Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  It was a common theme of the “nature sermons” that had made Laurillard one of the most sought-after preachers in Holland. Using simple, vivid images, he portrayed a Christ not only in nature, but also intimate with the processes of nature (plowing, sowing, reaping), and inseparable from the beauty of nature. Both Dorus van Gogh and Charles Spurgeon had preached the gospel of fertile seeds, fruitful vineyards, and “healing” sunbeams. Karr and Michelet had found God in flower beds and on tree branches. Carlyle had declared the “divineness of Nature.” But Laurillard and others went further. Finding beauty in nature was not just one way of knowing God, they proposed; it was the only way. And those who could see that beauty and express it—writers, musicians, artists—were God’s truest intermediaries.

  For Vincent, this was an electrifying new ideal of art and artists. Before, art had always served religion: from the ubiquitous emblem books that taught children moral lessons, to the devotional prints that hung in every Van Gogh room. But Laurillard preached a “religion of beauty” in which God was nature, nature was beauty, art was worship, and artists were preachers. In short, art was religion. “He made a deep impression on me,” Vincent wrote as he returned again and again to hear Laurillard preach. “It is as if he paints, and his work is at the same time high and noble art.” He compared Laurillard to two giants of his imagination, Andersen and Michelet. “He has the feelings of an artist in the true sense of the word,” he wrote Theo.

  The comparisons to Andersen and Michelet, both objects of shared passion with his brother, were carefully chosen. Vincent was responding to the other seminal event of the summer of 1877: Theo’s announcement that he wanted to be an artist.

  ONLY JUST TURNED TWENTY and already afflicted by bouts of depression that would eventually cripple him, Theo had been thrown into an existential crisis the previous winter after his third disastrous love affair in as many years. In May, after his refusal to end the affair triggered his father’s wrath, he saw no choice but to leave The Hague and start a new career and a new life someplace else. But that plan set off even louder alarms in Etten. A private scandal was abhorrent, but another family shame would be a catastrophe. “These are new worries and very big ones,” Dorus wrote as he hastily arranged an emergency trip to The Hague to head off Theo’s “crazy” plan. “I beg you not to take any rash steps … I beg you to wait until we have talked.”

  Theo had already shared with Vincent his plan to quit Goupil, probably earlier that spring before his parents knew that he had resumed the affair. At the same time, no doubt, he broached the idea of becoming an artist. Elated that his brother would spurn the firm that had spurned him, Vincent rallied to Theo’s cause. He sent the usual flood of support: paeans to the admirable “life and work” of artists they both loved (Breton, Millet, Rembrandt) and a copy of Legends of Artists. In mid-May, on his way to Amsterdam, he stopped in The Hague so the two brothers could visit Anton Mauve, their cousin by marriage, who was a widely admired and successful painter.

  Theo had recently begun seeing Mauve often, both at his home in the city and at his studio near the shore at Scheveningen. Charming and accomplished, with a young family and a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle, Mauve offered a perfect model of the successful artistic career that Theo no doubt imagined for himself. Vincent’s visit provided the final push. Soon after he left for Amsterdam, Theo informed his parents of his intention to quit Goupil. Vincent reveled at the thought of his brother breaking with convention and setting off on a new path—just as he had done. The vindication of it thrilled him. “My past comes to life again when I think of your future,” he wrote.

  Seeing fulfillment of his vision on the Rijswijk road within his grasp—two brothers “bound up in one … feeling, thinking and believing the same”—Vincent proclaimed the brotherhood of preachers and artists even more boldly than Laurillard did. He found “a resemblance” between the works of artists like Millet and Rembrandt and “the work and life of Father.” And he claimed for Theo’s new calling the same transformative power he claimed for his own: “When I see a painting by Ruysdael [or] Van Goyen,” he wrote, “I am reminded again and again of the words, ‘Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.’ ”

  But Theo could not go through with it. Within only a few days of making his momentous announcement, he rushed to Etten to retract it, not even waiting for his father to come to him. Whether from failure of conviction or excess of duty, he would stay at Goupil. At first, he asked to be transferred someplace else—to Paris or London. But Dorus talked him out of even that. Uncle Cent advised his ambitious, “golden-tongued” nephew not to “spoil his future with haste.” Instead, Theo should “concentrate on making himself indispensable,” Cent counseled. Both flattered and chastened, Theo quietly let the matter drop, bringing to a quick close the first in a career filled with similar periodic feints of rebellion.

