Rey described himself as “fond of painting.” Vincent urged Rey to become a collector and offered to inaugurate his collection with a gift of The Anatomy Lesson, Rembrandt’s famous paean to doctors. When Rey talked of the challenges he faced starting out in a new profession, Vincent promised him Theo’s help in making connections in Paris.
Vincent befriended the other, more senior doctors as well. He discovered one doctor in particular, a Parisian, who knew of Delacroix and appeared “very curious about impressionism.” “I think I can hope to become better acquainted with him,” Vincent wrote cheerfully. On January 5, he led a delegation of doctors, including Rey, to the Yellow House to show them his paintings. While there, he promised to do a portrait of the dapper young intern—to prove his mental “equilibrium”—just as soon as he was released. He also solemnly swore that “at the first sign of a serious symptom” he would return to the hospital and submit himself voluntarily to Rey’s care.
It was one thing to transfer a raving madman—a Protestant Dutchman, no less—to a distant asylum. That seemed appropriate enough to Rey. But to condemn a thoughtful, sensitive artist to the company of lunatics because of a single seizure of passion? Once Vincent began to plead on his own behalf, to contest his confinement with calmness and clarity, in passable French, what else could Rey do but release him? “I am happy to tell you,” he wrote Theo on the back of one of Vincent’s letters, “this over-excitement has only been temporary. I strongly feel that he will be himself in a few days.”
To be safe, he arranged for Vincent to take a day trip to the Yellow House on January 4, accompanied by Roulin and preceded by the charwoman who cleaned up the mess left by the crimes of Christmas. Rey’s subsequent visit to the house allowed him not only to see Vincent’s work but to assess personally his living situation—an appropriate precaution in the absence of family members to look after him. He may have had reservations, but with Vincent’s pleadings in one ear and Theo’s conspicuous silence in the other, foreclosing better alternatives, Rey signed the release papers.
Vincent’s campaign to rewrite the past turned next to his brother. “My dear lad,” he wrote Theo on his first day of freedom, “I am so terribly distressed at your journey. I should have wished you had been spared that, for after all no harm came to me, and there was no reason why you should put yourself to that trouble.” Week after week, through the rest of a bleak, wintry January, Vincent poured out his guilt in shades of denial and delusion. He dismissed his injury as “such a trifle”—an accident that hardly merited Theo’s attention; his breakdown as a mere indisposition; and his recovery as a foregone conclusion. Such incidents happened all the time “in this part of the world,” he joked. “Everyone in this good Tarascon country is a trifle cracked.” Other times, he explained it as simply an occupational hazard—“an artist’s fit” that could have happened to any painter. Gauguin himself had “caught the very same thing,” in Panama, Vincent insisted, “this excessive sensitivity.”
In flights of fantasy, he claimed that he had checked himself into the hospital and that his stay there “in fact refreshed me considerably.” He sent boasting reports of his hearty appetite, good digestion, and healthy blood—always accompanied by emphatic instructions to “please quite deliberately forget your unhappy journey and my illness.” He reassured Theo again and again that he had completely recovered and that “serenity returns to my brain day by day.” He withdrew the defiant rhetoric about his own art that had filled his letters before Christmas. “If you want any pictures, certainly I can send you some,” he wrote compliantly. “As to the Indépendants [exhibition], do what seems best to you, and what the others do.”
No vow was too broad, no pretense too improbable, no prevarication too extreme, so long as it helped erase the past. He pretended that he and Gauguin were still friends, reporting brightly to Theo (who certainly knew better) that Gauguin “on the whole, got himself rested here.” He imagined other painters coming to stay with him, now that he and Gauguin had worked out the kinks of joint housekeeping.
