Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  As in the Borinage, however, Vincent’s vision of a rustic paradise overruled the reality of injustice and anger that surrounded him. From the balcony of his room overlooking the canal, he saw only “fantastic silhouettes of Don Quixote–like mills” and “curious monsters of drawbridges profiled against the vibrant evening sky.” The surrounding villages looked “wonderfully cozy,” he reported; the peat workers’ hovels, “peaceful and naïve.”

  In late October, Vincent mounted the most ambitious of all his expeditions-as-arguments, a trip to the ancient village of Zweeloo, ten miles northwest of Veenoord. Just as he did three years earlier when he traveled from the Borinage to Jules Breton’s studio in Courrières, Vincent claimed an artistic inspiration for this latest punishing trek (“Imagine a trip across the heath at three o’clock in the morning in a small open cart”). Based on nothing more than an approving comment from Theo, he set out in pursuit of the Alsatian artist Max Liebermann, who had visited Zweeloo some months earlier and, according to Vincent, was rumored to still be there. Upon his return, he wrote Theo an account of his trip that is among the most elaborate and poetic word paintings in all his letters.

  He describes a journey into a landscape by Corot (“a stillness, a mystery, a peace as only he has painted it”), under Ruisdaelean skies (“nothing but that infinite earth [and] infinite sky”), suffused with Mauve’s “misty atmosphere,” and filled with Millet plowmen, “shaggy” Jacque shepherds, and old Israëls spinsters. In a trance of invention, he piled image on image, transforming the drab, inhospitable Drenthe winter into a beckoning fantasy of the Garden of Eden. “Now you can see what it is like here,” he concluded his pictorial brief. “What does one bring back from such a day? Merely a number of rough sketches. Yet there is something else one brings back—a quiet delight in one’s work.”

  If Drenthe was paradise, Goupil was the serpent that invaded it. Vincent had often taken advantage of Theo’s chronic disenchantment to criticize his employer, but never in language this harsh and uncompromising. “Odious, wanton, capricious, and reckless,” he called it, an institution that had “outlived its fame” and was headed for “deserved ruin.” It had turned the honorable profession of art dealing, as their uncles had once practiced it, into “nothing more than gambling,” he said. As for the gentlemen of Goupil who had made Theo’s situation impossible, Vincent accused them of “insupportable arrogance,” “horrible unfairness,” and “doing mean things.” He brushed aside any possibility of compromise (“do not flatter yourself with the belief in reconciliation”) and urged his brother to follow in his own defiant footsteps—“stand your ground … don’t give in.” To dissuade Theo from jumping to another dealer or setting up a gallery on his own, Vincent expanded his denunciations beyond Goupil and railed against all dealers everywhere. “It is Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” he argued; “the whole art business is rotten.” He hurled at the whole enterprise Zola’s ringing denunciation of bourgeois taste: “a triumph of mediocrity, nullity, and absurdity.”

  But that still left one question unanswered. If Theo quit his job, what would the brothers do for money? Vincent made all the usual arguments about life being cheaper in Drenthe and two being able to live for the price of one. Painters didn’t need much to live on, he reminded Theo; “money leaves us cold.” Besides, any deprivations would be short-lived because “my work will probably yield some profit soon,” he added. And in any case, God would provide. Yet again claiming the entitlements of a higher calling, he reassured his brother that “an infinitely powerful force” would protect them in their new mission of perfect brotherhood. “If one will only set about things with love, with a certain understanding of each other and cooperation and mutual helpfulness,” he wrote, “many things which would otherwise be insupportable would be made supportable.”

  Vincent “calculated” that the two of them would need two hundred francs a month for a period of two years before they could support themselves entirely on their painting. He suggested that Theo raise the necessary stake from one of their rich uncles, solemnly pledging his own work as collateral. Such guarantees proved that “we do not build castles in the air,” he said. He sent Theo elaborate projected budgets (“I do not know where and how to get the money, [but] I will work out for you how we should use it”). Yet even as he steadfastly defended the rationality of his arguments, he asked for more money and proposed a fallback plan—both brothers could return home to live with their parents—that must have struck Theo dumb with disbelief.

