Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  The ministry was by no means an obvious choice. Like his brother Cent, Dorus enjoyed the temporal pleasures that Paul had warned the Galatians against. Quoting a favorite poet, Dorus later referred to his youth in unmistakably lusty terms, comparing it to “a wheat field, delightful and beautiful for the eyes; howling, churning, and swelling in the early morning wind.” By his own admission, his student years were filled with “intimate interactions” and “crazy things.” Years later, when his own sons began to yield to the temptations of the flesh, Dorus admitted, “at your age I went through the same.”

  He found university life in Utrecht lonely and strange. But this was the field that fate had given him, and he was determined to make it bear fruit, no matter how barren and unpromising it seemed. “I am happy I have chosen to become a minister,” he wrote soon after his arrival. “I find it to be a beautiful profession.” He worked so hard at his studies that he repeatedly fell sick. One year, he almost died.

  In Holland in the mid-nineteenth century, only someone with blind resolve could see the ministry as a “beautiful profession.” In fact, by 1840, the Dutch Reformed Church was in upheaval. The simultaneous storms of revolution and science had loosened theology from its moorings in revealed truth. Only five years earlier, a German theologian had placed a bomb under Western Christianity with the publication of Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus), a book that analyzed the Bible as history and Christ as a mortal man.

  As Dorus began his studies, the clergy’s long monopoly over Dutch thought was collapsing around him. The powerful new bourgeois classes were demanding a less punitive, more accommodating religion—a modern religion that would permit them to enjoy both God’s favor and their newfound prosperity. In response, a new kind of Dutch Protestantism had emerged. Calling itself the Groningen Movement (after the university in northern Holland where most of its proponents taught), and claiming the biblical humanism of Erasmus as a model, it rejected not only the old dogmas, but the whole notion of dogma. Instead, it embraced a new idea of Christ that included both the historical Jesus (“as He lived on earth 1800 years ago”) and the spiritual Jesus who came “to make humanity ever more conformed to the likeness of God.” As a retort to Das Leben Jesu’s debunking of the Christ myth, the Groningers revived the Jesus of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi (The Imitation of Christ), a fifteenth-century vade mecum filled with down-to-earth guidance on living a Christlike life. “Make use of temporal things, but desire eternal things,” Jesus advises in Imitatio, confirming that even a rich man could be blessed so long as he achieved a “union with Christ” in his heart.

  THE ZUNDERT CHURCH (Illustration credit 4.3)

  Even Dorus’s own family conceded that he was “not talented” as a public speaker. His sermons—long, convoluted affairs, filled with the leaden pedagogy typical of the Groningers—resembled his handwriting, described by his son Theo as “very fine but also very illegible.” To make matters worse, his voice didn’t carry well and his words often got lost or garbled. During one early sermon he tried to clear his throat by putting some candy in his mouth and rendered himself so unintelligible, according to a witness, that the congregation “feared something was amiss with his speech organs.”

  But Dorus persevered. Finally, in January 1849, after three years of rejections, he was offered a position in a remote township on the Belgian border called Zundert. The outgoing minister called his congregation “a well-prepared field.” In fact, the persistent sower could not have found less fertile ground. The family chronicler, ever upbeat, described the new job as Dorus’s “ideal posting,” citing a popular poem about a quaint country parsonage on the moor. But the reality of Zundert, with its beleaguered band of Protestants set down in a sea of Catholic antagonism, bore no resemblance to the poet’s romantic vision. And no excess of family enthusiasm could disguise the hard truth that the Zundert congregation, whose very existence hung by a thread, represented the lowest rung of the Dutch Reformed Church. “This little flock has been small from the beginning,” Dorus noted ruefully, “and hasn’t grown appreciably in the nearly two and a half centuries since.”

  And the future looked even grimmer. A succession of devastating potato blights and crop failures had plunged many farmers into destitution. Unable to feed their families for weeks at a time, they ate the food meant for cows, when they could get it. On their way to church, members risked encountering bands of desperate dispossessed farmers who roamed the countryside begging and stealing. The little congregation suffered severe losses as typhoid epidemics swept through the town, killing Protestants and Catholics indiscriminately. Between death and desertion, Zundert’s tiny Protestant population shrank by half in a single decade.

