Of all Vincent’s new acquaintances, none pleased his parents more, or played a larger role in his life, than Anthon Gerard Alexander Ridder van Rappard. (In writing and in speech, Vincent always referred to him simply as Rappard.) Like almost everyone Vincent met in Brussels, Rappard knew Theo first. They had met not long before in Paris, during Rappard’s apprenticeship in the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme, a leading Salon artist as well as Adolphe Goupil’s son-in-law. Like so many of Theo’s friends, Rappard personified Anna Carbentus’s ideal of “civilized company.” The youngest son of a prosperous Utrecht lawyer from a noble family, he had attended the proper bourgeois schools; socialized in the proper circles; and summered in proper style, whether sailing on the lake at Loosdrecht or going to fashionable spas like Baden-Baden.
When Vincent arrived one morning in late October 1880 at Rappard’s well-appointed studio on the rue Traversière on Brussels’s north side, he found a handsome, affluent, self-possessed young man of twenty-two, one year younger than Theo. Even beyond the obvious differences of wealth, looks, and social standing, the two artists could not have been more different. Rappard was phlegmatic, good-hearted, and amiable, qualities honed from a lifetime of being well liked. An inveterate joiner of clubs, he moved with the ease of long experience in social gatherings, prized by his many friends for a level head and a steady heart. Vincent was confrontational, prickly, and self-righteous; never fully at ease in company; prone to outbursts of vehemence that could derail any conversation. After years of living inside his own head, he had lost almost all sense of social grace and approached every interaction as a choice between assaulting or being assaulted.
Rappard’s impeccable manners extended to his intellect, which was neither especially inquisitive nor overly colorful. He read newspapers “carelessly” and spoke loosely on intellectual subjects, always favoring the conventional wisdom of his class. Nothing could have been more different from Vincent’s ravenous, contrarian intellect and volcanic explosions of enthusiasm.
ANTHON RIDDER VAN RAPPARD (Illustration credit 14.1)
Years later, looking back on their first meeting, Rappard recalled Vincent as “violent” and “fanatical.” Vincent called Rappard “elegant” and “superficial” (the same accusations he leveled at Theo). Rappard complained that Vincent “was not easy to get along with.” Vincent called Rappard “abominably arrogant.” Nevertheless, by the time they parted that first day, Vincent had set his mind—and staked his larger ambitions to a new life—on winning the friendship of his young countryman. “I do not know whether he is the person with whom someone like me could live and work,” he ventured coyly. “But I certainly shall go and see him again.”
Over the next months, he took his new friend—the first since Harry Gladwell—on long walks in the countryside and made himself a frequent guest in Rappard’s spacious, well-lighted studio. Together, they explored the pleasures of the Marolles, Brussels’s red-light district, where Vincent apparently renounced the last self-mortifications of his previous life. Although reticent at first, Rappard eventually warmed to his strange new companion. The same wandering timidity that had led him from an early ambition to join the navy, through four different art schools without completing any of them, found a safe harbor in Vincent’s tyrannical enthusiasm. Inchoate and “ever dissatisfied with himself,” according to a friend, he yielded willingly to Vincent’s passion, sitting quietly during his outbursts: avoiding him at times, but never challenging him.
In another bow to his parents, whose faith in schooling never wavered, Vincent applied for admission to the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. He had resisted the idea when gérant Schmidt first proposed it soon after his arrival, arguing implausibly that he could skip the first step of Academic training because of his work on the Bargue course. No doubt he found the prospect of more schooling, after so many failed attempts, daunting. What he really needed, he said, was to work directly with an experienced artist in a studio setting. But the subsequent recommendation of Roelofs and, undoubtedly, the lure of solidarity with Rappard, who was a student at the Academy, soon brought him around.
