Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  In his art, too, Vincent turned from provocation to appeasement. Seized by the sudden and unexpected possibility of favor, his imagination returned to its earliest ambition: pleasing his parents. “I am glad to say Mother’s spirits are very even and bright,” he reported proudly to Theo. “She is amused by trifles. The other day I painted for her a little church with a hedge and trees.”

  Vincent had already briefly explored this nostalgic imagery in a series of drawings he did immediately upon his arrival in Nuenen, in the first flush of homecoming. After a heavy snowfall, he took his sketchpad into the cold and recorded the Brabant winter of his childhood: the parsonage garden with its bare trees and snowy vistas; a couple walking the tree-lined route to church, leaving their twined footprints in the snow; a peasant woman forking manure against a vast, white horizon; children building a snowman; crooked crosses etched in a churchyard cemetery. He had come home with many of these images already in his imagination—prepared, as always, to see what he most needed to see. Done in delicate pen and pencil shadings, with the exquisite care that he always lavished on “portraits” of his family’s homes, these notebook-sized mementos earned the admiration even of his skeptical father, in the brief interval before the storm descended on the parsonage. “Don’t you think those pen drawings of Vincent’s are beautiful?” he wrote Theo. “It comes so easily to him.”

  The chance to win his mother’s approval revived those first hopeful images. After the defiance and subversion of the weavers, Vincent returned to the comforting imagery of his father’s little church and the nearby parsonage. Rather than wandering down unknown paths, he took his sketchpad no farther than his mother’s garden behind the parsonage, where he lovingly recorded its ghostly winter pall and its promise of spring: saplings and rose bushes wrapped in straw against the frost; skeletal fruit trees gesticulating crazily; an old bell tower, long since stripped of its church, standing alone on the horizon, the ultimate reminder of rebirth. He took these sketches into his little laundry-studio and transferred them to big sheets of smooth paper, tirelessly hatching every change in texture, every twisted branch, every picket of hedge, every leaf or tuft or blade that braved the winter’s wrath. He broke out his paint box and displayed his new skill to his parents for the first time by painting his father’s church with the congregation assembled outside, as if for a group portrait. When he was done, he gave the painting to his mother, enacting a childhood ritual of offer and acceptance from which he had long felt barred.

  Freed from the need to prove or persuade, wanting only to please, Vincent began a series of images that would become the first indisputable masterpieces of his slow-igniting, fast-burning career. Retreating from the unfamiliar challenges of oil painting, he chose instead the instruments that felt most comfortable in his hand: pencil and pen. Black-and-white drawing had sustained him since the dark days in the Borinage, and through all the crises since. It was the only medium that had ever earned him compliments from his family. It was also the medium on which he had built his friendship with Anthon van Rappard. Now, with the possibility of reconciliation at home revived, Vincent launched yet another campaign of solidarity with this parental favorite, of which matchmaking was only a part.

  For subjects, he chose places as familiar and comforting to his parents as the rooms of the parsonage: a pond on the margins of the parsonage garden, swollen with winter runoff and fringed in wild grasses; a sandy road just outside the garden gate; and a stand of bare birches at the edge of town, only a short distance away. If his mother could not walk the garden paths she loved, Vincent would bring them to her in images.

  He captured the stillness and anticipation on the banks of the pond in the first days of spring. Pouring a lifetime of intense, meticulous observation into a single image, he filled the sixteen-by-twenty-one-inch sheet with an exquisitely detailed record of the devastation wrought by winter: the tortured stumps and twisted branches of unpruned bushes, the spindly bareness of unplanned trees competing upward to form a single lacy canopy that he traced in finer and finer lines to the top of the sheet. He filled the foreground with the lambent pond, its still waters mirroring its unkempt margins and the stand of trees in glowing grays. He caught even the reflection of the sky in endless modulations of fine hatching that left no part of the wove paper untouched by his pen. With his perspective frame, he laid in an empty road lined by a grizzled hedge. It enters from the left and vanishes on the horizon beyond the trees, its arrow straightness a rebuke to the amoebic pond. In the distance, dead center, ever present, is the faint gray ghost of a church tower.