Fearing that Theo might force him to return to Paris—a prospect perhaps divulged by Rey—he argued with renewed fervor on behalf of his Midi dream, claiming a newfound kinship with the people of Arles, who in fact still mocked and spurned him. “Everyone here is kind to me,” he protested, “kind and attentive as if I were at home.” He compared himself to Voltaire’s Candide, settled happily in the best of all possible worlds. He wrote glowing reports to friends in Holland with only joking references to “something the matter with my brains” before resuming the campaign for Tersteeg’s favor. Unaware that Theo (and Roulin) had already shared the real story with his mother and sisters, Vincent sent them a letter that portrayed his hospital stay as a spa-like interlude (“not worth troubling to inform you about”) that both refreshed his spirits and “provided the opportunity for getting acquainted with quite a number of people.”
Gauguin, too, felt the onslaught of Vincent’s unreality. Vincent had emerged from the hospital with his feelings toward his fellow painter in a haze of forgetfulness and regret. “Now, let’s talk about our friend Gauguin,” he inquired of Theo on January 2; “have I terrified him? Why hasn’t he given me any sign of life?” But within days, Gauguin, too, was pressed into the project of reassurance and denial. “Look here,” Vincent wrote him sternly from Rey’s office two days later, “was my brother Theo’s journey really necessary, old man?” In the same letter, he instructed Gauguin to “completely reassure everyone”—especially Theo—and warned him against “speaking ill of our poor little yellow house.”
Upon his release from the hospital, Vincent immersed himself in the duties of a good host, arranging to send the studies and other belongings (including fencing equipment) that Gauguin had left behind in his unseemly haste. He wrote chatty letters addressed to “My dear friend Gauguin” inquiring about Paris, his work, and his plans for the future. To Theo, Vincent expressed benign admiration for Gauguin’s paintings (even his mocking portrait of Vincent) and “hearty approval” of his return to Martinique. “Naturally I regret it,” he added good-naturedly, “but you understand that provided all goes well with him, that is all I want.”
When Gauguin responded to Vincent’s strange outreach by complimenting his sunflower paintings—two of which Gauguin had taken with him when he left Arles—Vincent seized on the evasive accolade (“it is a style essentially yours”) to prove that his project in the South yet lived—if not in the Yellow House, at least in the hearts of those who had shared it. “I should very much like to give Gauguin a real pleasure,” he wrote Theo. “And after all I should like to go on exchanging my things with [him].”
By the end of January, this delusion of reconciliation had overtaken Vincent’s imagination. “One thing is certain,” he wrote, toying with the unthinkable. “I dare say that basically Gauguin and I are by nature fond enough of each other to be able to begin again together if necessary.” To Gauguin, he admitted that “perhaps I insisted too much that you stay on here,” and “perhaps it was I who was the cause of your departure.” Finally, he invited his former housemate to join him in rewriting the past. “Be that as it may,” he ventured, “I hope we still like each other enough to be able, if need be, to start afresh.”
To bolster this fiction of recovery and renewal, Vincent summoned all the story-making powers of his brush. The portrait of Dr. Rey, which he began virtually the moment he returned to the Yellow House, took up again the great Bel-Ami mandate—abandoned by Gauguin—to “do in portraiture what Claude Monet does in landscape,” He painted the goateed, pomaded intern in an orange-trimmed blue coat set against a decorative Provençal wallpaper of red-flecked green—a lesson in complementaries as well as a proof of his steady hand and collected mind.
To document his mental and physical recuperation, he painted a still life showing the remedies that made it possible. On a sun-washed drawing board (itself a pledge of productivity), he placed a copy of his new bible, F. V. Raspail’
s Manuelle annuaire de la santé (Health Annual), a popular manual of first aid, hygiene, and home remedies. Next to the thick, pocket-sized book, he set a plate of sprouting onion bulbs, one of the many healthful foods Raspail recommended (along with garlic, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg). To represent Raspail’s most famous panacea, camphor (his prescription for everything from tuberculosis to masturbation), Vincent included a candle, probably camphor-scented, and a pot of camphor oil. (The bandage over Vincent’s ear, which was changed every day at the hospital, was doused with camphor, too, thanks to Raspail’s advocacy of the oil’s antiseptic properties.) To complete this inventory of his new, healthy life, Vincent also placed on the table his pipe and tobacco pouch—a promise of serenity—and a letter from Theo—his lifeline to the past. At the edge of the canvas, a drained wine bottle makes a pledge of moderation for the future.
