In Amsterdam, despite the heavy workload, he produced maps with the profligate energy that marked all his great obsessions. He spent his precious extra money on “penny” maps, and made special trips to Stricker, Reverend Meyjes, Mendes, and Uncle Cor’s bookstore to see and copy the magnificent volumes of hand-colored maps produced by the century’s great mapmakers, Spruner and Stieler, with their panoramic formats, evocative topography, and meticulous lettering. “The work of real artists,” he called them.
The distinction between map making and art making had never really been recognized in Holland, with its simultaneous mandates to explore and describe. In the Golden Age, Johannes Vermeer’s Art of Painting had included a map so precise that one could set sail by it. Vincent added maps to the prints on his wall and recommended that Theo do the same. He used maps, like prints, to create composite images. He made elaborate maps of the countries he studied, then copied long extracts from his texts onto the same sheet, “thus making a whole of the two.” A map of Normandy called for a page of Michelet. To a map of France he added “a list of everything I can remember concerning the French Revolution.” He embellished a map of Paul’s route across Asia Minor with excerpts from the saint’s letters. Despite the increasingly intense pressure of his studies, he labored painstakingly over each map, copying it again and again until it “finally has the quality I want,” he said, “namely that it has been made with feeling and love.”
One map preoccupied him more than any other that winter. Borrowing a book on the geography of Palestine from Uncle Stricker, he set out to create a map of the Holy Land. On a huge sheet of paper, almost three by five feet, he carefully drew all the cities and regions, rivers and mountains, valleys and oases, of this unseeable world. He shaded in their contours and washed their borders with color. In one corner, he set a plan of Jerusalem, with its jagged city walls and citadel, its Mount of Olives, its Golgotha—the landmarks of his last three years—all drawn in an eager, naïve hand—all “made with loving devotion,” he explained.
When his father came to Amsterdam in February 1878 for his third review, Vincent had the map ready to give him—as proof of his dedication, perhaps, or a plea for patience. But in his tortured retelling of the events of those days, Vincent never mentioned presenting it to him. Ten days later, he took a copy of the same map, drawn in red crayon, to the dark basement classroom of a little chapel near the Jewish Quarter and hung it there. “I thought that little room would be a nice place for it,” he wrote Theo. “It is only a very small light … but let me keep it burning.”
AFTER THE DISASTROUS MEETING with his father, Vincent clearly knew he would never succeed in his studies. “It is very doubtful that I shall ever pass all the examinations,” he wrote Theo in what had to be a painful admission. But he could not give up. Nor, despite his relentless exhortations to Theo and his increasingly elaborate invocations of it, did he consider becoming an artist himself. Instead, he vowed fresh determination and spun new delusions of success. “I must push on,” he said. “There is no remedy but to set to work again, since it is clearly my duty to do this, whatever it costs.”
And then a different path opened up. On February 17, only days after his father left, Vincent broke from his usual Sunday routine and visited the Waalse Kerk (French Church). In the lofty pulpit stood a visiting clergyman “from the vicinity of Lyon” who delivered a sermon unlike any Vincent had heard before.
The same industrial revolution that had brought great wealth to some, like Uncle Cent, had thrown hundreds of thousands of others into unimaginable poverty. As the center of French industry, especially the weaving industry, Lyon had suffered more than most places with inhuman working conditions, subhuman living conditions, child labor, and unchecked disease. This pandemic of exploitation and suffering, which had inflamed a workers’ movement that was already the most militant in France, was the subject of the sermon delivered in the Waalse Kerk that morning. The preacher spoke of the workers’ plight using “stories from the lives of the working people in the factories,” Vincent recalled.
Vincent responded not only to the heartbreaking imagery, which he always found more vivid than reality, but also to the messenger: an awkward, earnest foreigner struggling with his words. “One could hear that he spoke with some difficulty and effort,” he reported to Theo, “but his words were still effective because they came from the heart—only such are powerful enough to touch other hearts.”