  Against this frozen tableau of winter, Vincent set the tiny drama of a bird hovering over the motionless water in search of a meal. In a few careful dabs of white paint against the pond’s dark reflections, he evoked a childhood of bird-watching with his father, the shared gospel of Michelet’s L’oiseau, and the solitary rewards of waiting patiently by a creekbank for the thrilling surprises of nature. He decided to name the drawing after the bird: The Kingfisher.

  The Kingfisher, MARCH 1883, PENCIL ON PAPER, 15⅜ × 20⅞ IN. (Illustration credit 21.4)

  In another drawing, Vincent focused all his extraordinary powers of observation on a small stand of pollard birches. About a dozen of the stout, stunted trees stood in motley formation on the banks of a drainage ditch separating the town from the flat pastureland beyond. Anna van Gogh knew the sight well. Vincent set his perspective frame so close that the two trees in front almost filled his big sheet, both top to bottom and side to side. Behind each one, he drew a row of trees shooting to the distant horizon, converging almost at the center of the image—a dramatic perspective that thrust the front trees forward. Vincent had often drawn pollard trees before: their distinctive gnarled trunks and crown of new growth attracted him just as they had attracted generations of Dutch artists. Along many of the roads, canals, and fields he walked, trees of all kinds—willows, oaks, birches—were subjected to the annual pruning, called pollarding, that left them looking abused and forsaken, especially in winter—roadside grotesques, half tended, half natural.

  On these dozen birches, veterans bearing the scars of many spring mayhems, Vincent focused his unblinking eye. One should draw a pollard tree “as if it were a living being,” he had once told Rappard; “focus all one’s attention on that particular tree and not rest until there is some life in it.” But until now, Vincent had never followed this advice. In previous efforts, his pen had wandered to the mise-en-scène of landscape or farmhouse, cloudy sky or vanishing road. Or to figures. In drawing after drawing, he used pollard trees to frame a solitary figure tramping a lonely road, their tortured forms reduced to symbolic echoes as he labored fruitlessly over the figures that he loved and the feelings he longed to share.

  In the brief clearing of his mother’s favor, however, Vincent could just look. His eye found and probed every knotty wound, every stump of severed limb, every pitiful deformation. It captured the shiny white crinkles of bark as well as each tree’s slightly different, asymmetrical lean. And from the black knots that marked the most recent cuts, it caught the upward exultation of new growth—the slender, sun-seeking branches that sprang heavenward from the battered ruin beneath. In row after row of receding trees, he repeated the triumphant gesture, filling the top of the sheet with layer upon layer of vertical lines, and then echoed it everywhere across the bottom in a thousand vertical pen strokes of grass and reeds and distant stalks.

  Pollard Birches, MARCH 1883, PENCIL ON PAPER, 15⅜ × 21¼ IN. (Illustration credit 21.5)

  Only once before had Vincent allowed himself to look as long and deeply at a single subject as he looked at the pollard birches. In his fanatical pursuit of the figure, he had subjected the ever-patient orphan man Zuyderland to his relentless gaze, only to be frustrated by the unique challenges of the human form. Even now, in the spring of 1884, mastery of the figure was a quest that he could neither succeed in nor completely surrender. In another drawing that March, he lavished his pen on a
ditchside foursome of pollard trees just outside the garden gate. But beside them he added a man dragging a wheelbarrow—a stiff, faceless straggler from the Schenkweg studio, a time when his loneliness overruled his eyes. He eventually added figures to his drawing of the pollard birches as well—on the right, a shepherd with his flock; on the left, a woman with a rake over her shoulder—but they turn their distant backs and almost disappear beside the great thrusting vitality of the mangled trees.

  In the pollard birches, for the first time, Vincent found life beyond figures. He had always had an inexhaustible eye for nature, for the infinite incident and soulful escape of The Kingfisher, and all the gardens and wheat fields it adumbrated. But now he added to that intimacy with nature the fanatic eye he had always reserved for his models: the immediacy of purpose, the unity of vision, the boldness of expression. “A row of pollard willows,” he had written, “sometimes resembles a procession of almshouse men.” Freed from their long enslavement to figure drawing, Vincent’s powers of isolation, simplification, and intensification—honed on years of letter sketches—could now explore the latent life in virtually any object: a chair, a pair of shoes, a sunflower.

