When such a drawing emerged from the blizzard of failures, he made copy after copy, sometimes ten in a row, as if unsure of when, or if, another would follow. (“Later one hardly knows how one tossed it off.”) Vincent admitted that he worked this way partly because he could work no other way: “There is something in my make-up that does not want to be too careful,” he said. But it was clearly a method perfectly suited to his manic, missionary imagination—a relentless argument with the images in his head—and Vincent sealed it with the most encouraging example of persistence in the face of failure that he knew: “the more one sows,” he wrote, “the more one may hope to reap.”
Vincent also enlisted his art in his ongoing battles with the world. The increasingly bitter antagonisms with Mauve and Tersteeg drove him even more deeply into his obsession with figure drawing, despite his persistent inability to render the human form convincingly. “The figure takes more time and is more complicated,” he claimed, “but I think in the long run it is more worthwhile.” He made forays into other kinds of imagery—streetscapes with Breitner, cityscapes for Cor—but always returned to figures, disputing the judgment not only of Mauve and Tersteeg, but also of his own unruly hand. All artistic endeavors began and ended with figure drawing, he argued—even landscape. “[One must] draw a pollard willow as if it were a living being,” he wrote, “then the surroundings follow almost by themselves.” He bolstered this militant devotion to the figure by reading Alfred Sensier’s biography of Millet (“What a giant!”), and defended it with a campaign of words and images rallied by Millet’s battle cry: “L’art c’est un combat.”
To counter Mauve’s and Tersteeg’s arguments for watercolor—and against his beloved pen drawings—Vincent set out to prove that his black-and-white images could achieve the same moody tonality as the daubs of watery color that the world was pushing him to make. He worked over drawings again and again, relentlessly shading, rubbing, and erasing, using big carpenter’s pencils, ink from a reed pen, ink on a brush, charcoal, chalk, and crayon, trying to achieve the subtle modulations of gray that would match the “drowsy dusk” tone of Mauve’s watercolors. “This little drawing has caused me more trouble than has been expended on many a watercolor,” he claimed of one such effort. Of another he said, “I have brushed it in with lead pencil … as I would if I were painting.”
But it was a process that brought him into fresh conflict with both his images and his materials. Pencil marks could be erased or even scraped off (as long as he didn’t tear the paper, which he often did); some charcoal could be brushed off with a handkerchief or feather. But the images grew darker and darker as he reworked them in pursuit of a “warmer and deeper” atmosphere, and he had to fight to prevent them from turning “heavy, thick, black and dull.” Many of the drawings he made for his uncle show the strains of this struggle: skies lower menacingly, dark rivers pass through darker fields, shadows veil buildings even in broad daylight. When Mauve saw drawings like these, he recognized their defiant ambition to create the mood of color without the means. “When you draw,” he told Vincent, “you are a painter.”
In April, Vincent sent Theo a figure drawing that announced a new offensive in his battle of images against a disapproving world. It was a naked woman, seen from the side, her legs drawn up to her breasts and her head buried in her crossed arms.
Vincent had begun drawing from the nude.
BY APRIL 1882, only three months after his arrival, Vincent’s relentless combativeness had left him virtually friendless in a city his family had called home for three centuries. As an associate member of the Pulchri Studio, he had the right to draw from models two nights a week at the society’s imposing home on Prinsengracht, but he never wrote a word or left a drawing to suggest that he took advantage of the privilege. After only two recorded attempts, he gave up on social visits there as well. “I cannot stand the close air of a crowded hall,” he explained. “I do not like to be in company.”
Nevertheless, in late March, Vincent tried to mount a showing of his favorite black-and-white prints in the Pulchri’s popular exhibition series. Although supported by Bernard Blommers, a successful Hague School painter, the proposal met with opposition, even ridicule, from most Pulchri members. They dismissed Vincent’s cherished images as mere “illustrations”: too superficial, too sentimental, and too commercial for serious artistic consideration. Vincent, who saw even minor disagreements as personal attacks, took their rejection as a declaration of war. He dismissed their opinions as “humbug” and told them acidly to “hold their tongues until they learned to draw better themselves.”