His brush seconded the outreach to Gauguin as well. On the same day he returned from the hospital, he started a series of still lifes showing pairs of fishes and crabs that resumed the obsession with pairings and partnerships that had marked the months leading up to Gauguin’s arrival. Clinging to the compliment he imagined in Gauguin’s letter, he also launched on a vast new project of sunflower paintings, beginning with exact replicas of the two images that hung in “Gauguin’s room.” “You know, Gauguin likes them extraordinarily,” he boasted. “[He] is completely infatuated with my sunflowers.” Embracing Gauguin’s mocking portrait of him as “The Painter of Sunflowers,” he claimed the summer flower as his signature image. “The sunflower is somewhat my own,” he agreed. “[It] takes on a richness the longer you look at it.” He changed the subject, but not the palette, in a still life of oranges and lemons that he painted around the same time. To Theo, he boasted that the electric-yellow image had “a certain chic”—code for the kind of painting he knew Gauguin approved.
Portrait of Doctor Félix Rey, JANUARY 1889, OIL ON CANVAS, 25⅛ × 20⅞ IN. (Illustration credit 37.1)
Inevitably, the grail of Gauguin’s favor led Vincent back to the image that sat on his easel at Christmastime: the unfinished Berceuse, Inspired by yet another ambiguous compliment from his former housemate, he imagined completing his Loti-inspired maternal icon, the most conspicuous relic of their time together, by placing it between two sunflower paintings, creating a devotional triptych that combined his own Daumier vision of the South with Gauguin’s chic bouquets of color. In flights of rhetoric touched by the missionary fire of the past (“we have a light before our feet and a lamp upon our path”), he imagined this marriage of imagery ultimately redeeming not just the failed combination with Gauguin but all his Midi suffering and sacrifice. “We have gone all out for the impressionists,” he wrote Theo as he laid plans for a whole series of Berceuse-and-sunflower decorations, “and now as far as it’s in my power I am trying to finish canvases which will undoubtedly secure me the little corner that I have claimed.”
For his doctors, Vincent painted two self-portraits, both displaying his bandaged left ear and neat hospital dressing. In both, he showed himself bundled against the January chill in a deep-green coat and furry new hat: a pointed assurance to Rey and the others that he was following instructions (both theirs and Raspail’s) to take walks and get plenty of fresh air. In both paintings, he stares out from the canvas with focus and calm. In one, he serenely smokes his pipe. In the other, he stands before his easel—a promise of hard work—and a Japanese print on the wall, laying claims to both artistic legitimacy and avant-garde bona fides for the benefit of his art-loving provincial doctors.
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, JANUARY 1889, OIL ON CANVAS, 23⅝ × 19⅜ IN. (Illustration credit 37.2)
For Theo, however, Vincent saw a very different image in his mirror (and never mentioned the damaged, bandaged one). Done in the same small size and sunny palette as the many he painted in Paris when they lived together, the self-portrait for his brother shows Vincent from the other side—the healthy, youthful side (clean-shaven in the hospital), hiding completely the bandages and wounds that he displayed to his doctors. For Theo, he relegated recent events to the airy realm of humor. “As for me, being in this little country of mine, I have no need at all to go to the tropics,” he wrote. “Personally I am too old and (especially if I have a papier mâché ear put on) too jerry-built to go there.”
IN A LETTER TO Jo Bonger, Theo jokingly compared himself to “an oyster in its shell” and invited his now fiancée to pry him open. He had returned from his trip to Holland in a bliss of expectation. His week with Jo only perfected the desperate infatuation that had upended his staid existence in the weeks before Christmas. “You have no idea how you have changed my life,” he wrote her immediately after his return. They had spent their “wonderful week” (as Jo called it) meeting families and friends, but mostly discovering each other. They talked of Shakespeare and Goethe, Heine, Zola, and Degas. She played Beethoven for him. He took her to galleries. They confessed their many flaws and protested their mutual unworthiness. “You bring sunshine into my life,” he told her. “Am I truly your sunshine?” she blushingly replied.
