Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  These were the simple images that peopled Vincent’s world: “unpolished” laborers with faces “broad and rough”; fine-featured young ladies and solemn preachers; bent old men and sturdy peasants. Onto this childhood template, the new gospels of physiognomy and phrenology, the “tournure” of Daumier and Gavarni, the icons of Millet and the English illustrators, only added layers of refinement and confirmation.

  This was the “reality” that Vincent increasingly imposed on the world around him. “I see a world,” he said, “which is quite different from what most painters see.” It was a reality that demanded “significance.” When he saw a group of poor people gathered expectantly outside a lottery office, he dubbed the scene “The Poor and Money.” That way, he explained, “it assumed a greater and deeper significance for me than it had at first sight.” On his walks, he recognized only effects. (“All nature is an indescribably beautiful ‘Black and White’ exhibition during those snow effects.”) It was a reality tender with emotion. News of a friend’s death could pass with barely a mention, but seeing his portrait opened up floodgates of grief.

  It was a reality of uncompromising simplicity. Even his greatest passions had to conform to simple formulae, like the captions on his prints, whether “sorrowful yet always rejoicing” or “aimer encore.” Through this lens, everyday irritations appeared as “petites misères de la vie humaine” (little miseries of human life), and the deepest mysteries as “quelque chose là-haut” (something on high). For the rest of his life, no crisis or enthusiasm could avoid the relentless reduction of a motto. From foi de charbonnier to rayon blanc, he forced the world into categories, as if pinning bugs in a box or arranging prints in a portfolio. He eschewed ambiguity and saw cartoons of metaphor where others saw only harsh reality.

  When he looked at people, he saw only types. From the handsome, aristocratic Van Rappard to the lowly streetwalker Sien, they were never more real than characters in a book or figures on a page—drawn indelibly by fate in the broad outlines of their type. (“I see things as pen drawings,” he said.) Except for Sien, not one of the models who drifted through his studio in two years on the Schenkweg ever merited a personal word or any observation beyond a physical description. He drew orphans repeatedly, but never commented on their circumstance or condition. Of a disabled model he wrote only, “One little fellow, with a long thin neck, in a wheel chair, was splendid.”

  He treated people according to type, expected them to act according to type, and judged them according to type. Rich men like his uncle Cent should think only of money, he said. “One could not expect anything else.” But clergymen, like his father, “ought to be humble and contented with simple things.” The poor should help each other; women and children (but not men) should “learn thrift.” Bourgeois women should be cultured, but not intellectual; lower-class women, neither. Workers should never go on strike, but only “work on to the utmost.” Why? Because, like characters in a novel, he said, “it was impossible [for them] to act differently.”

  Most of all, artists should act like artists. Again and again in Vincent’s defiant standoff with the world, he invoked the destiny of “type” to define and justify himself. If he did not seek out good company, it was because, “as a painter, one must leave aside other social ambitions.” If he suffered from “temporary fits of weakness, nervousness, and melancholy,” it was the result of “something peculiar in the constitution of every painter.” If he led a troubled, unconventional life, it was because “it fits in with my profession … I am a poor painter.” Even his “ugly face and shabby coat” he claimed as badges of his type. And if he refused to change his mind about loving Kee Vos or drawing figures or using models or marrying Sien, it was because he was who he was, and an artist could not be any other way. “I do not intend to think and live less passionately than I do,” he declared. “I am myself.”

  In this world of pen drawings, Sien Hoornik had her place, too. For Vincent, as for his era, no typology was stricter than the typology of women (a strait-jacket laid out benevolently in Michelet’s treatise on womanhood, La femme). In their purest form, they were delicate, inchoate creatures, inherently weak and frail-willed, designed by God for love. Without love, a woman became an icon of pity—“she loses her spirits and the charm is gone,” Vincent said. Images of sad, helpless, unloved women preoccupied the Victorian mind in a kind of pornography of pathos: wives of departing soldiers, homeless maidens, husbandless mothers, grieving widows. The sight of lonely, unloved women, whether in a print or in a church pew, touched Vincent deeply. “Even as a boy,” he told Theo, “I would often look up with infinite sympathy, indeed with respect, at a woman’s face past its prime, inscribed as it were with the words: here life and reality have left their mark.” Mothers were the other icon of womanhood that could move Vincent to tears. His collections had always included this staple of nineteenth-century sentimentalism, and he spun vivid images of motherhood from the threads of his own experience long before he put pencil to paper.