  In fact, this seemingly offhand suggestion betrayed the fantasy at the core of Vincent’s furious campaign. Merging his vision of perfect brotherhood with yet another reverie of family reconciliation, he imagined a reunion of the Zundert parsonage. He, Vincent, would lead the family in rallying around his younger brother. Together, they would support Theo’s quest to be a painter—in all the ways they had never supported Vincent’s. They would bravely bear the hardships of poverty and the storms of disrepute. They would cooperate in the great new artistic “phenomenon of two brothers being painters.” In Vincent’s dream of a parsonage, he and Theo would no longer have to “obey.” Their father would have to subordinate his authority to the “force majeur” of Theo’s calling—as he had never done for Vincent’s—and treat both of his sons with “cordiality and love.”

  Seized by this new fantasy of redemption, Vincent demanded that Theo reverse his opposition to Vincent’s returning to Brabant, and wrote their father in a tone that both invited him to join this new incarnation of family and warned him against yet again spoiling it: “If I should have to live at home for a while, I hope, for myself as much as for you, that we shall possess the wisdom not to make a mess of things by discord, and that, ignoring the past, we shall resign ourselves to what the new circumstances may bring.” Convinced that the realization of his dream now rested entirely on Theo’s coming, Vincent raised his entreaties to a giddy fever of longing. “Living together … how delightful it would be. So delightful that I hardly dare to think of it, yet cannot help doing so, though that happiness seems too great.” He imagined the two of them renting a peasant’s cottage and decorating it together. Increasingly, his pleas strained with the ardor of a marriage proposal:

  Neither of us would be alone, our work would merge. In the beginning we should have to live through anxious moments, we should have to prepare ourselves for them, and take measures to overcome them; we should not be able to go back, we should not look back nor be able to look back; on the contrary, we should force ourselves to look ahead.… We shall be far removed from all our friends and acquaintances, we shall fight this fight without anybody seeing us, and this will be the best thing that can happen, for then nobody will hinder us. We shall look forward to victory—we feel it in our very bones. We shall be so busy working that we shall be absolutely unable to think of anything else but our work.

  Argument gave way to mindless exhortation (“[We] must, must, must go forward and win”), yet more salvoes of French (“la patience d’un boeuf” [the patience of an ox]), and mottoes drawn from his reading (Dickens’s “How-not-to-do-it system”). In pleas as repetitious as a drunkard’s, he insisted that Theo had the soul and stuff of a true painter. He predicted that Theo would find painting far easier and make faster progress than he had. “You will be an artist as soon as you take up a brush or a piece of crayon,” he boldly promised. “You can do it if only you want to.” He even told Theo exactly what kind of art he should make. Holding out the brothers’ great favorite, Michel, as a model within Theo’s grasp, he urged his brother to “try your hand at landscape at once.” The vast moorlands and dramatic skies of Drenthe presented endless vistas virtually authored by the French master. “It is absolutely Michel,” he wrote, “that is absolutely what it is here.” “These are the kinds of studies which I should like you to try at once.… I have thought it over so long.”

  “One becomes a painter by painting,” he declared, mixing self-justification with inspiration. “If one wants
to become a painter, if one delights in it,…one can do it.”

  Indeed, in Vincent’s desperate pleadings, he and Theo had already merged. Claiming a special insight into his brother’s heart, Vincent saw only his own reflection. Oscillating between first and second person, he both coached Theo and consoled himself:

  They will tell you that you are a fanatic, but most certainly you—after having undergone so many mental trials—will know that it is impossible for you to be fanatical … Don’t let them try to turn things upside down, that won’t do for me!

