Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  In fact, his destination was never really in doubt. The hard and lonely winter in Brussels had brought new urgency to his old and still unfulfilled longing for reconciliation. On the eve of his return, he wrote Theo: “It is necessary for good relations between myself and the family to be re-established.” He was determined to reverse the bitter judgment of the black country—what he called the “sufferings and shame” of the past. He imagined that once he had reclaimed his place in Etten, he could reach out to his uncles again, and that they, in turn, would reach out to him.

  But going home was not easy. He had not been there since the previous winter, when his father tried to commit him to the asylum in Gheel. He had stayed in the Borinage the previous summer rather than come home because he believed his parents preferred him to keep out of the way. Even now, he asked Theo to intercede with their father and calm his parents’ fears of another cycle of shame. “I am willing to give in about dress,” he said, “or anything else to suit them.”

  He originally intended to stay in Brussels until Rappard left in May, but the pull of home proved too strong to wait. As soon as he heard that Theo would go to Etten for Easter (April 17), he abruptly abandoned his room at the Aux Amis and took the train north. (He departed so precipitously that he had to return after the holiday to retrieve the rest of his belongings.) As always, Vincent layered his life onto the images that he saw—and, now, the images that he made. On the trip to Etten, one image in particular transfixed his imagination once again: the sower. As soon as he arrived, he sat down and made yet another copy of Millet’s icon of new life: his father’s icon of persistence in the face of failure. As if to demonstrate his new skills under his parents’ watchful eyes, he labored over the familiar figure, imitating the appearance of an etching with thousands of tiny pen strokes, endlessly hatching and cross-hatching, shading and shading again, in a manic proof of dedication.

  VINCENT BARELY PAUSED to savor his return home, saying only, “I am very glad things have been arranged so that I shall be able to work here quietly for a while.” Instead, he plunged with renewed energy into the project that had made his return possible. Every day that it didn’t rain—not many in Etten’s wet spring—he struck out across the woods and heaths in search of a place to set his folding chair. He wore a uniform befitting a young artist summering in the country: a blousy shirt shorn of its stiff collar, and a stylish felt hat. On cold days, he wore a coat.

  He carried his chair, a portfolio of paper, and a plank of wood. He worked so intensely—holding the big carpenter’s pencil in his fist like a knife—that he needed the heavy plank to prevent tearing the paper. He planted himself in front of trees and shrubs, outside farmers’ cottages and barns, overlooking mills and meadows, along roadsides and churchyards. He sketched animals as they fed, and implements—plows, harrows, wheelbarrows—where they lay. In the village of Etten (twice the size of Zundert, but poorer), he invaded the shops of tradesmen to practice his perspective drawing. In bad weather, and sometimes even in good, he stayed inside and worked furiously at his “exercises”: copying more Millets and racing yet again through Bargue “with a tremendous zeal,” according to one visitor that summer. “I hope to make as many studies as I can,” he pledged to Theo. Years later, the Etten parsonage maid recalled that Vincent sometimes spent the whole night drawing, “and when his mother came down in the morning she would sometimes find him still at work.”

  Sower (after Millet), APRIL 1881, INK ON PAPER, 18⅞ × 14¼ IN. (Illustration credit 14.2)

  But to achieve his ambition of self-sufficiency, Vincent argued, he needed more than anything else to draw from models. “Anyone who has learned to master a figure,” he wrote, “can earn quite a bit.” If he mastered figure drawing, he could make the kinds of images that often appeared in illustrated magazines—especially images of picturesque country life. Championed by artists like Millet and Breton, these images had become a staple of popular culture—favorites of a rootless bourgeoisie seeking comforting myths to replace the consolation of religion. Vincent’s studies of landscapes and interiors, farmyards and tools, copies of Millet and the Exercices, all served this larger ambition. “I must draw diggers, sowers, men and women at the plow, without cease,” he explained to Theo: “scrutinize and draw everything that is part of country life.”