He applied for the class in Dessin d’après l’antique (drawing after plaster casts of antique statues), and consoled himself that it would at least provide “a well-heated and well-lighted room” through the nasty Brussels winter. The Academy charged no fees, but it did screen candidates. While impatiently awaiting a decision on his application, Vincent found a “poor painter” who would give him lessons in perspective for one and a half francs per two-hour session. “I cannot get on without some instruction,” he said. Even this pleased his parents so much that they immediately agreed to pay for the lessons.
No issue defined Vincent’s reincarnation in 1881 more than money. Of all the accusations leveled against him over the previous years, none weighed more heavily on his new life than the charge that he could not support himself. This was, after all, the accusation on which his father had launched the effort to have him committed. The pain and humiliation of those memories had driven Thomas à Kempis completely out of his thoughts. From the moment he arrived in Brussels, he could not protest loudly enough his single-minded determination to earn a living. “My aim must be to learn to make some drawings that are presentable and saleable as soon as possible,” he declared in his first letter from the Aux Amis, “so that I can begin to earn something directly through my work.” His first stop in Brussels had been at Goupil for a symbolic re-embrace of the family’s mercantile heritage—“[I] have now returned to the art field,” he proclaimed. To Theo, he confided his hope that “if only I work hard … possibly Uncle Vincent or Uncle Cor will do something—if not to help me, at least to help Father.”
Over the winter, he continued to insist to his parents, “I shall make a living by it … A good draftsman can certainly find work nowadays … Such persons are in great demand, and there are positions that are very well paid.” He called their attention to the hefty fees that draftsmen earned in Paris (“from 10 to 15 francs a day”), in London, and “elsewhere the same and even more.” To Theo as well as to his parents, he justified every effort, every expense, as essential to this single goal. Pen drawing served as “good preparation, in case one should later want to learn etching.” Perspective lessons and animal anatomy would help him “become a better draftsman and get some regular work.” As if to prove his new bourgeois bona fides, he filled his correspondence with the language of business: about the “fair return” he would earn on the cost of his materials, the “capital” of his training, and the high “interest” it would eventually yield.
At some point, he even mustered the courage to make a “sales call.” With his portfolio in hand, he visited a former evangelical school classmate, Jozef Chrispeels, who had since entered the military. Heedlessly barging into parade ground exercises at the fort where Chrispeels was stationed, Vincent demanded to see his former friend. “A sergeant called me, saying: ‘There is a man to speak with you,’ ” Chrispeels recalled decades later. “It was Van Gogh with a large portfolio under his arm.” Vincent showed him the only finished drawings he had, the mine workers that he continued to draw and redraw after leaving the Borinage. Chrispeels’s reaction, if he shared it, could not have been encouraging: “How queer those stiff little figures looked!” he recalled thinking.
But Vincent was both impervious to skepticism and incapable of half measures. Before long, his new aspirations to bourgeois status led to new excesses. In an effort to accelerate his career and keep up with young artists like Rappard (he was acutely aware of his late start), he quickly began to spend more money than his parents could afford. Dorus had agreed to send him sixty francs a month, but his rent at the Aux Amis was fifty. Despite vociferous claims of frugality—“You must not imagine that I live richly here”—he in fact spared no expense. In the first few months, he bought four suits (one made of veloutine—“a material you can wear everywhere”). He restarted his print collection with another dozen Millet engravings, call
ing them “useful” because “it is quite possible that I shall work from wood engravings sometime.” He tore through drawing materials at a furious rate, filling dozens of sheets of expensive paper in a single session. For this prodigious consumption, he developed a justification that he would invoke for the rest of his life: “When I spend more, I get on quicker and make more progress.”
