Vincent's father, Theodorus van Gogh. Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam.
Vincent's mother, Anna Cornelia van Gogh-Carbentus. Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam.
Vincent at age thirteen, in 1866. Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam.
The house in Groot-Zundert where Vincent was horn. Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam.
Square in Ramsgate. (Drawing from letter 67.) 1876. Pencil, pen and ink on paper. Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam.
Sien with Cigar, Sitting on the Floor by the Stove. 1882. Pencil, black chalk, pen and brush (sepia), white wash heightened with white Ingres paper. 18 × 22 in. (45.4 × 56 cm). Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.
The Potato Eaters. 1885. Oil on canvas. 32¼ × 44⅞ in. (82 × 114 cm). Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam.
Vincent's Bedroom at Arles. 1888. Oil on canvas. 28⅜ × 357/16 in. (72 × 90 cm). Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Vincent's House in Arles, the “Yellow House.” 1888. Oil on canvas. 28⅜ × 36 in. (72 × 91.5 cm). Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam.
Boats on the Beach at Saintes-MArles-de-la-Mer. Arles period, 1888. Oil on canvas. 25 × 31⅞ in. (65 × 81.5 cm). Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam.
The Night Café (Le Café de Nuit). Arles, 1888. Oil on canvas. 28½ × 36¼ in. (72.4 × 92. Yale University Art Gallery. Bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A., 1903.
Harvest at Le Crau. Arles, 1888. Oil on canvas. 28¾ × 36¼ in. (73 × 92 cm). Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam.
Postmanjoseph Roulin. Arles, 1888. Oil on canvas. 32 × 2511/16 in. (81.2 × 65.3 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Robert Treat Paine II, 1935.
Le Père Tanguy. Arles, 1887. Oil on canvas. 36¼ × 29½ in. (92 × 75 cm). Musée Rodin, Paris.
Portrait of Eugène Boch. Arles, 1888. Oil on canvas. 23⅝ × 17¾ in. (60 × 45 cm). Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Portrait of Dr. Paul Gachet. Auvers, 1890. Oil on canvas. 26¾ × 22½ in. (68 × 57 cm). Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Vase with Sunflowers. Arles, 1889. Oil on canvas. 37⅞ × 28¾ in. (95 × 73 cm). Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam.
Wheatfield with a Reaper. St. Rémy, 1889. Oil on canvas. 28¾ × 36¼ in. (73 × 92 cm). Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam.
Lullaby: Madame Augustine Roulin Rocking a Cradle (La Berceuse). Arles, 1889. Oil on canvas. 36½ × 2811/16 in. (92.7 × 72.8 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of John T. Spaulding, 1948.
Road with Cypress and Star. St. Rémy, 1890. Oil on canvas. 36¼ × 28¾ in. (92 × 73 cm). Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.
The Starry Night. St. Rémy, 1889. Oil on canvas. 29 × 36¼ in. (73.7 × 92.1 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest.
Wheatfield with Crows. Auvers, 1890. Oil on canvas. 1913/16 × 40½ in. (50.3 × 103 cm). Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam.
Self-Portrait at the Easel. Paris, 1888. 25⅝ × 20⅛ in. (65 × 50.5 cm). Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam.
I know big long canvases are difficult to sell, but later on people will
see that there is open air in them and that they are good-humored.
—LETTER TO THEO, PARIS, SUMMER 1887
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC WAS Vincent's complete opposite in background and personality. A French aristocrat, he had a penchant for the wild Parisian life and the drinking that went with it. He loved to dress in costume and play practical jokes. His striking posters advertising music halls appeared on street corners and kiosks all around Paris. Born with a congenital weakness that affected his bones, as an adult he stood only four feet, eight inches tall, with short legs, a man's torso, and a huge head. He hobbled about on a hollow cane filled with brandy. The awkward, too-serious Dutchman was attracted to Toulouse-Lautrec, who compensated for his small body with a larger-than-life personality. And Vincent, sensitive to human suffering of all kinds, had deep sympathy for the younger artist's affliction. Toulouse-Lautrec's studio was a meeting place for many well-known artists and critics. Week after week Vincent would visit, standing shyly at the edge of the room, clutching his canvas, waiting for someone to comment. He was always disappointed.
