He assailed her humorlessness and indelicacy of manners—the same badges of victimhood he had celebrated six months before. He criticized her narrow-mindedness and her lack of appreciation for books or art—a failing that only grew more acute as the rest of the world fell away. “If I did not look for art in reality,” he said in a moment of brutal clarity, “I should probably find her stupid.” He referred darkly to something he had learned about her past that did cruel injury to his love—even killed it. “When Love is dead,” he wondered, “is it impossible for Charity to be alive and awake still?” And he hinted pathetically at the gulf he had discovered between them: “There is not a soul here in whom I can confide.”
In the midst of this melodrama, Anthon van Rappard began to slip out of Vincent’s grip. It began with yet another squabble over the faulty drawing in Vincent’s lithographs. Desperate to maintain his friend’s involvement in his album project as proof of its viability, Vincent held his fire through the Christmas season. If anything, his increasing isolation in The Hague only exacerbated the adhesiveness he brought to every friendship. He sent Rappard books and poetry, drawing tips, effusive flattery, and fervent pledges of brotherhood. In the most urgent terms, he proposed reciprocal studio visits and planned joint sketching trips to the countryside, even to the Borinage. “I regard love—as I do friendship—not only as a feeling,” he wrote, challenging Rappard to match his fervor, “but chiefly as an action.”
Grandly invoking their “spiritual unity,” he imagined a bond that went beyond mere friendship. “Whenever different people love the same thing and work at it together,” he said, “their union makes strength … a whole is formed.” It was the bond to which he had summoned Theo again and again—the vision of the Rijswijk Road—two brothers “bound up in one: feeling, thinking and believing the same”—an artistic marriage of “two good people … with the same intentions and object in life, actuated by the same serious purpose.” Even as his dream of a noble combination of artists—a reincarnation of the The Graphic—withered in the winter of his disrepute, Vincent imagined a perfect pairing of “human hearts who search for and feel the same things.” “What couldn’t they accomplish!” he exclaimed.
It was the same vision that he would fix on Paul Gauguin six years later, with disastrous results.
Vincent’s utopian visions, whether of family or friendship, left no room for compromise. In his tyrannical mirror, Rappard could not differ from or surpass him in any way. “We are both on just about the same level,” he told Theo. “I don’t try to compete with him as a painter, but I won’t let him beat me in drawing.” “I would despise a friendship which did not call for some exertion on both sides to maintain the same level,” he said—but only in a perfect and eternal marriage of equals.
No friendship could bear such a burden for long. In March 1883, when Rappard announced his intention to submit a painting to an exhibition in Amsterdam, the inevitable unraveling began. Vincent responded with a storm of protest. He lashed out with the fury of a betrayed lover at the very concept of exhibiting. Claiming an insider’s knowledge from his days at Goupil, he denounced exhibitions as nothing but fakery—a sham of unity and cooperation at a time when artists desperately needed real “mutual sympathy, warm friendship and loyalty.”
Rappard responded to this tirade in the most cutting way of all—he ignored it. His painting, Tile Painters, appeared in the International Exhibition that opened in Amsterdam two months later. Vincent, of course, immediately set to work to try to repair the breach he had opened between them. In May, he finally succeeded in arranging the reciprocal visits he had pined for. But the damage had been done. Vincent would have other chances, but within two years it would be over completely. After that, he and Van Rappard would never speak to each other again.
As Rappard balked, Vincent turned to other, more pliable companions like Herman van der Weele, the son-in-law of the manager of a paint store where Vincent often ran up debts. As a teacher at the local secondary school, Van der Weele had mastered the classroom art of encouraging without approving—an absence of criticism that Vincent eagerly construed as praise. “In looking over my studies,” he reported after one of Van der Weele’s visits to his studio, “he wasn’t so quick to say, ‘This or that isn’t right.’ ” That spring, after months of encouragement from Van der Weele, Vincent finally abandoned the austere, single figures and “heads of the people” that had obsessed him all winter long.
