Theo revealed that he had, in fact, recently spoken to Uncle Cor in Amsterdam, and he had agreed to commission another set of drawings from Vincent. Uncle was even prepared to pay him a substantial advance. But on one condition: Vincent would have to leave Sien.
That propelled the argument to new heights of rancor on the most sensitive subject of all. Vincent accused his brother and father of cruelty for denying him his one true love, Kee Vos—“a wound that I carry with me”—and forcing him into the embrace of “a faded whore” and her “bastards.” Theo argued that Sien had driven away the very people Vincent needed most, like Tersteeg. Finally, Theo leveled his most incendiary charge: that Vincent had fathered Sien’s child.
The rage that followed (“I decidedly lost my temper,” Vincent confessed) shattered any remaining fragments of fraternal feeling. In his brother’s accusation, true or not, Vincent must have heard again his father’s reproving voice. When Theo’s train pulled away from the station that night, Vincent’s parting thought was that his brother had become his father.
BY THE TIME Theo departed, it was clear that Vincent would leave Sien. He would choose his old family over the new one. The only question was when and how he would justify leaving. “Do not hurry me in the various things we could not settle at once,” he wrote his brother in a fit of regret immediately after returning from the train station, “for I need some time to decide.”
Over the next three weeks, he wrestled with the inevitable through almost a dozen long, agonized letters. Professions of undying fealty and pleas for understanding battled outbursts of self-righteousness and bitter denunciations of Theo’s oversight, as Vincent foundered in crosscurrents of love and resentment, acquiescence and resistance. Chest-beating confessions were freighted with long, defiant postscripts taking back every concession. Vows of cooperation (“I am at your disposal”) vied with demands to “let me go my own way, just as I am”—sometimes in the same paragraph. One day he offered to take a lowly job as a delivery boy “rather than put too heavy a burden” on Theo’s shoulders; but the next day he defiantly declared himself “dead to anything except my work.”
Rather than resolve this conflict, this “struggle in my very depths,” Vincent’s first instinct was to escape it. Only two days after Theo’s visit, he proposed leaving The Hague. “I should like to be alone with nature for a time,” he announced, “far away from the city.”
The idea of traveling to the country had been percolating for more than a year, as Vincent sought to emulate affluent artists who, like Mauve, retreated every year to country houses or, like Anthon van Rappard, took leisurely sketching trips to remote regions. As recently as early August, Theo had suggested that Vincent take a holiday from the heat and closeness of the city by going to the polders, the Dutch lowlands, for a few weeks. But now the pressure of creditors and assessors had given practical urgency to this bourgeois indulgence. Now, Vincent proposed a permanent stay “in that country of heath and moorland,” where, he imagined, “I could do what I want.” He advertised the move to Theo as an economic measure—a cheaper, healthier alternative to city life, a source of both better (more salable) subjects and more affordable models, thus guaranteeing Theo both the landscapes he loved and the economies he demanded.
Vincent’s first choice of destination was, of course, home. Only the month before, he had worked himself into a thrall of nostalgia for the heath and pine trees of Brabant. Yet again he pictured a perfect homecoming, with his father and mother not just welcoming him, but posing for him in the same way as his make-believe family on the Schenkweg. “What I should tremendously like to do is [to draw] the small figure of Father on a path across the heath … In addition, Father and Mother arm in arm, let’s say.” But they would have to pose patiently, Vincent added firmly. “They will have to understand that it is a serious matter … And so they will have to be gently warned that they must adopt the pose I choose and not change it.”
In the real world, however, Theo had put Nuenen—indeed, all of Brabant—off-limits as long as Vincent clung to his scandalous “family.” He must have reaffirmed that judgment at the brothers’ meeting, for when Vincent announced his plan for moving to the country soon thereafter, he had chosen a new destination: Drenthe.