  In single-minded pursuit of this goal, Vincent roamed across the countryside around Etten in search of models. At first, as in the Borinage, he drew laborers in the fields where they worked. He barged fearlessly into farmhouses to draw women at their chores. But neither quick nor dexterous enough to capture their activities as they happened, he needed them to pose. Sometimes he persuaded them to do so on the spot—in the field or yard or farmhouse—freezing in place with shovel poised or plow stayed. If he could, he took them back to the parsonage where he set up a studio in an abandoned outbuilding. Here, in the ample light of a big, arched window, he posed them standing, stooping, bending, kneeling. He usually drew them from the side to avoid the challenges of foreshortening. He gave them props: a rake, a broom, a shovel, a shepherd’s crook, a sower’s bag. He might start by asking them to re-create the positions in which he had sketched them earlier in the field, allowing him to clarify lines and correct proportions. But he often went on to pose the same model in multiple roles. He used the same big sheets of paper that the Bargue exercises required and consumed them at the same furious rate.

  He recruited models with a combination of money and intimidating enthusiasm. “He forced people to pose for him,” one villager remembered; “they were afraid of him.” Locals began to avoid the “peculiar” parson’s son when they saw him coming down the road, “always looking straight ahead,” intent on his new mission. “It was unpleasant to be with him,” one of them recalled. In the studio, he drove his models as tirelessly as he drove himself. He drew the same poses over and over and scolded his amateur sitters for their restlessness. He “would work on a drawing for hours,” according to the account of one of his models, “until he had caught the expression he was aiming at.” On his side, Vincent complained “what a tough job it is to make people understand how to pose.” He called his models “desperately obstinate” and mocked their bumpkin insistence on posing in their stiff Sunday clothes “in which neither knees, elbows, shoulder blades, nor any other part of the body have left their characteristic dents or bumps.”

  For a while, it looked like the world might yield to this hurricane of effort. In striking contrast to his previous stay there, the Etten parsonage began to seem like home; its occupants, like family. The house was big and square. Behind its impressive façade, the rooms were spare but lofty and comfortable, with an abundance of windows that welcomed every summer breeze. In back, a cozy garden filled with rosebushes nestled between the house and a vine-covered wall. Against the wall stood a wooden arbor. By the middle of summer, it was canopied in blooming greenery. Here, the family often sat in the shade and took sandwiches in the evening. On rainy days, they gathered at a round table in the living room under the light of a hanging oil lamp.

  Over the summer, Cor came home from school in Breda, sister Lies visited from Soesterberg, and sister Wil, now nineteen and returned from England, sat for one of Vincent’s first portraits. “She poses very well,” he reported. To replace the companionship of the missing Theo, Vincent found two young men, Jan and Willem Kam, sons of the pastor in neighboring Leur. Both amateur artists, the Kam brothers followed Vincent on his sketching expeditions and watched him at work in his studio. “He wanted his drawings to be precise—and profitable,” Willem recalled years later. “He talked about Maris and Mauve,” Jan remembered, “but most of all about Millet.”

  Reassured by the brothers’ good company, and by Vincent’s repeated pledges to “make a living,” even Dorus and Anna began to relax from their long despair. Not a word of criticism or concern made its way to Theo that summer. They willingly offered the parsonage outbuilding, a former Sunday school, for Vincent’s strange ritual with th
e local peasantry, taking on faith (and his forceful protests) that it constituted an essential step in the long ascent out of the black country—the safe return of their eldest son to the “normal life” for which they had never stopped praying.

  All those prayers seemed answered when Anthon van Rappard arrived in June. For both Vincent and his parents, the visit of the young gentleman with the noble name crowned the fantasy of a new life. On the day of his arrival, the Van Goghs took their distinguished guest on a long walk to display him to the neighbors. He accompanied them to church on Sunday and sat at the front of the big medieval sanctuary in the side pew reserved for the preacher’s family, where the whole congregation could see him. He received the ultimate imprimatur of family approval when Vincent took him to Prinsenhage to meet the ailing Cent (who was too sick to receive them).