In May, Vincent agreed to give drawing lessons to the son of another paint-store owner, again probably working off his invariably overdue bills. Twenty-year-old Antoine Furnée, who was studying for an examination in land surveying, caught the brunt of Vincent’s bitterness toward a community of artists that he now denounced as “inveterate liars.” As stern a master as he was a rebellious student, Vincent condemned Furnée’s amateur watercolors as “hideous,” “horrible daubs” and put him on a strict regimen of drawing only. “I made him draw many things which he did not like at all,” Vincent reported proudly to Theo. On their joint sketching trips, according to Furnée, Vincent never stopped talking: filling his student’s captive ears with all the pent-up arguments for which he had no other audience.
But Vincent found no comfort in these occasional contacts. “I should like to find and keep up a real friendship,” he lamented, “[but] it is difficult for me … Where it is conventional, bitterness is almost unavoidable.” He called himself a “sentinelle perdue” (lost sentinel)—“a poor struggler of a sick painter”—and compared himself to the tattered prints that he pulled from trash bins: “ignored and looked down upon as worthless rubbish, garbage, wastepaper.” He saw in his loneliness a martyrdom for art, succeeding his martyrdom for love. His imagination poured out images of lonely martyrs to console his solitude, from Christ in the Garden to Andersen’s Ugly Duckling. He cast himself as Quasimodo, Hugo’s despised, bandy-legged hunchback in Notre Dame de Paris. From the depths of self-loathing, he rallied himself with the hunchback’s pitiful cry: “Noble lame, vil fourreau / Dans mon âme je suis beau” (A noble blade, a vile sheath / Within my soul I am beautiful).
On March 30, Vincent passed his thirtieth birthday alone, rereading Hugo’s tale of hounded exile, Les misérables. “Sometimes I cannot believe that I am only thirty years old,” he wrote. “I feel so much older when I think that most people who know me consider me a failure, and how it really might be so.”
To escape such thoughts, Vincent took long walks. Abandoning the troubled Schenkweg apartment, he strolled the familiar alleyways of the Geest, and hiked to the distant sea at Scheveningen, calling the seashore a great antidote “for a man who is downcast and dejected!” He walked in storm and snow. He walked past the lavish house of Jozef Israëls—still the paragon of Millet piety and bourgeois prosperity—and peered longingly in the open door. (“I have never been inside,” he noted ruefully.) His considered going farther—lighting out for the country, for the Borinage, or for England.
To avoid encountering former acquaintances, especially Tersteeg, Vincent walked the cobblestone streets of the city center only at night. In the empty Plaats, he often stopped at Goupil’s gaslit window and stared at the works displayed there. One evening in April, he stood for a long time gazing at a small marine by Jules Dupré. He had given a print of the same or a similar image to his father seven years before, after being fired from Goupil. It was a dark painting—especially in the low, fluttering gaslight—so he came back many evenings in order to truly see it. “What an almightily beautiful impression it makes,” he wrote Theo. In moody tones and agitated brushwork, it showed a small sailboat caught between a roiling sea and an angry sky. In the distance, an opening in the clouds defined an island of sunlight where the water was green and smooth. The boat’s fragile prow pointed the way to the distant light. “When my worries become too great,” he wrote, “I feel as if I were a ship in a hurricane.”
There were times, however, when no ray of light appeared in the distance, when lif
e seemed “something like an ash heap,” he said; and it took all his effort to avoid “staring into the unfathomable.” He talked openly of regret (“some things will never return”) and obliquely of suicide—and what might lie beyond. “One begins to see more and more clearly,” he wrote, “that life is only a kind of sowing time, and the harvest is not here.”
ON THE SCHENKWEG, the only escape was illusion. Pressured by Theo for salable work, cut off from outsiders, and hounded by creditors, Vincent spun further and further into unreality. In early spring, he launched yet another ambitious plan to create an iconic image like Chelsea Hospital—a manifestation that would answer Herkomer’s mandate to “attract attention and fix a reputation.” With Van der Weele’s encouragements in his ear and Rappard’s paintings of tile painters in his competitive eye, he returned to an old subject: soup kitchens. He had visited the établissements de bouillon in Brussels with Rappard. He had also sketched the municipal kitchen in The Hague with Breitner. The subject had lingered in his imagination throughout the winter, sustained by numerous prints in his collection, surviving even the failed effort at watercolor group scenes in September.