A remote province reaching almost to the northernmost border of the Netherlands, Drenthe had long since earned a place in Vincent’s intimate geography of art and family. Mauve had gone there in the fall of 1881 and invited Vincent to join him, before he fell sick and the trip was abandoned. Rappard had traveled there in 1882 and again in 1883, returning with glowing reports of “being on the road,” as well as drawings and paintings that Vincent pored over in his friend’s studio in Utrecht. Based only on these, Vincent had pictured the distant Drenthe as “something like Brabant when I was young.” In fact, it was Rappard’s reappearance in The Hague—on his way to Drenthe again—at exactly this moment that fixed Vincent’s decision. Grasping at the last remaining tie to his family’s favor, he imagined Rappard visiting him more often in Drenthe and counted the ways they “could profit from each other’s company.” He envisioned the two of them founding a kind of colony where other artists could come and “saturate [themselves] in nature’s serenity on the heath.”
And he imagined taking Sien with him. “I should like to live with her someplace in a little village where she could see nothing of the town and could live a more natural life,” he said, incorporating his old vision of rescue into his new vision of escape to the country. In a storm of arguments, he fought to save his fantasy of family from Theo’s cruel logic. “If I deserted the woman, she would perhaps go mad,” he said; and besides, “the little boy really dotes on me.” In a fever of self-justification, he even offered, again, to marry her.
But Vincent had thrown his lot with Theo, and Theo was unyielding. Vincent, of course, put all the blame for their final undoing on Sien: her perfidy, her backsliding, her refusal to sever relations with her scoundrel family. On Sunday, September 2, he sat her down in the living room of the Schenkweg apartment and spoke to her the same hard truths that Theo had spoken to him. “It is impossible for us to stay together,” he said. “We make each other unhappy.” He urged her to “go straight,” but doubted she would. As to her future, he gave her the same solemn advice that Theo had so often given him: “Find a job.”
Up to the moment that Vincent’s train left The Hague on Sunday, September 11, doubts and regrets tormented him. He entertained fantasies that Sien would join him, or that he might stay, even as he settled his debts with the money from Uncle Cor and arranged to store his possessions in his landlord’s attic. He sped through preparations, convinced that each day of delay “took [him] deeper into the labyrinth” of Sien’s “wretchedness.” In a fever to leave, he dismissed Theo’s suggestion that he learn more about his destination. He took it as all the confirmation he needed that Rappard had written from Drenthe: “The country has a very serious character; the figures often remind me of your studies.” He begged Theo to send extra money so he could set out “as soon as possible … the sooner the better.” If he could not send enough for Drenthe, Vincent offered to go anywhere, as long as it was “far, far, away” and he could leave immediately.
When the money finally arrived, he left the next day. He had tried to keep his leaving a secret from Sien until the last minute, but she showed up at the station to see him off carrying one-year-old Willem in her arms, a sight he feared would break his heart. “The little boy was very fond of me,” he wrote Theo of his farewell, “and when I was already on the train, I still had him on my lap. On both sides, I think, we parted with inexpressible sadness.”
Vincent claimed the mantle of “duty” to cover his humiliating exit from The Hague. “My work is my duty,” he wrote on his last night there, “even more immediate than the woman, and the former must not suffer because of the latter.” But the currents that moved him had not changed. The foundering of his adopted family had driven him, yet again, back toward his
real one. Yearning for Theo suffuses the last letters from The Hague. He promised to return from Drenthe in time for Theo’s next visit and then to join a society for watercolorists to which both Mauve and Tersteeg belonged, and after that to go to London to find paying work. He imagined his uncles rallying to yet another resurrection of favor. “The main thing now is to paint a great deal,” he declared. “That, and nature’s serenity will bring us victory in the end—do not doubt it.”
Vincent left The Hague in search of Theo. On the moors of Drenthe, he seemed to imagine, the brothers might finally find the mythic union they had pledged each other on the road to Rijswijk. It was a redemption second only to the one that always beckoned him from an even more distant moor. Vincent had sacrificed everything—wife, family, home, art—to this elusive vision of perfect brotherhood. Soon it would be Theo’s turn to do the same.
