Declaring himself an artist also sustained another hope for reconciliation: the dream of the Rijswijk road—two brothers “bound up in one … feeling, thinking and believing the same.” Once the long winter of estrangement was broken, old feelings of solidarity flooded back. Only the “magic force” of brotherhood could unlock the cage in which he felt imprisoned, Vincent said. Protesting his “homesickness for the land of pictures,” he insisted that his enthusiasm for art had not waned during his wandering in the Borinage. He framed his new artistic ambitions emphatically as a response to Theo’s guidance (“I think you would rather see me doing something good than doing nothing”) and called for the restoration of their fraternal “entente cordiale” in order to “make us of some use to one another.”
Vincent even chose to resume their correspondence in French, as a tribute to his brother’s successful new life in Paris, and to their shared citizenship in the francophone “land of pictures.”
In the service of this new mission, Vincent’s powerful imagination, which had lured him to the black country, and kept him alive there, now began to reshape his experience there. When Theo wrote about the inspiration many French artists had found in Barbizon, a village in the Fontainebleau Forest south of Paris, Vincent recast his grueling trip the previous winter into a parallel artistic quest. “I haven’t been to Barbizon,” he wrote, “[but] I did go to Courrières last winter.” In Vincent’s imagination, the hellish, hopeless, wandering trek six months earlier was transformed into a pilgrimage in search of it—an inspirational “walking tour” as well as a chance to visit the great Barbizon painter Breton, for whom Theo shared his brother’s reverence.
In Vincent’s vision, an idyllic countryside of haystacks, thatched-roof farmhouses, and “marled earth, almost coffee-colored” erased the smoking slagheaps that dominated the French mining district around Courrières no less than the Belgian one around Cuesmes; and a “fine, bright” French sky replaced the choking smog of the Borinage, only a few miles away. He peopled his fantasy with picturesque peasants right out of the prints on both brothers’ walls: “all manner of workmen, diggers, woodcutters, a farmhand driving his wagon and a silhouette of a woman in a white cap.” Vincent even reimagined his ordeals of hunger and cold as the transformative trials of Bunyan’s Christian. “I do not regret it,” he said, passing revised judgment not just on the trip but on his whole time in the black country, “because I saw some interesting things and the terrible ordeals of suffering are what teach you to look at things through different eyes.”
Despite the winter of deprivations, he seized his new calling with furious new energy, combining his usual cyclonic enthusiasm for fresh starts with a desperate determination to put the past behind him. From the house in Cuesmes, he dunned Theo and others with demands for “models” from which to learn his new gospel. He especially wanted Charles Bargue’s two-part home study course on figure drawing, Exercices au fusain (Charcoal Exercises) and Cours de dessin (Drawing Course), and Armand Cassagne’s Guide de l’alphabet du dessin (Guide to the ABCs of Drawing), a similar how-to manual on perspective drawing. He devoured these big books, with their graduated exercises and promise of sure success to the diligent—page by page, over and over. “I have now finished all sixty sheets,” he reported after the first of many times he completed the Exercices au fusain. “I worked almost a whole fortnight on [it], from early morning until night … it invigorates my pencil.”
He worked with astonishing intensity, squatting on a camp stool in the little second-floor room that he shared with the landlord’s children, hunched over a large sketchpad balanced on his knees, with the full-sized Bargue and Cassagne propped next to him. He worked as long as the light allowed—outside in the garden if the weather permitted. In a single two-week period, he reported finishing a hundred and twenty drawings. “My hand and my mind are growing daily more supple and strong as a result,” he reported. He found the exercises “demanding” and sometimes “extremely tedious,” but dared not slacken his frantic pace. “If I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost,” he wrote. “That is how I look at it—keep going, keep going come what may.” He told Theo of a “great fire” that burned within him.
