VINCENT NEVER RECOVERED from the events of Christmas Day 1881. “It is and remains a wound which I carry with me,” he wrote two years later. “It lies deep and cannot be healed. After years it will be the same as it was the first day.” To him, it represented the culmination of all the injuries and injustices of the years that preceded it, many of which had plunged him into self-consuming throes of despair. This time, however, he did not wander into the black country. This time, he had a new light to follow: a new religion, realism; and a new preacher, Anton Mauve.
When Vincent was still in The Hague, Mauve had taken him into the studio and set up a still life of a pot, a bottle, and a pair of clogs. “This is how you must hold your palette,” he said as he showed him the oval of colors.
“With painting,” Vincent wrote his brother excitedly, “my real career begins.”
CHAPTER 16
A Draftsman’s Fist
VINCENT HEADED STRAIGHT BACK TO THE HAGUE, CONSUMED IN BITTERNESS and rage. The fiery trials of the previous years—the repeated clashes with his father, the months of doing battle over Kee Vos, both climaxing in the events of Christmas Day—had brought his ardor to a boil of indignation and hardened his defensiveness into an armor of resentment. “I used to have many regrets and be very sad and reproach myself because things between Father and Mother and me were going so badly,” he wrote. “[But] that’s over and done with, once and for all.”
Brazenly violating his agreement not to return to Mauve for at least three months, he went directly to his cousin’s house and begged to resume his apprenticeship immediately. In a move clearly intended to appall and alarm his family, he borrowed enough money from Mauve to rent a room nearby. Defying his father’s accusations of profligacy, he spent extravagantly on decorating it. In a brazen declaration of his intent to stay, he filled it with furniture he had purchased, not rented. He bought a raft of new prints to ornament the walls, and flowers for the table. Within a week of his arrival, his last penny was gone. Then he sat down and wrote to his parents, proudly announcing what he had done, declaring their relationship ended, and caustically wishing them a happy new year.
He wrote Theo, too, unapologetically detailing his new life (“I have a real studio of my own, and I am so glad”) and hinting darkly that he might be forced to borrow again from Mauve if Theo did not replenish his empty pockets—or even go to Tersteeg for money. Fearing another family embarrassment, Theo sent the money, but not without blistering his brother for behaving so badly toward their parents. “What the devil made you so childish and so shameless?” he scolded. “One day you will be extremely sorry for having been so callous in this matter.” Vincent exploded at the rebuke, responding to his brother’s accusations in a long and furious rebuttal. “I offer no apology,” he declared. To Theo’s charge that such bickering threatened their aging father’s health, Vincent replied acidly: “The murderer has left the house.” Instead of softening his demands, he complained that Theo had not sent enough money, and insisted that Theo guarantee further payments because “I must know with some certainty what to expect.”
This was the spirit of anger and defiance in which Vincent launched his artistic enterprise. Art was not just a calling, it was a call to arms. He compared his career to “a military campaign, a battle or a war,” and he vowed to “fight my battle, and sell my life dearly, and try to win.” “Persistence,” he cried, “is better than surrender.” He raged against his critics—“the persons who suspect me of amateurism, of idleness, of sponging on others”—and promised to fight them even “more fiercely and savagely” until he vanquished them with his “draftsman’s fist.”
Only one person seemed immune from Vincent’s reflexive, indiscriminate belligerence: Anton Mauve. A sensitive, decorous man, struggling to maintain family decorum without being dragged into the family’s darkest melodrama, Mauve opened both his house and his studio to his homeless cousin. “He helped and encouraged me in all sorts of practical and friendly ways,” Vincent wrote. Despite their obvious differences in age (fifteen years) and disposition, Mauve may have seen in the younger man a dim reflection of his own past. The estranged son of a preacher, he had left home at fourteen to become an artist, dashing the family’s plan for him to succeed his father in the ministry.
