Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  PARIS WAS IN AN UPROAR. IT WAS THE WINTER OF 1875 AND THE ART world was under attack by a rebellious cadre of young painters who styled themselves the Société anonyme (Anonymous Society), but whose enemies had stuck them with a range of dismissive labels including “Impressionalists,” “Impressionists,” and “lunatics.” They claimed to see the world in a new way: making the improbable argument that their bright colors and loose brushwork captured images in a more scientific way—so that “even the most astute physicist could find no fault with their analysis,” wrote one of the few critics who supported them. They even claimed to “paint” light—although they rejected the use of dark shadows, the traditional means of rendering the play of light on objects. They called their cheerful, airy paintings “little fragments of the mirror of universal life,” or simply “impressions.”

  Claims that Impressionism represented the “next wave” in art were met with catcalls and guffaws from most of the Paris art world, still deeply invested in the Renaissance academics of drawing and modeling, and the commercial hegemony of the Salon. They called the new works “crimes,” “absurdities,” and “mud-splashes,” and accused radicals like Claude Monet of conducting a “war on beauty.” Outraged editorialists compared the new work to that of “a monkey who might have got hold of a box of paints.” “Sheer lunacy,” huffed Le Figaro, “a horrifying spectacle.”

  The storm finally broke in March 1875. Desperate for money, a group of the upstarts (including Monet and Renoir) arranged to sell some of their controversial works at the city’s central auction house, the Hôtel Drouot. The event sparked a near riot of outrage. Spectators howled insults at the art and at the artists. As each work came on the block, they mocked it; and then when it sold for pennies—fifty francs for a Monet landscape—they cheered in derision. “That’s for the frame!” one yelled. The auctioneer feared that the frenzied crowd “would take me off to a lunatic asylum,” he recalled. “They treated us like imbeciles!” So ugly did the event become that the organizers had to call the police to prevent the mêlée from breaking out into fistfights.

  Two months later, Vincent arrived in Paris.

  By then, the firestorm had spread to every corner of the insular, gossipy art world. The young artists and gallery workers who filled the brasseries of Montmartre, where Vincent found an apartment, could talk of nothing else. The artists at the center of the storm gathered almost nightly at cafés—first the Guerbois, then the Nouvelle-Athènes—only blocks from the Goupil gallery on the rue Chaptal, where Vincent worked. At the Moulin de la Galette, not far from Vincent’s apartment, Renoir set up his easel to paint couples waltzing in the dappled light under the trees. On any given night, in any of the scores of music halls and nightclubs within a few minutes’ walk of Vincent’s room, or in any of the cheap local cafés frequented by young dancers, Degas could be seen with sketchpad in hand.

  Vincent’s frequent route to the other Goupil stores passed the studios of Renoir and Manet. When the Salon of 1875 rejected one of Manet’s works, he invited the public to come to his studio and see it for themselves—and thousands did. Near the Goupil store on the avenue de l’Opéra, who could have missed the banners of the Durand-Ruel gallery beckoning the public to view the Impressionists’ latest scandals: Degas’s strangely informal portrait of workaday life, Cotton Exchange, and Monet’s startling image of his wife in a bright red Japanese kimono? In June, Vincent visited the site of the infamous auction debacle, the Hôtel Drouot, not far from the Goupil store on the boulevard Montmartre. On one of his many trips to the area he no doubt passed a young stockbroker (and early Impressionist collector) named Paul Gauguin, who worked at the nearby Bourse and painted in his spare time.

  But none of it registered with Vincent. Despite the controversy that crackled all around him, despite the lunchtime chatter and the barroom debates, despite the indignant reviews and the impassioned defenses, despite the furor—to say nothing of the arresting, unsettling images—Vincent never mentioned a word about Impressionism or any of its proponents during the time he spent in Paris. A decade later, when his brother tried to interest him in the “new artists,” he could only respond, “I have seen absolutely nothing of them.” “From what you told me about ‘impressionism,’ ” he wrote in 1884, putting the unfamiliar term in quotation marks, “it’s not quite clear to me what it really is.”

  Where was Vincent? How could he have ignored the war of words and images being waged in the galleries where he worked, the cafés where he ate, the papers that he read, the streets that he walked? How could he have been so disconnected? The answer was as simple as the “strange” letter he sent his parents after arriving in Paris: Vincent had found religion.