To feed that fire, he needed more than exercises. He sent Theo sweeping calls for other images to copy, starting with Millet’s iconic Les quatre heures de la journée (Four Hours of the Day) and Les travaux des champs (Workers in the Fields), images that had hung on his walls for years and that he would continue to copy for the rest of his life. At first, laboring tirelessly over his course books, he requested only etchings by “masters” of figure drawing like Millet and Breton. “These are the things I want to study,” he insisted. But soon he demanded landscapes, too: from Golden Age giants like Ruisdael to Barbizon heroes like Charles Daubigny and Théodore Rousseau.
No matter how many images Theo sent, however, Vincent could not resist the impulse to leave his cramped “studio” and find images of his own. Despite repeated pledges to complete his exercises before attempting to draw “from nature,” he wandered the town sketching portraits and vignettes: women carrying sacks of coal, a family harvesting potatoes, cows in a pasture. He even persuaded some locals, including his former landlady, Esther Denis, to pose for him.
He took his folding stool to the mine entrance and made crude, childlike records of what he saw—unschooled attempts that even he dismissed as “clumsy.” (He later admitted destroying all his work from this period.) Still, he laid elaborate plans for a pair of large drawings: one, of the miners going to work in the morning (“passing shadows, dimly visible in the twilight”), and the other, the pendant, showing their return (with “an effect of brown silhouettes, just touched by light, against a mottled sky at sunset”). Long before he had finished the Cours de dessin, he committed the first of these images to paper. “I could not keep from sketching in a rather large size the drawing of the miners going to the shaft,” he confessed to Theo.
Miners in the Snow at Dawn, AUGUST 1880, PENCIL ON PAPER, 5⅛ × 8 IN. (Illustration credit 13.1)
But in this fury of work, this resurrection of hopeful enthusiasm, he returned again and again to one image in particular. “I have already drawn ‘The Sower’ five times,” he wrote in September, “and I will take it up again, I am so entirely absorbed in that figure.”
IN OCTOBER 1880, only two months after declaring himself an artist, Vincent abandoned the Borinage. He had slightly less than a decade—just one-quarter of his life—left to live. He departed for Brussels from the train station in Mons where, almost two years before, he had arrived from Brussels. Only now, instead of a portfolio of sermons, he carried a portfolio of drawings. He complained that he had “undergone some misery in the Belgian ‘black country,’ ” and needed a better studio, the company of other artists, and “good things to look at” in order to forget those miseries and “make good things myself.”
In fact, the trajectory of Vincent’s brief, incandescent artistic enterprise had already been set. Figure drawing would always energize him, even as success at it always eluded him. As a way of touching the sentiments he prized and of making the human connections he longed for, he never found any subject as satisfying as figures, even as he created some of the most sublime landscapes in Western art. The same deep belief in the transformative power of work—his mother’s religion of “keeping busy”—that had propelled him through the impossible hardships of England, Amsterdam, Brussels, and the Borinage would now be turned on the virtual impossibility of artistic success. The friction of this blind push would continue to produce the same self-inflicted anguish that it did on the blighted heaths of the black country.
He would continue to alternate between ambitious pledges to learn the fundamentals of his new craft and cries of exasperation when progress proved slow. He repeatedly laid grand plans for self-improvement that, like his pursuit of a religious calling, quickly foundered on his impatience, peripatetic interests, and fears of failing. Just as he started far more dr
awings than he completed (he found the process of turning a sketch into a finished drawing difficult as well as deadening) he littered his career with half-completed projects undertaken in fevers of enthusiasm that always rejected half-measures.
This flight from reckoning allowed him to be both mercilessly self-critical and endlessly hopeful: forever promising, and expecting, improvement; forever waiting for lightning to strike, or God’s voice to speak, or an angel to appear. “I am working away hard, though for the moment it is not yielding particularly gratifying results,” he wrote for the first of many times in a letter from the Borinage. “But I have every hope that these thorns will bear white blossoms in due course and that these apparently fruitless struggles are nothing but labor pains.” His sudden departure for Brussels—only days after assuring Theo, “the best thing is for me to stay here and work as hard as I can”—was the first of many preemptive flights to keep hope alive.
