As always, his imagination followed his longing into the past. He reread Andersen’s fairy tales, the lodestar of his childhood. He put aside his Zola and returned to the Romantic potboilers of Erkmann-Chatrian, a leap backward of a hundred years in time and even further in sensibility. The French Revolution had always loomed in Vincent’s imagination as a lost paradise of heroic men and noble ideas, and once again he seized on it as his true home in time. “There was definitely something warmer about those days,” he wrote, “more light-hearted and alive than today.”
In art, too, he surveyed the previous century and concluded that he had arrived too late; that the parade had passed. Even as Impressionists like Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro were celebrating their seventh group show in Paris, even as Gauguin was laying plans to best them and Manet was nearing death, Vincent pined for the days of Millet, Corot, and Breton. Art had gone into a “sharp decline,” he said; “capriciousness and satiety” had replaced passion. Artists had betrayed the spirit of the Revolution—“the honesty, the naïveté,” and especially the fraternité. “I had imagined that the painters formed a kind of circle or society in which warmth and cordiality and a certain kind of harmony reigned,” he wrote. As a result, art would never again rise to such heights. “Higher than the top of the mountain one cannot climb … The summit has been reached.”
To recover this lost Eden of passion and solidarity, Vincent turned inevitably to his portfolios of prints. Just as they had long defined his reality, now they defined his ambitions. In these carefully organized, lovingly mounted, and comforting black-and-white images, he found a community of artists that welcomed him, even if only in his imagination. His collection ranged from Dürer’s Renaissance allegories to modern surrealist cityscapes, but the campaigns and tribulations of the previous months had conferred a special status on one group of artists in particular: the English illustrators.
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AS EARLY AS THE 1840s, London newspaper publishers began recruiting artists to enliven their pages with eye-catching imagery. The same newly affluent public that made art prints a huge business also eagerly consumed illustrations of current events, public figures, exotic locales, and the latest fashions. By the time Vincent arrived in London in 1873, weekly illustrated magazines had become the rage. As the audience for them grew bigger and more sophisticated, so did the images. Thanks to the same advances in printmaking that made Adolphe Goupil and Cent van Gogh rich, publishers could achieve a subtlety of detail and tone unthinkable in the early years when drawings had to be painstakingly carved, in reverse, onto boxwood boards. Better printing techniques also made it possible to insert two-page foldout images—a startling visual experience in an era weaned on tiny books and stamp-sized illustrations.
LUKE FILDES, Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward, 1874, OIL ON CANVAS, 53⅞ × 95⅞ IN. (Illustration credit 18.1)
As the social cost of bourgeois affluence began to make itself felt, the illustrated magazines also recorded the sins and shames of the new economic order, as well as the easy Victorian remedies of charity and faith. When working as an apprentice at Goupil, Vincent had witnessed the massive public interest generated by these images of society’s castaways, but he rejected them as art. At the Royal Academy show in 1874, he saw Luke Fildes’s painting Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward, a somber, dark-hearted depiction of London’s poor lining up outside a shelter on a freezing night. Applicants stirred such a public sensation that barricades had to be erected to control the crowds clamoring to see it. But Vincent’s only comment on the show concerned some paintings of young girls that he thought “beautiful.”
Now, a decade later, alienated and abandoned himself, Vincent proclaimed these dramatic images, and their creators, the true heirs to the spirit of 1793: “For me the English black-and-white artists are to art what Dickens is to literature. They have exactly the same noble and healthy sentiment.” He called them “artists of the people” and praised their work in the same moralistic terms that he used to defend his own work—and, indeed, himself: “solid and substantial,” “rough and audacious,” “full of feeling and character,” “unpolished.” “These are pictures,” he said, “in which there is nothing, and yet everything.” The fact that art-world sophisticates like Mauve and Tersteeg (and Theo) considered them crass and passé, or that his fellow artists at the Pulchri Studio dismissed them as café divertissement, only inflamed Vincent’s passion for them. He would rescue them from cruel neglect and unjust condemnation just as he had rescued Sien. Who better to champion a rough, repudiated art than a rough, repudiated artist?