Nothing consumed his scarce resources like models. Vincent’s serendipitous encounters in the Borinage, where unmindful villagers allowed him to eavesdrop on their labors, had left him with an insatiable appetite for this perquisite of his artistic calling. Other art students waited a year or more to sketch from life; Vincent was still working on the Exercices au fusain when he brought his first model to the little room over the Aux Amis. “I have a model almost every day,” he reported happily, only a few months after declaring himself an artist, “an old porter, or some working man, or some boy, who poses for me.” He coached them into the poses he wanted—sitting, walking, shoveling, carrying a lantern—scolded them for their awkwardness, then sketched them again and again. In Brussels, however, unlike the Borinage, models had to be paid. “Models are expensive,” he complained, even as he argued for yet more models in order to “be able to work much better.”
Models also had to be dressed. In February, with his parents already fretting over his rising expenditures, Vincent reported that he was putting together a collection of clothes “in which to dress the models for my drawings.” He made a long list of the costumes he required, including “workmen’s clothes,” wooden clogs, Brabant bonnets, miners’ hats, fishermen’s sou’westers—“and also a few women’s dresses.” Preempting his parents’ objections to the expense, he insisted that “drawing the model with the necessary costumes is the only true way to succeed.” Models also required a studio, he added. His badly lit little room above the Aux Amis (for which he did not have the money to pay the rent that month) would no longer suffice. “I shall only be able to manage,” he said, “when I have some kind of studio of my own.”
His parents reeled under these spiraling demands. The sixty francs Dorus sent every month represented more than a third of his pastoral salary. When they raised the issue with Vincent, he vehemently denied any extravagance and reminded them pointedly of his opposite excesses in the past. Once again, Theo heard the familiar lament rising from Etten: “A melancholy has taken hold of us because of the pain concerning Vincent.”
This time, Theo was in a position to do something about the pain. Because of a recent promotion, he was finally earning enough to make a commitment to his parents: from now on, he would support his brother. “It is so very nice that you want to help us out with the expenditures for Vincent,” Dorus wrote. “I assure you this is not a small relief for us.” It was a promise that would have unimaginable consequences.
Theo’s largesse sprang more from duty than from fraternal feeling, however. Despite his decisive intervention the previous summer, or perhaps because of it, his relationship with Vincent had since fallen into a deep chill. The unannounced move to Brussels surely rankled the cautious planner Theo, and Vincent’s early visit to gérant Schmidt at Goupil raised new fears of family embarrassment. Theo immediately wrote back asking his brother to avoid the gallery (using a pending legal dispute as the excuse) and studiously ignored Vincent’s request that he pressure Schmidt into helping Vincent launch his new career. The last two months of 1880 passed without a letter between the brothers, not even at Christmas, when, for the second year in a row, their paths did not cross.
In January, Vincent fired off a scolding New Year’s greeting: “As I have not heard from you for so long … nor even had the slightest answer to my last letter, perhaps it will not be out of place to ask you for some sign of life.” Calling his brother’s silence “strange and rather unaccountable,” he speculated on its cause: “Is he afraid of compromising himself in the eyes of Messrs. Goupil & Co. by keeping in touch with me?…Or is it that he is afraid I will ask him for money?” After an awkward attempt at levity (“you might at least have waited until I tried to squeeze something out of you”), he tried to repair the damage with a retraction (“I wrote my last letter in a moment of spleen … let us drop it”). But the defensive, resentful, conflicted tone of the next ten years had been set, months before the first franc or guilder changed hands.
Sometime in late March, the torch was formally passed. Dorus came to Brussels to give Vincent the news. In the meantime, Theo laid out the terms of his benevolence. Echoing their last, disastrous encounter in Mons, he called again for Vincent to find a job and emphasized that he had to live within his means until then. He urged Vincent to think of financial hardship as an opportunity, not a “handicap.” To reduce the expense of models, he offered to send a secondhand mannequin with adjustable limbs for posing. He repeated the invitation for Vincent to join him in Paris, where they could live together more cheaply, and sweetened the offer with the prospect that Vincent could receive “guidance and teaching” from Hans Heyerdahl, a young Norwegian painter who had recently débuted at the Salon. “That is just what I need,” conceded Vincent, who had long expressed the desire for just such a mentor arrangement.
