Experimenting with Technique and Colour
During his period in The Hague, Van Gogh made great progress in drawing, working with numerous materials—everything from pencil, charcoal and chalk to lithographic ink—and trying out new techniques. In his letters he describes, for example, how he fixed his drawings by pouring milk over them (a method he had read about in a handbook). In the summer of 1882 he began to work in colour, documenting the landscape in the vicinity of his studio in a group of impressive watercolour drawings and making oil studies in the woods and on the beach. His subdued palette was in keeping with that preferred by painters of the Hague School and the School of Barbizon—established artists whose work sold well in galleries and was much in evidence at exhibitions. He also devoted himself briefly to making lithographs after drawings of workers and the poor, as part of a plan—which he never carried out—for a series of prints intended for the lower classes.
Vincent sent Theo drawings of folk types, town views and landscapes. Their correspondence in these years is full of exuberant and lyrical descriptions of colour:
To keep it light and yet keep the glow, the depth of that rich colour, for there’s no carpet imaginable as splendid as that deep brown-red in the glow of an autumnal evening sun, although tempered by the wood.
Out of the ground shoot young beech trees that catch the light on one side—are brilliantly green there—and the shaded side of those trunks a warm, strong black-green. Beyond these trunks, beyond the brown-red ground, is a sky, a very delicate blue-grey, warm—almost not blue—sparkling. And set against this is another hazy edge of greenness and a network of slender trunks and yellowish leaves. A few figures gathering wood move about like dark masses of mysterious shadows. (260)
Friction of Ideas
Van Gogh, a relentless experimenter, longed to exchange technical knowledge and artistic ideas with his peers. He had an expressive term for this: ‘friction of ideas’ (396). His contact with the painters Herman van der Weele and Anthon van Rappard was one way to satisfy this longing. He wrote impassioned letters to Van Rappard about his work, and they carried on discussions that cut right to the heart of things. The two men kept each other informed of their activities by making sketches and enclosing drawings in their letters, and they did not shrink from frank criticism of one another. This was exactly what Van Gogh needed, especially since his relations with Mauve had cooled because of his entanglement with Sien Hoornik. His candid friendship with Van Rappard had a very stimulating effect.
Often Van Gogh worked like a fanatic, bent on using his energy to the full. It stands to reason that he would describe himself as a drudge, workhorse or draught ox, and repeatedly tried to stretch his working day by starting early in the morning (which in his case meant very early indeed) and going on till late at night. ‘You know that nature can’t be conquered or made submissive without a terrible fight, without more than the ordinary level of patience’ (403), he explained. He constantly exercised his ‘draughtsman’s fist’ (220) by sketching scavengers on a rubbish dump, for instance, or workers in a sand quarry or farm labourers lifting potatoes in a field, to get a feel for human proportions and the perspective of the landscape.
‘In the Heart of the People’: Peasant Painter in Drenthe and Nuenen, 1883–1885
In September 1883 Vincent broke off his relationship with Sien, no longer trusting her intentions. He blamed her family for their dubious role in this conflict; he was certain that under their influence she would return to her life of prostitution. Taking along a minimum of artists’ materials, he set off for rural Drenthe. The choice of this northern province must have been prompted by what Mauve, Van Rappard and Breitner had told him about its unspoiled nature.
Van Gogh stayed for a while in Hoogeveen before travelling in early October via passenger barge to Nieuw-Amsterdam/Veenoord, where he found lodgings in the boardinghouse run by Hendrik Scholte. From this base he explored the surrounding area for suitable subjects, which resulted in a series of evocative landscapes with dilapidated huts, women working in the peat bogs, a man burning weeds at dusk and workers by a peat barge. He made a trip to Zweeloo with Scholte and described this excursion to Theo in lyrical terms (402). Vincent had an ulterior motive in praising the landscape so highly to Theo: his brother’s relations with his superiors were so strained that Vincent was trying to persuade him to become a painter and leave the art trade and city life behind. The prospect of breathtakingly beautiful nature was intended to make his proposal even more tempting. Theo, understandably, did not take his brother’s suggestion seriously.