Vincent began collecting the work of English illustrators almost as soon as he arrived in The Hague in January 1882, after years of ignoring them in favor of French and Dutch prints. They were not only affordable, they also embodied an attainable artistic goal. Certainly nothing else in his experience remotely resembled the “clumsy and awkward” sketches that he brought with him from Etten and the Borinage. In The Hague, he quickly found booksellers who provided him with a bottomless supply of both individual prints and old copies of magazines such as The Graphic, Punch, and The Illustrated London News from which he could cut and mount the illustrations.
By the summer of 1882, the search for works by these artists had turned into a full-scale obsession, temporarily supplanting even Millet and Breton in the gallery of Vincent’s autobiographical manias. “They are great artists, these Englishmen,” he explained in terms that amounted to a plea on his own behalf. “They have quite another way of feeling, conceiving, and expressing themselves, if only you take the time to understand them.” Eventually, Vincent bought an entire decade’s worth of The Graphic—1870 to 1880—more than five hundred issues in twenty-one volumes. He called them “something solid and substantial that one can hang onto in days when one feels weak.”
In May, Vincent’s old friend Anthon van Rappard stopped in The Hague prior to his annual summer sketching expedition. The two had always shared an interest in engravings; both had long collected prints and illustrations. But much had changed in the five months since Vincent summarily broke off contact, officially declaring himself “en froid” with his friend. He had been rejected by Kee Vos, expelled by his parents, estranged from his powerful uncles, excommunicated by Mauve, and denounced by the influential Tersteeg. After so much humiliation and rejection, the possibility of renewed friendship with Rappard offered a lifeline of good repute. And it came at precisely the right moment: only weeks before Vincent planned to confess to Theo his long, secret affair with Sien—a confession that threatened to unravel his sole remaining tie to the world.
After Rappard’s visit, Vincent was overcome by feelings of solidarity unequaled since his Bible-reading sessions with Harry Gladwell in Paris seven years before. This time, the shared gospel was black-and-white; the saints, illustrators. He sent long lists of his favorite images and artists, and begged his friend to respond in kind. He labored over encyclopedic letters showing off his astounding knowledge of engravers, periods, styles, and schools. He invited Rappard to test his knowledge with aficionado games of identifying prints and deciphering signatures. They exchanged books by and about draftsmen. Vincent repeatedly searched his portfolios for duplicates that he could send his confrère. When he ran out of duplicates, he combed through bins of old magazines hoping to find more. He wanted their collections to match exactly.
In Rappard, Vincent found not just a second to his obsessions, but a lone voice of sympathy and support for a mission that must have seemed increasingly hopeless. “He is a man who understands my intentions, and who appreciates all the difficulties,” Vincent wrote to Theo after Rappard’s visit in May. When Rappard spoke kindly of his drawings, Vincent melted with gratitude:
What I most want is for people to find some sympathy for my work; that gives me such pleasure … For it is so disheartening and dispiriting and crushing if one never hears, This or that is right … It is so exhilarating when you realize that others really do feel someth
ing of what one has tried to express.
Onto his absent friend, Vincent could project all the frustrations, angers, disillusionments, and fears that had accumulated through the long winter of battles and brooding: his astonishment at the abusive behavior of his fellow Hague artists; his paranoia that Mauve and Tersteeg might still “play tricks” on him; and, of course, his martyrdom of thankless toil.
In his favorite martial cadences, Vincent enlisted Rappard in his battle not just with their community, but with their era. “I believe it would be a good thing for us to focus our attention on the men and works of former days,” he wrote, “so it will not be said of us, ‘Rappard and Vincent may also be reckoned among the decadent fellows.’ ” In passages that must have puzzled and amused the conventional, congenial Rappard, Vincent lamented their shared fate as artistic pariahs and social outcasts. “They look upon you and me as unpleasant, quarrelsome nonentities,” he wrote in a delusion of solidarity. “They consider us ponderous and boring in our work and in our persons.” “Prepare to be misunderstood, despised, and slandered.” Even as Rappard enjoyed the comforts of his parents’ home in Utrecht, socialized with a large circle of friends, and eagerly joined an array of artists’ clubs, Vincent rallied him to a lonely, priestlike life of artistic devotion. “One feels weaker as an artist the more one associates with other artists,” he wrote. “I believe Thomas à Kempis says somewhere, ‘I never mingled with human beings without feeling less human.’ ”
Against this tide of nostalgia and obsession, self-vindication and fraternal longing, painting did not stand a chance. In mid-August, Vincent learned that Rappard had returned from his expedition with sketchbooks full of figure drawings. By then Sien had recovered enough to start posing again. The retreat began soon after that, announced by a figure study done in both charcoal and oil with “very little color.”
