Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  That left only Theo. In the weeks between Tersteeg’s visit and his brother’s, Vincent fell into a deep reverie of fraternal longing. He filled his letters with plaintive pleas for understanding and the most heartbreaking hopes of ultimate vindication. “I want people to say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels keenly,” he wrote. “In spite of my so-called coarseness—do you understand?—perhaps even because of it … I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.”

  On the eve of Theo’s arrival in early August, Vincent reaffirmed the image on which, he said, “my whole future depends.” “Sien and the baby are well and are getting stronger, and I love them both,” he wrote. “I shall draw the little cradle another hundred times.”

  Inevitably, reality disappointed him.

  The two brothers, who had not seen each other in a year, both made efforts to recapture their elusive bond. Theo brought presents from their parents, as well as drawing paper and crayon from Paris. Vincent took his brother for a walk on the dunes at Scheveningen to enjoy the “sand, sea and sky”—just as they had at their last reunion in The Hague five years earlier. Theo came to the Schenkweg to see his brother’s new home.

  But nothing, not even the sight of Vincent’s beloved cradle, moved him. “Do not marry her,” he told Vincent. Forever seeking a balance between fraternal and familial duty, Theo did promise to continue his support for another year regardless of Sien, thus averting his brother’s worst nightmare. In return, however, he demanded an end to Vincent’s campaign for acceptance of his new family—not only with their parents but even with Theo himself. (For the next six months, neither Sien’s name nor any discussion of her appears in Vincent’s letters.) She was to be banished from the public record as well as from the family’s reputation.

  But silence was not all that Theo demanded. Vincent’s art would also have to change. Despite his last-minute conversion to landscape and color, Vincent had continued to resist Theo’s pressure to make salable art. Only a few days before, he had argued in a letter that “to work for the market is in my opinion not exactly the right way,” and dismissed “speculation” in art as nothing more than “deceiving amateurs.” Theo came determined to set Vincent straight. He reiterated his demand that Vincent turn his attention away from black-and-white figure drawing and concentrate on landscape and color—that is, on painting.

  Because Vincent had often used the expense of painting as an excuse for inaction, Theo gave him extra money for the necessary supplies. To ensure faithful compliance, he insisted that Vincent send him proof of his “progress in a direction that is reasonable” in the near future.

  This was the full price Theo demanded for his continued support; this was his response to Sorrow: Vincent would have to erase Sien not just from his public life, but from his art as well.

  WHEN VINCENT COULDN’T SLEEP. as he often couldn’t after Sien and her baby returned from the hospital, he went to the studio downstairs where he pulled from the cupboard his big portfolios of illustrations and, by gaslight, pored over the familiar images for the hundredth time. “Every time I feel a little out of sorts,” he said, “I find in my collection of wood engravings a stimulus to set to work with renewed zest.” Unlike reality, these images stayed within their neat white borders. “I always regret,” he wrote later, “that the statue and the picture are not alive.”

  For months, years even, he had tried every conceivable way of forcing reality to conform to the sentimental, cliché-driven world between the covers of his portfolios: isolating it in fragments, cloaking it in imagery, distilling it into images; surrounding it in a relentless frame of words. The friction of that effort had produced nothing but heat: with his fellow artists, with his mentors, with his parents, with his brother.

  In the summer of 1882, out of that same friction, after so much heat, some light finally began to emerge.

  CHAPTER 18

  Orphan Man

  THE FISHERMEN ON THE BEACH MUST HAVE WONDERED ABOUT THE strange, lone figure standing on top of a dune thirty yards away, watching their struggle with the sea. He could not be a tourist; the weather was far too brutal for sightseeing. Rain and gale-force winds of up to fifty miles an hour lashed the dunes where the stranger stood. The city dwellers who overran the little fishing village of Scheveningen every summer, with their bathing machines and saltwater cures, would be watching nature’s fury from the safety of their hotel porches and parlors. Fighting to beach their little flat-bottomed shrimpers before the worst of the storm arrived, the fishermen probably never imagined that the lonely figure watching them from the windswept horizon was, in fact, a painter.