Like Vincent, Mauve had spent his early years as an impoverished artist set on achieving commercial success by making copable, conventional images. Like Vincent, Mauve threw himself into his work with an industry that verged on mania. In order to finish a painting, he sometimes locked himself in his studio for days at a time. “He gives each picture and drawing some small part of his life,” Vincent observed admiringly. Outside of work, Mauve, too, found consolation in nature. He shared Vincent’s love of long walks, especially in the evening, as well as his keen sensitivity to the sublime. Although he preferred music to literature (he often hummed Bach while working), Mauve, too, admired the fairy tales of Andersen, which he often recited to his children in a tableau of family intimacy that surely tugged at Vincent’s exiled heart.
Mauve’s generosity to Vincent represented an extraordinary sacrifice for the one and an unprecedented opportunity for the other. An intensely private man, Mauve rarely admitted guests to his family circle and even more rarely allowed visitors into his studio. He did not take students. Although active and widely admired in the art world of The Hague, he remained generally aloof from social activities. He entertained guests one at a time, choosing his friends for their refined tastes and “gifts of good sense and humor.” Crowds and “empty chatter” made him nervous. Despite his love of music, he refused to attend concerts because he found the rustle of the audience upsetting. He resented any disturbance or “violence” in taste or temperament that might jar what he called the “lyric” quality of his sensibilities.
ANTON MAUVE, 1878 (Illustration credit 16.1)
By opening up the cherished serenity of his life to Vincent, Mauve was offering him not just a surrogate family, but an opportunity for advancement that other young artists in Holland could only dream about. For Mauve was more than just a cultivated teacher, he was one of the leading figures of the Hague School, a movement in Dutch art that had risen to the heights of critical and commercial success in the decade since Vincent first encountered it as an apprentice at Goupil. The painters of the Hague School not only claimed the mantle of the Golden Age, but also commanded a growing audience of collectors, especially in England and America, eager to pay dearly for the moody colors, deft brushwork, and picturesque subjects of the new Dutch art. By 1880, Hague School paintings dominated sales at the Goupil store on the Plaats, and its most popular artists—especially Anton Mauve—could not produce enough new work to keep up with the demand both at home and abroad.
Like the movement he championed, Mauve stood near the zenith of his success when Vincent arrived in The Hague in the last days of 1881. Critics applauded and collectors clamored for his appealing images of life among the dunes and meadows, whether in oil or in watercolor. His fellow artists had already begun to surround him with what was later called a “nimbus of devout veneration,” lauding him as a “poet-painter,” a “genius,” and a “magician.” In 1878, they honored him by electing him to the board of their most prestigious society, the Pulchri Studio.
Only a week after Vincent arrived, in a first hint of what the future might hold, Mauve nominated his young cousin to become an associate member of the Pulchri, an unprecedented honor for a late-arriving novice. “As soon as possible after that,” Vincent wrote Theo in a rush of ambition, “I shall become a full member.”
In his comfortable studio on Uileboomen, Mauve offered his young protégé an even more important head start on his new career. Vincent came almost every day to watch and learn—his first opportunity to study a mature painter at his easel. Working with lightning speed, Mauve exercised absolute control over the brush, rendering even the smallest details and most evanescent effects with precise, unhesitating strokes. Experience and endless sketc
hing trips had finely tuned his innate facility until his eye and his hand seemed to work in perfect unison.
At the time Vincent arrived, Mauve had just begun work on a large painting of a fishing boat being hauled onto the beach at Scheveningen by a team of horses, a theme on which he had painted many variations. The scene’s foamy water and wet sand gave Vincent a chance to watch his teacher create the pearly atmosphere for which he was most famous. All the Hague School painters were praised (or criticized) for their distinctive muted palette. Instead of bright, contrasting colors, they used a limited range of subdued colors to create moody tone poems of suffused light. Ridiculed at first as “the gray school,” they believed that “tonal” painting better captured the “fragrant, warm gray” of their watery homeland.
No one rendered this silvery saltwater light better than Anton Mauve. In the painting that Vincent saw emerging in the studio, Mauve drenched the scene in it: from the mist-laden clouds hanging over the sea, to the puddles of water left by the receding tide, to the slippery sand, to the ink-black boat. “Theo, what a great thing tone and color are,” Vincent wrote, entranced. “Mauve has taught me to see so many things that I used not to see.”
