Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  But even Paris wasn’t perfect in every season. So in the winter of 1867–68, Cent went south—as his nephew would do exactly twenty years later—in search of a winter home, and relief from the respiratory problems that increasingly clouded his glittering leisure. He found both in the little coastal resort town of Menton, just beyond Nice, overlooking the blue waters of the Côte d’Azur. Over the next two decades, he and Cornelia would return there almost every winter, so enamored of the service at the town’s grand hotels that they never bothered to buy a house.

  For a summer place, Cent returned to the land of his childhood. In Prinsenhage, a wealthy enclave on the outskirts of Breda, he built a splendid villa as stout and solid as the nearby Zundert town hall, only bigger. With its huge English-style garden, conservatory, stables, coachman’s house, and the latest baronial accessory, a “picture gallery,” Huize Mertersem far outshone the country houses of the old aristocracy that it was designed to emulate.

  In November 1867, prematurely frail and winded, but still only forty-seven, Cent received one of his country’s highest honors. King Willem III, descendant of the Princes of Orange, conferred on Vincent van Gogh, descendent of gold thread-drawers, a Knighthood of the Order of the Eikenkroon (Oak Crown).

  ONLY FOUR MONTHS after Cent was knighted, his nephew and namesake Vincent abandoned school in Tilburg and returned to the Zundert parsonage in defiant disgrace. For his parents, the contrast could not have been more crushing. If Vincent could not carry on the family’s best name and highest purpose by serving God—as it increasingly appeared he could not, or would not—then the only face-saving alternative was to honor the family’s newly gilded name in commerce.

  Vincent himself dithered. “I had to choose a profession,” he later wrote of this period, “but did not know which.” He spent the rest of the year (1868) in obdurate paralysis (“moving is so horrible,” he once said): clinging to the familiar parsonage from which his parents had tried repeatedly to oust him. He wandered the moors, gathered bugs, and pored over his collections in his attic redoubt, ignoring the growing embarrassment as parishioners and townspeople began to talk about the parson’s strange, indolent son.

  Every success of his uncle Cent’s only added to the weight of expectation and impatience. With each honor, the legacy of his childless uncle—long considered Vincent’s to claim—grew richer, and Vincent’s refusal to grasp it grew more and more confounding. No one doubted that Cent was prepared to be generous to his family. The point was driven home the year before Vincent’s long idyll when the manager of the Hague store died unexpectedly and Cent bestowed the prize position on a twenty-three-year-old employee from outside the family. The appointment of the young, energetic outsider sent a clear message—to all, apparently, but Vincent: Uncle Cent was prepared to elevate, early and decisively, the first young Van Gogh to prove himself worthy.

  Finally, in July 1869, sixteen months after he left school, Vincent relented. Whether it was the cumulative weight of embarrassment and enticement, or the intervention of the persuasive Cent himself (who visited Zundert frequently during those sixteen months), probably not even Vincent knew. Ensuring that his recalcitrant, unpredictable son did not have last-minute second thoughts, Dorus accompanied him on the train trip to The Hague. There, on July 30, he registered Vincent, just recently turned sixteen, as an “office clerk” at Goupil & Cie and left him with a blessing that no doubt mixed encouragement, admonition, and weary apprehension.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Road to Rijswijk

  ONCE THE DIE WAS CAST, VINCENT EMBRACED HIS NEW LIFE. AS IF to redeem himself for years of isolation and months of indolence, he seized his new role with the single-minded determination that would come to characterize all his endeavors. Overnight, the rough provincial boy with the battered shoes and fishnet full of bugs transformed himself into an up-and-coming business apprentice, a cosmopolite in the most cosmopolitan of all Dutch cities. He donned the summer wardrobe of a young gentleman (white socks, straw hat) and spent his Sundays not at the Grote Beek but with the other fashionable people strolling the beach at Scheveningen, a nearby bathing resort on the North Sea. At work, he submerged himself in his role as “protégé” (his word) of the firm’s eminent founder, Uncle Cent, displaying “a certain proper pride,” he confessed, in their shared name.