  A pregnant prostitute combined the helplessness of all women, the pathos of unloved women, and the dewy sentiments of Mother Love. In Vincent’s typology, only a few “temptresses” actually chose prostitution. The vast majority of fallen women were merely victims of unloving men and their own weak natures. All women were easily deceived and readily deserted, he believed, but poor women especially, if not taken care of by a man, were always “in great, immediate danger of being drowned in the pool of prostitution” and lost forever. An older prostitute mother, like Sien, touched all these talismans of pity. “My poor, weak, ill-used little wife,” Vincent called her, “an unhappy, forsaken, lonely creature.” Not to help this thrice-damned creature would be “monstrous,” he protested. “She has,” he said, “something of the sublime for me.”

  In drawing after drawing, he situated Sien in this intimate typology. He drew her as the “bare, forked animal” of Sorrow; as a young widow, dressed in black and lost in melancholy; as a matron sewing serenely for her family. He posed her as a mother, using both her sister and her daughter as children. Suggesting her features with only the most cursory strokes, he depicted her contented in the safe embrace of domesticity: sweeping the floor, saying grace, carrying a kettle, going to church. Rough as they are, these pencil and charcoal drawings, taken together, represent Vincent’s first effort at portraiture—the first of many efforts over the coming years that would, like these, reveal far more about the artist and his inner world than about the sitter or the real world.

  HOLD UP IN HIS Schenkweg studio, surrounded by prostitutes posing as maternal icons, orphans as shoeblacks, vagrants as Millet farmers, and pensioners as fishermen, Vincent could keep the real world at bay. The studio itself became by turns an almshouse, a peasant’s hovel, a fisherman’s hut, a village inn, a soup kitchen. Vincent adjusted the light flooding in his window by adding shutters and muslin shades—not just to re-create the mysterious contrasts of a Graphic illustration, or the warm, tempered light of a Rembrandt print, but also to shut out the world.

  Windows had always played a special role in Vincent’s life. As both an observer and an outsider, he had staked his place early at the parsonage window overlooking the Zundert Markt. Twenty-nine years later, he was still there. Whenever he arrived in a new home, he lovingly recorded the view from his window and sometimes drew it, as in Brixton and Ramsgate. His descriptions of the scenes outside his windows, often filled with longing and nostalgia, are indistinguishable from his descriptions of the prints on his wall.

  From these frequent, detailed accounts, it is clear that Vincent spent long hours, day and night, gazing from his window, observing unobserved the distant ebb and flow of other lives: from the dockworkers in Amsterdam to the diggers in the railroad coalyards outside his Hague studio. In any interior, whether depicted or real, he was preoccupied by the window arrangement, and the view through windows would return again and again to obsess his own imagery. From the time he began to create studios for himself in 1881, he
complained relentlessly about the inadequacy of the windows and lavished far more of his precious funds on window treatments than his artistic requirements could justify.

  Among the very first images Vincent drew after arriving in The Hague was the view from his window: a cluttered patchwork of backyards, each fenced off from the others, but all visible from Vincent’s second-floor vantage. In May, when his uncle Cor commissioned a second set of city scenes, he returned to his window and drew the scene in loving, longing detail: the laundry yard of his own building in the foreground and a busy carpenter’s yard beyond—all rendered with a combination of intense looking and voyeuristic detachment that rehearsed a lifetime of seeing unseen. “One can look around it and through it,” Vincent wrote proudly of this drawing, “in every nook and cranny.” The laundresses and carpenters pass through the scene’s meticulous clutter like ghosts, unaware of being watched, leaving barely a trace of life.