CHAPTER 20
Castles in the Air
ON THE SEVEN-HOUR TRAIN TRIP INTO THE DARKNESS, VINCENT kept a map of Drenthe at his side. In the weeks leading up to his departure, his imagination had wandered over it many times. He had picked as his destination “a large white space devoid of any village names” where canals and roads came to an end. Near it was a body of water called the Zwarte Meer (Black Lake)—“a name to conjure with,” he sighed. Across it was written only one word: Veenen—peat moors.
He awoke the next morning to a landscape of unremitting bleakness. The moors—dense, damp, alluvial—stretched to the horizon in every direction. “What kind of attraction could there be in this land of moors as far as one can see,” wrote another visitor to the area three years earlier. “What else can one expect but exhausting monotony?” These were not the sandy heaths of Zundert or the playful dunes of Scheveningen. On these highland bogs, the only trees that survived were the ones planted along the roads—tall, spindly aliens clinging to the high ground. Little but water-loving mosses, like peat, thrived in the dense, sooty soil—a stew of long-dead vegetation as dark and impervious as its ancient cousin, coal. Like coal, peat could be burned—crucial in a treeless land of long, cold winters—and years of harvesting the precious fuel had robbed the landscape of even its desolate grandeur. Everywhere Vincent looked, the moor had been stripped of its layers of peat and scored with a grid of canals (ditches, really) for transporting the bounty away—a process that flayed the high heaths of Drenthe as surely as coal mining had disemboweled the Borinage.
Both the ditches and the bleakness drained into the little town of Hoogeveen, where Vincent stepped off the train. He picked it because it was marked by a red dot on his map: “[It] is classed as a town on the map,” he wrote, “but in reality it doesn’t even have a tower.” A makeshift frontier town on the edge of a watery wilderness, Hoogeveen was made up almost entirely of the simple modern brick houses that Vincent loathed. A widening in the main canal, grandly dubbed a “harbor,” had been dug when Hoogeveen was still at the center of the peat industry. But by now the surrounding bogs had been stripped bare and the big extraction operations had moved their armies of impoverished cutters and dredgers farther east. The few residents who remained eked out a living transporting dried peat from moor to market. Barge after barge mounded with the stuff arrived at the harbor every day—some drawn by horses, some by people. Women and children in mud-caked rags waded out to unload them. At the canal’s edge, emaciated cows drank from the foul water, while on the sandy paths above them, old men led delivery carts pulled by even more emaciated dogs.
So extreme was the poverty that Dutch order had begun to lose its grip. Years of economic depression, especially in agricultural goods, brutal working conditions, and official indifference (even the dogs were taxed) had stripped civility nearly to the bone of anarchy. “The people are left to fend for themselves too much,” complained a local evangelist. “They are almost wild.” Drenthe had paid a heavy price for the government’s policy of relocating criminals and paupers to the country’s most inhospitable regions to serve as cheap labor for Amsterdam investors. Barren earth and barren hearts had combined to produce not just a desolate, lonely landscape, but a country within a country: a Siberia of high infant mortality, rampant alcohol abuse, and unrepentant criminality; a wilderness still wild in a country that had been settled for five thousand years.
“The heath is magnificent,” Vincent exclaimed. “Everything is beautiful here, wherever one goes.”
Vincent had promised his brother, and himself, the Drenthe of his dreams: a land of autumnal beauty and moral authenticity, a place as perfect as their shared memories of Brabant. Nothing less than a vision of paradise could justify abandoning the fiction of family in which he had invested so much. Whether or not that was the Drenthe he saw, that was the Drenthe he reported: “splendid” and “inexpressibly lovely” peat fields; weather as “splendid” and “bracing” as Brabant’s; scenery of “so much nobility, so much dignity, so much gravity” it tempted him to stay forever. “I am very glad that I am here,” he wrote, “for, boy, it is very beautiful.”
