I sat still for a moment, hoping to regain control of my emotions, then I leaned forward and put the portrait on the bed, beside Vincent’s body. So much for my attempt to dispassionately record the truth. I don’t know how long I sat there weeping, though it could not have been long. The light had not changed when I heard a faltering step outside the door. I straightened and began to hunt in my pockets for a handkerchief. I had to give up and wipe my cheek with my cuff, a gesture that took me back to my childhood. I felt Theo’s hand on my shoulder. I tried to stand up, but he pressed me back into the chair. Instead he sat on the bed by Vincent’s side. He picked up my sketch, and for a moment his eyes filled, too. But he recovered faster than I had from the rush of grief.
“It’s for you,” I said. “There is nothing else I can do.”
He smiled briefly at me, then looked at his brother’s body. Vincent’s hands had been clasped on his chest. Theo lay his left hand on both of them. “We all did what we could, Doctor. I cannot think what else would have helped him. He had an unfinished letter in his pocket—did you know?” I shook my head. “He said …” Theo reached into his trousers pocket and drew out a folded piece of paper. He unfolded it and read, “As for my work, I put my life at stake for it and my reason has almost foundered. Well, that’s that.” He folded the letter and put it back into his pocket. There did not seem to be anything else to say. He leaned forward and put a hand very gently against Vincent’s cheek. Then he stood up. “I have some letters to write. Thank you for making that drawing.”
“Do not overtax yourself,” I said. “Tomorrow will be harrowing.”
He nodded. “I am conserving my strength.” I heard his slow, uneven footsteps go down the stairs.
I picked up the drawing, and the charcoal, which had rolled to the floor. Quickly, before I could think about it, I deepened the down-turning line of Vincent’s lips and drew the fold running from the edge of his nose. I shaded his lower lip and emphasized his chin. And there it was, Vincent’s angular face.
I made a copy of the drawing before giving it to Theo—much as Vincent had copied my portrait for me. We were paired in that way. I have to say that it was not a beautiful image. I have made other pictures—paintings, etchings—that are more pleasant to look at. But this sketch came close to a kind of truth. That was all I was trying for.
We buried Vincent on July 30. His paintings hanging on the walls of Ravoux’s café transformed the room. To stand in its center surrounded by such visions was almost blinding. You could tell by the reactions of the handful of men who came for the funeral. Vincent had always felt alone in the world, yet there was his friend the painter Emile Bernard, there was Lucien Pissarro representing his father, Camille; there was even old Père Tanguy, who had closed his shop to pay tribute to Vincent. One by one they stepped over the threshold from the main street, and then they halted in the doorway, astounded. I saw Tanguy studying all of the paintings as if committing them to memory. Some of the men wept, but often they smiled through their tears, for there was joy on the walls. It is easy to forget, especially for those of us who witnessed his last days, that Vincent found delight in what he saw around him, and he brought it to his paintings.
I tried to say that at his grave. We were a small procession following the hearse, no more than a dozen. In addition to those who had come from Paris, there were men from the neighborhood: Ravoux and his son, Levert the carpenter, others who must have seen Vincent roaming the fields.
I wanted so much to pay tribute to Vincent. I wanted to be sure that everyone there understood how faithful he was to his own mission. There was little talking as we trudged up the hill beside the church. Somehow Theo found the strength to follow the coffin and accept condolences without betraying any more weakness than one would ascribe to a grieving man. It was no cooler, though a dry breeze whisked around us. The cemetery is surrounded by wheat fields—we were in the very center of one of Vincent’s pictures. “How he would have loved to paint this,” Paul murmured as we watched the shifting tones of gold and ocher dancing to the blue horizon.
