He applied to the School of Fine Arts but didn't get the necessary recommendation from the mayor. He also expected that his extended family would be helpful with introductions that might lead to work, perhaps as a draftsman, but there, too, he ran out of luck. His uncles kept their distance. If they knew that people gossiped about Vincent's poverty, it didn't bother them.
Vincent struggled on, trying to live on a pittance from his parents and Theo and spending most of it on art supplies. He survived on coffee, bread, and roasted chestnuts purchased from a street vendor—particularly at the end of the month, before his allowance arrived. Staying in town meant the op-portunity to learn from established artists, but eventually Vincent gave in and did what so many others do when they haven't any money. He went home.
I try to put the same sentiment into the landscape
as I put into the figure.
—LETTER TO THEO, OCTOBER 1881
THE LARGE, SOLID PARSONAGE at Etten offered the refuge Vincent needed after his hard years in the Borinage. Here he could concentrate on art without worrying about food or a roof over his head. He labored over his drawing, but the stiff figures he produced didn't look too promising. His long-suffering parents made him comfortable and hoped for the best.
Vincent proposed to make a portfolio of “Brabant types”—drawings of peasant figures, faces, and occupations character-istic of the region. Other peasant painters showed their humble subjects at rest or prayer, but Vincent drew men and women working. At first the local gardener, the well digger, and the plowman wanted to wear their Sunday clothes to pose for the artist. It took some persuading on Vincent's part before they consented to be drawn laboring, dressed in everyday clothes and heavy wooden shoes.
No one could accuse Vincent of laziness now. Often the family came downstairs to breakfast to find he had worked through the night. His mother's repeated calls to meals met with an impatient “in a minute” that stretched into hours. Roughly dressed, loaded down with a folding camp stool, easel, and drawing equipment, he became a familiar figure around the village of Etten. The local farmers respected the “queer little fellow.” Those who posed for him received drawings in return, to which they paid their highest compliment—“accurate as a photograph.” While his parents' friends found him rude, the workingmen of the parish felt he “wasn't the least bit proud,” and he was a regular visitor in the houses of the poor, to whom he was as generous as his own poverty enabled him to be.
Mr. and Mrs. van Gogh, reassured that Vincent's skill was improving, wrote optimistic if still worried notes to Theo, who, as usual, heard from all sides of the family. Things might have gone on peaceably for some time if Vincent's newly widowed cousin Kee Vos-Stricker had not arrived to stay at the parsonage with her eight-year-old son. (Her mother and Mrs. van Gogh were sisters.)
Vincent had admired the slightly older Kee and her husband when he lived in Amsterdam, studying for theological school exams. Her father, the distinguished Reverend Mr. Strieker, had been his mentor. Now he spent days walking and talking with Kee and went out of his way to pay attention to her child. She assumed his kindness was to the fatherless boy. Instead he declared his undying love for her. Aghast, Kee cried, “No, never never,” packed her bags, and fled to her parents' home in Amsterdam, where Vincent peppered her with letters.
Far from sympathizing with their son, Mr. and Mrs. van Gogh scolded him, claiming that Vincent's persistent letters and his refusal to accept Kee's rejections were causing trouble in the family. They accused him of being “indelicate” and “crazy” and of “breaking family ties.” How could Vincent, who didn't support himself, take care of a wife and a child?
That, Vincent guessed, was the key opposition to his suit—money. But should he, a man gripped by passion, worry about such a detail? His parents grew so exasperated that they threatened to throw him out of the house. Vincent declined to go, claiming it would block his artistic progress. He begged Theo for train fare to Amsterdam so that he could pursue Kee in person. Theo sent it.
Vincent knocked on the Strickers' door at dinnertime, when he knew the family would be at home. Uncle Strieker let him in but told him that Kee had left the house as soon as he entered it. He admonished Vincent to stop writing to her. Not one to give up so easily, Vincent settled down to plead his case with her elderly parents, as if the strength of his feelings alone would change Kee's mind. As a last resort, he dramatically put his hand in the flame of an oil lamp and said, “Let me see her for as long as I can keep my hand in the flame.”