  Vincent, on the other hand, could not let go so easily. Emboldened by Laurillard’s ideas and driven by the image of perfect brotherhood, he continued to encourage Theo’s artistic ambitions long after Theo had retreated from them. For the rest of his life, Vincent would taunt his brother and torture himself with the vision of brotherly solidarity that he enjoyed for barely a week in the summer of 1877.

  Obsessed by that vision and guided by Laurillard, Vincent’s powerful imagination continued to shape new connections between art and religion, binding them together in an ever tighter unity. They shared not just common roots in Nature, he said, but a whole catalogue of Romantic imagery: from starry skies to “overflowing eyes.” To Vincent, those images now spoke not just of lost love, but of “the Love of God.” They shared a common source—“a deeper source in our souls,” he said—a source beyond the conscious mind or the clever hand. Both promised renewal, whether through revolution or apocalypse, and both offered “something of the spirit of the resurrection and the life.”

  Like Carlyle’s divinity, both resided in the particularity of this world, not in the perfection of the next: in a swaybacked draft horse patiently awaiting its next burden; in the corkscrew twist of a tree branch, or a battered pair of walking boots. All were “noble and beautiful,” he maintained, “with a peculiar, weird beauty.” They shared a common language, too. Not just the symbolism of suns and sowers, but a common mode of expression—a “simplicity of heart and simpleness of mind” that Vincent found in works as different as Michelet and the Book of Kings. Nor was this a language that required years of study to master. “It could be understood by everyone,” he insisted, because “it has an eloquence which wins the heart because it comes from the heart.”

  Finally, art and religion shared the signature power of Vincent’s imagination, the power to console—the power to “bring light into darkness,” to transform suffering into solace, sorrow into rejoicing. “For this is what great art does,” he declared: “cheer you and feed your inner life.” This was the power that brought tears to Vincent’s eyes over a passage of scripture, an Andersen story, or the sight of “the sun shining through the leaves in the evening.” When Vincent felt this power—for it was more a feeling than a perception—he recognized it instantly. “Dat is het,” he would exclaim. “That is it.”

  Vincent had first heard the phrase from Mauve, years before in The Hague. Then, it applied only to art—a painter’s eureka of tribute to the rightness of an image, the successful capture of a subject’s ineffable essence. Now he applied it to anything that evoked this new and mysterious conjunction of art and religion. “You will find it everywhere,” he said; “the world is full of it.” He found it in a group of old houses on a little square behind the Oosterkerk—a vignette of humble persistence just waiting for an artist to see. He found it in a sermon on the death of a child—“This was it,” too, he said. Whether encountered in a painting or a sermon, it evoked feelings of joyful consolation. It both illuminated the human condition—the way art had always done—and, like religion, gave life meaning in the face of inevitable suffering and inescapable death. Preachers and artist
s alike could provide the consolation of it, Vincent argued, as long as they “applied themselves heart, mind and soul.” His father had it, of course. But in Vincent’s union of art and religion, Uncle Cent had it, too: “something indescribably charming and, I should say, something good and spiritual.”