I told them that. I stood by Vincent’s grave and said, “Those of us who knew Vincent van Gogh will always see the world through his eyes. These fields and these skies are his world, but so are the riverbanks of Paris and the hills of Montmartre and the cypresses of the South.” I could feel my throat tightening. I looked at the knot of dark-clad men, bare heads bowed in the brilliant sun. I looked at the grave, freshly dug. The rich soil was already drying at the edges in the warm air. I looked down at the simple coffin and thought of my friend Vincent, the painter, the patient I had hoped to save. “He was a great artist,” I said, “and he cared deeply about mankind. His art will keep his name alive, I think we all know this.” I took out my handkerchief and mopped my eyes. “There is not a man here who will not remember this day and the genius of Vincent van Gogh,” I managed to choke out. I suppose those were enough words; they were the only ones I could speak. Theo followed me with similar emotion, then the earth was shoveled back onto the coffin. We had all brought with us some of the flowers that decked the bier at Ravoux’s. I had sent Paul out to gather sunflowers that morning: none grow in my gardens, but I knew how much Vincent loved them. Paul had returned with a bouquet that filled his arms. I laid the flowers next to the headstone. I will always see in my mind’s eye those heavy yellow blooms nestled against the gray stone. Vincent would have loved to paint them.
Epilogue
WE DID OUR BEST to help Theo pack up Vincent’s things. The contents of the garret room would barely have filled a carpet bag, but they were all so worn and battered that Theo did not bother to take them back to Paris. What use could there have been for the faded blue plumber’s jacket? I did see Theo carefully wrap Vincent’s pipe in a handkerchief and slip it into the pocket of his frock coat. I could imagine this relic taking a place of honor in the Van Gogh flat in Paris.
The paintings and the drawings presented a problem. Theo had hundreds of them already, tucked into every spare corner of his apartment and stacked in Tanguy’s attic. He gave many of them to those of us who had known Vincent in Auvers: Ravoux, Levert, and Hirschig were among those who accepted these mementos. He was exceedingly generous to Paul and to me, all but pressing canvases into our hands, but we insisted that he ship most of them back to Paris.
We all wanted very much to find a way to exhibit Vincent’s work after his death. How better to commemorate his life? Theo approached several dealers, but none was prepared to take the risk of hanging Vincent’s startling canvases. Ultimately he rented a larger flat in his building and persuaded Emile Bernard to select a fraction of Vincent’s output to hang on the walls there. Thus he and Jo lived surrounded by Vincent’s visions, and those artists and dealers adventurous enough to accept this new view of the world could see the paintings there. A biography was envisioned as well, drawing on the hundreds of letters that Theo had so carefully saved.
Yet before this effort came to fruition, Theo’s illness entered its final stage. He wrote to me complaining of dizziness, and also suffered from hallucinations and nightmares. Early in October this calm, loving man attempted to attack Johanna and the baby. Jo’s brother notified me, and we managed to find Theo a place in a Parisian nursing home that specialized in cases like his. There was some initial improvement, but soon he was completely irrational and Jo had no choice but to take him to Holland. He died in a Utrecht clinic in January 1891.
Johanna married again, but she has never wavered in her loyalty to her brother-in-law. She has sold some of his paintings and has loaned others to exhibitions. It seems that art lovers, especially in Germany, are gradually coming to understand Vincent’s particular genius. I like to think that his most extravagant hopes may someday be fulfilled, and that thoughtful people will find his work both touching and beautiful.
Of course I think every day about the part I played in Vincent’s death. I did not understand at the time to what extent the way one dies can color people’s memo
ries of the way one lived. I have always remembered Blanche’s astounding courage in the face of her dreadful death. She met pain without distress. If I had helped her to die, I would never have seen this strength in her. After her death, I perceived that strength in everything she had done as my wife.
Yet curiously I see a kind of strength and courage in Vincent’s suicide—the very opposite of Blanche’s stoicism. I have never regretted leaving the gun for him to find. In fact, I sometimes think it was the finest thing I ever did.
Author’s Note
IN THE SPRING OF 2005 I was sitting in the art history library at Columbia University, reading a biography of a nineteenth-century French printmaker named Charles Méryon. He was the subject of the thesis I was writing to complete a master’s degree in art history. Méryon struggled with madness, and his family had him committed to the insane asylum at Charenton, outside Paris. I was intrigued to read that one of his visitors in 1866 was a doctor named Gachet, a physician who was interested in both art and mental illness. I remembered that Van Gogh had painted a Dr. Gachet. I wondered if Méryon’s Gachet was the same as Van Gogh’s. He was. I became fascinated by this doctor who befriended artists at a time when art was changing so radically, and who cared for the mentally ill at a time when that field was being redefined as well.