  Vincent exulted in his parents’ approbation as much as his new friend’s attentions. “Van Gogh was in very high spirits then,” Jan Kam recalled of Rappard’s visit, “more cheerful than I would ever see him again.” With camp stool and sketchpad in hand, Vincent led his new “fellow traveler” (the same term he applied to Theo) on a tour of all his favorite spots in the countryside around Etten: the deep, mysterious woods of Liesbosch to the east; the “notorious” village of Heike to the south (home to “gypsy-like” refugees and other “riff-raff” where Vincent often recruited models); and the strange swampland, called the Passievaart, to the west.

  At various points along the way, in a celebration of artistic fraternity that Vincent would try for the rest of his life to reenact (most memorably in the Yellow House in Arles), the two men set their rickety stools side by side and shared the act of making art.

  Once the drawing began, their roles reversed: Rappard led and Vincent followed. The more warmly his parents embraced the handsome young gentleman-artist, the more eagerly Vincent embraced his friend’s genteel art. While still in Brussels, he had admired Rappard’s pencil-and-pen drawings of trees, vistas, and scenic vignettes, calling them “very witty and charming.” He had adopted Rappard’s favored métier, reed pen and ink, and his characteristic short, quick pen strokes to render the infinite variety of nature’s textures. Indeed, Vincent had come to the Etten heaths partly in imitation of his young companion, who, like many beginning artists, had made sketching trips into the countryside every summer since adolescence.

  ANTHON VAN RAPPARD, The Passievaart Near Seppe (Landscape Near Seppe), JUNE 1881, PENCIL ON PAPER, 4⅝ × 6¾ IN. (Illustration credit 14.3)

  Once Rappard joined him, Vincent set aside his long obsession with figure drawing and turned his full attention, for the first time, to landscape. Both drew views of the road to Leur, with its rows of stunted pollard willows on either side; both drew the forest’s edge at Liesbosch. Both drew the Passievaart swamp with the town of Seppe on the horizon.

  Despite their shared subjects, shared métier, and even shared vantage points, the images that emerged from these joint sessions differed as much as the two men who created them. From the spot they had picked on the edge of the Passievaart, Van Rappard looked across the watery marshland and drew the distant town as an island of heavy pencil shadings floating in the middle of a sheet of white paper barely bigger than a postcard. He suggested the marsh with just a few random pencil strokes of reeds and weeds, and clouds with the lightest grazing of gray. Vincent looked out across the same swampy vista and cast his eyes downward. Pushing the horizon almost to the top of his much larger sheet, he relegated the town to insignificance and fixed his gaze on the teeming water at his feet: a tangled world of reeds, flowers, lily pads, and leaves, each with its own slant or arc, its own shape and shade, its own cross-hatched reflection on the still surface of the sunlit bog. With a manic vehemence not taught in any exercise book, he filled the bottom of the sheet with clusters of dots, random dark spots, floating circles, and meandering lines in an effort to render the bottomless fecundity that he knew so well from the banks of the Grote Beek. He added a bird, a visitor from his childhood, swooping low over the water in search of the life squirming unmistakably beneath the pencil marks.

  Marsh with Water Lillies, JUNE 1881, PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 9⅜ × 12⅛ IN. (Illustration credit 14.4)

  In another drawing that summer—while Rappard continued to make spare, correct renderings of tree-lined country roads and vistas of heath—Vincent explored an even more exotic, unexpected landscape. Probably after his companion had left, he wandered into the garden behind the parsonage and focused his intense gaze on the wooden arbor against the back wall. He had often done drawings of his family’s houses, or details of them, to give as mementos or keep as aides-mémoires. The sketch that he started that summer day may have begun that way, as a gift for Rappard or for his sister Wil, who left Etten around the same time.