But this time, he did not have to face the hostile crowds in the Geest or the scorn of the soup kitchen patrons. This time, he re-created the entire scene in his studio.
In an extravaganza of unaffordable expenditures, he remade the front room of the apartment into a replica of the soup kitchen he knew. He hired workmen to install multipart shutters in each of the studio’s three big north-facing windows, “so that the light falls exactly as in the place itself.” Using the canvas that had served as blinds, he made a partition across one end of the room and drew on it the small double opening through which the soup was served in the actual kitchen. He painted the entire room with the gray wainscoting of the original. “By paying attention to those things,” he explained to Theo, “one gets the local color so much more correctly.”
Vincent sent him lengthy descriptions of the mise-en-scène, complete with elaborate drawings that labeled each feature and explained its function. No detail was left unattended to; no expense forgone. He hired a crowd of models and bought “real clothes” for all of them—“picturesque” patched smocks and coarse linens like the ones in his illustrations. “Tomorrow,” he wrote in a fever of anticipation, “I’ll have the house full of people.”
The next day, Vincent sketched from dawn until dusk, moving his models from one position to another, opening and closing the shutters to get the highlights on the heads of the figures just right and “render the character most completely and strongly.” He was so delighted with the results that he immediately planned more alterations, more expenses, more models, and many, many more drawings. “I just go on drawing,” he said of his plans for the future, “that’s all.” He told Theo that he felt “at home and content” with the models together in his studio. The scene reminded him of a print in his collection depicting a corridor in the offices of The Graphic at Christmastime when all the models who had appeared in the magazine throughout the year came to offer their Yuletide greetings. It showed a procession of invalids, beggars, and blind men hanging onto each other’s coattails, all united by the redemptive spirit of Christmas.
Soup Distribution in a Public Soup Kitchen, MARCH 1883, CHALK ON PAPER, 22¼ × 17½ IN. (Illustration credit 18.6)
Now he could live in that print. He imagined not just a series of soup kitchen drawings, not just a series of group scenes, but a permanent Christmas on the Schenkweg—a “place where the models could meet every day, as in the old days of the Graphic”:
My ideal is to work with more and more models, quite a herd of poor peoples to whom the studio would be a kind of harbor of refuge on winter days, or when they are out of work or in great need. Where they would know that there was fire, food and drink for them, and a little money to be earned. At present this is so only on a very small scale, but…
CHAPTER 19
Jacob and Esau
IN PARIS, THEO READ HIS BROTHER’S LETTER WITH A FRESH WAVE OF dismay and alarm. The bizarre plan to transform the Schenkweg apartment into a private soup kitchen summarized all the excesses and misdirections of Vincent’s flawed and faltering career as an artist—a career that increasingly seemed destined to end, as all the others had, in failure.
Theo had tried dutifully to steer Vincent in the right direction—with little success. Indeed, as he looked back over the previous two years, it must have seemed that he had spent the entire time arguing with his brother about the direction of his art. Beginning in the fall of 1880, the two had sparred repeatedly over artistic issues great and small. Theo called Vincent’s early drawings, with their Puritan simplicity and recherché sentiment, old-fashioned—a direct assault on his brother’s exaggerated nostalgic enthusiasms. He complained that they were not only too big to attract buyers, but also “too dry” (a rebuke of Vincent’s preference for pencil), too dark, and too meager—charges that embraced Vincent’s whole beloved canon of black-and-white. He urged Vincent to find more cheerful subjects than the dreary workers and pitiful old men he favored. Buyers wanted “pleasant and attractive” images, he said, not “things of a more gloomy sentiment.”
He sent repeated exhortations for Vincent to do more landscapes—for which he seemed to have an innate talent—and lobbied relentlessly for more color and more elaboration. He said again and again that those endless solitary figures against blank backgrounds would never sell. If Theo knew one thing from his ten years in the art business, it was that people bought art because they liked it, because they found it pleasing and charming. They didn’t give a fig about Vincent’s fervent principles or tiresome rhetoric; they wanted “details,” they wanted “finish.”
