Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  The Provily School commanded the narrow street that ran between the town hall and the Protestant church in Zevenbergen. The Zandweg was lined with mansions far finer than anything in Zundert, but none finer than number A40. Elaborate stained-glass panels crowned the front door and the lofty first-floor windows. Stone—a rare building material in Zundert—studded the brick façade: stone quoins, stone pilasters, stone garlands, stone fruit, a stone balcony. Six stone lion’s heads peered down from a deep stone cornice. When Anna and Dorus left their son in the school’s grand parlor, they surely believed they were setting him on the right path at last.

  Inside Vincent’s palatial new home, a large staff tended to the needs of a relative handful of students: twenty-one boys and thirteen girls, sons and daughters of prominent Protestants from throughout Brabant—high government officials, gentlemen farmers, and prosperous local merchants and mill owners. In addition to the sixty-four-year-old founder, Jan Provily, his wife Christina, and his son Pieter, the faculty included two head teachers, four assistant teachers, and a governess imported from London. The school offered a formidable array of courses at both primary and secondary levels. All of this came at a price, of course. As a clergyman, Dorus may have received special consideration, but every guilder spent on Vincent’s tuition represented a sacrifice for a parson with a growing family and an impoverished congregation.

  But Vincent felt only abandonment. From the moment his parents drove away in their carriage, loneliness overwhelmed him. For the rest of his life, he would return to the memory of their good-bye at the school door as an emotional touchstone—a paradigm of tearful leave-taking. “I stood on the steps before Mr. Provily’s school,” he wrote Theo twelve years later. “One could see the little yellow carriage far down the road—wet with rain and with spare trees on either side—running through the meadows.” At the time, however, no sentimental gloss could distract him from the obvious conclusion. After eleven years of relentless exhortations to family unity, he had been cast off the island parsonage, set adrift. Years later, he would compare his plight in Zevenbergen to that of the forsaken Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, crying out for his father to rescue him.

  The next two years at the Provily School only confirmed his darkest fears. Nothing could have been more paralyzing for a sensitive boy with habits of sullenness in public and temperament in private than the emotional exposure of boarding school. It didn’t help that Vincent, at eleven, was the youngest student in the school. As the little redheaded newcomer with a country accent, short temper, and strange manners, Vincent withdrew deeper into his shell of preadolescent melancholy. At the end of his life, he compared his days at the Provily School to being locked in an insane asylum: “I feel every bit as out of place now,” he wrote from the asylum at Saint-Rémy, “as I did when I was a twelve-year-old boy at boarding school.”

  Vincent waged a fierce campaign—as he would so often in the future—to reverse his exile. Within a few weeks, Dorus returned to the school to console and calm his unhappy son. “I flung my arms around Father’s neck,” Vincent later wrote of their tearful reunion. “It was a moment in which we both felt we had a Father in heaven.” But Dorus did not take his son back to Zundert with him. Vincent had to wait until Christmas to see his family again. His jubilation at returning to the parsonage for the holidays was recalled vividly by his sister Lies more than a decade later. “Do you remember how Vincent came home from Zevenbergen?” she wrote Theo in 1875. “What beautiful days those were.… we never thereafter had so much fun or spent such happy days together.”

  But eventually Vincent was forced to return to the stone lions on the Zandweg. Over the next two years, Dorus paid other visits and Vincent made the round-trip to Zundert for other family celebrations. Finally, in the summer of 1866, responding to what must have been a hail of homesick letters into which Vincent poured all his manic energy and injured loneliness (setting a pattern for the future), his parents relented. He could leave his palatial prison in Zevenbergen at last.

  But not to come home.

  IT IS NOT CLEAR why Anna and Dorus decided to move their forlorn son from the Provily School to the Rijksschool Willem II in Tilburg, even farther from home. As in Zevenbergen, Dorus probably found his way to the Tilburg School through family connections. Money appears to have been a factor as well. Unlike Provily’s, Tilburg enjoyed the privileges of a Hogere Burgerschool (Higher Bourgeois School)—HBS for short—a state-supported school created under the mandate of a new law that encouraged public education as a way of spreading secular, bourgeois values.