  At every opportunity, he urged on Theo his own gospel of recklessness (“My plan is always to risk too much rather than too little”) and defiance (“If you hear a voice within you saying, ‘You are not a painter,’ then by all means paint, boy, and that voice will be silenced”). “My aim in life is to make pictures and drawings, as many and as well as I can,” he both explained and entreated; “then, at the end of my life, I hope to pass away, looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking, ‘Oh, the pictures I might have made!’…Do you object to this, either for me or for yourself?”

  All of these arguments, and more, found their ultimate expression in images. In the letter that launched his campaign, Vincent enclosed a sheet of drawings on which he had labored heroically: a half dozen vignettes of Drenthe life—peasants in the fields, canal banks, village roads—all carefully arranged in a montage exactly like those he had seen in The Graphic introducing readers to quaint industries or picturesque locales. When he summoned Theo to paint the moorland skies just as Michel had painted the Montmartre skies, he accompanied the summons with drawings and paintings “in the spirit of Michel”: vistas of brown earth and slate-gray sky. He translated his cries of delight—“What tranquility, what expanse, what calmness in this landscape”—into swirling strokes of clouds and boldly brushed furrows of earth. With nothing more than a pencil, pen, and ink, he showed his brother the serenity that awaited him in a way words never could: a long canal, a barge under sail, a vast pearly dusk.

  His straining invitations to a life of simplicity on the heath—“Come and sit with me, looking into the fire”—took their tenderest, most plaintive form in image after image of lone cottages under twilight skies brushed in broad strokes of translucent gray. And to enact the noble labor he beckoned Theo to join—“something good, an honest enterprise”—Vincent conjured a procession of Millet peasants: a shepherd driving his flock past a village church; a plowman silhouetted against a sky as big as the American West; two women stooped in unison on a stormy moor; a broad-shouldered farmer pulling a harrow behind him, leaning against the drag with the patience of an ox, his gaze fixed on an infinite horizon.

  In Drenthe, Vincent finally, fully recruited his art to the service of his larger quest. Since the Borinage, art had been the fixed star around which his arguments swirled: an eye of Victorian convention in a vast storm of angst and pain. The dream of merging with Theo, furious and insuppressible, uprooted all that. It wrenched him from the great unifying passion of The Hague—figure drawing—and left the defiant preoccupations of the last three years scattered behind. He would return to figure drawing from time to time, both for love of the work of its greatest masters, and for the warmth and control that he found only with models. But he would no longer be bound by it.

  His single-minded devotion to pencil and pen and ink and the black-and-white images they produced was another victim of the storms of October and November 1883. He discovered in Drenthe how persuasive paint could be; and color and brushstroke. “Painting comes more easily to me,” he wrote Theo from Veenoord, in a turning point for Vincent and for Western art. “I am eager to try all kinds of things which I have left undone till now.” And this time he meant it. In Drenthe, painting became not just a defensive posture, an appeasement to his brother, but his most eloquent argument—a new and powerful language of persuasion that he could recruit to the great missionary zeals that ruled his life. In Drenthe, Vincent discovered that he could do more than just dream or argue these castles in the air—he could paint them.

  Landscape in Drenthe, SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1883, PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 12⅛ × 16½ IN. (Illustration credit 20.2)

  Man Pulling a Harrow, OCTOBER 1883, LETTER SKETCH, PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 3½ × 5¼ IN. (Illustration credit 20.3)

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  AT FIRST THEO dismissed his brother’s pleas with breezy objections (the family depended on him) and polite demurrals (painters are born, not made). But resistance only stoked the fire. Before long, Vincent’s furious attacks on Goupil and art dealing jolted Theo out of his disillusionment. Choosing duty over solidarity, as he always did, he chided his brother as a dreamer, and confessed that his heart was still in the art business. “I will have to stick it out for all our sakes,” he wrote in a refusal that only Vincent could have taken as equivocal. “All that [is] rubbish,” Vincent retorted, dismissing his brother’s arguments. Pleading letter followed pleading letter. But the longer and more baroque Vincent’s missives, the shorter and more summary Theo’s eventual replies; the more sweeping and passionate Vincent’s arguments, the more immovable Theo’s refusals.