Mr. Strieker blew the flame out. “You will not see her!”
While he stayed in Amsterdam, waiting for a chance to talk to Kee, Vincent didn't lose sight of his artistic goals. The critically and financially successful painter Anton Mauve, his cousin by marriage, lived a short train ride away in The Hague, and Vincent went to visit. Mauve looked at Vincent's latest drawing and said, “I always thought you rather dull but now I see it isn't true,” which Vincent took as high praise. He promised that when Vincent was ready he would help him.
After three days Vincent gave up the struggle with Kee's family and returned to the parsonage at Etten. He never saw Kee again. Bitterly he blamed his parents for his unhappiness, and on Christmas Day the tensions between father and son exploded. The immediate cause was Vincent's refusal to go to church. When his father insisted, Vincent wrathfully denounced the hypocrisy of organized religion. One angry word led to another, and Mr. van Gogh, who could be as pigheaded as his infuriating son, demanded he leave the house “immediately.” This time Vincent went, abandoning his dream of finishing the Brabant portfolio.
With no other place to go, he turned up, a few months earlier than expected, on Mauve's doorstep. The worldly artist advised the scruffy-looking Vincent to dress a little better so that he could go out socially and meet people who would be useful to him. Then he generously lent him enough money to set up a modest studio.
Vincent couldn't afford to live in one of The Hague's imposing neighborhoods dotted with parks and lakes. Instead he rented a single room with an alcove in a ramshackle building on a cinder path. The room had a view of the railroad sheds. Mauve's loan covered the purchase of a sturdy table and a bed. Vincent decorated the walls with a mixture of his own drawings and illustrations from magazines and even purchased a few bulbs in pots. Proudly he detailed his housekeeping to Theo, inviting him to visit anytime.
Mauve, one of the leaders of the Hague school of artists, was a prickly character who refused to take students, but he consented to teach Vincent, perhaps partly because his wife, Jet, was the niece of Vincent's mother Vincent settled in to learn as much as possible, and he rapidly progressed under Mauve's guidance.
Art was the one area in which Vincent tried to control his temper. Not that he didn't have his moments. Mauve started him drawing in charcoal and crayon, and Vincent admitted to Theo that he had become so impatient, he'd stamped on the charcoal stick. After his tantrum was over, he'd picked up the stick, determined to master the technique: “If it were so easy, there would be no fun in it.”
At Goupil in Paris, Theo had received a promotion and a raise, so he gave his brother a small but regular allowance, which Vincent tended to spend immediately. To help out, Theo arranged with Mr. Tersteeg, the head of Goupil in The Hague, to lend him money from time to time. Vincent was outraged to find that the loan came with a stern lecture. Ter-steeg held firm opinions, and as a friend of the family, he be-lieved his duty lay in reprimanding their black sheep. “You are no artist. You started too late. You should earn your own living. You failed before and you'll fail again.” Vincent raged that he'd rather go without dinner than ever ask anything of Tersteeg again.
Shortly after this meeting, Vincent's uncle Cor, one of the art dealer uncles, stopped by the studio to suggest it was time that Vincent “earned his bread.” Uncle Cor looked at his nephew's recent sketches and, to Vincent's amazed pleasure, bought three views of The Hague's historic district as part of a twelve-drawing order.
Vincent set the price at two and a half guilders each and excitedly promised Theo that with a few more customers like this, he'd be able to support himself. Unfortunately the drawings of the gasworks and the iron foundry Vincent soon produced were not the pretty trifles Uncle Cor had in mind. His gallery's customers wanted picturesque images as souvenirs—not scenes of the city's grungy industrial outskirts. Uncle Cor tried again with a very specific order, but Vincent resisted painting lightweight tableaus, claiming such drawings hurt his progress as an artist. He gave his uncle renderings of a fish-drying barn and a carpenter's yard and laundry. Uncle Cor pronounced them unsalable and offered him no more assignments.