He looked at the wretched sod houses that peasants shared with their livestock and pronounced them, too, “very beautiful.” He compared the quaint barges loaded with peat to those the brothers had seen on the Rijswijk canal, and the miserable women unloading them to the picturesque farm laborers of Millet. He described the innkeeper at his lodging house near the station as “a real coolie.” He delighted in the creased, careworn faces he saw everywhere among the townspeople, calling them “physiognomies that put one in mind of pigs or crows.” In their plodding sullenness, he saw “melancholy of a healthy kind.” “The more I walk around here,” he insisted, “the better I like Hoogeveen.… It is more and more beautiful here … it is so beautiful here.”
So beautiful, in fact, that only a day after arriving, he announced plans to take a barge trip into the heart of the great labor, where the peat operations were just winding down for the season. He would traverse the entire breadth of the peat country right up to the Prussian frontier, he declared, because “Further into the country it will be even more beautiful.”
Vincent bolstered this idyllic vision with images by all the brothers’ favorite landscape painters, from the Golden Age to the Barbizon School. He described the heath as nothing but “miles and miles” of Jan van Goyen, Philips Koninck, Georges Michel, Jules Dupré, and Théodore Rousseau. Through repeated mentions of Michel, in particular, whose stormy skyscapes had long made him a hero to both Van Gogh brothers, Vincent proclaimed the Romantic allure of his new home. He filled his letters with elaborate word paintings, as poetic as any he ever wrote, depicting everything from the voluptuousness of the women to the austere beauty of the moors:
That vast sun-scorched earth stands out darkly against the delicate lilac hues of the evening sky, and the very last little dark-blue line at the horizon separates the earth from the sky.… The dark stretch of pine wood border separates a shimmering sky from the rugged earth, which has a generally reddish hue—tawny—brownish, yellowish, but everywhere with lilac tones.
Then he translated these visions into paint. After a year of resistance, he capitulated completely to Theo’s pleas and took up his oil brushes again. “You know quite well,” he wrote, “that painting must be the main thing as much as possible.” Vowing to paint “a hundred serious studies,” he ventured into the countryside with his easel and paint box in search of picturesque subjects to convince Theo of his Drenthe. He painted peat cutters’ houses (little more than piles of sod held together by sticks) silhouetted against a hazy dusk; red sunsets over birch groves and marshy meadows; vistas of heath and bog with vast, boldly brushed skies, empty horizons, and not a figure in sight. He praised the “serious, sober character” of the country and explained how it demanded the very light, color, and elaboration that Theo had been calling for in his art.
In this Eden of imagery, real or not, Vincent found hope for yet another new beginning. Within a few weeks, he sent some of his paintings to Paris and boldly recommended that Theo show
them to dealers. He imagined returning to The Hague in triumph with portfolios full of “characteristic bits of nature” that were sure to “find sympathy” among buyers, especially in England. He compared himself to a character in a Daudet novel, a “simple fellow … absorbed in his work … careless and shortsighted, wanting little for himself,” who nevertheless finds fortune in the end. On his easel, he crowned this newest vision of redemption with a very old image: a sower striding improbably over the peat bogs of Drenthe, flinging his seeds on the barren moor.
NOT EVEN VINCENT could sustain this delusion for long. Loneliness—“that particular torture”—soon overwhelmed him. In the immense emptiness of the high heaths, “one could wander for hours without seeing a living soul,” wrote a visitor to Drenthe in 1880, “except perhaps a shepherd, his dog and his sheep, of which the dog is still the most interesting creature.” Mail arrived slowly and intermittently, underscoring the remoteness of the place. “I am so out of everything,” he complained. Nature, no matter how “stimulating and beautiful,” was not enough, he confessed. “There must also be human hearts who search for and feel the same things.” He found no such hearts in Hoogeveen. The clannish townspeople regarded the odd stranger from the west with suspicion, or contempt. On the street, they stopped and stared, taking him for a “poor peddler.” When he knocked on strangers’ doors in search of picturesque subject matter—as he had done in Etten—town gossips began to whisper about the “lunatic” in their midst. Vincent rued his estrangement (“I take it so much to heart that I do not get on better with people”), but responded in kind. He called the town “wretched” and the locals “primitives” who did not behave “as reasonably as, for instance, their pigs.”
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