  This was the unpromising plot of moorland to which Dorus put his plow in April 1849. He set an example of faith in the future by marrying and bringing his bride, Anna Carbentus, from The Hague. He raised money from Zundert’s handful of wealthy Protestants and bought an organ. In the spirit of self-help that animated the Society for Prosperity, he arranged with a carpet manufacturer in Breda to supply spinning wheels to widows in the congregation who were paid piece wages for the yarn they produced. Despite the hard times, he trimmed the church’s welfare subsidies—a thankless task that required evicting farmers from church-owned lands, with force if necessary, often with catastrophic consequences.

  Sowing and reaping were more than just metaphors to Dorus van Gogh. Like his father, he worked the farmland of Brabant in every way other than with his hands. As the local administrator of the Society, he identified farms and farmland to be purchased; he evaluated their soil, drainage, and pasturage; he negotiated the leases. He advised farmers on how to drain and plow, what and where to plant, and how to manure (all-important in Zundert’s sandy soil). He was a demanding manager, grading each leaseholder on his skill, diligence, behavior, and cleanliness. Was his wife stupid, indiscreet, or disorderly? Did he have too many children to feed, or insufficient livestock for composting? For those who performed well, Dorus did what he could to shield them from the torments of poverty and debt. He pleaded their cases to the Society’s board—the “Gentlemen in Breda,” he called them—arguing that the church owed a special duty to “the handful of members who stand here, at the barricades.”

  But even soldiers at the barricades had a reckoning. The Dutch God was an understanding landlord, but neither His patience nor His pocketbook was unlimited. If a farmer died and his wife could not carry on, Dorus evicted her and sold the family’s possessions at public auction. Even the family of a typhoid victim was not immune. At the direction of the Society, Dorus evicted the dead man’s wife and ten children. Another widow pleaded that eviction would leave her with no way to support her five children except prostitution. But the Gentlemen were unmoved. When the carpet manufacturer complained about the poor quality of yarn produced by the widows in Dorus’s work-relief program, the Society terminated it. Soldiers and widows were not expected to be profitable, just to pay their own way. Otherwise, church support might be treated as charity, which, as the mayor of Zundert noted, “only feeds the laziness of people.”

  Whether in matters of God or money, this was the bottom line, the irreducible core of Dutch success: self-sufficiency. It was here, at this elemental level, that Dutch spiritual and temporal ambitions met. Neither piety nor pious labor—“the daily bread” that came from “the sweat of the brow”—was enough: not in this world, not in the next. There could be no true spiritual success without this minimum of temporal success.

  This was the lesson Dorus taught his leasehold farmers—and his son Vincent: “Keep helping us by helping yourself.” Without self-sufficiency there could be no self-respect. “Make sure that you can be independent,” Theo van Gogh wrote his younger brother Cor, “for being dependent is a misery for yourself and for others.” Decades later, when Vincent watched a sower at work outside the barred window of his cell at the insane asylum at Saint-Rémy—a sower he would immortalize in paint—he couldn’t help
deploring the laziness and waste he saw. In a letter home, he upbraided the farmer for living off the charity of an easy land. “The farms here would produce three times as much,” he wrote, “if [they] were sufficiently manured.”

  For Vincent, as for Dorus, nothing existed in a temporal vacuum: not nature, not religion, not art. Everything, and everyone, had to succeed in this world to have any hope of success in the next.

  WHILE DORUS VAN GOGH carried on his forebears’ service to God, his brother Cent dedicated himself to the family’s other traditional pursuit: money. After two years in The Hague, his bachelor high life had attracted the glowering attention of his parents. “There is much they don’t like,” the family chronicler hinted darkly. At their insistence, apparently, he left both the home and the employ of his dissolute cousin and, in 1841, opened a paint store a few blocks away on the Spuistraat selling paints and artists’ supplies.

  Most of the artists who patronized his new store were, like him, young men from good families, bon vivant sons of the bourgeois class with money and the leisure to enjoy it. Charming and gregarious, with a quick wit and an easy laugh, Cent moved with equal comfort in the best drawing rooms of Hague society and in the smokiest artists’ taverns. He fenced by day and partied by night. He dressed nattily; starred in amateur theatricals; and loved singing. “[We] were a very jolly, high-spirited group,” one of his comrades recalled.