  BUT VINCENT’S ESCAPE from the past was doomed to failure. The prospect of regaining his rightful place in the family, however dim, put him on a collision course with the person who had assumed that place. By January 1884, his relationship with Theo had already fallen into a stalemate of acrimony. Vincent had arrived in Nuenen bursting with rancor—over Theo’s opposition to Sien, over his refusal to quit Goupil—all of it pent up during the long, fruitless campaign on behalf of Drenthe. Describing himself as “disillusioned” and “disenchanted,” he held Theo accountable for the “bitterly, bitterly sad” end to his dream of perfect brotherhood.

  Theo, too, felt betrayed. In going to Nuenen, Vincent had done the very thing Theo had worked hardest to prevent. Up to the last minute, he had tried to persuade Vincent to come to Paris instead of going home. He had even found a job for him at a magazine there, Le Moniteur Universel. Vincent’s refusal, postmarked from Nuenen, was filled with yet more jeremiads against the art business (“within relatively few years a number of great art enterprises, like Le Moniteur Universel… will dwindle down [and] fall into decadence”) and nose-thumbing expressions of confidence in his ultimate vindication: “I say it is possible that a revulsion of feeling will come about in your mind, either gradually or suddenly, and that this will force you to adopt a new conception of life, which perhaps will finally result in your becoming a painter.”

  Theo’s efforts to defend their father (Vincent boasted of his “savagery” in argument) revived Vincent’s old fears of a conspiracy against him. He accused Theo of joining the laughter he always heard behind his back and demanded that his brother declare his true loyalty: “I ask you point-blank how we stand—are you a ‘Van Gogh,’ or are you the ‘Theo’ I used to know?” Theo’s answer came in the form of a scolding letter that called Vincent a “coward” for bullying their aging father, and insisted that he take back his harsh criticisms. Vincent responded with a fury of defensive letters—bitter, petulant, snide letters that simultaneously lamented the loss of their former closeness and blamed Theo for all his problems. No sooner was the ink dry on that storm of protest than Vincent added a new provocation: the Christmas trip to The Hague. When he returned, he blamed his brother for the wretched state of Sien and her family, and he openly vowed to continue supporting them in flagrant violation of Theo’s demand that he renounce the woman once and for all. “Whatever your financial power,” he wrote, declaring his freedom in bold underlining, “you will not be able to force me to renounce her.”

  But real freedom proved harder to win. In his campaign to reclaim favor after Anna’s accident, his dependence on Theo continued to thwart him. He tried to escape his reputation as a “ne’er-do-well” by openly embracing the Goupil gospel of salability and making more commercial works like watercolors (borrowing both the subject matter and gauzy tonality of Mauve). He linked his weaver paintings to successful Hague School artists like Jozef Israëls and added dreamy French titles to some of his drawings from December (Jardin d’hiver, Mélancolie), as if they were bound directly for the Paris market. But every time he presented himself to his parents’ friends—“the respectable natives of these regions,” he called them now—he opened himself up to a torment of questions: “Why is it that you never sell your work?” “Why do others sell and you don’t?” “How strange that you don’t do any business with your brother or with Goupil.” He catalogued these injuries to Theo in increasingly rueful tones. “Everywhere I go, especially at home, a constant watch is being kept on whether I get anything for my work,” he wrote. “In our society virtually everybody looks out all the time for that sort of thing.”

  Inevitably, guilt and paranoia magnified every polite inquiry, every askance look, into a stinging rebuke. “I have to put up with being reproached with idling away my time—or even being absolutely looked upon as ‘having NO means of subsistence,’ ” he keened. “One hears that drivel day in, day out, and one gets angry with oneself for taking it to heart.” He complained bitterly about the unflattering impression created by his financial dependence on his brother and how it trapped him in a “false position”—a coded reference to the deeper injuries long inflicted by Theo’s ascendancy. It wasn’t long before he lashed out at his distant but ever-present brother. “On my coming home, I was struck by the fact that the money I was in the habit of receiving from you was looked upon … as charity for a poor fool,” he wrote, betraying the accusations in his own head. “I am feeling more and more cramped.”