In his emotional life, too, Vincent would never leave the Borinage. When Theo sent him fifty francs in June, it not only revived their relationship, it began a financial dependence that would last the rest of Vincent’s life. Within a few months, he was advancing the first of the plaintive, coercive arguments for further subsidies that would become the corrosive hallmark of their correspondence. “Honestly, to be able to work properly I need at least a hundred francs a month,” he wrote in September, along with a warning: “Poverty stops the best minds in their tracks.” Money made vivid and undeniable the reversal of the brothers’ relative positions in the family—“if I have come down in the world,” Vincent conceded, “you have in a different way come up in it”—ushering in a new world of suspicion and reserve. Yet, at the same time, money brought a new edge of desperation to Vincent’s old craving for fraternal solidarity. The “magic force” of brotherhood would no longer be sufficient; Vincent now needed Theo’s absolute commitment to the joint enterprise of his art. His work, Vincent claimed, was their progeny, fathered forever by Theo’s decisive encouragement in the summer of 1880.
But Vincent’s “depressing dependence” (his term) brought new waves of guilt and resentment. The guilt expressed itself in relentless protests of hard work, apologetic pleas for patience, and pathetic promises to pay his brother back. (“Someday or other I shall earn a few pennies with some drawings,” he wrote in his very first letter as an artist.) The resentment found its voice in manipulative schemes, escalating claims of entitlement, and fits of moral indignation when Theo, inevitably, failed to live up to Vincent’s vision of a joint enterprise. By the time Vincent left the Borinage, Theo had stepped fully into their father’s shoes in this vicious spiral of guilt and anger: a spiral in which resentment sometimes overruled gratitude, no support was ever sufficient, and gestures of generosity were often answered by spasms of defiance. In September, Theo invited Vincent to come to Paris. Vincent responded with a veiled request for money to visit Barbizon, and then, without advance notice, moved to Brussels instead.
Finally, through the sheer power of his imagination, Vincent emerged from the Borinage with his vision of “it” intact, undimmed by the years of setbacks and suffering. “My inner self,” he told Theo, “has not changed.… I think, believe, and love more seriously now what I thought, believed, and loved then.” Consolation remained the ultimate goal; truth the ultimate medium; and sorrow the ultimate, redemptive sentiment. His imagination was already busy transforming his years of exile and misery into the stuff of it—the “inner sorrow” that he found in the works of all the artists he admired. He vowed to seek in his own work “a nobler, worthier, and if you will allow me, more evangelical tone.” He spoke of the challenge ahead in biblical cadences (“Narrow is the way and strait the gate and there are only a few who find it”), and of his rebirth in the black country as a resurrection. “Even in that deep misery,” he wrote, “I felt my energy revive, and I said to myself: In spite of everything I shall rise again. I will take up my pencil.”
VINCENT VAN GOGH, AGE 18 (Illustration credit col2.1)
CHAPTER 14
Hearts of Ice
IT LOOMED OVER BRUSSELS LIKE A FANTASY OF EMPIRES LONG PAST. Even in a century infatuated with itself, the Palais de Justice would stand as a high-water mark of grandiosity. “A little Michelangelo, a little Piranesi, and a little madness,” said the poet Verlaine of the Babel-like structure nearing completion when Vincent arrived in October 1880.
But, of course, it had to be huge (the biggest single-building construction project in the nineteenth century), because Brussels was a city with something to prove. Emboldened by the fiftieth anniversary of its independence and enriched by its African colonies, the young country of Belgium had set out to transform its ancient capital into a world-class city—to reverse centuries of domination by either French or Dutch and make Brussels a center of prestige and splendor to rival even Paris. What Baron Haussmann had done to the French capital, King Léopold II was doing to Brussels: leveling great swaths of medieval city to make room for grand new boulevards of bourgeois appartements and great new palaces of commerce, government, and art. Outside the old city, Léopold built a vast countryside park to match Paris’s Bois de Boulogne and a huge fairground where, in 1880, the country celebrated its anniversary with a jubilee that echoed Paris’s Exposition Universelle.