Despite his commitments to work and family, Mauve made time for his “greenhorn” cousin. He pointed out Vincent’s mistakes, offered suggestions, and corrected details of proportion and perspective, sometimes directly on Vincent’s sheet. He dispensed his advice with a combination of authority and deference that perfectly suited Vincent’s vulnerable state. “If he says to me, ‘This or that is no good,’ ” Vincent reported to Theo, “he immediately adds, ‘but just try it this way or that.’ ” A meticulous craftsman, Mauve extolled the virtues of good materials and good technique (“use the wrist, not the fingers”), and offered “lessons” in common problems, such as how to draw hands and faces—just the kind of practical advice that Vincent craved most: the inside information he felt deprived of by his late start.
Responding to his pupil’s most pressing concern—how to make salable works—Mauve continued to urge him toward watercolor. Impatient and forceful, Vincent had always struggled with this fragile medium (he called it “diabolical”), using it mostly just to highlight and fill in drawings. But Mauve, a master watercolorist, showed him how to draw using only the luminous daubs and washes of color. “Mauve has shown me a new way to make something,” Vincent exulted. “I am getting to like it more and more … it is different and has more power and freshness.”
Hungry for approval after years of reproaches, Vincent grasped at the attentions of his celebrated cousin. “Mauve’s sympathy,” he said, “was like water to a parched plant to me.” In a fever of gratitude, he lavished praise on his new mentor. “I love Mauve,” he wrote. “I love his work—and I count myself fortunate to be learning from him.” He bought him gifts, mimicked his speech, cherished his compliments, yielded to his criticisms, and faithfully relayed to Theo every word of his wisdom. “Mauve says that I shall spoil at least ten drawings before I know how to handle the brush well,” he wrote, “so [I] am not disheartened even by my mistakes.”
Vincent was so enamored of his new mentor that he abjured all other company. “I do not wish to associate much with other painters,” he said, “[because] each day I find Mauve cleverer and more trustworthy, and what more can I want?” He begged Theo for more money so that his penury would not embarrass him in front of his genteel cousin, and vowed to “dress a little better” now that he was a regular visitor to the studio on Uileboomen. “I know now the direction in which I have to go,” he wrote solemnly, “and need not hide myself.” Because of Mauve, he said, “the light is beginning to dawn [and] the sun is rising.”
But it couldn’t last. No one could satisfy the demands of Vincent’s admiration for long, especially not the prickly, introverted Mauve. And Vincent’s wild flights of enthusiasm were always doomed to crash in disillusionment. The relationship had already begun to fray when Mauve came to visit Vincent on January 26 in his second-floor flat on the outskirts of town. While he was there, one of Vincent’s “models” showed up: an old woman he had recruited on the street—the only place he could find people willing to pose for the little money he could pay.
Vincent tried to cover the awkward encounter by posing the hapless woman and showing Mauve his sketching skills. But the effort collapsed in embarrassment, sparking an argument between student and teacher. Vincent tried to dismiss the discord as the inevitable friction of artistic temperaments—“we are equally nervous,” he explained to Theo—but the episode upset him so much that he took to his bed with “fever and nerves.”
Over the next few weeks, in a series of furious letters, Vincent inflated the dispute into a preemptive casus belli. Mauve, apparently, had been dismayed by the scene in Vincent’s studio, seeing it as the worst kind of amateur posturing. If Vincent truly wanted to learn to draw the figure, Mauve insisted, he should start by drawing from plaster casts—the traditional method—rather than waste his time (and his brother’s money) on playacting with street people. “He spoke to me … in a way such as the worst teacher at the academy would not have spoken,” Vincent fumed.
The battle lines were drawn. Rather than wait for the inevitable rejection, Vincent sprang to the attack. He accused Mauve of being “narrow-minded,” “unfriendly,” “moody and rather unkind.” He cast the dispute as a veiled assault on his whole artistic project, claiming that Mauve secretly disliked his work and harbored a wish “that I should give it up.” He escalated the argument into a contest not just between live models and plaster casts, but between drawing and watercolor; then, between realism and academism. Calling watercolor “exasperating” and “hopeless,” he virtually gave up trying to master the medium—a ringing repudiation of his teacher.