  In February, inflamed by these accumulating slights, Vincent mailed his brother two parcels of drawings and watercolors, accompanied by a “proposal for the future.” In language that strained to sound businesslike, he offered yet another plan for their troubled relationship: Vincent would occasionally send his work; Theo would choose what he liked. Any money that Theo sent would be considered payment for the selected works (“money I have earned”); any works Theo rejected, Vincent could take to other dealers. As always, he framed his proposal in fond blandishments, calls to fraternal solidarity, and solemn assurances that it would keep their relations on “a straight course.” But nothing could disguise the angry demand at its core. “After March, I will accept no money from you,” he wrote, reviving the deadline he had imposed in Drenthe, “[unless] I give you some work in return.” It was the same threat of self-destruction he had made so often before: if Theo refused to “buy” his work, Vincent would refuse to take his money—casting himself, and his family, into yet another crisis of uncertainty.

  He waited weeks for a reply, alternately fretful and fuming, as Theo again punished him with silence. He sent plangent reminders comparing himself to a convict awaiting the judgment that would set him free. He placated his brother with poetry and protests of good faith, as he battled a wave of second thoughts and the pendulum swung back toward fraternal devotion. “Whatever the difference in feelings may be, and the difference over this or that,” he wrote, “we are brothers, and I certainly hope that we shall go on behaving like brothers.”

  It wasn’t until early March that Theo responded. In language as unequivocal as Vincent’s was oblique, he told his brother that his work was “not good enough” to sell; that he had “not yet made enough progress” since his first clumsy efforts in Etten. Whether as a dealer or as a patron, Theo said, he could do nothing to advance Vincent’s career until his work “improved a great deal.” If anything, Vincent’s baroque appeasements only seemed to clarify his brother’s rejection. He ridiculed the notion that Vincent could find other dealers for his art, and reminded him that no one else would advance him money on dreams and rhetoric. It would be “a good many years” before his work would have any real commercial value, Theo predicted—and even longer before he could support himself on it. He criticized the crude technique of Vincent’s drawings (the public would “take offense
” at their imperfections), the superficiality of his painted studies, and the drabness of his colors. In a slight that amounted almost to a repudiation of their shared past, he accused Vincent of being “too obsessed” with the French landscapist Georges Michel, the brothers’ lifelong favorite, and in particular dismissed Vincent’s Michel-inspired paintings from Drenthe as simply “no good.”

  In proposing his plan, Vincent had reassured his brother that “if [my work] should not please you and you should not want to have anything to do with it, then I should not be able to say anything about it.” “I want you to feel free with me,” he had written in bold underline, “just as I want to feel free with you.” But, of course, there was no such freedom. On either side. Vincent’s rage followed as inevitably as Theo’s scolding. In the most furious letter he ever wrote his brother, he raised the pitch of their dispute to new heights of rawness and ferocity. He blamed Theo for virtually every setback he had ever suffered. If his work didn’t sell, it was because Theo had done nothing to sell it. He had “put it away in a dark corner” and “not lifted a finger” to find buyers. His indifference to Vincent’s art only mirrored his insincerity, even dishonesty, in their relationship. He was a “wretched” brother, who put “feathering his own nest” above love of art or bonds of fraternity. “You couldn’t care less about me,” Vincent raged. A true brother would not have held him hostage to need. He would have given freely—without oversight or obligation—instead of “tugging at the purse strings” and forcing him to “knuckle under.” Reopening the freshest wound of all, he decried again the betrayal on the Schenkweg. In opposing Sien, Theo had deprived him of “a wife … a child… a home of [his] own.” What a fool he had been to invite Theo to Drenthe. What a vain hope it was that his brother had the heart or spine or spleen to be a painter.