But Theo resisted his brother’s demands for more money—specifically, his insistence that living on less than one hundred francs a month was “impossible.” Meanwhile, the gap between Vincent’s new bourgeois ambitions and his chronic money shortage only grew more obvious. Friends like Van Rappard, whose opinion mattered dearly to him, began to ask questions about the “strange and unaccountable fact” that he was so “hard up,” despite his famous name and rich uncles—questions that threatened to undo all his hard work to put the past behind him. “[They think] there must be something wrong with me … and will have nothing to do with me,” he complained. The pressure of these questions eventually drove him to the indignity of a job search. He applied for work at printing houses, hoping to practice his drawing skills and perhaps learn lithography. But he was “rebuffed everywhere,” he later recalled. “They said there was no work, business was slow.” Eventually he did find one job: drawing stoves for a blacksmith.
Vincent’s ambitions to a new life were under assault from every direction. His experience at the Brussels Academy proved so unsatisfactory that he never mentioned a word about it again, nor saved a scrap of his work there. He may have been refused admission, or dropped out soon after starting. In any event, the companionship of his fellow students eluded him. He apparently made not a single friend among the Academy’s nearly a thousand students, one of whom later recalled avoiding Vincent “because we would end up in a hefty row in no time.”
Vincent’s strange ways and persona non grata status at Goupil quickly threatened to become “the subject of gossip in the studios,” which in turn fed his paranoia. He blamed the coldness of people like the Dutch painter Roelofs on the false position into which his family, and Theo, had thrust him. He complained that people “accuse [me] of many bad intentions and villainies which have never entered [my] head,” and that bystanders who watched him work “think that I have gone mad and, of course, laugh at me.” In his defense, he could say only, “Few people know why an artist acts as he does.”
The failure of his family, especially his uncles, to come to his aid rankled more and more with each new indignity. Why wouldn’t his omnipotent uncle Cent at least “smooth the way” for him? Why wouldn’t his rich uncle Cor, who so often supported other draftsmen, help him? Shouldn’t they show their own family the same “good will”? He and Cor had argued three years before in Amsterdam when Vincent quit his studies, “but is that any reason to remain my enemy forever?” he demanded. He considered writing to them, but feared they would not read his letters. He considered going to see them, but feared they would not receive him cordially. When his father visited in March, Vincent begged him to intervene on his behalf: to make them “see me with new eyes.”
At some point, he worked up the courage to write Tersteeg. Vincent had been h
oping for months that he could come to The Hague in the summer to repair relations with his old boss, renew his relationship with his successful artist cousin Anton Mauve, and “have some intercourse with painters.” But Tersteeg responded to Vincent’s overture with a fierce rejection that seemed to speak for the whole family. He accused Vincent of trying “to live off the bounty of his uncles,” and said he had “no right to do such a thing.” In response to Vincent’s request to come to The Hague, Tersteeg answered categorically: “No, certainly not, you have lost your rights.” As for his artistic ambitions, Tersteeg snidely suggested he would be better off “giving lessons in English and French.” “Of one thing he was sure,” Vincent reported bitterly: “I was no artist.”
Finally, Vincent decided to take his faltering campaign of rehabilitation to the place where all his campaigns led: home. His decision was helped, no doubt, by Rappard’s plan to go home for the summer. By now, Vincent did almost all his work in the studio on the rue Traversière, so when Rappard left Brussels, Vincent would have to go, too. Vincent had also come to see his young friend as a model of the gentleman-artist he wanted to be. If Rappard could spend the summer boating and sketching in the bosom of his family, why couldn’t Vincent? He briefly entertained a fantasy of going to some genteel summer resort (which he called “the country”) and setting up housekeeping with another painter. But there was no one but Rappard to join him, and the costs of going alone were prohibitive. “The cheapest way,” he concluded, “would perhaps be for me to spend this summer at Etten.”
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