  If Vincent needed a model to emulate—or a glimpse of what his future held—he had only to look to his boss, Hermanus Gijsbertus Tersteeg (known to all as H.G.). Handsome, hardworking, and poised far beyond his twenty-four years, Tersteeg was a new kind of man. He had risen to the top of his trade at such a young age not the old way, through family connections, but the new way: on his merits. Even as a teenage apprentice in an Amsterdam bookshop, Tersteeg had demonstrated the unsentimental pragmatism and levelheadedness so prized by the Dutch. And he dressed well. All of that, combined with a phenomenal memory, an eye for detail, and a “refined manner,” had quickly won the confidence of Cent van Gogh, who no doubt recognized some of himself in the smooth, sharp-witted younger man. Only six years after starting, Tersteeg was promoted to gérant of the flagship store.

  The young boss showed the firm’s newest employee special solicitude. He invited Vincent to join him for coffee in the apartment over the store where he lived with his young wife, Maria, and their infant daughter, Betsy. Vincent found much to admire in his new boss. Like Vincent, Tersteeg read voraciously in multiple languages. Already a leader in The Hague’s bustling literary community, Tersteeg loved to talk about books—he “radiated poetry,” Vincent said—and Vincent loved listening to him. “He made a strong impression on me,” Vincent later recalled. “[I] looked upon him as a being of a higher order.”

  H.G. TERSTEEG (Illustration credit 5.1)

  With Tersteeg as a model, Vincent threw himself into his new work. “I am very busy and glad of it,” he wrote Theo, “for that is what I want.” Most of his time was spent in the stockroom, out of the public eye, where the vast majority of the store’s business was done and most of its money was made fulfilling orders for prints. After locating the requested images in the store’s vast inventory, he carefully mounted, wrapped, and packed them for posting. Occasionally he helped box a painting in the shipping room or assisted a customer in the artists’ supplies store (the sole remnant of Cent’s original enterprise).

  As a full-service “department store” of art, the house also included a restoration studio, a framing department, and even an auction service, all of which might call on the services of an apprentice. In the store’s sumptuous public gallery space, there were always exhibitions to be arranged, paintings to be hung or taken down or brought out for private viewing. To keep expenses down, Tersteeg (like Cent) operated the store with a minimum of staff. Vincent was one of only two apprentices on duty, working from daybreak until after dark most days, including Saturday. Of course, the store had servants (ubiquitous and invisible in this era) to do the menial chores like scrubbing and sweeping, but in the hubbub of a busy day, an apprentice like Vincent could be found doing everything from dusting picture frames to arranging window displays.

  In his enthusiasm for his new job, Vincent took a characteristically sudden, feverish interest in a subject toward which he had shown no particular inclination before: art. He “devoured” books on artists, on art history, on art collections in Holland and elsewhere. He devoted himself to the latest art journals—available in abundance in The Hague’s literate, international society. He paid frequent visits to the Dutch royal collection at the Mauritshuis, only steps from the Plaats, with its walls of Golden Age paintings like Vermeer’s View of Delft and Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. He made pilgrimages to Amsterdam to see Frans Hals’s The Merry Drinker, and, of course, Rembrandt’s Night Watch; to Brussels to see the jewels of the great Flemish “primitives” (as Vincent called painters like Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling); and to Antwerp to see Rubens. “Go to the museum as often as you can,” Vincent advised his brother; “it is a good thing to know the
old painters.”

  He studied “new” painters, too—that is, contemporary Dutch artists such as Andreas Schelfhout and Cornelis Springer, whom his uncle favored. He found them not just on Goupil’s walls, but in other galleries; in local art “bazaars,” usually displayed amid a jumble of antiques and bric-a-brac; and in the just-opened Museum van Moderne Kunst (Museum of Modern Art) only a few blocks from the house where Vincent boarded.

