In his rush to put the past behind him, Vincent renounced almost everything that he had once held precious—in some cases only months before. After years of encouraging his brother’s romantic adventures, he warned Theo to “keep your heart against all attention.” After years of lurching toward success as an art dealer, he disavowed the whole notion of worldly success and now wished only to become “rich in God.” He came close to renouncing art itself. “You need not exaggerate … the feeling for art,” he cautioned Theo. “Don’t give yourself utterly to that.” After a winter of wrestling with the brave new ideas of Carlyle and Taine, he now dismissed them all as “deviations” and discouraged Theo from thinking “too deeply” lest his intellect imperil his faith. Repudiating a childhood of defiant noncomformity, he repeatedly enjoined his brother to aim always for “the narrow road” (a phrase he borrowed from his father). And after years of desultory attendance, he sternly instructed Theo in imperative terms to “go to church every Sunday; even if the preaching is not good.”
Perhaps the most astonishing reversal—surely the most surprising to Theo—was Vincent’s rejection of his longtime hero Michelet. In September, Theo sent a letter with a favorable mention of L’amour, a book that his brother had been pressing on him only the year before. Vincent scrawled an alarmed response onto Theo’s letter—“Do not read Michelet any longer”—and shot it back by return post. A few weeks later, he sent another anxious warning: “I am going to destroy all my books by Michelet, etc. I wish you would do the same.” He followed up a month later: “Did you do what I advised you to do, get rid of the works of Michelet?” And again a week after that: “I advised you to destroy your books, and do so now; yes, do so.”
Why this hounding? In Vincent’s guilt-obsessed mind, Michelet had become synonymous with sexuality. Avoiding the Frenchman’s erotic writings was an essential part of the regimen Vincent proposed to ward off the temptations of sex—temptations that clearly, for Vincent, lurked in every unguarded moment. (His regimen included Bible reading and visiting friends in the evening as often as possible.) Soon Vincent’s moralistic fervor extended to other books as well. With a certitude that could only have reflected his own precarious grip on certainty, he commanded his brother not to read anything at all but the Bible, dismissing everything else as “disgusting.” Romantics like Heine and Uhland were “dangerous traps,” he warned Theo. “Be on guard … do not abandon yourself to them.” As for Renan’s Vie de Jésus: “Throw [it] away,” Vincent thundered.
In place of Michelet and Renan and all the other books banished in the fall of 1875, Vincent pressed a new favorite on his brother: Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi (Imitation of Christ). Even more than the Bible, this fifteenth-century spiritual guide for monastic novices brought Christ vividly to life—not as a biographical figure, but as an intimate friend. Unlike the “hero” of Carlyle and Renan—a remote figure on a millenarian mission—Kempis’s Jesus speaks directly to the reader in “the language of the heart”: with sincerity, common sense, and an exquisite sympathy for human weakness. He counsels, exhorts, chides, and cajoles. With its unique combination of classical wisdom and medieval sweetness, Imitatio proved the perfect comfort to Vincent’s estranged soul. Kempis’s Jesus reassures his followers that “God loves us as much in our failings as in our successes,” and that loneliness is a badge of devotion, not a curse. All true believers live as “strangers and pilgrims in the world,” he says, and “gladly endure the heart’s interior exile.”
In letter after letter that fall, Vincent tried to play the part of Kempis’s consoling Christ to his eighteen-year-old brother. Melancholic from the deaths of several friends, disgruntled at work, and bedridden by an injury, Theo presented an ideal test for the new, beatific Vincent. Instead of the usual exhortations and incitements, he sent his brother quiet urgings to see the storms of adolescence as “nothing but vanity”; not to take setbacks “too much to heart”; not to put too much stock in the things of the world; even “not to dream” too much. “All things work together for good to them that love God,” he wrote about Theo’s sprained ankle. “Courage, old son,” he concluded philosophically, “rain and good weather alternate on the road that goes uphill all the way—yes to the very end.” For a volatile young man whose life so far had been riven by wild enthusiasms and bitter disappointments, it was a bold leap of imagination—a desperate grab for the serenity that had always eluded him in reality.