  It was probably his active social life in this bourgeois milieu that led Cent to the discovery that would make him a very rich man. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the new Dutch middle class, indeed all of Europe, was buying art prints. Sales of everything from cheap wood engravings to expensive drypoint etchings skyrocketed as great swaths of Europe’s population were introduced to the luxuries of disposable income and competitive acquisition. Classical and historical images, idealized nature scenes, still lifes, and religious subjects crowded the houses of the newly affluent.

  In the Netherlands, the same wave of nostalgia that inspired hundreds of books on Dutch history also generated thousands of images of a quaint, picturesque, self-congratulatory Dutch past—so-called genre scenes. Images from the champions of the Golden Age, Rembrandt especially, flooded back into the public imagination and onto parlor walls. The Dutch, like the rest of Europe, also felt the fever of fashion radiating from the south. Newspapers and magazines trumpeted the prizewinning artists and paintings at the annual Paris Salon, fueling the demand for prints of mythological fantasies or costumed cavaliers as the bourgeoisie rushed to stake a claim in the latest style.

  In the mid-1840s, Cent van Gogh’s little paint store became one of the few places in The Hague that sold art prints. By 1846, business was booming. In May of that year, Cent traveled to Paris to visit the man who supplied many of the prints sold in his shop—indeed, most of the prints sold in Europe—Adolphe Goupil. The tall, starched Frenchman took an immediate liking to the slight, smooth-talking Dutchman, whose youth astonished him. Goupil, too, had started young. From a small store on the boulevard Montmartre in 1827, he had built an empire of images: a vertical monopoly that included not only several stores in Paris, a branch in London, and an agent in New York, but also a huge production facility where ranks of engravers and printers supplied his stores—and middlemen like Cent van Gogh throughout Europe—with thousands of prints in every conceivable format, subject, and price range.

  Cent returned from his trip to Paris with a new determination. In the same year that Dorus became a candidate for the ministry, 1846, Cent van Gogh committed himself to becoming truly rich. Closing the door on his frivolous flâneur days, he finally married—at the extraordinarily belated age of thirty—choosing for his wife Cornelia Carbentus, youngest sister of another up-and-coming Hague merchant, bookbinder Gerrit Carbentus. When he discovered that his new wife could not bear children, he blithely enlisted her into the business as a way to keep overhead down (always a concern for the penny-wise Cent).

  With an energy that defied his always frail health and an impresario’s acumen that nearly matched his French mentor’s (a friend described him as “a careful … clever … calculating businessman”), Cent set out to replicate Adolphe Goupil’s success in Holland. His motto: “Everything gets sold.”

  He quickly grasped the essence of Goupil’s genius: images were commodities, not unique works of art. A successful print seller had only to assess the public taste and then find the images to suit it. Goupil’s eye for popular imagery was legendary. Cent soon proved his equal. Before long, the traffic between Paris and The Hague went both ways: Goupil sent the latest fashionable prints adapted from French paintings; Cent forwarded to Goupil’s reproduction factory images by Dutch artists that he judged “salable”—his signature word. Traveling ceaselessly, he scoured the Continent for images, artists, even whole schools of artists, to feed the insatiable demand for comforting, sentimental, fashionable, decorative art. Like Goupil, he sold images in every format and size, at every price point. In the mid-1850s, the development of photographic reproduction techniques made it possible for both men to add cheap and inexhaustible photogravures to their stock, opening up a vast new market of middle-class buyers. By the end of the decade, Goupil had built an entire factory dedicated to the new mass medium.

  While he relentlessly showcased and spent lavishly on the artists and images that sold well—like Ary Scheffer’s religious dramas and Rosa Bonheur’s animal pictures—Cent also encouraged lesser-known Dutch, French, and German artists to create salable images by hanging their works in his store, and even, occasionally, buying them. He was known to provide materials, even cash, to young Hague artists whose works he judged promotable. But this was not charity. Like the “Gentlemen in Breda,” Cent considered these subsidies investments. He never gave materials or cash to any artist without receiving work in exchange. He never bought, sold, or supported artists whose painting styles he considered unsalable. Ultimately, artists, like widows, had to support themselves.