However impressed he was by the landscape, Vincent found the solitude depressing in these cold and rainy months. It was difficult to work outdoors, there were no models to be had, and he was running out of painting materials. The evenings were long, and this is reflected in the length of his letters. Theo’s mention of his uncertain financial situation prompted Vincent to leave Drenthe and seek refuge again with his parents, who had meanwhile moved to Nuenen, near Eindhoven.
Return to His Parental Home
On 5 December 1883 Van Gogh first set foot in the austere but respectably furnished parsonage where his parents had been living for over a year. He was to remain in the village for two years. His homecoming and welcome were, to his mind, anything but cordial.
I feel what Pa and Ma instinctively think about me (I don’t say reasonably).
There’s a similar reluctance about taking me into the house as there would be about having a large, shaggy dog in the house. He’ll come into the room with wet paws—and then, he’s so shaggy. He’ll get in everyone’s way. And he barks so loudly. (413)
The room where the washing was pressed, behind the house, was fixed up as his studio (fig. 9). Its location and furnishings were far from ideal, however.
9. The parsonage in Nuenen. The studio was located at the lower right
Van Gogh’s new mission was to paint peasants and labourers at work. His first subjects were weavers: between December 1883 and July 1884 he made a series of drawings and paintings of weavers at their looms. In the months when it was difficult to work out of doors, he painted whole series of still lifes.
In early 1884 Vincent decided that, in exchange for the money Theo sent, his brother should do as he saw fit with his artworks, ideally finding buyers for them. Vincent was still in frequent contact with Van Rappard: they painted together and discussed technical problems, and Van Rappard came to respect his friend’s talent for drawing. The fact that Van Gogh frequently gave lessons to amateur painters in the area testifies to his growing self-confidence.
From May 1884 he rented from the sacristan a reasonably large studio: two rooms en suite, which gave him enough room to work comfortably. In the summer he again caused consternation by starting up a relationship with his neighbour Margot Begemann, who was mentally unstable. Both of their families did everything they could to put an end to their affair, the low point of which was Margot’s attempted suicide. Vincent briefly considered marrying her, but eventually abandoned the idea, to the relief of the parents. It was at times such as these that he felt how deep and irreconcilable the differences were between himself and those around him.
Colour Theory
In the first years of his career as an artist, Van Gogh had primarily occupied himself with questions of composition, such as the proportions and grouping of figures and the rendering of perspective. His main activity was drawing, and his chief considerations were of a technical nature: the handling of line, for example, and the effect produced by the materials he used. Colour played a subordinate role. This changed in Nuenen, when he decided to devote himself completely to painting and consequently immersed himself in colour theory. The letters from this period contain numerous passages about art, artists and colour theory, quoted or paraphrased from the books of Félix Bracquemond, Théophile Silvestre, Edmond de Goncourt, Alfred Sensier, Jean Gigoux, Charles Blanc and Théophile Thoré (William Bürger), all of which he studied closely. His eyes
were opened by what he read about the palette of the French painter Eugène Delacroix in Blanc’s art-theoretical handbooks, and by the artists’ anecdotes Silvestre and Gigoux recounted. He painted a series of still lifes in which he applied his newfound knowledge of the effect of colours and the result of mixing them. At first, however, these new ideas did not lead to a brighter palette. He stuck to his subdued colours, partly because he had no firsthand experience to help him put his book learning into practice.