Vincent grasped his example like a lifeline. In the Frenchman’s tales of evangelical outreach to the poor workers of Lyon, Vincent found a new model for his foundering enterprise to become “a real Christian”: He would do “good works.” Almost overnight, references to his studies virtually disappeared from his letters. So did the endless philosophical ruminations, dense knots of scripture, and flights of homily and rhetoric. “Better to say but a few words, but filled with meaning,” he corrected himself. He argued with his tutor about the value and relevance of his lessons. “Mendes,” he said, “do you really think such horrors are necessary for someone who wants what I want?” In place of sermons and studies, he proposed work as the ultimate expression of spirituality, and exalted the “natural wisdom” of the peasants over book learning. Instead of a scholarly parson like his father, Vincent now aspired to be a “laborer” for the Lord. “Laborers, your life is full of suffering,” he wrote to Theo, echoing a French evangelical pamphlet. “Laborers, you are blessed.”
Vincent began preaching the apotheosis of “the simple people” (as he called them) in the winter of 1878. But the idea already had deep roots in his imagination. In his childhood, of course, real peasants were rarely seen and never discussed. Vincent had little contact with the yeoman farmers that his father supervised; even less contact with the invisible and often landless peasants who stood at the bottom of Anna van Gogh’s social ladder; and no contact whatsoever with the emerging class of workers in sparsely industrialized Brabant. He lacked any actual experience to contradict either his parents’ view of peasants as “rough, uncivilized, sensual, churlish, and aggressive,” or the new, romanticized Victorian view scornfully summarized by George Eliot: “Idyllic ploughmen … jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic shepherds mak[ing] bashful love under the hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers danc[ing] in the chequered shade.” Like most sons of the bourgeoisie, Vincent often conflated these conflicting narratives—noble farmer, beast of burden, libertine fantasy—so that his imagination could be equally engaged by reverential portrayals of peasants at prayer and by leering depictions of country girls in come-hither poses, while remaining indifferent to the horrifying plight of actual peasants.
Vincent had been fired by evangelical ardor toward the underclasses once before, in England, largely on the basis of reading Eliot’s Silas Marner and Adam Bede. But that zeal had since faded in the white heat of his identification with his father. As recently as the previous summer, his only requirement for a future parish was that it should be “picturesque.” But the vision that suddenly seized him in Amsterdam that winter went far beyond the romantic idealization of the prints on his wall, or the homesteading mandate of his father’s ministry, or even Eliot’s empathetic rustic realism. Now he imagined peasants and workers not just as icons of Romantic sentiment or paragons of religious piety, but as objects of emulation. “It is right to try to become like [them],” he said: they hold fast to their faith despite unending toil and utter hopelessness; they bear their labors with patience and dignity; and they die, like the old farmer in Zundert, serene in their ultimate redemption. In short, they had it.
Vincent’s new vision of blessed labor was accompanied by a blaze of new imagery. Dressmakers, coopers, woodcutters, and diggers crowded baptisms and benedictions off his walls. Works by the patron saint of peasant painters, Jean-François Millet, returned to their “Holy Ground” in the pantheon of his imagination. These images had “soul,” he argued. Their subjects’ hard work and humble appearance proved them “richer in spirit,” an
d therefore “more beautiful.” “Dat is het,” he declared.
This was a definition of it that went far beyond the merits of a painting, beyond the synthesis of artistic perfection and divine inspiration, beyond the “cheer and feeding of the inner life.” In Vincent’s flailing imagination, it had become a way of life—a calling higher than his father’s piety or his brother’s aesthetics—a summons to apply himself without reservation or compromise to the creation of “truthful work.” “It must be good to die in the knowledge that one has done some truthful work,” he wrote, “and to know that, as a result, one will live on in the memory of at least a few and leave a good example for those who come after.”
It was, of course, an impossibly demanding standard for an awkward, alienated young man who confessed to feeling “like Robinson Crusoe.” Nevertheless, Vincent embraced the new calling with all his singular intensity. After hearing the French preacher at the Waalse Kerk, he sought out the church’s regular minister, Ferdinand Henri Gagnebin. Considered a “radical” in Amsterdam’s staid clerical community, the Swiss Gagnebin encouraged Vincent to pursue his new calling. “Forget yourself completely and throw yourself into your work without reservation,” he advised. Vincent found similar encouragement at the cloistered English Church, where he spent more and more of his Sundays as his devotion to his lessons and to his own church waned. The minister there, William Macfarlane, introduced him to another in Amsterdam’s circle of evangelical preachers, an Englishman named August Charles Adler. His mission was converting Jews to Christianity.