  Vincent clearly found something deeply satisfying about this eavesdropping perspective. When he went to the almshouse in search of models, he secreted himself in front of a window looking out and made sketches of the activities he spied on the grounds. In the hustle and bustle of the Geest, he yearned to withdraw to a safe distance and observe unobserved. “I wish one could have free access to the houses,” he wrote, “and sit down by the windows without ceremony.” In summer, when he moved to a new apartment in the building next door, he immediately went to its higher window and drew the same scene again. “You must picture me sitting in my attic window as early as four o’clock in the morning,” he reported to Theo, “studying the meadows and the carpenter’s yard with my perspective frame.”

  Carpenter’s Yard and Laundry, MAY 1882, PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 11⅛ × 18½ IN. (Illustration credit 17.2)

  When he left his studio and went out into the world, Vincent took his window with him. He had first heard about perspective frames in the writings of Armand Cassagne, a French draftsman who authored a number of books for both artists and amateurs. Vincent had read Cassagne’s book for children, Guide de l’alphabet du dessin (Guide to the ABCs of Drawing), when he first emerged from the Borinage. Cassagne recommended the use of a “cadre rectificateur” (correcting frame), consisting of a small rectangular frame of cardboard or wood divided by threads into four equal rectangles. By holding the frame up to a view, a draftsman could isolate the image to be drawn and better gauge its proportions.

  It wasn’t until Vincent arrived in The Hague more than a year later, however, that he arranged for a carpenter to make such a device for him. Always eager for simple solutions and long frustrated by the “witchcraft” of proportion, he saw in Cassagne’s suggestion the key to taming his unruly hand and unlocking the mysteries of salable art. The frame he had made was still small (11½ inches by 7 inches), but hardly Cassagne’s pocket-sized cadre rectificateur. And instead of two intersecting wires, Vincent’s had ten or eleven, creating a grid of little squares like windowpanes through which he could peer and peer and painstakingly transfer every contour onto the same grid traced on his paper.

  Despite the balancing act required to simultaneously secure the frame, a sketchpad, and himself, Vincent took his little rectangle everywhere: around his Schenkweg neighborhood, onto the city streets, into the dunes at Scheveningen, and throughout the countryside in between. Everywhere, he held up his frame and “corrected” the world. He called it his “spy-hole.” “I think you can imagine how delightful it is to focus my spy-hole on the sea, on the green meadows,” he exulted. “One can look through it like a window” (his emphasis). To shut out the world beyond the frame, he squinted his eyes—a trick Mauve may have taught him—until only the blurry, crisscrossed scene in his spy-hole was visible.

  In drawing after drawing, the results thrilled him. “The lines of the roofs and gutters shoot away into the distance like arrows from a bow,” he boasted to Theo of one successful effort. He took his frame into the attic to draw the view of the busy yards out back and the “infinity of delicate, soft green, miles and miles of flat meadow” beyond. He liked it so much that he had two more frames made, larger and sturdier, the last one a deluxe affair with iron corners and special legs for uneven ground—“a fine piece of workmanship,” he called it. He even took it into his studio where he peered through it at Sien and his other models, drawing them “faithfully and with love,” he said, “by calmly looking through my little window.”

  IN THE MONTHS BEFORE the birth of Sien’s baby, Vincent saw only one image: family. After years of trying—with his own family and others—he had finally found a family that would have him. “She sees that I am not rough,” he wrote of Sien, almost in amazement, “and she wants to stay with me.” Images of motherhood had riddled his letters to Theo, even as he continued to withhold the key that would have unlocked their meaning. Every day in the studio, he posed his models in a preenactment of the vision in his head: Michelet’s “triple and absolute tie” of man, woman, and child.

  With that vision firmly in his spy-hole, Vincent shut out everything else. Even as the feuds with Mauve and Tersteeg threatened to undo Theo’s support, he spent lavishly on his imaginary family: medicine for Sien, rent for Sien’s mother, clothes for the coming baby. He used the rent money Theo sent to pay Sien’s doctor, precipitating a desperate crisis when the landlord threatened to evict him. Even before that storm had passed, he began lobbying Theo to move to a bigger apartment next door, deepening the deception with each letter.

