolver (supposedly purchased to frighten crows), put the gun to his stomach, and shot himself. This was not a moment of insanity or a seizure; it was an act of considered despair. Like the reaper of his paintings, he faced death in the wheat fields under the burning sun.

  It was dusk when Vincent returned to the inn. The Ravoux family, sitting on the terrace of the café after the busy Sunday meal, noticed he was bent over, stumbling. Mrs. Ravoux asked, “Monsieur Vincent, we worried, we are glad to see you come home. Has anything unfortunate happened to you?”

  “No, but I …,” said Vincent without finishing the sentence.

  Mr. Ravoux follo
wed him upstairs and found him in bed with his face to the wall. Vincent showed him his wound, saying softly, “I wanted to kill myself.”

  Gossip about Vincent's attempted suicide spread around town, and the next morning the police arrived and demanded to see for themselves. There were French laws against suicide.

  “You know you don't have the right to do so?” one told the dying man.

  Vincent said in his quiet voice, “This body is mine and I am free to do with it what I want.”

  When Dr. Gachet heard the news, he quickly sent Hirschig to Paris with a letter for Theo that began, “With greatest regret, I must bring you bad tidings.” Rushing to Auvers, Theo found Vincent with Dr. Gachet and another physician from the village. Vincent lay in bed smoking his pipe, saying nothing until Theo knelt down near him. As Vincent was conscious, Theo assumed his brother would pull through, but it was not to be. Vincent van Gogh died of infection from the unremoved bullet on July 29, 1890. His last words were “I wished I could pass away like this.”

  Emile Bernard traveled from Paris for the funeral of his friend. He wrote, “On the walls of the room where the body lay, all his last canvases were nailed, forming a sort of halo around him, and rendering his death all the more painful to the artists who were present by the splendor of the genius which radiated from them.” His coffin, placed on the billiard table at the inn, was covered with white linen and strewn with yellow sunflowers and dahlias. Yellow was the color he had chosen to express his deepest emotions—“the high yellow note.” His brushes and easel were placed in front of the coffin.