  EVERY THURSDAY EVENING and twice on Sunday, pilgrims thronged the Metropolitan Tabernacle in south London. They came by the thousands, blocking the streets in every direction. They filled the cavernous music-hall auditorium, packing it until the crowd spilled into the yard and spread as far as sound could reach. They came from everywhere: from London, from the countryside, from as far away as California and Australia. They came mostly from the ranks of the newly prosperous: clerks and shopkeepers, bureaucrats and housewives—alienated bourgeoisie longing for an escape from the oppressive matter-of-factness of modern life. Some came out of fervor, some out of disillusion, some out of curiosity. But they all came for one reason: to hear Charles Haddon Spurgeon preach.

  Among the pilgrims in the winter of 1874–75 was a lone Dutchman, Vincent van Gogh.

  After leaving the Loyers, Vincent had moved into a boardinghouse only a few blocks away from the immense Corinthian portico of Spurgeon’s palace of worship. The Baptist preacher held all Victorian England in his thrall (there were rumors that Victoria herself attended services in disguise). Long in the public eye, Spurgeon had grown from a sensational “boy preacher” at twenty to a religious mogul at forty. His empire included a college, an orphanage, and a vast library of publications. But the soul of his success was still the thrice-weekly performance on the grand one-man stage that he had built for himself in Newington. From a railed platform the size of a boxing ring set in the middle of an adoring sea of more than four thousand worshippers, Spurgeon preached the promise of redemption: of “lifting men from the lowest degradation” and “bringing joy where there is sorrow.”

  A stout, comfortable man with a broad, bearded face, Spurgeon moved around the stage offering what he called “common sense” with the ease and animation of a favorite uncle. He addressed the deity with an intimacy many found shocking. He preached “the real humanity” of Christ. “Feel him to be near of kin to you,” he said, “bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh.” He “piled metaphor on metaphor,” using the same parables of mustard seeds and sowers and “sheep gone astray” that Vincent’s father used. He talked often about families and spoke of Christ as the paradigm of unconditional parental love. He used the example of his own misspent youth to prove that no one was beyond his Father’s—or his father’s—forgiveness.

  It was a message perfectly tuned to a wayward, self-reproachful youth far from home.

  Meanwhile, in his little room not far away on Kennington Road, Vincent set out on another pilgrimage—an inner pilgrimage through the only country in which he felt completely at home: books. It was the “age of advice,” as the historian Peter Gay has dubbed it, an era when the “anguished bourgeois,” seeking refuge from the century’s social, scientific, and economic upheavals, turned to books to “re-enchant their world.” Vincent was one of them. “I am reading a great deal just now,” he wrote Theo. Hungry for belief, but alienated from his childhood sources of belief, he reached out in every direction: to collections of poetry and philosophical tomes; to nature guides and self-improvement books; to George Eliot novels and silly romances; to ponderous histories and, the latest craze, biographies—searching for new sources of mystery in an increasingly literal world.

  His first guide was Jules Michelet, a master of many of the new genres. Michelet
first gripped Vincent’s imagination with his highly personalized books on natural history and the animal world, enthralling the childhood collector of birds’ nests and beetles with books like L’oiseau (The Bird) and L’insecte (The Insect). Michelet had only tightened that grip with his chauvinistic and eccentric instructional books on sex and love (exploring, among other things, a fetishistic obsession with blood) that had helped Vincent through the romantic and sexual vicissitudes of the previous years.

  But Michelet was primarily a historian, and it was through the Frenchman’s sweeping, multivolume histories that Vincent ventured into the deeper and more perilous waters of faith. Michelet wrote history the way his friend Victor Hugo wrote fiction: with forceful narrative, soaring rhetoric, and a grand vision. In Michelet’s histories, Vincent encountered for the first time a world unyoked from Christianity: a world in which le peuple (the people), not God, made history; a world in which the only true determinism was the determinism of the human spirit. In a message ideally pitched to an anxious but atheistic age, Michelet championed the French Revolution over the life of Christ as the seminal event in human history, the ultimate triumph of freedom over fatality, of life over death.