  Despite being cheaper, the Tilburg School was even more impressive than Mr. Provily’s mansion on the Zandweg. In 1864, the Dutch king had donated the royal palace and gardens in the town center for use as a secondary school. The building itself was the stuff of schoolboy nightmares. A strange, squat, forbidding structure with corner towers and crenellated ramparts, it looked more like a prison than a palace. As a new HBS school, Tilburg had attracted a large and distinguished faculty. Because most members taught on a part-time basis, the curriculum offered a rich variety of courses—everything from astronomy to zoology—and drew on the talents of scholars and pedagogues from as far away as Leiden, Utrecht, and Amsterdam.

  But all such distinctions were lost on Vincent. Zevenbergen or Tilburg, both were just extensions of his exile. If anything, he withdrew further into his protective shell and redirected the fire of bitterness into his schoolwork (as he would later direct it into his art). Despite his protest that he “learned absolutely nothing” at Provily’s, he was admitted to Tilburg’s first class without having to attend the preparatory program required of most applicants. Once classes began on September 3, 1866, the school’s intensive curriculum absorbed all of his fanatic energy with long hours of instruction in Dutch, German, English, French, algebra, history, geography, botany, zoology, geometry, and gymnastics. The last, taught by an infantry sergeant, included close-order drill and “instruction in the use of arms.” But even as he marched on the Willemsplein in front of the castellated school shouldering his state-supplied cadet gun, he dreamed about the Grote Beek, heath bugs, and larks’ nests hidden in the rye.

  All of the Tilburg experience seems to have passed the same way: in a haze of mental absenteeism. In a lifetime of correspondence, he never once mentioned his time there. While most of his fellows struggled with the heavy course load, Vincent filled his lonely hours by memorizing great swaths of French, English, and German poetry. By July 1867, he had compiled the fourth-best record of any of his classmates, entitling him to advance to the next level (the second of five). Still, none of Vincent’s course work, as successful as it was, seems to have interrupted his inner drama.

  Not even art class.

  The class’s charismatic teacher, Constantin Huysmans, was the brightest star on the Tilburg faculty. The preeminent art pedagogue in Holland, Huysmans had virtually written the book on art education, championing the central role of drawing in preparing young people for the challenges of the new, industrial era. Fifty-five years old when he began teaching at Tilburg, Huysmans had been leading the fight for more and better art instruction in schools since long before Vincent’s birth. What had started out as a simple drawing manual in 1840 had grown into a full-fledged popular movement. Huysmans argued that art education held the key to a new Dutch golden age: economic success through better design. A student who learned to draw well would not just acquire “a quick and sure eye,” he promised, but also develop a mind “accustomed to steady attention” and alert to “impressions of beauty.”

  The classroom that Vincent entered for the first time in the fall of 1866 reflected Huysmans’s lifetime of thinking about art education. Each student was assigned his own bench and drawing board grouped around a large table in the center of the room where the “model” of the day was displayed—a stuffed bird or squirrel, a plaster arm or foot. Huysmans moved around the room, giving each student, in turn, an exclusive share of his attention—a r
adical new way of teaching in an educational system just emerging from its dreary, lectern-dominated past. “The teacher himself must be the living method,” Huysmans declared, “adapting himself to the subject and especially to the greater or lesser capacity of the pupil.” Students hailed him as “stimulating” and “inspiring.”

  In his classroom, as in his writings, Huysmans made a galvanizing case for a new way of thinking about art—a new way of looking at it as well as creating it. He rejected the “tricks and techniques” that had been the staple of art schools for so long and urged his students instead to seek “power of expression.” As a champion of practical art, he opened their eyes to the “art” in commonplace images such as botanical illustrations and atlases. He airily eschewed technical precision and encouraged his students to “sketch the impression the object makes rather than the object itself.” In drawing a wall, he said, “the artist who must copy every small stone and each stroke of whitewash has missed his calling: he should have become a bricklayer.”

