If the brilliant landscapes of summer masked his despair, the self-portraits unmasked it. In quick succession, he produced another series of confessions in paint, all full-sized and all on canvas—as if the smaller, paper images of spring couldn’t contain his guilt or his grievances. Stripped of silks and satins, the figure in the mirror appears in the limp, tattered smock of an artist, his hair cropped short, his cheeks sunken, his gaze colorless, unfocused, affectless. For all the sun flooding into his Montmartre studio, he stands against the dark, murky background of a prison cell. The hollow-eyed criminal of Antwerp had returned. In his letter to Wil, Vincent, now thirty-four, reported “making swift progress toward growing into a little old man—you know, with wrinkles, a tough beard, a number of false teeth, and so on.” To Theo, he put it even more bluntly: “I already feel old and broken.”
Vincent had dealt with the threat of a woman disrupting their perfect brotherhood before. In Drenthe, he proposed that Theo’s mistress Marie join the two painter-brothers in their cottage on the heath. “Of course she would have to paint too,” he encouraged; “the more the merrier.” In Antwerp, he responded to Theo’s talk of marriage by declaring, “I wish both of us might find a wife.” The following summer (1886), when Theo left for Amsterdam with engagement on his mind, Vincent had offered not just to take the mistress S “off his hands,” but to marry her—“if worse comes to worse.” In Vincent’s estimation, these were the only two circumstances in which marriage was thinkable, for him or Theo: either one woman married them both, or they both married. Anything else would upset the perfect balance of their brotherhood.
But Vincent had not yet even met Jo Bonger, the woman of whom Theo said, “I cannot put her out of my mind; she is always with me.” Jo was still a stranger to Vincent; and she to him. In fact, as Vincent either knew or suspected, Theo had not yet told his inamorata anything about his troubled brother—a hint of the shame he felt and a preview of the inevitable exclusion to come.
If they could not both marry Jo Bonger, then Vincent would have to find a wife of his own. And indeed, the ghosts of failed attempts to do so haunt his letters that summer. “I still continue to have the most impossible and highly unsuitable love affairs,” he wrote sister Wil, “from which as a rule I come away with little more than shame and disgrace.” One such “unsuitable” affair may have been with an older woman that he met in Asnières. He called her “the countess” and he courted her with repeated gifts of paintings. “I cannot help thinking of [her],” he later admitted, even as he wondered if their liaison was just “an illusion.” He tried to explain his sad record of similar illusions as the inevitable fate of an artist. “I blame it all on this damned painting,” he wrote. “The love of art is the undoing of true love.” And, as always, he compensated with images for the inadequacies of life. Setting his easel in a lovers’ lane, he painted happy couples strolling arm in arm and embracing on a bench, as if painting it could make it come true for him.
But as the moment of Theo’s departure for Amsterdam approached, a sense of urgency gripped him. Reviving past fantasies, he inquired after the status of Margot Begemann and asked his sister unabashedly, “Did Sien de Groot marry her cousin?” The distorted version of family that he had briefly enjoyed on the heath came back to him in a wave of regret and he acclaimed The Potato Eaters, the icon of that time, “the best picture I have done.” He lived in terror that he had waited too long: that love was destined to be the last and greatest in a litany of failures. “In years gone by,” he lamented, “when I ought to have been in love, I gave myself up to religious and socialist affairs, and considered art holier than I do now.” Desperately reassessing the verities of a lifetime, he wondered if “people who only fall in love are more saintly than those who sacrifice their hearts to an idea.”
Only desperation could explain Vincent’s amorous advances on Agostina Segatori.
The two had continued to see each other over the winter. Vincent painted a portrait of the bored-looking signora fashionably attired, sitting at one of her distinctive tambourine tables. He continued to patronize Le Tambourin, too, occasionally bringing along the old paint dealer Tanguy, to the horror of his shrewish wife. When Vincent needed money—perhaps to ransom his treasured portfolios in Nuenen—Segatori let him display some of his recently acquired prints on her café walls, alongside his paintings, in hopes of raising quick cash. The relationship seemed cordial enough—she was a professional hostess, after all—but hardly intimate.