In mid-September, Vincent announced a new ambition: “I want to make groups of people,” he said, “at the soup kitchen, in the waiting room of the station, the hospital, the pawnshop … talking in the street or walking around.” Images like these, which had been staples of The Graphic and other magazines, would require “innumerable separate studies and sketches of each figure”—in other words, more models. Within a few weeks, however, the new initiative foundered, undone by the hostility he encountered whenever he went out to sketch in a crowd, and by his decision to use watercolor—probably to satisfy Theo—a medium that he found especially frustrating in attempting to render the elusive human form.
Vincent never explicitly renounced painting. But the proof of his retreat filled the studio. By late September, he was back ensconced in his Schenkweg world, with his charcoals and pencils and his family of models, churning out figure drawings at the rate of a dozen a day. He still occasionally protested his love for painting or color or landscape—primarily to parry Theo’s concerns about salability—but his work returned almost exclusively to the black-and-white of his prints and his fraternité with Rappard. He took all the canvas left over from his few weeks of painting and used it to cover the studio windows in order to create a more sympathetic light for his models.
AFTER THE FAILURE of his crowd scenes, Vincent turned for inspiration to another famous Graphic image, Hubert Herkomer’s Sunday at Chelsea Hospital. The depiction of an ancient war veteran slumped dead in his chair at a meeting of old comrades was so well received when it first appeared in 1871 that Herkomer made a painted version, which went on to win international acclaim under a more sentimental title, The Last Muster (another painting that Vincent had seen in London in 1874 but not commented on).
In September, Rappard began a series of drawings at the institute for the blind in Utrecht, a project that promised many similar heart-tugging images. At almost exactly the same moment, as if responding to a shared initiative, Vincent began recruiting models at the almshouse in the Geest. He approached many of the elderly pensioners with his strange request, but only one came back again and again. His name was Adrianus Jacobus Zuyderland.
HUBERT VON HERKOMER, The Last Muster: Sunday at Chelsea Hospital (detail), 1871, ENGRAVING, 11½ × 8⅞ IN. (Illustration credit 18.2)
Vincent may have known his name, but he never mentioned it. Nor could Zuyderland have responded if Vincent had called him by name: he was deaf. Like all the pensioners at the Dutch Reformed Old People’s Home, he wore a number on his sleeve for identification; his was 199. He also wore the uniform of all male pensioners: tailcoat and top hat—a frayed faux gentility that marked him everywhere as a charity case. On cold days, Zuyderland wore a long double-breasted overcoat like the ones worn by the veterans in Herkomer’s Chelsea Hospital. Despite the military-style coat and the medal pinned to his lapel, the seventy-two-year-old Zuyderland would never be mistaken for either a soldier or a gentleman. His unruly white hair stuck out from under his hat and cascaded over his collar. The hat covered a perfectly bald pate. Dense mutton-chop whiskers hung on his cheeks. He had a broad, hooked nose; large, protruding ears; and small, heavy-lidded eyes. Vincent called him “echt”—the real thing.