In the course of researching and writing this novel, I grew very fond of Van Gogh. I learned a great deal about the early treatment of madness. (There is a whole subset of Van Gogh scholarship devoted to postmortem diagnosis. I suspect he suffered from some combination of epilepsy and bipolar disorder, but writers have made cases for third-stage syphilis, schizophrenia, porphyria, and absinthe poisoning among other ailments.) I became familiar with the huge field of Van Gogh studies and thought a lot about suicide, madness, and genius.
The first thing I want to know when I finish reading a historical novel is How much of that was true? To answer that question, I have to say something about the primary sources for Dr. Gachet and Vincent van Gogh. Vincent was well read, trilingual, and a brilliant writer. He was also separated from the people most important to him for much of his life as a painter and thus wrote over nine hundred letters. Within a few years of the Van Gogh brothers’ deaths, Johanna van Gogh began the immense project of reading and sorting the correspondence for publication. The first edition, in Dutch and French, was published in 1914–15. An English translation appeared in 1958. In October 2009, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam unveiled its new edition of the correspondence, known as the Van Gogh Letters Project. All of the letters were newly transcribed and translated. They can be read online at http://vangoghletters.org/vg/. Each letter is accompanied by a facsimile, footnotes, and thumbnails of every image Van Gogh refers to, whether his own work or that of painters he admired. The letters that Dr. Gachet reads in Leaving Van Gogh are my translations from the French originals. Some of Vincent’s dialogue uses or paraphrases ideas from letters that are not explicitly quoted.
Dr. Gachet left a much less distinct trail. His son, Paul, is his principal historian, and Paul’s reliability is often questioned. The doctor died in 1909, leaving his house and collection to his children, who remained in Auvers for the rest of their lives. In 1911 Paul married a quiet woman named Emilienne. His nephew Roger Golbéry described an eccentric household in which Marguerite and Emilienne deferred at all times to Paul’s wishes. He had little use for the twentieth century, maintaining the Auvers house much as it had been in that summer of 1890. He refused to install central heating or a telephone, and only reluctantly allowed the ground floor of the house to be wired in the 1950s so that he could write at night by electric light.
Paul Gachet’s great project was curating his father’s collection. One of his principal efforts was a manuscript catalog of Dr. Gachet’s most important paintings, drawings, and prints. According to this catalog, the doctor owned twenty-six Van Goghs, twenty-four Cézanne oils, a dozen Pissarros, as well as examples by other artists including Renoir, Monet, and Sisley. Paul Gachet fils published many short scholarly works in the 1950s. Les 70 jours de van Gogh à Auvers did not appear until 1994. It follows Van Gogh’s stay in Auvers, quoting letters and discussing what paintings Vincent produced each day.
Paul Gachet is thus the primary source on his father’s life. His goal at all times is to promote the importance of his father to Van Gogh, Cézanne, and the other painters he knew. He refers throughout to “Vincent” as if he had been the painter’s peer rather than the seventeen-year-old son of the doctor’s household. He also produced a number of artworks that seem aimed at consolidating his claim to special status in the Van Gogh saga: one, for instance, is a painting called Auvers, from the Spot Where Vincent Committed Suicide.
Paul Gachet is accurate about many aspects of his father’s life. Dr. Gachet did serve at the Salpêtrière in 1855, he did write his thesis on melancholy, and he was Pissarro’s family doctor. He did marry Blanche, and she did die in 1875, most likely of tuberculosis. The doctor did serve as a medical officer in the siege of Paris, but there is no record of his ever having possessed a gun. At this writing, we don’t know what kind of gun Van Gogh used for his suicide. Nor do we know where he got it, where it vanished to, or the precise location where he shot himself. There has been occasional speculation concerning alternative explanations for his death. Some writers believe Paul Gachet (the son) knew more than he ever told.