  The Dutch god of commerce smiled radiantly on Cent’s efforts. In 1848, another revolution in France, combined with an explosion of railroad construction and the adrenaline of colonial empire, jolted the Continent’s economy out of its long doldrums. Everyone, now, it seemed, wanted art. Encouraged by his brother’s success, Hein van Gogh started selling prints at his bookstore in Rotterdam, and in 1849, youngest brother Cor opened a store for books and prints in Amsterdam, where his fortunes, too, rose with the tide. By the end of the decade, Cent’s little store on the Spuistraat had been given a grand new title, the Internationale Kunsthandel Van Gogh, and the name Van Gogh had become virtually synonymous with art dealing throughout Holland and even beyond.

  Given his company’s phenomenal prosperity and expansion, it was inevitable that, sooner or later, Cent would have to either compete with Adolphe Goupil or partner with him. In February 1861, fifteen years after their first meeting, the two men sat down in the immense hôtel on the rue Chaptal that was Goupil’s new Paris headquarters, and signed a partnership agreement. Much had changed in those years. Goupil, even more than Cent, had prospered extravagantly in the boom of the previous decade. Nothing trumpeted his success more loudly than the huge house at 9, rue Chaptal. Five floors of limestone in the grand empire-recherché style in which Baron Haussmann was then remaking Paris, it included galleries worthy of a king, studios for favored artists, printing facilities, and a palatial appartement for visiting dignitaries.

  The deal was an extraordinary coup for the forty-year-old parson’s son from Brabant. While technically a partnership (with Goupil holding a controlling 40 percent stake, Cent 30 percent, and Goupil’s partner, Léon Boussod, 30 percent), the agreement relieved Cent of all managerial duties, creating for him a lifetime seigneury of privilege and influence that propelled him instantly into the aristocracy of the new age.

  By the end of the year, the store in The Hague had moved from the narrow Spuistraat to sumptuous new quarters on the busy Plaats, and changed its name again—to Goupil
& Cie. Still nominally under the management of a Van Gogh (Hein had sold his Rotterdam bookshop in 1858 and come to work for his successful brother), the new store began to stock more French paintings—Gérôme’s orientalist fantasies and Bouguereau’s sad-eyed girls—alongside the low-priced Dutch landscapes and genre paintings that had long been its mainstay. And, of course, it offered “a complete inventory of prints from the [Goupil] catalogue,” Cent reassured his clients in a farewell letter. A few months after opening the new store, Cent and his wife left The Hague and moved into the grand Goupil appartement in Paris.

  He still traveled, acting as ambassador-at-large for Goupil’s international empire. When the company’s reproductions won a gold medal at the 1867 World’s Fair, Cent presented a copy of the winning prints to Willem III, King of the Netherlands. When Queen Victoria entertained the purchase of a painting, it was Cent van Gogh who traveled to Balmoral Castle to represent the Duchy of Goupil. Only his frail health prevented him from visiting the firm’s busiest new branch, in New York. When business or family took him to Holland, he held court at the new store on the Plaats, which locals continued to refer to as “the house of Van Gogh.” In 1863, he prevailed on his new partners to open another Goupil branch in Brussels and appointed his brother Hein its gérant (manager).

  More and more, Cent occupied himself with the habits of wealth and leisure. True to the social class that had made him rich, he started an art collection. Before, he had bought paintings to support artist friends, to secure reproduction rights, or just to add to stock. Now he bought for the sheer pleasure of owning and showing. He fussed endlessly over hanging his growing collection and changed its arrangement frequently in a succession of grand domiciles. In 1865 he found a palatial city house on the avenue de Malakoff, just off the grandest of Haussmann’s grand new boulevards and the city’s most fashionable promenade, the avenue de l’Impératrice. Located halfway between the towering Arc de Triomphe and the Bois de Boulogne, Cent’s new home offered a front-row view of the famous tour du lac, the daily procession of all Paris’s “finest people.”