  It was probably at places like these that Vincent saw the first signs of a revolution coming in art. Here and there among the ranks of windmills, townscapes, storm-tossed boats, and idyllic skating scenes that had been the grist of Dutch artists for more than a century, he found a few paintings—landscapes, mostly—with vague forms, loose brushwork, muted colors, and gauzy light—paintings that looked nothing like the precisely detailed, intensely colored works around them. To Vincent’s unaccustomed eye, they probably looked unfinished, as they did to so many at the time. Before long, however, Tersteeg began buying them, and the artists who painted them began coming into the store to purchase supplies and meet the new apprentice with the famous name. Over the first years of the 1870s, Vincent saw the work of, and almost certainly met, Jozef Israëls, Jacob Maris, Hendrik Willem Mesdag, Jan Weissenbruch, and Anton Mauve, all of whom were painting in the new style—soon to be dubbed “the Hague School”—that would finally free Dutch art from the grip of the Golden Age.

  Vincent undoubtedly heard stories about the new movement: its roots in shared outings in the Dutch countryside; the importance of plein air (outdoor) painting; and the new mandate to capture “the virgin impression of nature” that artists like Israëls had brought back from a distant woodland village in France called Barbizon. Vincent eagerly added the works of the “new” Dutch painters, and their French cousins such as Camille Corot and Charles Jacque, to the already crowded walls of his musée imaginaire (museum of the mind), while Tersteeg cautiously began testing the market for them.

  Still, it would be another decade before the Barbizon painters found a prominent place on Goupil’s brocaded walls. And with a revolution stirring in Dutch art, no one paid much attention to another group of French painters who had taken the Barbizon lessons about light and impressions in a very different direction. In the fall of 1871, the arrival in Holland of a young French painter named Claude Monet went virtually unnoticed on the Plaats.

  Even as Vincent attended the birth of a new movement in art, his most important education was taking place in the Goupil stockroom, in the kaleidoscope of images that came across his desk every day—in woodcuts, engravings, etchings, lithographs, photogravures, photographs, artists’ albums, illustrated books and magazines, catalogues, monographs, and special publications. Goupil had by now mastered the art of selling images across markets and using a painting’s success to sell prints of it like stock in a booming company. Popular images came in all sizes and shapes, at every level of quality and cost—in some cases right up to the original painting itself.

  The result was an explosion of imagery: everything from the richly detailed historical fantasies of Paul Delaroche to the domestic icons of Hugues Merle; from Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro biblical scenes to Ary Scheffer’s devotional images of Jesus (images that would define Christ for more than a century); from Bouguereau’s fetching shepherdesses to Gérôme’s oriental seductresses; from stirring battle scenes to sentimental vignettes of Italian peasant life; from romantic canalscapes of Venice to nostalgic visions of seventeenth-century Holland; from tiger hunts in Africa to the English parliament in session; from games of whist to vast sea battles; from New World magnolias to Egyptian palms; from bison on the American plain to Queen Victoria on her throne. All of these images crowded Vincent’s keen and insatiable eye. “A continual spur for rousing the imagination,” one observer called Goupil’s huge catalogue of prints. “When we see them, how many voyages do we take in imagination, what adventures do we dream of, what pictures do we sketch!”

  Vincent kept a salesman’s open mind about the images passing across his desktop. Indeed, for the rest of his life, he rarely singled out either a work or an artist for criticism. Rather than drowning in this sea of images, his enthusiasm seemed buoyed by it. “Admire as much as you can,” he advised Theo about this time; “most people do not admire enough.” When he tried to write down his “favorites,” the list grew to unwieldy proportions—sixty names of artists both famous and obscure. He included Dutch Romantics, French orientalists, Swiss landscapists, Belgian peasant painters, British Pre-Raphaelites, Hague School neighbors, Barbizon newcomers, Salon favorites, “[and] then there are the old masters.” “I could go on like this for I don’t know how long,” he added in exasperation. Even so, it wasn’t until a decade later that Vincent owned up to his liking for the gaudy, silly pictures of courtly life by Italian and Spanish painters of the era. “Those brilliant peacock’s feathers,” he recalled guiltily in 1882, “I thought them splendid.”