The light Theo brought back from Holland changed his “somber world” in Paris from night to day. He found new pleasures in society: from intimate dinners with Jo’s brother Andries to “grand soirées” with glittering strangers. (Jo playfully chided him for his “disgraceful gadding about.”) At home, he enjoyed the companionship of the Dutch painter Meijer de Haan, who had taken Vincent’s place in the rue Lepic apartment and listened every night as Theo unwound his love. Even being alone no longer frightened him. “[I] sometimes catch myself whistling or humming a tune,” he told Jo. “It’s your fault.”
Whether late at night or during breaks in his workday, he found time to write letters—a Vincent-like flood of affirmation and affection (“I should like to lay my head in your lap and bask in your love”). Despite his busy schedule and preparations for another Monet show in February, a day rarely passed without a letter, sometimes two. He sent books (Michelet, the patron saint of lovers), photographs of himself, and even a portrait of him that De Haan had drawn. He wished he were a painter, he said, because “I can picture you so clearly that I would be able to paint you if I knew how.” He longed to give Jo “the best and innermost part” of himself, and agreed with her that “softly and imperceptibly the ties that bound me to my old life are loosening, and I mostly live in the future.”
MEIJER DE HAAN, Sketch of Theo van Gogh, 1888, CHALK ON PAPER, 8¼ × 5½ IN. (Illustration credit 37.3)
In this bright future, there was little place for his troubled brother. In the three weeks after he returned from Holland, Theo wrote fifteen letters to Jo—fat letters filled with quotidian details, intimate inquiries, and pleadings of love. During the same period he sent three letters to Vincent, all of them to accompany payments. He enclosed no photographs. While Vincent responded promptly (sometimes twice in the same day) and at length (one letter filled twelve pages), Theo’s missives lagged and dwelt on money matters. He answered Vincent’s pleas of poverty after emerging from the hospital (because Theo had missed the first January payment) with a demand that Vincent prepare a budget for the year. Married life would put new burdens on his finances, he cautioned.
In the river of words that poured from Paris to Amsterdam after Theo returned from Holland, Vincent’s name was rarely mentioned. Jo was forced to inquire: “You’ve told me nothing about [him]…is anything wrong?” More than a week later, Theo responded with a rambling parable comparing “people who want something passionately” to sunflowers. “It is impossible to stop them [from] turning to face the sun,” he pondered, even though “it makes them wilt a little sooner!” Vincent, he wrote vaguely, “is certainly one of the people who have done the most and wishes to.” For the literary Jo, he invoked the nobly delusional Don Quixote, who, like his brother, possessed “an exceptionally kind heart.” Then the subject quickly moved on to wedding plans and “kisses in thought.”
For all the same r
easons, Theo looked past the signs of new trouble in Arles. In response to Vincent’s increasingly “agitated” and “overwrought” letters, he briskly advised resignation. Drawing in equal measure on his father’s pious stoicism and his mother’s precautious fatalism, he instructed Vincent “not [to] let oneself have any illusions about life” and “to accept the probably disastrous reality.” He took Vincent’s reports of continuing hallucinations and nightmares and fears of a relapse as “signs of improvement rather than symptoms of illness.” They showed, he explained to Jo, that Vincent “understood his condition.” Clinging to his wedding plans, his family’s good name, and his own last chance for happiness, he continued to insist that his brother suffered only “an imperfect state of health” brought on by overwork and self-neglect.
Theo’s self-preserving fatalism masked a double denial. Not only did Vincent’s illness cast a shadow over his pending marriage (and the children he intended to father with Jo) at a time when insanity was widely regarded as hereditary, but Theo had health secrets of his own. He had not yet told Jo about his battle with syphilis—another threat to his vision of marital bliss. (It was widely believed at the time that syphilis could be passed not only to sexual partners but also to babies in utero.) When Theo mistakenly thought that Vincent had revealed the truth to Doctor Rey, he lashed out in a fierce rebuke that startled Vincent into an apology: “I did not think I was doing anything to compromise you.”
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