On the other hand, he defiantly continued working with his model, arguing that he was “getting more used to [her], and for that very reason I must continue with her.” As if determined to push the dispute into a confrontation, he persisted in demanding his cousin’s attention. He seemed shocked when Mauve withdrew further (“Mauve has done very little for me lately,” he complained) and genuinely wounded when the older man lashed out at him in exasperation: “I am not always in a mood to show you things, [and] you will damn well have to wait for the right moment.”
When Vincent still pressed his case, Mauve turned on him. In a poisonous pique, he “spitefully” mimicked his student’s “nervous and flurried” speech, and mocked his earnest, grimacing expression. “He is very clever at those things,” Vincent later recalled painfully. “It was a striking caricature of me, but drawn with hatred.” Vincent tried to defend himself: “If you had spent rainy nights in the streets of London or cold nights in the Borinage,” he told Mauve, “you would also have such ugly lines in your face and perhaps a husky voice, too.”
But his real response came later when he returned to his room and hurled the plaster casts he had into the coalbin, smashing them to pieces. “I will draw from those casts only when they become whole and white again,” he vowed in a fury of hurt, “when there are no more hands and feet of living beings to draw from.” Then, in a final provocation, he returned to Mauve and flaunted his defiant act. “Don’t mention plaster to me again,” he raged. “I can’t stand it.” Mauve immediately banished Vincent from his studio and vowed “not to have anything to do with him” for the rest of the winter.
It had lasted barely a month.
WITH H. G. TERSTEEG, the break came even more quickly. The precocious Goupil gérant, now thirty-six, stood at the epicenter of the Hague art world, his star rising ever higher with the success of the Hague School painters whom he had long supported. No one, not even Mauve, could have done more to further Vincent’s career.
At first, Tersteeg welcomed his former apprentice to The Hague, apparently setting aside their rancorous exchange the previous spring when he accused Vincent of sponging off his uncles and advised him to be a teacher, not an artist. Vincent joined in the show of r
econciliation, saying “all had been forgiven and forgotten,” and suggesting “let bygones be bygones.” But of course nothing had changed. Just as he could leave no slight unchallenged, Vincent could leave no courtesy untested. Less than two weeks after his arrival, he went to Tersteeg and borrowed twenty-five guilders, not a trivial amount. Tersteeg retaliated by waiting three weeks to make his first visit to Vincent’s apartment.
When he finally did visit, the dispute erupted into the open. Shrewd and imperious, and unrestrained by family ties, Tersteeg did not mince words. He called Vincent’s pen drawings—his pride—“charmless” and “unsalable,” and reproached him for persisting in the clumsy, amateur sketches that filled his studio. He disparaged Vincent’s prized models with a haughty “There are no models in The Hague.” If Vincent really wanted to make a living as an artist, said Tersteeg, he had to abandon figure drawing and apply himself to watercolor—landscapes, preferably. He also had to give up the large Bargue-sized images he favored and make smaller works. He scoffed at Vincent’s defense that his drawings had “character,” and when Vincent brought out his fat portfolios to prove how hard he worked, the gérant dismissed their contents as “a waste of time.” Figure drawing, he told Vincent, “is a kind of narcotic which you take in order not to feel the pain caused by being unable to make watercolors.”
Even by the standards of their difficult past, it was a shattering indictment. Tersteeg had always had a perverse instinct for Vincent’s weaknesses; and Vincent, always a special sensitivity to his former boss’s rebukes. Deeply wounded, Vincent unleashed a storm of protest. The violence of it would tear him away from beliefs he had professed only weeks before and cast him on a new and perilous course. Calling Tersteeg “thoughtless” and “superficial,” he vehemently defended his drawings, insisting “[they] have a great deal of good in them.” He argued that figure drawing from the model was both more difficult than watercolor, and more “serious”—that is, more capable of expressing deeper truths.
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