  For a while, it seemed that Vincent had truly turned a corner, that he had laid aside the brittle frustrations of his youth as surely as he had put down his fishnet and bottle. In some ways, the years of angry, self-imposed solitude had given him the perfect skills for his new job. The close observation and discernment he had practiced on birds’ nests and beetle legs could now be applied to the subtle degradations of late impressions or the stylistic variations between different engravers’ renderings of the same painting. His limitless energy for collecting and categorizing, combined with an astounding memory, helped him master everything from the stockroom’s flood of images to the paint department’s huge inventory of artists’ supplies. The lonely, meticulous care he had lavished on his bug collection could now be put to use in the packing room or the display case.

  A congenital arranger, Vincent excelled especially at seeing the relationships between images: not just in subject matter or artist, but in materials, style, and intangibles of mood and “weight.” (A painting by Mesdag, he observed, had a “ponderous” effect beside a Corot.) He advised friends (and, no doubt, customers) on compiling the newly fashionable “scrapbooks”—blank books in which one could paste favorite images. “The advantage is that you can arrange [them] any way you like,” he explained. He began a print collection of his own (starting with the “peacock feather” Italians) that he would add to and edit, arrange and rearrange for the rest of his life, honing ever more subtle notions of order and context.

  Whether because of his knowledge and enthusiasm, or because of his family connections, Vincent was soon allowed to deal directly with the public in Goupil’s plush, parlorlike gallery, where paintings in elaborate gilt frames filled the dark walls and gentlemen in top hats lounged on Turkish divans. Within a few years, Vincent was dealing with some of the firm’s best clients. He demonstrated an instinctive savvy about value and rarity, fashion and demand, and no reticence whatsoever about the imperative to sell. By 1873, he had joined the annual sales trips to Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and elsewhere to court clients and show the nouveautés, the latest additions to the Goupil catalogue. At some point, he learned accounting. So confident was Vincent in his new role that he reassured his parents he would never again have to look for a position.

  GOUPIL GALLERY, THE HAGUE (Illustration credit 5.2)

  But no success, or promise of success, could console his loneliness. A decade later, Vincent recalled his early years in The Hague as “a miserable time.” At first he may have blamed his unhappiness on the trauma of leave-taking, which he always dreaded. “The beginning is perhaps more difficult than anything else,” he warned Theo when he left home and started work in 1873. “I know so well how strange you must feel.” But after two years, he had to recognize that the problem went deeper than homesickness. Despite the cosmopolitan distractions of the city; despite the familial comforts of a community planted thick with relations; despite the long hours of busy labor, Vincent had brought his unshakable isolation with him from the moors of Zundert.

  At work, the demand
s of the understaffed store would have made socializing difficult even for a sociable person. As the only two apprentices, Vincent and Teunus van Iterson could not take breaks or vacations at the same time. Vincent’s family connections, underscored in the beginning by his uncle’s frequent visits to the store, also undoubtedly separated him from other employees, even if his odd, prickly personality did not. By now, sickly and frustrated, Cent had become a nagging, oppressive overseer, whose departures for Paris or the Riviera were welcomed with relief by Tersteeg and no doubt others. “[He] was a difficult, cross-grained gentleman,” Tersteeg later recalled, “harping on endlessly about the same subject.”

  In the winter of 1870, Cent was stricken by a near-fatal illness, and Tersteeg assumed full control on the Plaats. Almost immediately, his attitude toward his patron’s nephew changed. From the beginning, the smooth, dignified Tersteeg had been bothered by Vincent’s strange, unpolished manner, which he attributed to his rustic upbringing. (He compared Vincent’s father unfavorably to the sophisticated Cent.) Now, that disdain began to show itself in angry words and sharp-witted disparagement. Vincent responded with the same bitter ambivalence that he felt toward his father: withdrawing into deference and “timidity” in his boss’s presence (“I kept my distance,” he recalled), while nursing a wound of rejection that would never heal.