All Vincent's relationships in The Hague were becoming strained. Cor had written him off. Tersteeg, aggressively critical, called his work charmless. Even Mauve, who had taught him many important things and introduced him to watercolor technique, now seemed unreasonable. He instructed Vincent to practice drawing the human figure from plaster casts of Greek and Roman statues, a task Vincent loathed. Vincent said, “I kept quiet, but when I got home I was so angry that I threw those poor plaster casts into a coal bin, and they were smashed to pieces. And I thought, I will draw from those casts only when they become whole and white again and when there are no more hands and feet of living beings to draw from.” On hearing this, Mauve, who also had a hot temper, told Vincent to stay away for two months.
After the two months passed, Vincent tracked Mauve down and asked him to visit. Mauve refused. “I will certainly not come to see you, that's all over.” He then said, “You have a vicious character.”
Vincent wrote asking Theo if he had any insight into why every hand was against him. In the next sentence he admitted the truth. He was living with a woman named Christine Hoornik (also called Sien). Until he met her she had added to the tiny income she earned from sewing and taking in laundry by working as a prostitute. When he first picked her up, she was sick and pregnant. He saw her as a wounded dove, but to those who viewed her without Vincent's compassion, she was a tough, uneducated woman of the streets, with a face scarred by smallpox, a grating voice, a five-year-old daughter, and a grasping family.
Vincent had a dozen deeply human reasons to involve himself with someone his middle-class world found depraved. The biggest one seems to have been his need to love and be loved after his shattering rejection by Kee. Sien, sick and vulnerable, filled a terrible, lonely space in his life. True, she had a bad temper, but he said it helped her understand his own outbursts. He yearned to save her. “Am I free to marry—yes or no? Am I free to put on a workman's clothes and live like a workman—yes or no? Whom am I responsible to? Who will try to force me?”
He refused to recognize that his association with Sien had created ill will in two valuable former supporters—Tersteeg and Mauve—and he swore that Sien helped him in his work by cleaning his studio and modeling for him.
Theo was not overjoyed at Vincent's news, but he did not cut off his support. However, he warned his brother that when their parents heard of Vincent's affair, they might once more try to have him confined to a madhouse. Who but an insane person could behave so disgracefully? Vincent sturdily resisted. It would not be so easy to have him declared incompetent.
Sien brought her infant son home from the hospital to a new studio—all arranged at Theo's expense. Vincent had labored to build partitions and hang curtains, making a safe nest for what he referred to as his “little family.” Elated at the domestic reality of a cradle with a baby in it, he settled in to work harder than ever. Sien and her two children at least gave him the illusion of the family life he longed for, and he responded with many sensitive drawings that reflected his at-tachment. “Who am I in most people's eyes? A nonentity, or an eccentric and disagreeable man—in short the lowest of the low.… I want to progress so far that people will say of my work, He feels deeply, he feels tenderly—not withstanding my so-called roughness, perhaps even because of it.”
The men and women who lived in the local poorhouse also caught his artistic attention. Most were old, with no families to take care of them. Vincent paid some to pose for a group of drawings he called “Heads of the People,” after an English series he admired. Believing as he did in the power of art to both uplift and console, he wanted the prints to be sold cheaply to decorate workingmen's homes. Like the rest of Vincent's proposals for making money, this didn't happen, but he did make some lithographs and was proud when the printer's helpers asked for copies to hang on their walls.
Since he first picked up a pencil in the Borinage, he had focused on drawing, persuaded that it was the foundation of everything. Now, after several years of strenuous effort, he felt the time had come to start painting, and his letters gloried in his newfound pleasure. He set to work learning theories of color with the same intensity he had spent on drawing.
Vincent's painting technique was largely self-taught, the result of trial and error, but he was not a naive painter. One day as he was working on a painting in an autumn forest, he discovered that if he squeezed the paint directly from the tube onto the canvas, the thick paint made the trees look rooted in nature: “I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me, and that I have put it down in shorthand.”