  Vincent eventually placed much of the blame for his predicament on Theo’s mistress, Marie. Early on, Vincent had encouraged his brother to enter into a formal engagement with his companion of a year, imagining her to be an ally in the campaign to lure Theo away from Paris. Overcome by the vision of a family of painters on the heath, Vincent had even recommended that Theo bring Marie with him to Drenthe. “The more the merrier,” he exclaimed, adding, “If the woman came, of course she would have to paint, too.” But Theo’s silence changed all that. As he would five years later when Theo proposed marriage to another woman, Vincent turned against the intruder. “This woman of yours, is she good? Is she honest?” he probed. Perhaps Marie had “bewitched” him, Vincent suggested, planting doubts with words like “poison” and “enchantment.” He compared Marie to Lady Macbeth—a wicked woman with a “dangerous craving for ‘greatness’ ”—and warned Theo that he, like that lady’s infamous husband, risked losing his “sense of right and wrong.”

  In this contest of escalating rhetoric and contrary motion, it was inevitable that Vincent would turn to darker threats. Defying Theo’s repeated objections, he reiterated his plan to flee to Brabant and impose himself on their aging parents if Theo chose to stay at Goupil. He even threatened to renew his ties to Sien. “I should not stop seeing her to please anybody,” he warned pointedly. “Let people think and say what they like.” Theo parried every provocation with a combination of delay and courtesy and cleverly invited Vincent to come to Paris instead, dangling the possibility of a role for him in a future business venture. The unexpected counterinvitation briefly threw Vincent off his fiery stride (“there are things for me to learn in Paris as well as here on the moor,” he conceded), but he quickly recovered, dismissing the plan as “too much in the air for my taste” and discouraging his brother from any new ventures other than painting in Drenthe.

  In early November, Theo tried yet again to cut off the exchange with an especially curt note. “For the present,” he wrote, “things will remain as they are.” It had exactly the opposite effect. Enraged, Vincent shot back an ultimatum that exposed the raw need beneath his exhausted arguments. If Theo did not quit Goupil, he warned, “it is my intention to refuse your financial help.” As hard as Vincent tried to portray this threat of self-destruction as an offer of self-sacrifice (“I don’t want my needs to be a reason for your staying [at Goupil]”), he could not hide its dark, coercive heart. He vowed to throw himself headlong into “the tempest,” sternly setting a deadline for Theo’s final decision, and solemnly granting his brother permission “to have nothing more to do with me.” He promised to look for work, any work, to support himself, but despaired of finding it, and warned of “enervation” if he did. He enclosed some studies “as a small sign of life,” but added miserably, “Of course I do not suppose they will be considered saleable.�
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  Even before he posted it, Vincent regretted the letter’s threatening message and petulant tone. He added two postscripts of qualifiers and mollifiers (“Please don’t take what I tell you amiss”), but sent the letter nevertheless. When Theo failed to respond, or to send the next fifty-franc payment when it was due, Vincent panicked, fearing that his brother had accepted the apocalyptic offer. “It made me crazy when your letter did not come,” he confessed, as he flooded Theo with explanations and equivocations.

  Theo eventually sent more money, as he always did, but Vincent’s arguments had so incensed him, apparently, that he refused to make up the missing payment. In a stinging rebuke, he insisted that he took “renewed pleasure” in his work at Goupil, and compared Vincent to the wild-eyed, peasant-loving Nihilists who had recently assassinated the Russian czar—icons of ruinous fanaticism and contempt for civilized norms.

  It was enough, finally, to snuff out the last traces of hope—“the last straw,” Vincent called it. “Differences of opinion are no reason to overlook the fact that we are brothers,” he wrote dejectedly. “One must not blame the other or become hostile, or spiteful, or throw obstacles in each other’s way.”