  Vincent had come prepared to do battle with the elements. Despite the warm August weather, he wore a pair of thick trousers to protect his legs from the bristly dune grass and from the coarse fish basket he used as a chair. Sometimes, he kicked the basket aside and knelt to paint, or sat, or even lay prone in the sand. He had brought sturdy shoes, too, in expectation of days like this one. With his linen smock soaked and clinging to him, he imagined that he looked “like Robinson Crusoe.”

  He carried so much painting gear with him that he couldn’t fit on the tram from The Hague and ended up walking to the beach. Immediately after Theo’s visit, with a wad of Theo’s money in his pocket, he had bought a new paint box, palette, brushes, and dozens of tin tubes of paint (an innovation that had only recently liberated painters from their studios). He also bought a new watercolor kit—a huge improvement over the awkward saucers on which he used to mix his colors. Loaded with all this, plus his large perspective frame, a stretched canvas with paper affixed to it, and provisions of bread and coffee, he plodded his way from the Schenkweg to the sea, an arduous three-mile journey even in fair weather.

  In the storm, none of it mattered. Wind and blowing sand played havoc with all the equipage and rituals of art making, blotting out the view in his perspective frame and covering his paints and brushes with a crust of grit every time he opened his box. The stretched canvas threatened to sail away with each blast of wind. More than once, the impossible conditions drove him to seek shelter in a little inn behind the dunes. Eventually, he left most of his materials there. When the next calm came, he loaded his palette with more color and his pockets with extra tubes and rushed out again. He scrambled up the wet, windswept dune, gripping his canvas tightly in one hand, his palette and a few brushes in the other. “The wind blew so hard that I could scarcely stay on my feet,” he described the scene to Theo, “and could hardly see for the sand that was flying around.”

  He seemed invigorated by the storm: fully alive in defiance of it. With his smock snapping wildly at each gust, he somehow managed to brush the roiling gray clouds and the murky, furrowed sea, working as quickly as his hand could move from palette to paper. He laid the paint on “thick and sticky” and “quick as lightning” in a spontaneous frenzy that made his inexperience as irrelevant as his perspective frame. It was a burst of direct image making that suited his manic imagination far better than the still lifes of Mauve’s quiet studio, his only previous experience with oil paints. At least twice the storm drove him back inside, where he found the painting “so covered with a thick layer of sand” that he had to scrape it clean and repaint the image from memory. Eventually, he left the canvas behind and ran back out into the storm just “to refresh the impression.”

  In this extremity of art and nature, Vincent made an astonishing discovery: he could paint.

  “When I paint,” he wrote Theo, “I feel a power of color in me that I did not possess before, things of broadness and strength.” After some initial hesitation, he “plunged headlong” into the new medium with all his characteristic fervor and abandon. Within just a month after Theo’s visit, he had painted at least two dozen scenes of beach, woods, fields, and gardens. He “painted from early in the morning until late at night,” he reported, “scarcely taking time even to eat or drink.”

  He took a boyish pleas
ure in the license that his painting “adventures” conferred. Insisting that everything looked more beautiful when it was wet, he rushed into every rainstorm in search of subjects, covering himself in mud as he knelt to work. In one painting, he depicted a girl in a white dress clinging to a tree surrounded by a sea of forest floor muck, painted in thick strokes of brown and black with such voluptuous verisimilitude that “you [can] smell the fragrance of the woods,” he claimed. He reveled in the tactile docility of the oil paint—so unlike watercolor. From the first, he spread it on the canvas or paper without reserve—“one must not spare the tube,” he cried—and scraped it off without remorse. He squeezed it from the tube and then worked it with a brush, eschewing glazes and mixing colors directly on the surface, as if afraid of too much deliberation.