But Brussels had also benefited from its long eclipse in Paris’s shadow. Successive political convulsions had sent waves of artistic and intellectual refugees to this French-speaking safe haven. Karl Marx and other founders of socialism wrote and published here with impunity. The anarchist Paul Proudhon (“Property is theft!”) escaped imprisonment here. As Vincent must have known, Victor Hugo began his twenty-year exile here—the most productive years of his hugely productive life. Charles Baudelaire fled persecution for the “perversities” of Symbolism here. Verlaine brought his forbidden lover Arthur Rimbaud and sketched the first drafts of Romances sans paroles (Songs Without Words) here. By the time Vincent arrived, Brussels had solidified its reputation as a place where people of uncommon mind, estranged from their homelands, could come to reset their destinies.
To this city of new ambitions and second chances, Vincent brought his own desperate bid for a new life. The troubles of the past disappeared from his correspondence. Only the name of the café-inn where he lodged, Aux Amis de Charleroi, hinted of his black time in the black country. (Charleroi was the capital of the coal mining region.) In his little room above the café at 72, boulevard du Midi, overlooking the train station, the fever of work resumed. “I am pushing ahead with a will,” he assured Theo after his arrival. “We must make the same efforts as lost, desperate beings.”
Living on the free bread and coffee available around the clock in the café downstairs, he threw himself into the last part of the Bargue course, which showed him how to make copies after the great line portraits of Raphael and Holbein. But at the same time, he returned to the more elementary charcoal exercises and raced through them yet again. He made still more copies of his favorite Millet prints, experimenting with a pen, which he found frustrating. (“It is not as easy as it seems,” he complained.) He labored over a big anatomy book, copying its large-scale illustrations of grimacing skulls and muscled limbs until he had traversed “the whole of the human body,” front, back, and side. Then he sought out veterinary sources for illustrations of horses, cows, and sheep, to master animal anatomy as well. He even ventured into the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology, convinced that an artist had to know “how character is expressed in the features and in the shape of the skull.”
Vincent dutifully reported these Herculean efforts to his parents and to Theo, working as hard to reverse the family judgment against him as to master the mysteries of the figure. “[If] I make progress and my drawing becomes stronger,” he wrote his parents, “then everything will come right sooner or later.” He sent them drawings (“so [they] might see I am working”) accompanied by plaintive protests of his diligence and sincerity. Scarcely a letter went by w
ithout a reminder of the difficulty of the task before him or a promise of ultimate success. “On the whole I can say I have made progress,” he wrote on New Year’s Day 1881. “[Now] I ought to be able to get along more quickly.”
He bought new shoes and new clothes. “[They] are well cut and look better on me than any others that I can remember,” he reported proudly. He even enclosed a swatch of suit fabric for his parents’ approval, noting with a newfound sense of style, “this material is often worn, in studios especially.” “I also replenished my underwear with three pairs of drawers,” he added reassuringly, and went to the public bathhouse “two or three times a week.”
Responding to another of his parents’ complaints, Vincent resumed the quest for “good company.” Almost as soon as he arrived in Brussels, he reported meeting “several young men who were also beginning to study drawing.” He dunned Theo for introductions in a city where his brother had worked for almost a year. One of his first stops after arriving was the Goupil gallery at 58, rue Montagne de la Cour, in the shadow of Léopold’s grand new showplace, the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts. He hoped that Theo’s old boss, gérant Schmidt, could help him “make the acquaintance of some of the young artists here,” he said. When Theo wrote back with introductions, Vincent promptly pursued them. He presented himself to Willem Roelofs, the dean of expatriate Dutch painters in Brussels, and probably met Victor Horta, a young Belgian architect who had just returned from Paris to enroll in the Brussels Academy. Theo may also have provided an introduction to another expatriate Dutch painter, Adriaan Jan Madiol. Vincent eagerly advertised these social forays to his parents and pledged to renew relations with family favorites like Tersteeg and Schmidt and, by extension, Uncle Cent.
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