  He found it in everyday experience. “There are moments when the common everyday things make an extraordinary impression,” he wrote, “and have a deep significance and a different aspect.” A little girl he saw in the flower market, knitting while her peasant father sold pots, had it: “so simple in her little black bonnet, and with a pair of bright, smiling eyes.” Old people, like the wizened sexton at the Oosterkerk, had it. What they had in common, he observed, was “soul”—a term he used to refer to any burden, affliction, or sadness (such as poverty or age) that separated them from the soulless beauty found both in Salon paintings and in church pews. Always sensitive to his own rough appearance, he increasingly saw outward ugliness as a sign of “spirituality” within. “I would rather see a homely woman,” he argued after seeing a voluptuous Gérôme nude, “for what does a beautiful body really matter?”

  In Vincent’s relentlessly visual imagination, it also had a face. Years of deep, obsessive immersion in the Bible had imprinted on him an image that could not be erased: the image of an angel. “It is also good to believe that now, just as in olden days, an angel is not far from those who are sad,” he wrote Theo in the midst of his crisis. In England, he swore he saw the “countenance of an angel” when his father preached. In Amsterdam, he fixated on the story of Elijah being “touched by an angel” as he lay sleeping, alone in the wilderness. He wrote Theo about the angel who told Paul, “Fear not,” and about the angel that visited Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane and “gave strength unto Him Whose soul was sorrowful even unto death.” He bought an engraving of Rembrandt’s The Angel Leaving the Family of Tobias, a dramatic depiction of the moment when the archangel Raphael, after restoring sight to the blind Tobias, reveals himself and rises into the air in a burst of light and a swirl of weightless robes.

  For Vincent, angels would always be the instruments of God’s consolation, the messengers of His comfort: hovering, always hovering “not far away from us—not far from those who are broken-hearted and dejected in spirit.” Despite the encroachments of an increasingly skeptical world and modern notions of a godless universe, despite his own bold and desperate straining to create an embracing it that superseded his father’s demanding faith, Vincent clung to these earlier incarnations of divine possibility, these nuncios of the sublime. Till the end of his life, they continued to hover over his imagination, embodying his last delusional hope for reconciliation with a Father both abandoned and abandoning. In the asylum at Saint-Rémy, between images of sowers and cypresses and starry nights, he painted a radiant portrait of the archangel Raphael.

  In Amsterdam, Vincent immediately began experimenting with the new ideas he was formulating. “Happy the one who is taught by truth,” he argued, “not by fleeting words but by itself, showing itself as it is.” In addition to collecting prints, copying out passages, and recording examples on his walks, he tried to capture it in the medium he knew best: words. Going beyond the simple word paintings that had long filled his letters to Theo, he tried to evoke not just images, but complete moments: fragments of experience suffused with deeper significance—with it. His new vision was at work in December when he described the dockyards outside his window:

  Twilight is falling … That little avenue of poplars—their slender forms and thin branches stand out so delicately against the grey evening sky;…Farther down is the little garden and the fence around it with the rosebushes, and everywhere in the yard the black figures of the workmen, and also the little dog … In the distance the masts of the ships in the dock can be seen … and just now here and there the lamps are being lit. At this moment the bell is ringing and the whole stream of workmen is pouring toward the gate.

  Vincent clearly saw creations like this as something new and significant. Later that month, he collected “a few writings” that he had done, and took them to a bookseller to have them bound.

  Vincent had already learned to layer words and images in the pursuit of what he called “the finest expression.” A dense thicket of Bible verses, hymns, and poetry filled the margins of his print collection. But the search for it—for “deep significance and different aspect”—transformed these composite images, just as it did his word paintings, into deeply creative explorations.

  In his description of a twilight walk along the bank of the IJ River, he struggled to express—for the first of many times—the solace he found in the night sky. He began with the “shining moon” and “that deep silence.” He added poetry (“God’s voice is heard under the stars”), literature (Dickens’s “blessed twilight”), and scripture (“twilight, when two or three are gathered together in His name”). Recalling a drawing he had seen, he reimagined the night sky as a backdrop for a Rembrandt biblical scene in which “the figure of our Lord, noble and impressive, stands out serious and dark against the window through which the evening twilight radiates.” For Vincent, this promise of redemption was the comforting Truth—the it—in every moonlit night or starry sky.