A converted Jew himself, the forty-two-year-old Adler had recently come to Amsterdam under the auspices of the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Jews, a radical offshoot of the Church of England. With its large and mostly impoverished Jewish population, Amsterdam had long been one of the continental centers for “the fight with Jewish ignorance and darkness,” as one account referred to it. Despite fierce and sometimes violent resistance from the local rabbinate, the Society had built a mission church on Barndesteeg, at the edge of the Jewish Quarter.
On February 17, 1878, Vincent began teaching Sunday school in the basement of the Zionskapel. The extent to which he participated in the church’s larger evangelizing mission—as measured every year by an announcement of the number of Jews baptized—is not known, as his letters to Theo slowed to a concealing trickle. He may have accompanied Adler on his frequent evangelizing trips into Jewish neighborhoods, or joined the church’s crew of colporteurs who delivered the Gospels door to door in the warrenlike Quarter. Adler shared Vincent’s love of George Eliot and recommended that he read Romola, Eliot’s novel based on the great firebrand preacher Savonarola. Vincent admired the bald, bearlike Englishman and no doubt confided in him his new dream of a life serving the needy, of which he considered the Sunday school class the first “small light.” “Adler is not the man to let [that light] go out,” he told Theo.
The weeks following Vincent’s start at the Zionskapel saw a burst of missionary activity and enthusiasm. He proselytized to distant relatives and even at Roman Catholic churches. By the beginning of March, flush with new zeal, he seemed poised to shake loose from his studies and embrace his new mission as a catechist: a simple teacher of the Bible. He would spend his life as a bringer of comfort, an annotator of prints, a maker of maps—as a disciple of it.
But Vincent’s parents did not share his vision. “A Catechist!” Dorus wailed. “That does not put bread on the table.” This was the final indignity. Catechists occupied the lowest rung on the ladder of religious work; they were low-status, low-paid readers of rote and reciters of syllogisms to children. Years of effort and worry, thousands of guilders, sleepless nights, wearying travel, appeals for family support, for what? For a catechist? Not that the news was unexpected. Dorus had returned from the February review discouraged about his son’s prospects for success. Soon afterward, Vincent wrote a “strange, contradictory letter” complaining about his studies and probably mentioning the dreaded word “catechist” for the first time. That was followed by a letter from Uncle Jan “concerned about [Vincent’s] study,” At some point, Uncle Stricker, who met with Vincent regularly, added his voice to the rising chorus of worry.
“It is a torment for our souls,” Dorus wrote Theo. Anna compared it to a death in the family. “He wants a job in the church but without studying,” she wrote in horror; “what a prospect for his honor—and ours!” They blamed this latest catastrophe on the new company Vincent was keeping—“ultra-orthodox” ministers like Adler, Gagnebin, and Macfarlane—whose radical ideas had led him into “an even higher number of mistakes in his work,” according to Dorus. But mostly they blamed Vincent. “There is such a close connection between human errors and sad results,” Dorus wrote. “He knows no joy of living.” They wrung their hands in exasperation. “We did all we could to set him on an honorable course!” they said. “It is as if he chooses on purpose what leads to difficulties.”
Vincent’s failure to write on his birthday (March 30) was the last straw. In a stern letter, Dorus demanded that he quit his job at Adler’s Sunday school. Vincent objected in a long plaintive reply, but Dorus stood firm, citing “the danger that [Vincent] would give his heart to the lesser thing and that the main thing would be neglected because of it.” The dispute seemed headed inexorably toward open defiance. “Enfin, we just sit and wait,” Dorus wrote with weary resignation. “It is like the stillness that comes before the storm.”