Meanwhile, her situation, like his, grew increasingly complicated and untenable. After its auspicious opening, Le Tambourin had fallen under a cloud of disrepute. The manager—whose relationship to Agostina remained suspiciously unclear—had attracted a circle of menacing thugs and pimps. The restaurant’s aura went from fashionably outré to genuinely sinister. At a time of widespread xenophobia directed against immigrant Italians, dark rumors swirled around “La Segatori’s” erotic eatery. Every sensational murder, it seemed, involved Italian villains who had been seen plotting at a tambourine table. Brawls and police raids were common. A Tambourin regular rumored to be one of Agostina’s ex-lovers was convicted of murder and executed. Alarmed customers fled, pushing the café inexorably toward bankruptcy.
But Vincent didn’t care. He needed a woman. And in his limited social circle, Segatori’s flattering sensuality and Neapolitan warmth were no doubt as close as he had come to reciprocity. If the rumors reached him at all, he either ignored them or cast the hapless beauty as the victim of those around her (“she is neither a free agent nor mistress in her own house,” he explained to Theo). With his usual heedless ardor, he courted the aging beauty using the same means of persuasion he always used: art. Reviving the bond of the previous year, he started painting flowers again, filling large canvases with elaborate bouquets, brighter and bolder than ever, brushed in the pure, dappled colors he had practiced all spring in Asnières. Wooing image followed wooing image, including one of a basket of violets, the flower of requited love, set on one of her tambourine tables—an unmistakable gesture of seduction.
After Theo left on his mission of marriage in July, rejection became unthinkable. Even when Segatori refused to accept his courtship bouquet of violets, Vincent persisted. “She didn’t tread all over my heart,” he noted optimistically in a letter to his absent brother. When he heard that she had fallen in love with another man, he condemned the gossipmongers. “I know her well enough to trust her,” he insisted. When she told him to “go away,” he imagined she was only protecting him from the dangerous men who surrounded her. “Appalling things would be done to her if she took my side,” he explained.
Despite the banishment, despite the danger, despite a threatening visit to the rue Lepic apartment by a restaurant employee, Vincent returned to Le Tambourin—convinced, no doubt, as he always was, that he could still persuade her to love him. What happened next is unclear. Secondhand accounts vary, and Vincent’s is unreliable. One thing is certain: there was a fight. Someone, the manager or one of his henchmen, tried to throw Vincent out. He resisted. They exchanged blows. The assailant may have thrown a beer glass in Vincent’s face, cutting him on the cheek, or perhaps smashed one of his flower still lifes over his head. Either way, Vincent fled the scene, bleeding, shamed, and in despair.
Nursing his wounds and waiting anxiously for the verdict from Amsterdam, he took paper and pen and struggled to explain this latest catastrophe to befall him. He recast it as a business deal gone sour. He had returned to Le Tambourin merely to reclaim his paintings and prints, he protested, concerned about their fate at a threatened bankruptcy auction. It was the manager who had “picked a quarrel,” he said, not him. “You can be sure of one thing,” he assured Theo. “I shan’t be doing any more work for the Tambourin.” As for Segatori herself, he struggled manfully to excuse her role in the debacle, casting her, like Sien Hoornik, as yet another guiltless Mater Dolorosa, more to be pitied than censured. “She’s in pain and unwell,” he explained. “I don�
��t hold it against her.” As with Sien, only exoneration could keep the delusion alive. “I still feel affection for her,” he insisted, “and I hope that she, too, still feels some for me.” In a few months, he imagined, she might even thank him.
When he wasn’t entertaining delusions of reconciliation with Segatori, he constructed fantasies of a place for himself in his brother’s new married life. Theo might buy a country house “like so many other art dealers,” he suggested, where Vincent could decorate the walls with his paintings and the three of them—Theo, Jo, and Vincent—could live together, “looking rich” and “enjoying life.” Beyond that, he could see only one other alternative, which he pointedly shared with Theo: “to do away with oneself.”