Over the next year, Zuyderland came to the apartment on the Schenkweg often—probably as often as he could, given that pensioners were only allowed out three days a week and had to return by sundown. For fifty cents a day (all of which Zuyderland was obliged to surrender to the home), Vincent finally had a model commensurate to his capacity for drawing. With the patience of Job, Zuyderland stood frozen for hours while Vincent drew him in every conceivable position: standing, sitting, bending, kneeling—front, back, side. Sometimes he appears frail and stooped, sometimes erect as a soldier. He posed with a cane, with a stick, with an umbrella; with a top hat, with a cap, hat in hand, bareheaded. Vincent gave him props—a handkerchief, a glass, a cup, a book, a pipe, a broom, a rake—and posed him eating, drinking, reading, and doing chores. He joined with Sien, her mother, her daughter, and her baby for “family portraits.”
Despite the almshouse prohibition on pensioners’ wearing “any outer clothing outside the home other than that supplied by the governors,” Zuyderland compliantly donned the costumes and carried the attributes of the “types” that peopled Vincent’s imagination. A smock, a cap, and a peat basket transformed him into a peasant; a shovel, into a digger; a sou’wester, into a fisherman; a pickax, into a miner; a pipe and blouse, into an artist. Vincent sat him at a table, posed him praying, and drew him as a paterfamilias saying the mealtime benediction. He draped a bag over the old man’s sloped shoulder and drew him again and again as The Sower.
Zuyderland endured every pose with the stoicism of the dray horses that Vincent admired so much. For Vincent, who rarely could get models for more than one or two sessions and even then had to plead for their indulgence and race their impatience, Zuyderland’s patience amounted to a gift from the gods. It freed him not only to try more poses, but to do and redo each one until the correct outline emerged—a crucial condition for success given Vincent’s lottery-like approach to studies. It also allowed him to take more time with each successful outline, to focus his extraordinary powers of observation on the play of shadows in the folds of a coat or the creases in a shoe. He returned to the larger size and bold strokes of Sorrow—which he still considered his best drawing—but added to it the vigorous hatching of the English engravings that filled his portfolios.
Over the long winter months in the Schenkweg studio, Vincent grew attached to his patient, compliant, stone-deaf model. Like the old pensioners in Herkomer’s Last Muster, Zuyderland must have looked to Vincent like a castaway from the past, one of the disappearing “faithful veterans” from the era of Millet and Dickens. Homeless, wifeless, childless, friendless, and penniless, Zuyderland, too, was a Robinson Crusoe in the world, marooned in the passionless present. Vincent often referred to him using a name given to all the “poor old fellows from the workhouse.” He called him “weesman”—orphan man.
Old Man with a Stick, SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER 1882, PENCIL ON PAPER, 19¾ × 12 IN.; AND Old Man in a
Tail-Coat, SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 1882, PENCIL ON PAPER, 18¾ × 10⅛ IN. (Illustration credit 18.3)
IT WAS ONLY a matter of time before Vincent’s new enthusiasm for drawing, for Van Rappard, and for the past coalesced into one of the driving manias that inevitably overtook him. In late October, a letter arrived from Rappard that fanned all these fires of ardor into a single, perfect flame of obsession. It contained a summary of an article by Hubert Herkomer that had appeared in an English magazine. In language as emotional as The Last Muster, Herkomer championed black-and-white imagery and celebrated the English illustrators (himself included) for bringing the form to its highest expression. In words that must have seemed to have jumped directly from Vincent’s thoughts onto the page, Herkomer hailed the bygone glories of wood engraving, and made the astonishing claim that the illustrations that appeared in a single magazine, The Graphic, represented as “true and complete” an artistic expression as all the paintings on all the walls of all the museums in the world.
In Herkomer’s “energetic words,” Vincent found vindication for all the impassioned arguments he had made on behalf of his repudiated art. An artist’s sincere heart mattered more than his agile hand, Herkomer argued; his bravery more than his expertise; his mettle more than his training. He extolled the “moral advantages” of drawing over other art forms and exalted draftsmen above all other artists. He praised tone over color and vigor over care. In words that transformed Vincent’s alienation and nostalgia into badges of courage, Herkomer warned against the dangers of “morbid conventionalism” and bewailed the decadence of recent trends in art (even at The Graphic), taking particular aim at the “foolish school” of Impressionism, founded by “half-formed minds” who painted “anything [and] everything they see in Nature, irrespective of all claims to beauty, or interest in [the] subject.”
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