  Gripped by the same fever of caring as in the Borinage, Vincent threw himself into “rescuing” the fallen woman on whom he had staked everything. He made her take baths and long walks. He administered “restoratives.” He ensured that she ate “simple food” and got plenty of fresh air and rest. “I have taken her up and have given her all the love, all the tenderness, all the care that was in me,” he wrote, framing their relationship as a model of Christian charity. When she went to register at the maternity hospital in Leiden, he accompanied her. A frustrated doctor, like his father, Vincent represented Sien in discussions with the hospital staff and acted in every other way like a husband.

  So single-mindedly did he focus on bringing “the poor creature” back to life that he neglected his own deteriorating health. After complaining ominously in January about headaches, fever, and weakness (lamenting, “my youth is gone”), he barely mentioned his condition through a flood of letters that spring and dismissed any problem with a defiant “I haven’t given in to it.”

  Theo must have been surprised when a letter arrived in early June announcing, “I am in the hospital … I have what they call the ‘clap.’ ”

  But not even illness could shake Vincent’s life in images or his new vision of family. Despite Sien’s likely role in putting him there, he entered the hospital in extraordinarily good spirits for a twenty-nine-year-old man who had never been seriously ill in his life. The indignities of a common ward with ten beds, overflowing chamber pots, and abrupt male nurses struck him as “no less interesting than a third-class waiting room,” he said. “How I should love to make some studies of [it].” The doctors assured him that his gonorrhea was a mild case that would require only a few weeks of treatment (quinine pills for fever and sulfate irrigations to quell the infection). Although confined to bed, he had brought Dickens novels and his books on perspective to study. When the nurses left the ward, however, he sneaked from his bed to look out the window. “The whole is a bird’s-eye view,” he wrote.

  Vincent always found pleasure in the company of doctors. (Years later, in Arles, he said that painting “consoles me up to a certain point for not being a doctor.”) At first, he also had visitors to buoy his spirits: his old Goupil colleague Iterson; his cousin Johan; even the gallingly proper Tersteeg. But the visits that truly sustained him were Sien’s. “She came to visit me regularly,” he told Theo proudly, “and brought me some smoked beef and sugar or bread.” On one such visit, on June 13, while waiting in the hospital lobby for visiting hours to begin, Sie
n crossed paths with a short, silver-haired preacher striding toward the wards on clerical privilege. It was Vincent’s father.

  Dorus van Gogh no doubt looked past the humble pregnant woman waiting in the lobby as he went to see Vincent for the first time since their fateful Christmas Day argument. He had traveled from Etten as soon as he heard of Vincent’s hospitalization, to make peace with his sick son. “I invited Vincent to come stay with us for a while after he leaves the hospital,” he reported to Theo, “so he can regain some strength.” At an earlier time, Vincent would surely have succumbed to yet another hope for reconciliation. Or a misplaced word might have reignited the bitter antagonisms that had scorched so many previous encounters. But now his vision was firmly fixed on his new family, not the old one.

  Throughout their conversation, Dorus noticed that Vincent kept “restlessly looking at the door, as if he expected a visitor that he would rather not have me meet.” Vincent declined the invitation to return home, saying only, “I want to go back to work.” Afterward, he dismissed his father’s surprise visit as an unwelcome spectral visitation out of a Dickens tale. “It was very strange to me,” he told Theo, “more or less like a dream.”

  But Sien could not continue to visit. On June 22, she herself checked in to a different hospital, in Leiden, preparing for a delivery that the doctors predicted would be difficult and dangerous. Almost as soon as she stopped visiting, Vincent suffered a relapse. Overcome by sentiment, he attributed his worsening condition to their separation. He was moved to a different ward for more intensive care and put on a new regimen to fight the resurgent infection. To drain his bladder and irrigate the inflamed canal, doctors inserted catheters of increasing size into his penis. Infection and irritation made the insertion difficult and painful. The process of “stretching” the canal was so excruciating that it left him lame with soreness for days.