Vincent sent copies of Imitatio not just to Theo but to his sisters Wil and Anna as well, and everyone reported receiving “good letters” from him. But the person who felt the full force of Vincent’s ardor that fall wasn’t Theo or any other Van Gogh. It was Vincent’s housemate, Harry Gladwell.
Vincent met the young Englishman at the Goupil office on the rue Chaptal where he, like so many Goupil apprentices, had been sent for training by his art dealer father. With his provincial ways, poor French, and jug ears, Gladwell cut an almost comic figure in cosmopolitan Paris. “At first everybody laughed at [him],” Vincent reported, “even I.” But religion brought them together. By October they not only shared a boardinghouse, they shared a joint discipleship. Every night, they read aloud from the Bible, intending to “read it from one end to the other,” Vincent said. Every Sunday, they visited “as many churches as possible,” leaving early in the morning and returning late at night. Vincent ardently preached Kempis’s Imitatio to his young companion, chastising the homesick eighteen-year-old for “sighing after” his family too much—a violation of Kempis’s instruction to withdraw from the world and seek solitude. Gladwell’s close relationship with his father drew an especially sharp rebuke from Vincent, who called it “dangerous” and “unwholesome”—“idolatry, not love.” According to Kempis, parental love should be marked by sadness and regret, Vincent insisted—at least in this life.
When it came to Harry Gladwell, however, Vincent ignored Kempis’s warning to “shut the door” on emotional ties. Starved of companionship for so long, he found in the awkward outcast Gladwell both a mirror of himself and a new slate to write upon. He quickly expanded their nightly readings to include his favorite poetry (a true familial intimacy). He tutored Gladwell’s eating habits, introduced him to the joys of print collecting, and guided him through museums, pointing out “the pictures that I like the most.” The friendless Gladwell, who was exactly Theo’s age, gladly accepted the role of pliant, attentive younger brother that Theo himself had long since abandoned. He came to Vincent’s room every morning to wake him and make him breakfast. They walked to and from work together, ate dinner together around the little stove in Vincent’s room (“our room,” Vincent called it), and took long soulful treks together through the streets of Paris. “I should like to walk again with [Harry] in the twilight, along the Seine,” Vincent recalled fondly years later. “I’m longing to see his brown eyes, which could sparkle so.”
The unfamiliar passion of friendship, combined with the new passion of piety, crowded out everything else. Even as the Paris art world burned with controversy; even as young artists plotted insurrection in brasseries and traditionalists retaliated in furious editorials; even as Monet’s and Renoir’s riverbank scenes of Argenteuil were scorned and derided—or championed—all around him, Vincent holed up in his little Montmartre “cabin” (his word) with his young acolyte, reading the Bible and following the example of Kempis’s Christ: “Withdraw your heart from the love of things visible, and turn yourself to things invisible.”
But Vincent could not surrender his vicarious life in images any more than he could resist the balm of Gladwell’s companionship. Instead, he enlisted art in the service of his newest obsession. Already in London the previous year, he had begun adding explicitly religious images to his storehouse of favorites. He made a special trip to the British Museum in August 1874 to see one of Rembrandt’s drawings of the life of Christ. Over the winter, as his thought-pilgrimage led from Spurgeon to Michelet to Carlyle to Renan, the gallery of images nailed to his
wall tracked its progress. Scenes of provocative women and bourgeois life came down; scenes of Bible readings, christenings, religious heroes, and pious ceremonies went up. Carlyle’s view of divinity in Nature brought a rush of images of serene sunrises, glimmering twilights, turbulent skies, and lowering clouds (especially by the French landscapist Georges Michel)—cementing a bond between nature and religion that would never be broken.