In a letter Vincent wrote in August 1883, he added a startling postscript. He said that given his health, his body should hold up for another six to ten years, during which he hoped to accomplish something “full of heart and love.” He didn't expect to live longer.
Sien hardly was mentioned. Vincent reported that his life with her was not “moonlight and roses but something prosaic like a Monday morning.” Now that her baby had been born and her health was coming back, Sien was less “a tame dove” and more a difficult woman who didn't find it easy, or worthwhile, to change her ways. What Theo sent barely supported four people, especially when one of them had a constant need for expensive art supplies. Sien's family urged a return to prostitution, where she could earn more than she did posing for a poor artist.
In the end, the pressures on them were too strong. Vincent and Sien sadly agreed to part. She said she planned to work as a laundress, doing other people's washing and ironing. He didn't believe she would remain virtuous, but defended her to his family, saying, “She has never seen what is good so how can she be good.” He gave Sien what he could—a tender farewell and a piece of his best canvas to make clothes for the children. With that he set out on a new artistic journey.
His destination was Drenthe, a flat, windswept province in the north of Holland. It had been recommended by a friend as a place where the scenery inspired painters. Blank spaces on the map, no towns for miles, and notations indicating peat fields lured Vincent with the promise of sweeping landscapes and big, exciting skies.
Visually inspiring as Drenthe might be in autumn, it also was wet, bleak, and windy. The other artists who painted there had gone home at summer's end, leaving Vincent in the company of farmers and sheep. He couldn't find art supplies and had to order them from The Hague. As fall gave way to winter, he grew lonelier
Most days it was too cold to paint outdoors and too cramped to paint indoors. Restless, with nothing to do except write long letters to Theo about art and the scenery, Vincent loaded up his paints, luggage, and all the canvases he could carry. Then he hoisted his bundles and walked to the train station—six hours across a snowy heath. With some idea of making a visit to his parents before starting out again, he went to their new parsonage in Nuenen, another small town in Brabant. His visit would last two years.
I am getting to be like a dog, I feel that the future will
probably make me more ugly and rough, and I
foresee that “a certain poverty” will be my
fate, but, but, I shall be a painter.
—LETTER TO THEO, DECEMBER 1883
VINCENT CAME HOME ready to give his parents another chance to do the right thing. If only his father would apologize for throwing him out of the house, they could all settle down to the important bu
siness of Vincent's becoming an artist. Mr. van Gogh didn't see it that way. He and Vincent's mother welcomed their thirty-year-old problem child, but they were ambivalent at the prospect of having him back in the nest. After a few days Vincent wrote humorously yet bitterly to Theo, comparing himself to a stray dog.
Dear brother,
I feel what Father and Mother think of me instinctively (I do not say intelligently).
They feel the same dread of taking me in the house as they would about taking in a big rough dog. He would run into the room with wet paws—and he is so rough. He will be in everybody's way. And he barks so loud. In short he is a foul beast.
Vincent's strong sense of injustice blinded him to his parents' understandable worries. In a small, rural nineteenth-century town such as Nuenen, the arrival of the new pastor's nonchurchgoing son, a son who dressed like a tramp and painted outdoors in all weather, gave Mr, van Gogh's parishioners plenty of juicy gossip to discuss over dinner. If Vincent had ever possessed any social skills, he no longer bothered to use them. When visitors came at the family mealtime, he left the table and ate his bread in a corner, scowling over a painting in progress. People who peered curiously over his shoulder while he painted outdoors were ordered to go away.
There were a few tense weeks, but in the end his parents' kindheartedness won out. They cared about their complicated boy. After some negotiation, they gave him the use of the laundry room for a studio and fixed it up to be as comfortable as a small room located between the sewer and the coal storage pit could be. Mr. van Gogh wrote to Theo that “with real courage we undertake this new experiment and we intend to leave him perfectly free in his peculiarities of dress etc. The people here have seen him anyhow, and though it is a pity he is so reserved we cannot change the fact of his being eccentric.”
Vincent Van Gogh Page 3