  The results amazed him. “I am sure no one could tell that they are my first painted studies,” he wrote proudly. “To tell you the truth, it surprises me a little. I had expected the first things to be a failure [but] they are not bad at all.” “I don’t know myself how I paint [them],” he confessed. “I just sit down with a white board in front of the spot that appeals to me [and] look at what is in front of my eyes.” Nevertheless, he considered them so good that he tacked them up on his studio walls, displacing his treasured figure drawings. In his letters, he described their colors and subjects in extravagant detail. He spoke of “something infinite in painting,” of “hidden harmonies” and “tender things,” and even uttered the unthinkable: “[Painting] is more gratifying than drawing.” “It is so delightful just for expressing one’s feelings,” he marveled, as if experiencing it for the first time, “[and] so sympathetic to me that it will be very difficult for me not to go on painting forever.” “I have a painter’s heart,” he proclaimed. “Painting is in the very marrow of my bones.”

  And then he stopped. After barely a month of heroic exertions, prodigious consumption of paint, and repeated pledges to go “full speed ahead” and “strike while the iron is hot,” he quit painting entirely. To cover his hasty retreat, he raised a host of arguments. The most emphatic and least convincing of these was the cost. “Though I myself love doing it,” he protested, “for the present I shall not paint as much as my ambition and desire demand because of the heavy expenses.”

  The reality, of course, was far less simple and far more painful.

  VINCENT HAD GOTTEN his wish. His fantasy of a family unto itself, an island removed from the real world, had come true. No one visited him and he had no one to visit. The all-day painting expeditions meant that even his bedraggled band of models had no reason to make the long trek to his studio. His fellow artists and acquaintances, starting with Mauve and Tersteeg, had completely abandoned him. They “consider me an outcast,” he acknowledged. “They look down upon me, and consider me a nonentity.” When they saw him on the street, they jeered. When he saw them first, he slunk away to avoid a confrontation. “I purposely avoided those who I thought would be ashamed of me,” he later admitted.

  At first, he pretended not to care that the world had abandoned him, and claimed not to understand why its “good will” had been “as short-lived as a straw-fire.” At times he blamed his rough appearance, his social ineptitude, or his sensitive nerves. At other times, he succumbed to paranoia, imagining all the “eccentric and bad things [that] are thought and said about me” and decrying the failure of artists to support each other out of fraternal esprit. Sometimes, however, the truth proved too obvious to deny: “They think my own actions foolish.”

  Gradually, the price he had paid for his illusions became clear. “One would like to go and see some friend or would like a friend to come to the house,” he wrote. “One has an empty feeling when one can go nowhere and nobody comes.” Especially as he ventured into new artistic territory, he felt keenly the absence of both mentors and colleagues. He brooded endlessly over the loss of Mauve’s guidance, alternating between anger and regret. “I often feel the longing and need to ask someone’s advice,” he admitted. “It stabs me to the heart whenever I think of it.” He longed to watch other artists at work and wished wistfully that “they would just take me as I am.”

  Sometimes the brooding took him to the darkest possible places, as his reading in Zola’s saga of family degeneration planted thoughts of genetic curses and inescapable fates. “What am I in the eyes of most people,” he lamented, “a nonentity, an eccentric or an unpleasant person—somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.” Again and again, his thoughts returned for consolation to the story of Robinson Crusoe, the shipwrecked mariner, “who did not lose courage in his isolation.”

  Even when he walked the narrow streets of his beloved Geest, away from the bourgeois sensitivities of family and fellow artists, Vincent could not find belonging. With his shabby clothes, odd manner, and strange burden of equipment, he attracted unwanted attention, not just from the fearless street urchins who harassed him relentlessly, but even from passersby, who freely offered their judgments. “That’s a queer sort of painter,” Vincent heard one of them say. In public places like soup kitchens and train stations, he often created such a scene, with his big sheets of paper and “vehement scratching,” that he was asked to leave. Once, on a visit to the potato market, someone in the jostling crowd “spat his quid of tobacco onto my paper,” Vincent reported miserably. “[They] probably think I am a lunatic when they see me making a drawing with large hooks and crooks which don’t mean anything to them.”