But the divine Nature of Carlyle soon yielded to the triumphant Christ of Renan. From a memorial exhibition of works by the most soulful of all Barbizon landscapists, Camille Corot, Vincent singled out one work, The Garden of Olives. From a show of old masters, he picked Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross for praise. From the vast riches of the Louvre and Luxembourg galleries, he recommended that Theo see Rembrandt’s Supper at Emmaus, another scene from the life of Jesus. For his mother’s birthday in September, he sent two engravings: Good Friday and St. Augustine. Within a few months after his arrival in Paris, he had added to the images on his cabin wall a nativity scene, a picture of a monk, and a print entitled The Imitation of Jesus Christ.
Vincent’s otherworldly obsessions only compounded his problems at work. The fresh wave of enthusiasm with which he began the job in May was quickly dashed when he learned in June that he would not be returning to London as he had hoped and expected. His devotion to Christ may have consoled his disappointment, but it earned him no friends, other than Gladwell, among his fellow employees on the rue Chaptal. Nothing could have been more ill-suited to Adolphe Goupil’s bastion of cosmopolitan commercialism than Kempis’s Imitatio, with its exhortations to disengagement and asceticism. What were Vincent’s fellow apprentices, merchant sons in training, to make of Kempis’s injunction: “Do not flatter the rich, nor desire to be in the presence of those who are important in the eyes of the world”? If Vincent tried to convert them—as he surely did—he no doubt received the same impatient rebuff he did from his Uncle Cent: “I know nothing of supernatural things.”
Vincent later dismissively described his job in the salesroom at Goupil as “entertaining visitors,” suggesting both the dreaded social demands of the work and his poor track record of sales. His inborn shortcomings as a salesman—rough appearance, unsettling gaze, awkward manner—must have stood out even more jarringly on the rue Chaptal than they did on the Plaats. The ladies of Paris who came to shop at Goupil’s limestone palace of parlor-art called him “ce Hollandais rustre” (that Dutch rube) and stiffened with disdain when he waited on them. He treated them not as customers to be wooed, but as novices to be educated—recruited to his latest enthusiasm—or sometimes as philistines to be chastened. The “stupidity” of some customers “exasperated” him, according to one account. And when someone defended a purchase by saying “C’est la mode” (That’s the fashion), he would recoil in astonishment and anger. The customers responded in kind, indignant that this strange clerk “dared to question their taste.” In such confrontations, Kempis’s call to honesty in word and deed could only have emboldened Vincent’s natural obstinacy. On more than one occasion, his impolitesse so alarmed his superiors that they were forced to take disciplinary action against him for setting a “bad example” to his coworkers.
To make matters worse, Kempis’s call to embrace the “simple and humble” sent Vincent’s taste in art wandering in ever more contrarian and idiosyncratic directions. He developed a special obsession for the strange, somber works of the Dutch artist Matthijs Maris, a former Communard who lived not far from Vincent’s boardinghouse in Montmartre. Maris was another fallen son of the bourgeoisie. He had once worked for Goupil and painted in the same conventional style as his successful artist brothers, Jacob and Willem. But he had turned his back on all that. Dismissing his previous works as nothing but “potboilers,” he began painting in an eerie symbolist style and took up the life of an exile and recluse. When Vincent championed Maris’s “genius” to his parents, they responded warily: “[He] is so enthused about the bleakly-colored paintings of Maris,” Dorus lamented. “I wish that his tastes would prefer the expressions of a more energetic life, something done in strong and bright color.”
Despite their proximity, Vincent never reported visiting the misanthropic Maris. But in every way that mattered, he had found a kindred spirit. They shared the same otherworldly concerns; the same history of family alienation and revolutionary ardor; the same trajectory of eccentricity, rejection, and withdrawal. Sometime that fall, Vincent began preparing a poetry album for the older man. He invoked Kempis in the very first entry: “When you are a stranger everywhere,” he wrote, “how fortunate it is to have the truest friend in your heart.”