In early April, trying one last time to broker a family peace, Theo traveled to Amsterdam to see his brother. Dorus and Anna had kept him vividly informed of their ordeal. But the relationship between brothers no longer had the reparative power it once did. The events of the previous summer had left a bitter aftertaste. Despite continuing protestations of fraternal devotion, Vincent never fully forgave Theo for abandoning his plan to quit Goupil and join Vincent in the pursuit of it. Nor did it help that Theo and Dorus had visited each other frequently during the intervening months. Inevitably, Vincent began to question his brother’s ultimate loyalty.
In mid-March, his most paranoid suspicions seemed confirmed by the news that Theo would be transferred to Goupil in Paris. After his rebellious episode the previous year, Theo had applied to work in one of Goupil’s other branches. He had even learned English in case he was sent to London. But Paris was still the capital of the Goupil empire, and was now also the site of the 1878 Exposition Universelle, an extravaganza of art, science, and technology from five continents. “It is truly an extraordinary chance to cast your eye over that colossal world around you,” Dorus wrote proudly. To Vincent, however, Paris was the site of his most painful failure, the family disgrace from which he seemed unable to escape. Now Theo would go to Paris to take Vincent’s job—and his legacy—in a devastating rejection not just of Vincent’s relentless advice and of their perfect brotherhood, but also of it.
If Theo’s announcement did not open the floodgates of self-reproach and resentment, the jubilation in Etten surely did. “Dear Theo, remain the pride and joy of the parents who are being shaken so often,” they wrote. “It’s a ray of sunshine in these uneasy days.”
Barely two weeks later, Theo came to Vincent on his peacemaking mission. By all indications, the brothers fought bitterly. The arguments spilled into Vincent’s letters in the weeks that followed, as he tried to have the last word against the seemingly irrefutable argument of his brother’s success. He lashed out at Theo’s easy, superficial life. He mocked his “polite circles” and “fine surroundings.” He called him “narrow-minded and over-cautious,” and accused him of “straying from all that is natural” and thereby losing his “real and inner life.” He contrasted his brother’s smooth road to success with his own rocky path, and he dismissed Theo’s coming adventure in Paris with an ominous warning: “Though there may be a bright dawn, there is also a dark midnight and a burning, oppressive heat at noon.”
As for his career, he had no choice but to go
forward as a catechist, Vincent insisted; anything else would be “backsliding.” Just turned twenty-five, he needed to “become accomplished” in something: to establish a “way of thinking and acting” independent of his father and his past. He defended Adler and his Sunday-school work with dewy-eyed passion. In response to the inevitable question “What will you do for money?” Vincent turned to a higher authority. “Happy is he who has faith in God,” he declared, making an argument that he would spend the rest of his life trying to prove, “for he will in the end be tided over all life’s difficulties, albeit not without trouble and sorrow.”
If anything, Theo’s opposition, like his father’s, only stiffened Vincent’s resolve. Through page after page of convoluted argument and frantic self-encouragement, he reaffirmed his commitment to it in an ecstasy of fervor. “The need is for nothing less than the infinite and the miraculous,” he declared, “and a man does well to be satisfied with nothing less.” He marshaled long lists of books and poetry and images, in addition to the Bible, to which he intended to dedicate his life as “un homme intérieur et spirituel.” He would join the ranks of authors, poets, and artists who had “thought a little more deeply and searched and worked and loved a little more than the rest, who [had] plumbed the depths of the sea of life.”
When Theo spoke of Vincent’s duty to family, Vincent proclaimed a higher duty to it—“that divine spark,” that “fire in one’s soul”—a duty to “keep loving faithfully what is truly worth loving.” Of course, he would “encounter genuine sadness and real disappointments,” he said, but for love to be true, it must be tested by life—“as gold is tested by fire.”
Propelled by this vision of the “rayon d’en haut” (light from above), Vincent finally broke openly with his father. In early June, after Dorus’s deadline for quitting the Zionskapel had passed, Vincent wrote that he intended to remain a catechist and put off his studies until some later date. Dorus immediately offered a compromise: if Vincent would continue his lessons for at least three months (“to become more enlightened and to give him the patience for reflection”), Dorus would try to find a position for him somewhere. Vincent summarily rejected the offer. He would not return to his studies, but instead would look for missionary work on his own.
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