Paul Gachet’s credibility was severely questioned in the 1950s. He had until then supported his Auvers household and his scholarly pursuits by selling off his father’s collection. In 1949, though, he donated the famous Van Gogh Self-Portrait to the Louvre along with the second version of Portrait of Dr. Gachet. (The first version, with the yellow books, went back to Holland with Johanna after Vincent’s death, but Van Gogh had made for the doctor a second, simpler version, which remained in Auvers.) Further important donations followed in 1951 and 1954. By that time the works of Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Dr. Gachet’s other painter friends were highly prized.
However, Paul Gachet had not endeared himself to the scholarly community. Although earlier in the century he had loaned works from his collection for museum exhibitions, he ceased doing so. He permitted only limited study of the paintings he owned and prohibited their reproduction. Thus, when previously little-known canvases by Van Gogh and Cézanne appeared in the collection of the French state, some critics were skeptical. Van Gogh’s works had been enthusiastically forged for decades, as had Cézanne’s. Paul Gachet had been a painter, as had his father, the doctor. Doubt about the authenticity of some of the Gachet holdings was expressed and has periodically resurfaced. In fact, the most current scholarship supports the authenticity of the Van Gogh paintings, though a few small Cézannes have been reattributed.
In 1954 an exhibition entitled “Van Gogh and the Painters of Auvers-sur-Oise” opened at the Orangerie in Paris. Paul Gachet wrote the introduction to the catalog. By this time Van Gogh was a huge figure in the popular imagination. Irving Stone’s novel Lust for Life, published in 1934, had been an international bestseller. Vincente Minnelli began shooting the film version in 1955 (Dr. Gachet’s garden was used as a location). Paul Gachet’s stature in the art world had benefited enormously from this development; his spate of publishing in the 1950s seems closely tied to his generous donations. In 1961, the year before he died, Paul Gachet was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, a distinction that escaped his father.
In 1990, the first version of Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet (with the yellow books) was auctioned at Christie’s. It had been in various private collections since 1890. It fetched $82.5 million, making it the most expensive painting ever sold at the time. The buyer, Ryoei Saito, took the canvas to Japan. Its whereabouts is currently unknown.
The Gachet house in Auvers is open to the public, as is Vincent van Gogh’s attic room at the Auberge Ravoux. The former café downstairs has been restored in the style of the late nineteenth century and is now a pleasant restaurant.
Theo’s body was finally brought to the cemetery in Auvers in 1914. The Van Gogh brothers now lie side by side beneath a blanket of ivy. The plateau surrounding the cemetery is still planted with wheat.
Acknowledgments
The writing of this book began several years ago while I was in graduate school, so I thank Lee Adair Lawrence for flattering me into going; Hilary Ballon and Anne Higonnet for their encouragement; Barbara Laux and Sue Roy for their company; and my family for their patience when I kept talking about Walter Benjamin.
As I wrote I had help from early readers and other boosters, notably Andrea Rounds, Alice van Straalen, Fred Bernstein, F. Paul Driscoll, Lisa Callahan, and Katherine Fuller.
After writing, selling. I owe gratitude to Lynn Seligman, as well as to Emma Sweeney for her enthusiasm and editorial acumen, and her colleagues Eva Talmadge and Justine Wenger.
Then publication, with remarkable solicitude and energy. Thanks to Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau, first of all. Mike Mezzo and Hana Landes, Vincent La Scala and Susan M. S. Brown for shaping and refining the manuscript. Greg Mollica for the lovely cover, Carol Cunningham for the handsome interior, and Sally Marvin for helping introduce Leaving Van Gogh to the world.
And none of this would have been possible without Rick, who seemed to take for granted all along that it was a worthwhile enterprise.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CAROL WALLACE is the author of numerous books, including The Official Preppy Handbook, which she co-authored. Leaving Van Gogh is her first historical novel. A graduate of Princeton University, Wallace received an M.A. in art history from Columbia University in 2006. The research for her M.A. thesis provided the foundation for Leaving Van Gogh. She lives in New York.
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