  With religious fervor, Vincent threw himself into the study of the events of 1789. In addition to historical accounts, he read novels inspired by “those unforgettable days.” The combination of Michelet’s vivid evocations and melodramatic fictions like Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities struck the chord of Vincent’s nostalgic imagination. For the rest of his life, he both pined for this lost paradise of freedom and fraternity, and believed it could be regained.

  During his first transfer to Paris at the end of 1874, he had added paintings to his celebration of the glories of the Revolution. One painting in particular, a portrait of a revolutionary youth wearing the bonnet rouge, struck him as “indescribably beautiful and unforgettable.” He saw in it a face like Christ’s: “marked by those cataclysmic times.” When he returned to London in 1875, he hung a print of the painting in his room on Kennington Road like a devotional icon. In the years ahead, he would invoke it again and again as a symbol of hope and a promise of redemption. “There is something of the spirit of the resurrection and the life in it,” he said.

  He read Hippolyte Taine, another French historian whose efforts to reconcile science and religion threatened to carry Vincent even further from the reassuring verities of the Zundert parsonage. To Taine, religion was nothing more than the childish projection of human frailties onto the unseen and unknowable. Because one could only truly know what could be observed and experienced, Taine argued, the only valid mode of thought was the scientific mode. Humans could never do more than witness and classify. Vincent, who always craved the comfort of the infinite and never lost his taste for the poetic excesses and moralistic sentimentality of Romantic literature, seems to have resisted Taine’s contempt for transcendental truth. But in another way, Taine’s ideas offered something like salvation to a bookish, introverted, social misfit like Vincent. “Inner realities” mattered more than mere appearances, Taine argued; and only “private reflection”—an intense personal struggle with the unknowable—could lead to a true understanding of the ultimate mysteries of life. All conceptions of truth and beauty, all “intimations of the infinite” derived from this exquisite loneliness.

  Vincent also found balm in the dense arguments and brilliant dicta of Thomas Carlyle, yet another lapsed romantic rebuilding his faith. For Carlyle, it was man’s fate to be a pilgrim, to wrestle with doubt, to reject old creeds and seek new insights into the “Unseen World.” In a conceit that must have had special resonance for Vincent, Carlyle compared the discarding of old beliefs to the shedding of threadbare clothes. Like Vincent, the hero of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus was ejected from his idyllic childhood home, estranged from his family, unsuccessful in friendship, spurned in love, and forced to face the world alone (“one lone Soul among those grinding millions”). After undergoing a crisis of suffering and self-doubt, he emerges, Christlike, reborn in a new faith.

  In his book On Heroes, which Vincent also eagerly consumed, Carlyle explored more fully what it meant to lead a Christlike life. Jesus may have been “the greatest of all Heroes,” he said, but only one of many. Heroes could be prophets (like Mohammed or Luther) or potentates (like Napoleon), but they could also be poets like Dante or Shakespeare or Goethe. They could even be artists. What made them heroes was not their effect on the world, according to Carlyle, it was their way of seeing the world. In passages that must have warmed the heart of the creekbank gazer from Zundert, Carlyle claimed for all hero-poets a special vision: the power to “discern the loveliness of things,” to appreciate their “inner harmony.” “Through every star, through every blade of grass,” he argued, “is not a God made visible, if we will open our minds and eyes?”

  Carlyle’s heroes were no paragons, either. Like Vincent, they had struggled with self-doubt and discouragement. His Dante was “an unimportant, wandering, sorrow-stricken man”; his Shakespeare, a sad soul who spent years “wading in deep waters” and “swimming for his life.” His heroes cared not at all for the “smooth-shaven respectabilities” of conventional behavior, and their oddness blinded others, even their families, to their true worth. With nothing more than “sincerity of heart” and a “clear, all-seeing eye,” Carlyle promised, even a flawed, unconventional youth, estranged from his family and spurned by the world, could find the “divinity” within himself.

  For Vincent, this was the ultimate consolation: an identification with Christ. It not only sanctified his pain and heroized his loneliness, it trumped his father’s sanctimonious condemnations. It also held out the promise of forgiveness and redemption—an end to his wandering exile.