After that, he withdrew completely, choking on bitter denunciations of his fellow artists’ “pedantic self-conceit,” and fantasies of ultimate vindication. “In a year—or I don’t know how long—I shall be able to draw,” he vowed, “then they will hear me thunder, ‘Go to hell’;…‘Go away, you’re standing in my light.’…To hell with anyone who wants to hinder me.”
The more attacks he fended off, the more attacks he suspected. Gripped by paranoia, he accused people of laughing at him behind his back, of plotting to “obstruct” him, of “trying to devour” him. Despite his early unearned access to luminaries like Mauve and Tersteeg, he expressed shock at the “jealousy” and “intrigues” he imagined directed against him. He tried to explain the opposition as artistic and inevitable: “The better my drawings become, the more difficulty and opposition I shall meet.” But he heard Mauve’s cruel taunts of the previous winter echoed everywhere. “If remarks are made about my habits—meaning dress, face, manner of speech, what answer shall I make?” he asked Theo. “Am I really so ill-mannered, insolent and indelicate? Could I be such a monster of insolence and impoliteness? [Do I] deserve to be cut off from society?”
In May, Mauve reappeared in Vincent’s life just long enough to confirm all the paranoid voices in his head. Even after his banishment expired in April, Mauve had successfully avoided any further contact with his former student. “One day he is ill, then he needs rest, then he is too busy,” Vincent complained. He had written Mauve a pitiful letter, but Mauve ignored it. They spoke only once, briefly, in the street. Angered by this continued coldness, Vincent had written him yet another letter, bitter this time, reopening their final argument (about drawing from plaster casts) in a desperate bid to end their relationship on his terms, not Mauve’s. “It is too difficult for you to guide me,” he wrote, “and it is too difficult for me to be guided by you if you require ‘strict obedience’ to all you say—I cannot give that. So that’s the end of the guiding and being guided.” When Mauve still did not reply, Vincent felt “choked” by his indifference. He complained that the shock of Mauve’s desertion made it impossible for him to work. “I cannot look at a brush,” he said, “it makes me nervous.”
But a few weeks later, when he encountered Mauve by accident in Scheveningen, he found his draftsman’s fist again. He demanded that Mauve come see his work and “talk things over.” Mauve refused. “I will certainly not come to see you,” he said flatly, “that’s all over.” When Vincent reminded him that Uncle Cor had seen his work and even given him a commission, Mauve scoffed: “That doesn’t mean anything; [it] will be the first and last, and then nobody will take an interest in you.” When Vincent stood his ground, insisting, “I am an artist,” Mauve repeated his accusation of amateurism and added venomously, “You have a vicious character.”
Vincent later compared the encounter to being tortured.
In Mauve’s betrayal, as in every calamity that spring, Vincent thought he saw the gloved hand of H. G. Tersteeg. Ever since their falling-out in February, Vincent had suspected the gérant of plotting against him. He lived in constant fear that Tersteeg’s implacable skepticism would infect distant family members, especially Uncle Cent, and no doubt attributed the hostility of the Pulchri members to Tersteeg’s ubiquitous influence. When Mauve’s attitude toward him “changed suddenly,” Vincent immediately accused Tersteeg of poisoning his mentor’s ea
r. In a reverie of paranoia, he imagined Tersteeg whispering to Mauve: “Be careful, you can’t trust him with money. Let him go, don’t help him any longer; as a dealer I see no good coming of it.” Driven by such visions, Vincent imagined Tersteeg as the architect of a relentless conspiracy—a “poisonous wind”—intended to drive him out of The Hague. He accused him of slander and betrayal, and damned him as “an enemy who begrudges me the very light of my eyes.”
By April, Vincent imagined that the conspiratorial gérant had set his sights on Theo. “[Tersteeg] told me he would see to it that you stopped sending me money,” he wrote, frantic with worry. “[He said], ‘Mauve and I will see to it that there is an end to this.’ ”
—
SO FAR, THEO HAD BEEN spared the blunt force of the draftsman’s fist. Compared to the rhetorical fireworks and bitter recriminations directed at Mauve and Tersteeg, Vincent’s letters to his brother, although tense at times and furious with others, had never veered into open hostility. After Theo’s scolding letter in January, and Vincent’s defiant reply, their exchanges settled into a wary intimacy—a volatile mix of pleading and threatening on Vincent’s side; encouraging and warning on Theo’s. Beneath the surface, however, a battle raged.