  The wooden bench against the vine-covered wall looks recently deserted, its curvilinear sides drooping as if downcast. Facing it, a metal chair is pushed far away, beyond the shade of the overhanging pergola, where it sits in unnatural isolation. On the ground between them, a basket and gardening glove lie abruptly abandoned. Around this drama of ghosts, Vincent’s manic imagination spun a web of life even more dizzying than the swampy margins of the Passievaart—as if, by looking intensely enough, he could mitigate the pain of loneliness. Vines vein the wall like cracks, grasses bristle underfoot, flowers spring from dense thickets of spiky leaves, pine bushes explode, leaves blot out the sky in a blizzard of dots and dashes. But instead of comforting the observer, the skein of boisterous, indifferent life only intensifies the emptiness of the abandoned pergola. It was a painful contradiction in nature to which Vincent would return again and again in the years to come.

  The end of Rappard’s twelve-day visit left Vincent lonelier than before, and hungrier than ever for the reconciliation due the Prodigal Son. After so much searching and suffering, did he not deserve the unreserved embrace that Rappard enjoyed from his patrician family—especially his lawyer father? In his renewed ambition to win the hearts so long set against him, Vincent must have drawn strength from the portrait of unstinting paternal solicitude and forgiveness he found in Balzac’s Le père Goriot, which he read that summer. Theo’s visit in July—for which Anna, Wil, and Lies all returned to Etten—demonstrated the joys of family favor in such unbearable contrast that Vincent claimed illness and took to his bed. On leave from his new job as gérant of one of Goupil’s three Paris stores, Theo, in his elegant suits and Parisian manners, served as a vivid reminder of the distance Vincent had yet to travel to recover what he had lost.

  Then, only weeks after Theo left, Vincent thought he saw an opportunity to close that gap and end his years of loneliness in a single stroke. In August, he asked Kee Vos to marry him.

  CHAPTER 15

  Aimer Encore

  VINCENT HAD NOT SEEN HIS COUSIN SINCE THE LAST TIME HE VISITED the Vos house in Amsterdam in 1878. In the three years since, both their lives had changed irreversibly. Kee’s sick husband, Christoffel, had died later that same year—right before Vincent failed at evangelical school and headed for the black country. They may have just missed each other when Kee visited Etten in the late summer of 1879—about the time Vincent showed up unexpectedly from the Borinage for the fateful confrontation with his father. Apparently, they had not corresponded.

  When she arrived at the parsonage for an extended visit in August 1881, thirty-five-year-old Kee was no longer the brave, beleaguered mother of the house “where love dwells” that Vincent remembered from Amsterdam. Still bitterly sad over a death she considered unjust, she remained locked in mourning: a severe, unsmiling figure in high-buttoned black satin, forever sealed to her dead husband by grief; and to her timid son Jan, now eight, by their shared loss.

  If anything, the death of Kee’s husband only perfected the image that had so enraptured Vincent in Amsterdam. “That deep grief of hers touches and moves me,” he wrote. Now, as then, her sadness cried out for consolation—for Vincent, still the heart’s highest ca
lling—and her tiny, twice-wounded family seemed even more in need of the completion he longed to provide. But he saw her in another way, too. As part of his new ambition to throw off Kempian self-denial and reclaim his family’s favor, Vincent had decided that he needed a wife. “I was set against being alone,” he later recalled. His parents had often expressed their desire to see all their children married, and for Vincent in particular, they believed marriage would both anchor him and “spur him to acquire a social position.”

  Vincent had discussed his new ambition with Theo in July before Kee’s arrival, expressing both his long frustration (“Women are the grief of the righteous”) and his new determination. “A man cannot stick it out in the open sea,” he argued; “he must have a little cottage on the shore with a bit of fire on the hearth—with a wife and children around that hearth.” He bolstered this new imperative with a frenzy of reading in the vast Victorian literature on love and marriage. He consumed Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, an eight-hundred-page novel of courtship and connubial advantage, in three days. He read the same author’s Jane Eyre, a story of love (and marriage) triumphing over self-denial, and two novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe, My Wife and I and We and Our Neighbors, both lengthy testaments to the sanctity of home and family.