  I hope never to forget what that drawing seems to tell me: “I am the light of the world, he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”…Such things twilight tells to those who have ears to hear and a heart to understand.

  Portraits, too, were transformed by the search for it. The “stormy, thundery expression” in an old engraving of a seventeenth-century Dutch admiral reminded him of his religious hero, Oliver Cromwell. A noble portrait of Anne of Brittany summoned up images “of the sea and rocky coasts.” The portrait of a young boy from the French Revolution, Citizen of the Year V, that had hung on his wall for years, suddenly resurfaced in his imagination, carrying in its resigned young face all the passion and adversity of Vincent’s own religious coming of age. (“He is astonished to find that he is still alive after so many catastrophes.”) Vincent’s synthesizing eye combined the “splendid” portrait of the boy in the bonnet rouge with Michelet, Carlyle, Dickens, and all his reading on the Revolution so that it made “a good and beautiful whole.”

  But no composite portrait he “painted” that winter was more vivid than the one he painted of himself. Looking through old art magazines at his uncle’s bookstore, he ran across an etching entitled A Cup of Coffee, which he described to Theo:

  A young man with rather severe, sharp features and a serious expression who looks just as if he were pondering over a fragment from Imitation [of Christ] or planning some difficult but good work, as only une âme en peine [a soul in pain] can do.

  Vincent added to this unblinking self-portrait his own prescient postscript: “Such work is not always the worst; for what is wrought in sorrow, lives for all time.”

  At some point, he took the final step. Instead of layering his words on others’ drawings, he layered his drawings on their words. It was an easy line to cross. Vincent had grown up making drawings as gifts and as records. After leaving home, he made them as a way of sharing with his family and others his life away from them: his room, his house, his church. Whenever his parents moved, he made a drawing of each new parsonage. When he left a place, he invariably made drawings as mementos, to interleave with his memories.

  The Cave of Machpelah, MAY 1877, INK ON PAPER, 2⅞ × 6⅛ IN. (Illustration credit 11.1)

  The first drawings he did in the summer of 1877 were no different from these. Only now, the home that he wanted to share was not on any map. “Last week, I got as far as Genesis 23,” he reported to Theo on the progress of his Bible studies, “where Abraham buries Sarah in the cave of Machpelah; and I spontaneously made a little drawing of how I imagined the place.” The drawing he enclosed was small (less than six by three inches) but it contained a world. With tiny strokes from a fine pen, he drew the dark cave opening in the cente
r and, above it, a marker stone with an infinitesimal inscription. On the right, a path wanders by, discernible by its weedy border, and a disappearing trio of knotty, crooked trees; on the left, a flock of birds alights from a distant field. Next to the marker he drew a tiny bush, each of its rangy limbs defined by a stroke as fine as a hair and topped with a straggle of blossoms drawn with a conviction that suggests he knew exactly what kind of bush it was.

  After hearing Laurillard preach, Vincent’s ambitions for these drawings changed. They were no longer merely records of places, whether real or imagined; they became expressions. “What I draw, I see clearly,” he wrote. “In these [drawings], I can talk with enthusiasm. I have found a voice.” He immediately tried his new voice on a biblical image that always obsessed him: the wandering, Christlike Elijah. “I did [a drawing] this morning, representing Elijah in the desert under a stormy sky,” he reported to Theo.

  In his quest for “complete expression,” these early efforts were soon replaced by another form of imaginary landscape: maps. Vincent’s fascination with geography and maps must have begun with his childhood in a stopover town on a busy transcontinental road, with one uncle who sent reports from places as distant as the beaches of southern France and the Alps of Switzerland, and another uncle who explored corners of the planet as impossibly exotic as Borneo and Java. The same fascination made him a ready audience throughout his life for pseudoreligions and science fictions that promised different worlds on distant planets; and stayed with him to the end, when he looked into the night sky and saw a map of eternity.