  Eventually, the mere proximity of people unnerved him. “You cannot imagine how irritating and tiring it is when people always stand so close to you,” he wrote. “Sometimes it makes me so nervous that I have to give up.” Eventually, he did give up: avoiding public places except in the very early morning hours (as early as four in the summer) when he shared the streets only with the sweepers.

  His own family offered no comfort. Cast adrift on a raft of lies, Vincent saw his hope for reconciliation with his parents fade with each passing day. “This is worse than having no home at all, no father, no mother,” he wrote. “It is a great sorrow.” In August, the family moved to Nuenen, a town forty miles east of Etten where Dorus had accepted a new position—putting even more distance between Vincent and his dream of returning to the Zundert parsonage. He tried to reopen a correspondence with them, but his secret weighed on every exchange of pleasantries. Nor could he talk with them about his work. “I am afraid that Father and Mother may never really appreciate my art,” he concluded forlornly. “It will always be a disappointment to them.”

  The gulf only widened when Vincent’s father paid a surprise visit to the Schenkweg in late September. Unable to hide Sien and the baby, Vincent pretended that she was merely a poor, sick, pitiful mother whom he felt duty-bound to help. No talk of love or marriage—just Christian obligation. When he returned to Nuenen, Dorus sent a parcel that included a woman’s coat—an apparent show of support for Vincent’s latest charitable project. But neither father nor son was fooled. Almost a year later, Vincent admitted that the visit had left no doubt about his parents’ attitude: “They were more or less ashamed of me.”

  Vincent’s pledge of silence about Sien not only delegitimized his life with her, it alienated him from the only person who cared: Theo. Weighed down by prohibitions, his letters lapsed into superficiality, coded references, and unfathomable circumlocutions. Or he simply wrote less often. Every unaccounted guilder that he spent on Sien (or her baby, her daughter, her sister, her mother) only added to the burden of guilt he always felt in taking Theo’s money. To that unseen debt, Vincent now added the costs of oil painting, a frightening new level of expenditure far exceeding the paper, pencils, and charcoal he was used to. “Everything is so expensive,” he complained soon after starting, “and is so quickly used up.” It didn’t help that he brought the same manic, trial-and-error method to painting that he had come to rely on in drawing. “So many things that I start turn out wrong,” he explained, “and the
n one has to begin anew, and all the trouble has been in vain.”

  The final blow came in late September when Theo asked to see one of the new oil studies for which Vincent had expressed such enthusiasm. At first he refused to send anything, cloaking his refusal in a vague argument about the difference between studies and finished pictures. “Making studies is like sowing,” he said, “and making pictures like reaping.”

  But no argument could conceal the truth: his confidence had collapsed. When he finally relented and sent Theo a study (of tree roots), it came accompanied by a letter filled with apology and self-criticism. Only five weeks after boasting “no one would guess that these really are my first painted studies,” Vincent desperately pleaded his inexperience. “I have been handling the brush for too short a time,” he wrote. “If it is a disappointment to you, you must remember that it is such a short time since I began painting.” He begged Theo “not to judge the future from the one” and ended with a pathetic plea for continued indulgence: “If when looking at it … you do not regret having enabled me to make it, then I shall be satisfied and shall continue with good courage.”

  Mocked in public, scorned by his fellow artists, alienated from his brother, and facing the challenges of a new family and a new medium, Vincent escaped into the past on a wave of nostalgia. He blamed his ostracism on the “skepticism, indifference, and coolness” of modern life: its decadence, its dullness, its lack of passion. With a poignancy striking for a twenty-nine-year-old man, he mourned his lost youth and cursed the factories, railways, and agricultural combines that were robbing the Brabant countryside of its “stern poetry.” “My life,” he wrote Theo, “is not as sunny now as it was then.”