Art above Nature
Van Gogh had a feeling of solidarity with labourers and stood in awe of the enthusiasm he perceived them as having for their work; indeed, he considered the portrayal of a peasant figure in action as ‘the very heart of modern art’ (515). It was not his aim, however, to make true-to-life depictions of landscapes and figures; instead, he sought to record them as he saw them. In imitation of the philosopher Francis Bacon and the novelist Emile Zola, he defined a work of art as ‘a corner of nature seen through a temperament’ (361). It was precisely this expression of a personal vision that conveyed reality more strongly and made works of art ‘truer than the literal truth’ (515). The objective was an intense magnification of the artist’s perception, thus allowing him to touch the essence of reality.
After his period of religious fanaticism, Van Gogh’s former belief in the principles of the church made way for a religious concept of nature, a ‘faith in and consciousness of something higher, in short of the something on High’ (333), which was expressed in nature and the cycle of the seasons. In his drawings and paintings he initially sought to capture the ‘sentiment’ and the atmosphere of the landscape. However, after he had declared himself to be a peasant painter like Millet, his principal subjects became the common people who worked the land and communed with nature—an ideal to which he steadfastly adhered. The ultimate challenge for an artist was to rise above the quotidian and arrive at ‘the type distilled from many individuals. That is the highest art, and in that art is sometimes above nature—as, for instance, in Millet’s sower, in which there is more soul than in an ordinary sower in the field’ (298). In Van Gogh’s work the sower would grow into the ultimate symbol of the never-ending cycle of nature and ‘the something on High’.
Test of Workmanship
Van Gogh had a growing conviction that the drawings and paintings he made deserved to be seen as works of art, and that he—‘the little painter’ (schildermenneke), as the people in Nuenen referred to him—was gaining control of the brush. ‘The blank canvas IS AFRAID of the truly passionate painter who dares’, he wrote self-confidently (464). He had left their parents’ house and moved into his studio after an argument with his sister Anna, who, since the sudden death of their father, felt that Vincent should no longer be a burden to their mother. He had little contact with the family in this period, apart from his correspondence with Theo.
Vincent saw many of his works as experiments. He painted dozens of peasants’ heads to get a feel for them, so that he could incorporate them into a real figure painting. This resulted in April/May 1885 in The potato eaters, which in his eyes was the first fully fledged painting he had ever made.
The frankly negative reactions to this great test of his workmanship made Van Gogh realize that in many respects he was in a rut. His work was apparently unsellable, his objectionable behaviour made models unwilling to pose for him, and he missed the necessary contact with the art world. Theo tried to make Vincent understand that his approach was not in step with the ‘modern art’ in Paris. There Impressionism had more or less become mainstream, whereas Van Gogh was still looking back, seeking to become a Barbizon painter après la lettre, as it were.
Van Gogh’s visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in October 1885 was a wake-up call. Up to then he had believed that technique was less important than the message conveyed by an artwork and the sentiment it expressed; the Old Masters, whom he now studied for the first time from the perspective of a painter, taught him how much could be achieved with a resolute brushstroke and an expressive palette. The manner in which an artwork was made could certainly make a difference. Deep down, his ambition remained the same—to convey his vision of reality—but he needed to change his palette and find a manner of painting that would enable him to define that vision more forcefully.
Feeling the need for new stimuli and further study, Van Gogh set out in November 1885 for Antwerp, where he enrolled at the art academy. He also hoped that the city would offer him a larger choice of subject matter and opportunities to sell his work.
The Beginning of Van Gogh’s Modern Artistry: Antwerp and Paris, 1886–1888
Van Gogh made the short trip to Antwerp on 24 November 1885. The bustling, historic harbour city appealed to him immediately. His hunger for art and new ideas, stirred by what he had seen at the Rijksmuseum, drove him to visit every place in the city where the work of old and contemporary artists could be seen: the museums, the churches with their religious paintings by great masters, the viewing days at auction houses, and even an art lottery. He commented, more frequently than before, on the use of colour and technique in the paintings he saw. He looked at Rubens differently now, judging not so much his subject matter and convincing rendering of emotions as his effective use of colour. Van Gogh was now looking at things through the eyes of a painter. The small number of painted portraits that survive from this period—executed in looser brushwork and brighter colours than his Nuenen work—show how eager he was to put his new insights into practice.