In Paris, as he had in Antwerp, Vincent learned more about painting from observing other painters than from the teachers. He imitated the style of the Impressionist painters he admired, such as Claude Monet. Camille Pissarro, who took on the role of mentor to Vincent and the younger artists, explained how to combine colors with a series of short brushstrokes. From the artist Paul Signac Vincent learned the color theories of the Pointillists, who systematically placed dots of complementary colors such as yellow and blue side by side, instead of mixing them, to make green. But the painstaking effort of painting little dots of color lost its appeal for Vincent, who turned the Pointillist brushstroke into longer dashes.
He and Signac often hiked to the suburbs of Paris to paint. One day, carrying their paints, brushes, easels, and canvases slung over their backs, they spent the day working on the banks of the Seine with a view of Paris in the distance. Vincent divided a large canvas into squares so that he could make more than one study at a time, filling the spaces with boats, houses, and restaurants shaded by oleanders. They worked all day and walked back to Paris at dusk. In his blue plumber's blouse, the sleeves dotted with paint he'd daubed there as a test, Vincent talked nonstop to Signac all the way home. Gesturing this way and that with his newly painted canvas, he doused himself and passersby with streaks of wet paint.
He also took excursions to paint in the nearby town of Asnieres, where Emile Bernard lived with his parents. There he argued with Emile's father, who, Vincent said, should be more supportive of his son's career as an artist, even if he earned no money. The slender, dark-haired Bernard had a streak of originality and daring that Vincent declared should be nourished.
This proved to be an intense learning period for Vincent, who resolved to master new techniques as well as to develop his own style. He had started collecting brightly colored Japanese woodcuts in Antwerp and, now sure of their worth, had amassed more than two hundred to hang on the walls of his and Theo's apartment. He studied their colorful decorative designs, and a number of his paintings at the time incorporated images from the prints. In his portrait of the paint store owner Père Tanguy, Vincent painted him facing the viewer against an imaginary backdrop of Japanese seasonal scenes and costumed figures instead of in a typical Parisian setting.
In Tanguy's little store the young, progressive artists met to talk and buy paints. If they were broke, the old man, a peasant from Brittany, obliged them by trading supplies for their finished artworks, which he put all over the store. Vincent was glad when Tanguy hung a painting of his in the window but complained that Tanguy's “old witch of a wife” tried to prevent her husband from giving Vincent the canvases he couldn't afford to buy. After Vincent's death, Tanguy sold one of his still lifes to a critic for exactly forty-two francs. When the man asked why not forty or fifty, Tanguy replied, “I looked up what poor van Gogh owed me when he died. It was forty-two francs. Now I have got it back.”
Thanks to his visits to Tanguy's shop and the studios, Vincent had become well known in the bohemian artists' community of Paris. His favorite hangout was the Café du Tambourin, where tambourines decorated with pictures and poems by the patrons hung on the walls, and where the tables were shaped like drums. Vincent, who preferred this unpretentious atmosphere to that of the staid Goupil gallery, attempted to arrange small exhibitions there. He did a show of Japanese prints and hung his own paintings on the walls as well However, this venture ended one night after he picked a fight with a waiter who was jealous of Vincent's romance with the owner, Agostina Segatori. The fiery Agostina booted Vincent out. When he returned a few months later, he found she'd gone out of bus
iness, and he had to fight to retrieve his paintings, some of which had been peddled as waste canvas.
He organized another exhibit of 150 works at a restaurant on the avenue de Clichy, where Bernard sold his first painting. Most of the artists, even those who were middle-class and had family support, like Vincent, lived hand to mouth; therefore they appreciated his efforts. Each in their own way tried to break from the Impressionists, to create a “modern” style that went beyond an “impression of the moment.” Vincent referred to these young artists as the painters of the petit boulevard. (The grand boulevard signified the more established Impressionists.) His friends regarded his work with interest, and his opinions were valued in spite of his unruly personality. At last he'd found the camaraderie for which he'd searched vainly in The Hague and Antwerp.