They fought over money. For Vincent, no subject was more sensitive or incendiary. Since the Christmas expulsion from Etten, his war with the world had made money the defining issue between the brothers. Vincent had spurned his parents’ (astonishing) offer to lend him money after his flight to The Hague (“I hate to have to account to Father for every cent I spend,” he said brusquely), and Uncle Cent had long since recused himself from his nephew’s sad tale. That left only Theo. But his support was by no means assured. In December, he had refused to send Vincent the money he needed to extend his earlier stay in The Hague, after fleeing the Strickers’ house.
No doubt with that refusal in mind, Vincent struck a defiant note in his very first request for money from his new home. After spending all one hundred guilders that Mauve had lent him on furniture and “ornaments” for his apartment, he laid his predicament at his brother’s feet. “I am in for it now, and the die is cast,” he wrote unapologetically. “Of course I must ask you, Theo, if you will occasionally send me what you can spare without inconveniencing yourself.” Within a week, the mask of deference was ripped away, and Vincent’s tone turned demanding: “Theo, what’s the matter with you?…I have not received anything… send me at least part of [the money] by return mail.”
Theo’s delay in sending a second payment in February sealed Vincent’s anxiety and condemned their relationship to an unending cycle of resentful pleading and guilty scheming. Buffeted by a dependence that he loathed and an indebtedness that he could not deny, Vincent careered back and forth between petulant demands and grudging gratitude. He appeased his brother with pledges to dress better, to socialize more, and, most of all, to make salable art—in Vincent’s assurances, always just around the corner. He placated Theo with promises of hard work and harsh economies, and charades of financial acumen (calculating down to the day when he would next be “absolutely penniless”). He spun vivid, Camille-like tales of fainting spells brought on by “scarcity of funds.” He complained of being harassed and feverish with worry when Theo’s money failed to arrive on time. He protested that every franc Theo withheld was a detriment to his art, reminding him again and again in endless variations that “the success or failure of a drawing also depends greatly on the mood and condition of the painter.”
He also threatened. With increasing directness, he warned Theo of the calamities that would befall him if more money were not forthcoming: the embarrassment, the discouragement, the sickness (headache and fever), the depression—and especially the mental problems. “Don’t forget that I shall break down if I have too many cares and anxieties,” he wrote, waving the red shirt of the Borinage and the family upheaval over Gheel. “All the worry and troubling over my drawings is hard enough,” he hinted heavily. “If I had too many other cares … I should lose my head.”
Meanwhile, he continued to spend money with a defiant disregard for the limits of Theo’s purse. Vincent had always been a spendthrift, never budgeting and never saving. He cited the aristocratic Van Rappard as his example. “I see again in Rappard how practical it is to use good stuff,” he explained. “Rappard’s studio is very good and looks very comfortable.” Even so, he should have been able to get by on the hundred francs that Theo sent every month. The average workman earned about twenty francs a week and often supported a whole family on that. While Vincent had expenses no workman did, he also received shipments of his favorite (expensive) paper from Theo, and extra income from his “sales” to Uncle Cor and Tersteeg. No, when Vincent pleaded poverty or missed rent payments, it was because he had spent his last pennies on books, or “special” penholders, or a new easel, or more models, or improvements to his apartment, or additions to his growing collection of prints and illustrations. (Five months after arriving in The Hague, he had more than a thousand of them.) And through it all, he never did without the little girl he paid to sweep his studio.