  Given his own love of landscape drawing, Huysmans inevitably led his students outside to sketch what he called “the source of all beauty, God’s glorious nature.” He was a spirited advocate of perspective, too. The first and foremost aim of art education, he said, was to “foster a keen power of observation.” And nothing was more crucial to achieving that aim—to seeing—than perspective. Studying other works of art was another pillar of Huysmans’s method. He lavished class time on a huge collection of reproductions that he used to illustrate his classroom lessons. He encouraged students to visit museums and exhibitions at every opportunity and develop their own “artistic sense.” Without that sense, he argued, “one cannot bring forth anything beautiful or exalted.”

  Huysmans made himself readily available to students at his house not far from the school, which was filled with a vast collection of books and periodicals as well as his own paintings—primarily dark landscapes of the Brabant countryside and tenebrous farmhouse interiors. An aging, gregarious bachelor, Huysmans could easily be persuaded to reminisce about his youth as a landscape painter in Paris, about his successes at the Salon, his friendships with prominent artists, and his sojourn in southern France.

  All this and more was available to any inquisitive student. But none of it mattered to Vincent. He never mentioned Huysmans or his class again. Years later, he complained bitterly: “If there had been someone then to tell me what perspective was, how much misery I should have been spared.” Even when he set out to list his early artistic efforts, neither Huysmans’s class nor any of the work he did there rated a mention.

  With his extraordinary powers of retention, he no doubt tucked away some of what he heard and saw to be retrieved years later, unconsciously: the joy of cataloguing reproductions; the overlooked art of everyday imagery; the dark Brabant landscapes and interiors; the insistence that art have a practical value; the belief that expressiveness mattered more than technical skill; the conviction that true art, like any other craft, could be achieved by diligent application as well as by inspiration or gift. All of these would surface, or resurface, later in Vincent’s life. But only after a sleep of almost two decades.

  Vincent’s few classmates (down to nine his second year) may have fitted Anna’s ideal of “right company,” but none was likely to befriend the strange country boy who kept to himself so much. All but one had grown up in the Tilburg area; all still lived with their families. When the last school bell rang, only Vincent trudged off through snow or rain to a home that wasn’t his own. The family that boarded him, the Hannicks, treated him as well as could be expected of a couple in their late fifties with a sulky thirteen-year-old boy thrust upon them. Vincent never mentioned them again.

  Cut off from all emotional support, his spirits sank deeper and deeper into contrary feelings of homesickness and resentment. The twenty miles between Tilburg and Zundert—twice as far as Zevenbergen—discouraged both parental visits and trips home. When he arrived at the train station in Breda and the yellow carriage failed to appear—as it sometimes did—he had to walk the rest of the way to the parsonage, a trek of more than three hours. Even during his rare vacations, his siblings saw less and less of him as estrangement propelled him out the parsonage garden gate, or deep into a book.

  Yet every time he returned to school, the homesickness swept over him again; the exile resumed. It was a bitter, hardening cycle that the visits home, with their inevitable leave-takings, only made worse. In a school photograph taken about this time, Vincent sits in the front row, his arms and legs crossed tightly, his shoulders hunched, his body bent forward as if folding in on itself. A military cap shields his lap. Other students relax, stretch out, spread their legs, lean back, look distractedly to the side. But not Vincent. With his drooping cheeks and perpetual pout, he hunkers within himself and glumly peers into the camera as if spying the world from a hidden, solitary redoubt.

  VINCENT VAN GOGH ON THE STEPS OF THE TILBURG SCHOOL (Illustration credit 3.3)

  In March 1868, only weeks before his fifteenth birthday, and two months before the end of term, Vincent walked out of the Tilburg School.