However, Vincent's habit of drinking and carousing all night in the bars of Montmartre began to take its toll. Theo complained in letters home to their sister Wil that Vincent was driving him crazy. His unkempt appearance, untidiness in the apartment, and bullying temper made it impossible for Theo to invite anyone to visit. He left tubes of paint around and used Theo's socks to wipe off a canvas. He marched into Theo's bedroom at all hours with insults and demands. Theo tried to be tolerant, but it was exasperating to live with such an ungrateful brother. Vincent harassed him for money, yet never wanted to earn any on his own. He didn't seem to care whether he sold his paintings, preferring to hoard them or to trade for his friends' pictures. Vincent said his reason for trading was to build a collection that someday might be valuable. If Theo disagreed with any of his whims, Vincent would follow him around the apartment, puffing on his pipe, arguing incessantly.
Theo wrote to their sister Wil, “It is as if he had two persons in him—one marvelously gifted, delicate and tender, and the other egotistical and hardhearted. They present themselves in turn, so that one hears him talk first one way, then in the other, and this always with arguments which are now all for, all against the same point. It is a pity that he is his own enemy, for he makes life hard not only for others but for himself.”
Despite Wil's advice to kick Vincent out of the apartment, Theo put up with him and supported him, a pattern that continued throughout Vincent's life. Fortunately, within a few months the situation improved, and Vincent, who always rose to the occasion when someone needed him, even offered to marry a troublesome woman with whom Theo had become involved.
Theo wrote home, “I have often asked myself if I have been wrong in helping him continually, and often have been on the point of leaving him to his own devices … but in this case I think I must continue in the same way. He is certainly an artist, and if what he makes now is not always beautiful, it will be of use to him later; then his work will perhaps be sublime.”
As manager of the smaller Goupil's branch that exhibited nineteenth-century paintings, Theo sold mostly works by established artists. Only a few canvases by the Impressionists passed through his hands in the first year of Vincent's stay in Paris. With his pale blond hair and melancholy face, the gentle, mild-mannered Theo wasn't adventurous, but he had a great eye for art. He managed to buy very cheaply the work of young artists he admired, and stacked the canvases in a storeroom above the shop. With Vincent's encouragement, Theo gradually came into his own as a dealer of new art. When Goupil mounted a show of works by Claude Monet, he sold ten landscapes, and later he sold some paintings by Paul Gauguin. Vincent, in his modest way, took no credit. He wrote to their sister Wil, “What I wanted to make you understand is this, that it is rather important that Theo has succeeded in inducing the business he manages to have a permanent exhibition of the Impressionists now.” Yet Theo's debt to Vincent is clear. After his brother moved to Arles, Theo wrote to him, “You may do something for me if you like—that is go on as in the past, creating a circle of artists and friends for us, and which you have really more or less created since you came to France.”
At thirty-five, Vincent realized that devoting his life to painting would require a personal sacrifice. Once he had hoped for a family; now he was losing the desire for marriage and blamed it on “this rotten painting.” Theo, he said, should be the one to marry. That would please their mother as well as help preserve Theo's health.
By the end of his second year in Paris, Vincent had come to loathe the city he'd once so eagerly embraced. Always a man of extremes, he now saw disease and failure everywhere he turned. The art dealers were interested only in money, he thought, and he was sick of his fellow artists, with their petty fights and competition. “I will take myself somewhere down south, to get away from the sight of so many painters who disgust me as men,” he told Theo.
Most of all he disgusted himself. Unhealthy from drink and lack of sleep, he longed for a calmer life in which to produce his art. He made up his mind to go south, “to look at nature from a brighter sky.” Vincent, who theorized that a new art could be forged there, regaled Bernard with his grand scheme to start an artists' commune in the south of France.