The combination of Kempis’s lessons, Maris’s example, and the continuing troubles at Goupil gradually reshaped Vincent’s world. Old attitudes were swept away—not just toward his uncle’s profession, but toward wealth and privilege in general. He developed a lifelong antipathy to the class he had once aspired to join—the class that, like his family, would not have him. According to his sister Lies, he came to see bargaining as nothing more than “seeking to get the better of another,” and art dealing as “simply legitimate stealing.” “Everything, everything,” Vincent later wrote, “is in the clutches of the moneychangers.” Angry and adrift, he complained of depression and took up again his cure for the “blues,” pipe smoking. He endlessly wandered the streets of Paris, avoiding museums but lingering over cemeteries. He referred dismissively to his life at Goupil as “that other world” and spurned familial duties to his patron Cent. In perhaps the clearest sign of his inward revolt, he began defying the strict dress code of both family and profession. Godliness, said Kempis, “does not avoid what is shabby, and does not mind wearing clothes old and tattered.”
The one vanity that Vincent could not give up, regardless of Christ’s example, was his longing for family. As always, the approach of Christmas fanned that longing into a blaze of anticipation. Because his father had accepted a new position, the family would celebrate the holiday in Etten, a little town on the outskirts of Breda, only four miles from Zundert. So Christmas would be a double homecoming. As early as August, Vincent started laying holiday plans. In September, he wrote to Theo, “How I am longing for Christmas,” and instructed his paymaster to withhold something from his salary checks each month because “I shall want a lot of money around Christmas.” December began with a rush of letters and a flurry of shifting plans for his departure from Paris. When a painting arrived at the gallery showing a snow-covered village scene, Vincent imagined it as his own Christmas reunion to come. “It tells us that winter is cold,” he wrote hopefully, “but that human hearts are warm.”
But the months of longing and anticipation only added to the burden of failure and guilt that he carried home with him on the overnight train that left Paris on December 23. The news he had to tell his parents would blacken his family’s brightest, most cherished holiday: he could not stay at Goupil.
THE ACCOUNTS OF VINCENT’S final humiliation are incomplete and confusing, but on one point they agree: he saw the ax coming. In a subsequent letter to Theo, he called his dismissal “not entirely unforeseen” and admitted vaguely to having “done things that in a certain sense have been very wrong.” One of those things surely was his unauthorized trip home for the holidays. In fact, it appears that Vincent’s holiday leave had been canceled, probably at the last minute—not an unusual occurrence during the store’s busiest season. But after months of planning and longing, Vincent defied his bosses and left anyway. It may have been during a confrontation over the last-minute cancellation that Vincent “flew into a rage and walked out,” as he confessed to Theo years later. He told his family none of this at first. Only after the celebrations were finished and Theo had returned to The Hague did Vincent sit down for a “heart-to-heart talk” with his father.
Even then, he never mentioned his unauthorized departure or the dismissal he must have known was coming, but instead portrayed his predicament in more general and sympathet
ic terms. “He is definitely not happy,” Dorus reported to Theo after the conversation. “I believe he is not in the right place there … It may be necessary to change his position.” Even as his train left Breda for Paris on January 3, Vincent had still not told his parents the truth. At their farewell, “[Vincent] was of the opinion that he should stay [at Goupil],” Dorus reported to Theo. Anna recorded her son’s parting words: “I am looking forward to my work.”
As Vincent feared, the dismissal was, in fact, the first item of business when he returned to work on January 4. Léon Boussod, one of Cent’s partners, delivered the news in an encounter that Vincent described as “very unpleasant.” Confronted with his unauthorized leave, coming on top of a litany of customer complaints, disciplinary actions, and admonitory transfers, Vincent retreated into silence. “I never made a big thing to answer back,” he told Theo. He must have known that he had no choice but to accept a decision that had clearly been approved at the highest level. In January, the Van Gogh family chronicler noted tersely: “Vincent received word that he was no longer employed in the house of Goupil.… The gentlemen had noticed long ago that he was not fit for business, yet they had let him stay as long as possible for Uncle [Cent]’s sake.”
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