Pondering the same dark thoughts in images, he painted a coda to the flower offerings begun for Agostina. He chose a particular late-summer-blooming flower and painted a trio of pictures. Taken together, they present—and in Vincent’s metaphorical mind, surely were intended to present—a narrative of the disastrous summer. His subject, for the first time: sunflowers. He brooded on these huge blossoms with the same lingering, introspective eye that saw abandonment in empty birds’ nests and fruitless journeys in worn-out shoes.
For the first image, he cut just two aging flower heads from their stems and laid them, already wilting, on a tabletop. He faced them both forward and enlarged them to fill the whole canvas so his obsessive brush could explore every detail of their dying: the wasted burden of seeds, the shriveling fringe of petals, the drying leaves. Rendered in sallow yellows, acidic greens, and a rain of red dashes, they summarize in morose close-up the evanescence of perfection. In the next image, he brought one of the flowers back to life. Its swirling center bursts with color and fertility. Its fresh yellow petals are still edged in green, bending and curling voluptuously against a background of brilliant cobalt blue. But this time he tucked the second blossom demurely behind the first: its face turned away, upstaged by its exuberant partner.
Finally, he painted four huge blossoms arrayed across the biggest canvas of all (two feet by three and a half feet). Three of them explode like suns, each with its own writhing corona of yellow petals; its own teeming, radiant bounty of seeds; its own long, green stem—recently cut but still full of life. Only the fourth flower turns away, hiding its face, revealing its short, closely cropped stalk, betraying the brief, dismal end to come.
Alone, afraid, broke, unable to work, anxiously awaiting his brother’s return, Vincent could only watch as his paintings and prints at Le Tambourin were auctioned off as junk—“in a pile … for a laughable sum.” It was his first “exhibition,” other than in a creditor’s window. Afterward, one fellow artist dubbed it a “succès de rire”—a triumph of laughter.
But none of that mattered anymore. All that mattered now was the announcement Theo brought from Amsterdam.
CHAPTER 29
Catch and Release
JO HAD TOLD THEO NO. WORSE THAN THAT: SHE HAD HUMILIATED HIM. Marveling at the forwardness of a man she felt she hardly knew, she recorded the scene in her diary:
At two o’clock in the afternoon the doorbell rang: Van Gogh from Paris. I was pleased he was coming, I pictured myself talking to him about literature and art, I gave him a warm welcome—and then suddenly he started to declare his love for me. If it had happened in a novel it would sound implausible—but it actually happened; after only three encounters, he wants to spend his whole life with me, he wants to allow his happiness to be dependent on me. It is quite inconceivable.… My heart feels numb when I think of him!
Arguing over her refusal—just as Vincent had done with Kee Vos—Theo offered her “a rich life full of variation, full of intellectual stimulation, [and] a circle of friends who are working for a good cause, who want to do something for the world.” But Jo stood firm. “I don’t know you,” she protested, rejecting not just his impetuous proposal, but his whole sad, unilateral delusion of love. “I am so terribly sorry that I had to cause him such sorrow,” she concluded. “How depressed he will be when he returns to Paris.”
Jo’s unequivocal rebuff brought Theo reeling back to the rue Lepic apartment, where Vincent welcomed him like a prodigal son. Spurned himself—both in love and in art—Vincent saw in his brother’s misfortune a chance to revive his Goncourt fantasy of “working and thinking together.” Always eager for reconciliation, and crushed by Jo’s refusal, Theo fell into the waiting embrace.
Only a few months earlier, he had resolved to banish Vincent from his apartment. But even then he had confided to his sister that he, too, still clung to the vision of the Rijswijk Road. “It is a pity,” he wrote about his difficult brother, “for if we had worked together it would have been better for both of us.” Now Vincent’s familiar entreaties to “join hands” offered not just consolation for his broken heart, but a recall to duty. When Anna van Gogh heard the news about Jo, she warned Theo against the dangers of despondency by invoking her dead husband’s favorite image, the persistent sower: “Have faith that there will be good things after times of sadness,” she wrote, “for the sadness often yields fruit that makes us grateful in the end.”