He had hoped to make contact with some art dealers, but realized that the few paintings that had been shipped with his things were unlikely to sell. His chances of success were minimal, he now understood, unless he started producing town views and portraits. It was not easy to find affordable models, however. Occasionally he tried to persuade a prostitute or other folk type to pose for him, but they almost always refused. As he himself said, the high cost of painters’ materials and the expense of hiring models were ‘ruining’ him (547).
Lessons at the Academy
The small room Van Gogh rented at 194 Lange Beeldekensstraat provided him with scant space for drawing and painting. In January 1886 he showed some of his recent work to the teachers at the art academy and was admitted for a course of study. There he could paint from live models and, in the evening, draw from plaster casts of antique statues. At drawing clubs for art students, which met late in the evening, he could also draw from the nude. His acquaintance with other students allowed him to sharpen his mind somewhat, but did not give him much satisfaction. In his eyes, most of them had been completely misled by their teachers, who wrongly focused on technique and disapproved of personal expression. At the same time, he was disappointed at the lack of fellowship and verve in the world of artists and art dealers. He actually found the dull artistic climate quite depressing. It strengthened his conviction that solidarity and collaboration were necessary to bring about a ‘renaissance’.
In the meantime his health had deteriorated to an alarming degree. He generally tried to cut costs by spending less on food and personal hygiene, but in Antwerp this caused him to feel ‘literally exhausted and overworked’ (558). Acting on a doctor’s advice, he finally got some rest. He had to be treated for venereal disease and needed a lot of dental work, all of which cost a great deal of money. It is touching to see that Theo, who often opposed Vincent’s uncontrolled spending on materials and models, immediately sent extra money if his brother’s health was at stake. Theo understood such things, because his health was even more fragile than Vincent’s.
At the end of January Van Gogh finished his courses at the academy and took stock of the situation: he was glad he had come to Antwerp, for not only had it freed him from the social control of the village but he had also been able to study a lot of art and draw and paint from models. Most importantly, however, ‘my ideas have changed and been refreshed, and that was actually the goal I had in mind in coming here’ (562). No progress had been made, though, with regard to the ‘frict
ion of ideas’ that he had sought among his peers and the hoped-for sale of his work.
An idea that had been brewing for some time became a serious plan in February: he pressed Theo to let him come to Paris—not in June or July, when Theo’s lease was due to expire and he would be free to look for a more spacious apartment for the two of them, but immediately. Vincent wanted to spend a year honing his skills as a draughtsman. To this end, he had his eye on Cormon’s studio, which was known to be less rigid than more traditional studios, and he wanted to paint copies in the Louvre and the École des Beaux-Arts. Theo tried to persuade him to return to Nuenen until the summer, but Vincent, leaving behind not just his possessions but also his debts, suddenly set out in late February for the capital of France, considered by artists to be the capital of the world.
Paris: Modern Art, Modern Life
Compared with rural Brabant, Antwerp was a large and bustling city, and Paris infinitely more so: busy and chaotic, worldly and picturesque. It had been ten years since Van Gogh’s last visit to the metropolis. Hausmann’s urban expansion, with its wide boulevards and stately apartment buildings, had boosted the city’s allure, whereas the hill of Montmartre—where Theo lived and Vincent, too, now took up residence—had preserved its small-scale, rural character.
Everything that was progressive in art, literature, theatre and music came together in Paris, and the arts were strongly influenced by the most recent scientific discoveries in the fields of physics, medical science, psychiatry, biology, astronomy and spirituality, to name but a few. It was here that Van Gogh first heard the music of Wagner and saw experimental plays at the cafés and cabarets of Montmartre. Modern novels by such writers as Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans and Lev Tolstoy sharpened his view of a society that was changing rapidly in the face of industrialization.
Ever Yours Page 3