The problem went beyond simple profligacy. Vincent had come to believe that he deserved to be supported. Whether as an angry challenge or a desperate self-justification, or both, he argued that his hard work and noble purpose entitled him to his brother’s money. Thus when Theo pressed him to make more salable works so that he could earn his own living, he countered airily: “It seems to me that it is much less a matter of earning than of deserving.” Armed with this delusional sense of entitlement, Vincent loudly asserted his artistic prerogative; eschewed formal training; disdained taking a job to help defray expenses; and demanded a large, well-stocked studio, prodigious supplies of materials, and a steady flow of private models—all while he was still little more than an unpromising novice. He passed his mounting debts on to Theo with only the faintest expressions of regret (“I see no other way”) while covering the indignity of his dependence with a flood of self-justifying letters that argued his right to even more money. He mocked the “poor wretches” who bought lottery tickets “paid for with their last pennies, money that should have gone on food,” even as he undertook projects and purchased luxuries without a cent in his pocket, on the expectation of Theo’s next letter.
Tersteeg’s threat—“I will see to it that there is an end to this”—threw Vincent into a self-righteous panic. “How is it possible, and what’s got into him?” he wrote, frozen by the fear that Tersteeg and Mauve might conspire with his like-minded brother to cut off his funding—“to try and take my bread away from me.” He sought reassurances of Theo’s support with pleas for sympathy (“I have struggled through this winter as best I could”) and with howls of pain: “Sometimes it seems as if my heart would break.”
But also with defiance. Rather than moderating his claims of entitlement, Vincent escalated them. Instead of one hundred francs a month, he now wanted one hundred and fifty—almost half of Theo’s salary. And he wanted a new studio—bigger, because “it is much better for posing.” And, most of all, he wanted a guarantee. “I insist upon its being arranged so that I no longer need be afraid that what is strictly necessary will be taken from me,” he dictated, “nor always feel as if it were the bread of charity.” No matter what Vincent did—or refused to do—the money should continue to flow, because, he declared, “a workman is worthy of his wages.” It was a demand for nothing less than financial independence without financial means, an unprecedented arrangement, and Vincent argued his brother to paralysis over it.
Theo had arrived at the same bitter impasse as Mauve and Tersteeg: Vincent refused to give up, or even moderate, his obsession with figure drawing. With religious absolutism, he had declared himself a disciple of the human body, banishing all compromises as surrender and answering all challenges with indignant defiance. Even the failure to match his passion constituted an act of intolerable moral cowardice, as Breitner and De Bock and the artists of the Pulchri had learne
d.
Why was drawing figures so important that Vincent was prepared to antagonize two of the most influential figures in Dutch art and even defy his benevolent brother? Why would he sacrifice his best chances for success, collegiality, and even survival on an art form for which he had demonstrated no talent and resisted all efforts at instruction? Was it purely his contrarian nature: his draftsman’s fist, still shaking angrily at the world after the twin blows in Amsterdam and Etten? Or was something more at stake?
The answer had to be apparent to anyone who visited the little apartment off the Schenkweg.
It wasn’t much: a single room with a potbellied stove flued into a fake fireplace, an alcove for a bed, and a window looking out on a cluttered carpenter’s yard and the neighbor’s laundry lines. The building, nondescript and cheaply built, sat in a sparsely developed new area on the outskirts of The Hague just beyond the Rijnspoor station: an area of garden plots and cinder paths and the ceaseless belch and scream of trains only a few steps from the front door. Not really city, not really country, it was a no-man’s-land where “nice” people rarely ventured, and never settled.
Still, the neighbors must have wondered at the strange parade of visitors who made their way to the second-floor rear apartment at Schenkweg no. 138. Sometimes Vincent brought them; sometimes they arrived unaccompanied. They came and went throughout the day, from morning until evening: boys and girls, sometimes with their mothers, sometimes without; old men and young men, old women and young women—but never ladies. None was dressed for visiting. They all wore “everyday clothes”; many clearly had nothing else.
These were Vincent’s models. He recruited them wherever he could: in soup kitchens and train stations, in orphanages and old people’s homes, or just off the street. At first, he tried hiring experienced models like the ones Mauve used, but they cost far more than he could afford. Besides, he seemed to find an odd pleasure in accosting strangers and asking them to pose for him. With its combination of persuasion and intimidation, the “hunt” (his word) for models perfectly suited his missionary mind-set. But it was far harder in The Hague than it had been in rural Etten, where he could convincingly claim a droit d’artiste. “I have great trouble [finding] models,” he complained soon after arriving.
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