LUCIEN PISSARRO, Vincent and Theo van Gogh, 1887, CRAYON ON PAPER, 8¾ × 6⅞ IN. (Illustration credit 29.1)
In that spirit, Theo returned to Paris and put the plow once again to the field of his fraternal bond. He described the task ahead in terms both resigned and determined:
I think it is far more important, knowing that we are what we are, to extend a hand to one another &, in the faith that we are stronger together than alone, to hope and strive, by living together, to reach a point where we see each other’s faults & forgive them & try to nurture whatever is good and noble in one another.
Retreating into the solace of brotherhood, Theo lifted the restrictions of the past. After more than a year in which their joint social life consisted largely of dinners at home or at neighborhood restaurants, with perhaps a single Dutch friend, he and Vincent began frequenting concerts, cafés, and cabarets together. They heard the music of Richard Wagner for the first time (still a controversial novelty in Paris) and saw the famous “shadow theater” at Le Chat Noir, a pre-cinematic extravaganza of puppets, lights, music, and special effects.
At home, too, Theo admitted Vincent into regions of his life from which he had long been barred. It was at this time, apparently, that the brothers finally, fully revealed their health secrets to each other. Soon they were sharing doctors and treatments for the syphilis from which they both suffered. They endured together the latest “scientific” remedies of Louis Rivet, a young doctor who specialized in “nervous disorders” (a catchall euphemism for secret afflictions); as well as the idiosyncratic regimens of Dr. David Gruby, an eccentric health guru renowned for his celebrity clientèle.
Theo also brought his brother fully into the obsession and pain of his love for Jo Bonger. Soon after his return to Paris, undoubtedly at Vincent’s prompting, he sent Jo a pleading, combative letter that simply pretended her “no” had never been uttered. (“I am writing in the hope of hastening [your] decision, whatever it may turn out to be.”) In the patronizing, defensive tones that had marked all Vincent’s failed loves, Theo accused Jo of naïveté and dismissed her adolescent notions of love as “only a dream … bound to be followed by a rude awakening.” True love, he declared, could only be achieved through faith and forgiveness. She must learn to love him, he insisted. (Like so many of Vincent’s demanding missives, the letter brought all correspondence to an end.)
The renewed grip of brotherhood extended even into Theo’s work. Until now, their reconciliations had always stopped at the doors of the Goupil branch on the boulevard Montmartre—the scene of Vincent’s humiliating dismissal ten years earlier. If Theo didn’t ban his brother from the premises outright, Vincent surely felt unwelcome there. No evidence survives that he ever set foot in Theo’s workplace during his two years in Paris. The mere mention of Goupil could ignite arguments over Theo’s allegiances and “
true self” every bit as bitter as the furious letters from Drenthe. Vincent browbeat his brother late into the night over the corruption of the art market in general and Goupil in particular. Thus it was hurtful, though hardly surprising, when Theo chose to partner with Andries Bonger in his abortive bid for an independent dealership in 1886. Theo never stopped admiring Vincent’s extraordinary knowledge of art and artists, but the life of a Goupil gérant was filled with delicate negotiations and diplomatic compromises, and there had never been a suitable place in it for his volatile, vehement brother.
Until now.
In fact, when Theo returned from his failed mission to Amsterdam, Goupil was no longer Goupil. The firm had officially changed its name. Starting in 1884, with the imminent retirement of its founder, Adolphe Goupil, the gallery had begun to rechristen itself. By the time Vincent came to Paris, the sign over the door of Theo’s gallery read “Boussod, Valadon & Cie” (after Goupil’s partner Léon Boussod and the company’s manager, René Valadon, Boussod’s son-in-law). For decades, however, people continued to refer to it simply as “Goupil.”
But the sign wasn’t the only thing that had changed. A whole new generation of management had taken charge. In addition to the thirty-eight-year-old Valadon, Boussod brought into the company his sons Étienne, twenty-nine, and Jean, twenty-seven. Together, they set out to bring Goupil’s huge but aging business into the new era. They severed longstanding ties with Salon stars like Bouguereau (whose fetching women had been a virtual industry within an industry), and dropped many of the École artists who supplied the firm’s staples of academic genre scenes and history paintings. They revamped the printing and photography divisions to take advantage of new technologies and new media, especially magazines. In May 1887, they staged a huge auction of inventory, both to raise capital for new ventures and to dispose of old, unsalable stock.
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