He asked Bernard to come over to redo the apartment in such a way that Theo would feel less lonely when he was gone. They decorated the walls with fresh Japanese prints and set up an easel with one of Vincent's paintings. Bernard embraced his friend and promised to come to Arles to help build their colony of the future. Then, as a last nod to the Paris art world, Vincent and his brother visited the studio of the celebrated Pointillist painter Georges Seurat on their way to the train station. In Provence, Vincent fantasized, the weather would be warm, the countryside would look just like Japan, and his mental and physical health would improve. These hopes were short-lived, but he was about to achieve his dream of becoming a great artist.
I want to produce, to produce a lot and with a consuming drive.
—LETTER TO THEO, SEPTEMBER 1888
VINCENT'S FIRST VIEW of Arles was cold, deep snow. After a fifteen-hour train journey, he lugged his heavy baggage through the thick white drifts into the town, down an avenue of plane trees, through red stone towers, to the Hôtel Carrel, where he rented a room for five francs a night—too much money, in his opinion, and no warmth anywhere.
He came prepared for sunshine and friendly natives, but he had trouble settling in. His letters were full of complaints. The weather was terrible. Everything cost too much. He couldn't find decent food or good blue paint or correct information on the price of stamps. In addition, the townspeople, who spoke in their own peculiar dialect, didn't understand the Dutchman's French. “You have no idea of the slackness and the nonchalance of the people here,” he wrote to Bernard. At first he agreed with the guidebooks that the women of Arles were beautiful, only to revise his opinion later, “They are, no question about it, really charming, but no longer what they must have been … for they are in their decadence.” As for Arles, “It is a filthy town this, with old streets,”
Arles had its roots in ancient times, with a still-standing Roman amphitheater and a magnificent medieval church. These were classic subjects for some artists, but Vincent thought of himself as modern, a man of his own time. Old buildings and ruins held no interest. Instead he painted a street scene of a butcher shop seen from a window, a landscape of the snowy fields, and a portrait of an old woman in the costume of the region.
The mistral, a seasonal wind that swept down the Rhone valley, made painting outside a struggle. Some claimed that a few days spent in the relentless sixty-mile-an-hour wind was an excuse for murder. To Vincent, the mistral was an unexpected handicap that “got on one's nerves badly.” On days when he felt strong enough, he'd set up his canvas on an easel fastened into the ground with pegs. When the gales were too fierce for that, he laid the canvas flat on the ground and painted on his knees. Perhaps one of his first scenes, a snowy field painted in the short brushstrokes and light palette of the Impressionists, was done quickly because he was uncomfortable out in the cold. But he did describe the picture as “just like the winter landscapes that the Japanese have painted.”
As Theo sent him mon
ey every month, Vincent felt obliged to let Theo know how hard he was working, writing long letters about his progress. “At present I feel pretty bad some days, but I don't worry about it in the least, as it is nothing but a reaction to last winter, which was out of the ordinary.… I must reach a point where my pictures will cover my expenses.”
The letters chronicle the steps he took in organizing his compositions (possibly his way of defending his unconventional style) and also trace his mood swings. To Bernard, who was painting with Gauguin and other artists in Brittany, he wrote his most cheerful letters, to show how well he was doing. To Theo he tended to pour out his fears and insecurities. With the first signs of spring, his mood lightened and his letters became enthusiastic about his move to Arles and the abundance of subjects to paint. The wide plains and canals reminded him of Dutch scenery. He delighted in the women's multicolored clothes with yellow, green, and red stripes. Arles suddenly seemed as gay as Holland was gloomy.
In April, when the trees blossomed, he wrote to Bernard, “At the moment I am absorbed in the blooming fruit trees, pink peach trees, yellow-white pear trees. My brushstroke has no system at all. I hit the canvas with irregular touches of the brush, which I leave as they are. Patches of thickly laid on color, spots of canvas left uncovered, here and there portions that are left absolutely unfinished, repetitions, savageries; in short I'm inclined to think that the result is so disquieting and irritating as to be a godsend to those who have fixed preconceived notions about technique.”
Vincent Van Gogh Page 5