  But it was another book he read that winter that truly sealed Vincent’s messianic identification—sealed it so tightly that, in later years, it would spring from his fevered mind with delusional force. The book was Vie de Jésus, Ernest Renan’s verité account of the birth of Christianity. Such was the impact of Renan’s biography on Vincent’s imagination that in February 1875 he sent a copy to his brother alongside the poetry album over which he had slaved all winter. In Catholic France especially, Renan’s claims that Christ was a mere mortal, the Eucharist just “a metaphor,” and miracles merely the delusions of superstitious minds ignited a firestorm of controversy. But as a Dutch Protestant raised in the shadow of Das Leben Jesu and the Groningers’ biblical humanism, Vincent would have found nothing shocking in such claims. What transfixed him was Renan’s vivid portrait of a man in search of himself.

  Like Vincent, Renan’s Jesus was a “provincial,” a Galilean, with “an exquisite sympathy” for nature, in which he often sought solace. The eldest of many brothers and sisters, but never married, Renan’s Jesus shunned his family and came to value “the bond of thought” more than “ties of blood.” Like Vincent, Renan’s Jesus was a man of volatile moods: alternately rent by anger, possessed by rapturous enthusiasms, and paralyzed by melancholy. He was a deeply flawed man. Obstacles irritated him. He argued incessantly, and saw his life increasingly as a battle with the forces of hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness. Isolated and ostracized, he disdained convention and delighted in flouting the social niceties of his day. “Contact with the world pained and revolted him,” according to Renan. By the end, he had altogether “forgotten the pleasure of living, of loving, of seeing, and of feeling.”

  Yet these torments and trials were merely the necessary passage to ultimate redemption: not in a literal resurrection (Vincent never showed any interest in Christ’s Passion), but in pointing the way to a new life, a journey’s end. For humanity, that destination was the promised utopia, the consummation of Michelet’s apocalyptic revolutions. For Jesus’ fellow outcasts, like Vincent, it was a place in the soul where they could finally find comfort and belonging.

  THROUGHOUT THE WINTER and spring of 1874–75, these ideas simmered in the solitude of the little room on Kennington Road. Vin
cent’s parents heard only hints of them in his rare, brief letters. At Christmas, his sister Lies admired Vincent’s “pure ideas.” In February, even Dorus noticed some “good thoughts” in his son’s birthday greeting. Vincent almost certainly poured out these “thoughts” to Theo in the six months of missing letters. He eagerly added passages from his readings in Taine, Carlyle, and Renan to the poetry albums he was preparing for his brother, creating an incongruous pastiche of swooning love poetry and ponderous philosophizing that perfectly reflected his manic mind. Equally comfortable with the deepest ideas and the shallowest sentimental notions (a versatility later critical to his art) he was moved by Spurgeon’s avuncular exhortations to simple faith even as he embraced Carlyle’s abstruse “divine infinite” and Renan’s controversial Christ.

  By the time Vincent arrived in Paris, however, his search for answers had resolved into a single mandate: “Fear God and keep his commandments,” he enjoined his brother in the summer of 1875, “for this is the whole duty of man.”

  The triumph of evangelical ardor over existential angst—of Spurgeon over Carlyle—in Vincent’s flailing thoughts may have been the result of a pilgrimage he made that spring to Brighton, the resort town on the south coast where, in May and June, evangelicals from across Europe gathered for one of the great “conventions” that marked the spiritual revival of the 1870s. Although he missed the convention itself, Vincent later recalled how “moving” it always was to see “the thousands of people now flocking to hear the evangelists.”

  Whatever the cause, the transformation was complete. In Paris, he launched into a paroxysm of piety. He read the Bible fervently every night and filled his letters with its wisdom. He imposed monastic self-discipline on his routine: rising at dawn and going to bed early (in contravention of long habit). He summarized his day to Theo with the ancient monastic motto ora et labora (prayer and work). He eschewed the pleasures of the flesh and took a new, sacramental interest in bread (“the staff of life”)—both ominous portents of the self-punishments to come. Writing at a furious pace, he deluged his family and friends with exhortatory letters: letters fat with scripture, hymns, inspirational verses, and homiletic aphorisms. So overwhelming was the outpouring that even the pious Dorus expressed unease. “[Vincent] is always in such a serious mood,” he complained to Theo. Ever distrustful of excess, Dorus may have recognized in his son’s newfound passion not the ardor of a man embracing new angels, but the desperation of a man fleeing old demons. “This morning I heard a beautiful sermon,” Vincent reported to Theo in September. “ ‘Forget what is behind you,’ the preacher said. ‘Have more hope than memories.’ ”