  He may have walked all the way to Zundert—seven hours—instead of taking the train partway. If so, it would be the first of many long, lonely, self-punishing walks that marked turning points in his life. What welcome he received when he showed up at the parsonage door, bags in hand, is not recorded. He had no convincing explanation to give his parents. No matter how much they bewailed the money already wasted on his education—the fees, the board, the travel—and the shame of such failure and waste in the eyes of others, Vincent remained unmoved. He had what he wanted. He was home.

  FOR THE NEXT sixteen months, Vincent clung to his recovered life in the island parsonage, a reparative fantasy enhanced by a new baby brother in the house, one-year-old Cor. Defying the guilt that accumulated with each passing month of idleness, he resisted all suggestions for his future, preferring to spend his days at the Grote Beek, on the heath, and in his attic sanctuary. His rich uncle, an art dealer in The Hague, probably offered him a job. If he did, Vincent refused it, preferring his solitary pursuits.

  He must have known that questions about his future, or the self-reproach they undoubtedly aroused, could not be put off forever. No matter how determinedly he trekked through the heath or lost himself in a book, or mounted his collections, sooner or later he would have to confront his family’s frustrated expectations. Especially his father’s.

  CHAPTER 4

  God and Money

  EVERY SUNDAY, THE VAN GOGH FAMILY, DRESSED IN BLACK, WALKED solemnly from the Zundert parsonage to the nearby church. There they took their place in a special pew at the front of the tall, spare little sanctuary. From his vantage point at the foot of the pulpit, Vincent could watch the ceremony unfold. The reedy chords of a harmonium summoned the forty or fifty worshippers to their feet. The music called forth the deacons, in their long dark coats and grim faces, measuring their steps as they came. Finally, the pastor emerged into view.

  He was a short, slight man; hardly remarkable in most crowds. But here, the ceremony singled him out. The light reflected off his silver-sandy hair. His face shone against his full black robes, the inverted V of his starched collar singling him out like an arrow.

  Then he ascended into the pulpit.

  Thrust high into the air and overhung by a heavily carved sounding board, its tall parapets enclosing barely enough room for one man, the pulpit looked like a richly appointed box, just opening up to reveal its precious contents. Every Sunday, Dorus van Gogh ceremoniously climbed the steep stairs to the sacred enclosure and stepped inside. Vincent sat so close that he had to crane his neck to watch his father’s ascent.

  From this lofty position, Dorus directed the service: announcing each hymn, summoning music with a wave of his hand, leading the congregation in prayer and psalm. In his sermons—the soul of the service—he used High Dutch, a language rarely heard in the provincial depths of Brabant. I
f he followed the homiletic conventions of the era, the little church must have reverberated with the histrionic extremes of Victorian rhetoric: the ringing declamations, the exaggerated variations in speed and volume, the melodramatic cadences, the accelerating repetitions, the thundering climaxes. His body, too, spoke in broad, larger-than-life gestures: every sweep of his arm or thrust of his finger dramatically elaborated by his billowing sleeves.

  Dorus van Gogh was not only God’s interlocutor to the Protestants of Zundert, he was their leader. Unlike parsons in other parts of the country, Dorus acted as both spiritual and temporal shepherd to his tiny band of Protestant pioneers in their outpost on the heath. Cut off from all but essential contact with the Catholic community around them, congregation members used the parsonage as both spiritual center and social club, filling the Van Goghs’ front room almost every day of the week with readings, classes, or informal visits.

  THEODORUS (DORUS) VAN GOGH (Illustration credit 4.1)

  Dorus acted not only as the leader of his own community but also as ambassador to the larger Catholic community. His mission there was not to convert the papists of Zundert, but to deny them hegemony in this disputed region. At all public celebrations, Vincent would have seen his father among the town notables gathered on the dais, standing next to elected officials, as well as his Catholic counterpart. In public fund-raising drives, like a major one for flood victims, Dorus always took a conspicuous leading role, matching the mayor’s contributions guilder for guilder. These public acts, like his daily walks through town in his top hat with his family in tow, served notice to the Catholics of Zundert that the Protestants were there to stay.