Vincent had responded to all these suggestions with an unceasing stream of arguments. Over the winter, the stream had turned into a torrent as he struggled to justify his rising expenditures and unchanging art. At least twice a week, a fat letter appeared in Theo’s Goupil mailbox filled with Vincent’s hyperventilating justifications and promises of future progress. After long experience, Theo no doubt knew that any frank criticism might trigger an eruption of defensiveness that could last for weeks, even months. So, like his father before him, he avoided direct confrontations, veiling his persuasion in generalities about “vivid” palettes and the beauties of nature. He wrote lengthy descriptions of colorful scenes that would make wonderful paintings, and sang the praises of successful colorists and landscapists.
But Vincent matched his brother’s missives description for description, artist for artist, hint for hint, in a battle of indirection as rancorous as any open debate. He repeatedly solicited advice, often in the most affectionate terms, but almost always refused to follow it. He repledged his love for watercolor and landscape, but pushed any return to painting into the indefinite future. In an especially clever parry, he praised the vivid word paintings that Theo sent as proof of his brother’s true vocation and renewed his call for Theo to become a painter—essentially shifting the burden of unrealized potential back onto his brother.
He deflected accusations of “dryness” with complaints about Theo’s stingy stipend (“my life is too cramped and meager”) and protests that all beginners suffered the same problems. He responded to Theo’s call for more pleasing imagery by drawing one of his models pushing “a wheelbarrow full of manure.” When Theo encouraged more elaboration, Vincent answered with a paean to the “honesty, naïveté, and truth” of his unembellished images. Despite intense pressure to make smaller works (from Mauve and Tersteeg as well as Theo), he vehemently defended his continued use of the large, Bargue-sized sheets, dismissing the arguments against them as “preposterous” and vowing never to change. Finally, he rejected Theo’s right to make any comments about his drawings before he had seen them all together in the studio.
Much of Theo’s advice seemed designed to coach his obstreperous brother toward the new art of Impressionism. In his five years in Paris, Theo had seen the st
ock of artists like Manet, Degas, and Monet rise from the humiliating depths of the Hôtel Drouot auction in 1876. Their colorful, challenging images had not yet unseated commercial giants like Bouguereau and Gérôme, whose works still lined Goupil’s lush galleries, but the winds of fashion and capitalism were clearly at their backs. Only the year before, in 1882, the French state had withdrawn its official support from the Salon, leaving all artists at the mercy of the market. The Impressionists, who had by then mounted seven annual group shows, were already masters of the new rules of success. As a junior gérant in a bastion of the old order, Theo himself would not begin to deal in the works of artists like Monet and Degas for several more years, but he had already come to see their commercial success as inevitable. “To me it seems quite natural,” he wrote his brother about the revolution in the air, “that the desired change will occur.” Recognizing that Vincent would never master the sharp rendering and deft modeling of his heroes like Millet and Breton, Theo must have seen in Impressionism’s brusque, unfinished images a perfect home for his brother’s impatient eye and unruly hand.
But Vincent resisted every effort to coax him from the grip of the past. In his opinion, the change brought by the Impressionists was neither natural nor desirable. He especially resented Theo’s suggestion that they would eclipse his eternal favorites Millet and Breton. He linked the Impressionists to the forces of decadence about which Herkomer had “sounded the alarm bell.” “The changes that the moderns have made in art are not always for the better,” he cautioned his brother, “neither in the works nor in the artists themselves.” He accused the Impressionists of “losing sight of the origin and the goal” of art. He associated their confectionary colors and unfocused forms with the “hurry and bustle” of modern life, with the ugly summer houses of Scheveningen, the disappearing moors of Brabant, and everything else that had “taken the joy out of life.” He rejected their loose “à peu près” (approximate) way of rendering reality, and dismissed their pretensions to scientific color as mere “cleverness.” Cleverness, he warned, would never save art; only earnestness could do that.
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