Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  What was left but to break it off? Only cowardice could explain their failure to part company sooner—Theo’s cowardice. Vincent had put up with his meaningless encouragements, his refusal to “soil his hands,” long enough. The only “manly action” was to put an end to the “wretched business” into which their perfect brotherhood had degenerated. The time had come to break free. “It is perfectly natural to kick when one knows for certain that one is being kept dangling, being kept in the dark,” he said. “If one goes from bad to worse … what difference does it make?” It was the ultimatum that had hung over their relationship since The Hague, only this time stripped of its conditions. “I cannot leave matters as they are,” he declared. “I have resolved on a separation.”

  He vowed to find a new dealer, flatly rejecting Theo’s verdict that none would treat him any better. Furthermore, he would pursue every opportunity to develop new contacts and to exhibit his work—tasks he had always disdained in the past. He talked of going to Antwerp to find buyers. He and Rappard had discussed it. Perhaps he would even move there. Or perhaps he would return to The Hague. In what could only have been meant as a threat, he proposed returning to the site of his previous disaster and renewing his relations at Goupil. “After all,” he protested, “I have never misbehaved myself toward them.”

  To underscore his determination to go his own way, he contracted with a local carpenter to build some frames for his paintings, a requirement for selling them (he thought they looked best in black ones). The first works he planned to frame were some Drenthe studies—just like the ones Theo criticized. He also packed up the best of his recent drawings, including The Kingfisher and Pollard Birches, and sent them to Rappard with a request that he “show them to people.” To Paris, he sent not landscape drawings—the imagery Theo had long urged on him—but yet another batch of weavers, as if daring his brother to reject them again.

  Not even in the midst of this, his greatest fury, could Vincent escape the torment of second thoughts. When Theo wrote reporting the final breakup of his affair with Marie, Vincent scrambled to “unsay” some of his harshest words. (“You see it is not my aim to break off relations with you.”) But when Theo retaliated by delaying his next payment, Vincent sprang back to the attack, his rage redoubled. He accused Theo of not merely failing him in his time of need, but of intentionally sabotaging him. “You commit this negligence on purpose in order to make life more difficult for me,” he railed. In the bitter, helpless language of a frustrated child, he lashed out at his brother, summoning all the injuries of the past year—and long before that—in one great explosion of abuse. The “high and mighty” gérant had tortured him for too long with his “conceited” condescension, his “dear little Van Goghish tricks,” and his “silly, insipid” criticisms. Vincent could not suffer for another day such “narrow-mindedness” and “self-righteousness.” Theo had become their father, he wrote, hurling his most devastating bolt, and the outrage of it had finally grown absolutely unbearable. “It would be stupid to go on in this way,” he thundered. “Stupid!”

  BUT THEO WAS a prisoner, too. In early April, he agreed to all of Vincent’s demands. He would send one hundred and fifty francs every month, as he had been doing. In return, Vincent would send him all his work. Theo could do anything he wanted with it (even “tear it to pieces,” Vincent agreed). Vincent could tell people in Nuenen that his brother had bought his work. The money would be “earned,” Vincent emphasized; “that way I have something to justify myself in the eyes of the world.” Theo would impose no conditions on his support. Vincent would make no additional demands on his brother. Theo would tell no one, not even their parents, about the terms of the agreement. Despite his own financial straits, Theo sealed the deal with a special payment of two hundred and fifty francs to placate his implacable brother. Vincent finally had his “definite arrangement.”

  But it resolved nothing. Vincent immediately began demanding revisions to the agreement. Within a few weeks, he issued yet another ultimatum that Theo accept his revisions “or else we’re finished.” He accused his brother of not showing sufficient enthusiasm for his work—of treating it “too frivolously.” He repudiated the images that Theo admired and embraced those he rejected, returning to the contrarian paralysis of The Hague. After showing Theo some of the great penned landscapes from the spring, Vincent never did another. “I have somewhat changed my technique,” he reported without explanation.

  Despite Vincent’s repeated claims of “freedom,” the months of intimate battle with Theo had left him even more hopelessly trapped in a downward spiral of provocation and defiance—a spiral that would capture both his emotional life and his artistic life over the next year in Nuenen, undoing the promise of his mother’s recovery as surely as it disowned the art that comforted her. Even in the flush of his victory over securing an arrangement, Vincent himself saw the darkness ahead. In a passage meant as a warning to his brother, he compared himself to his hero Millet, betrayed by faithless backers who gave him only money—not respect, or enthusiasm, or love. “He clasped his head with both hands,” Vincent recounted a story about Millet, “in a gesture as if once again he were overwhelmed by huge darkness and unutterable melancholy.”

  CHAPTER 22

  La Joie de Vivre

  IN MAY 1884, WOMEN IN NUENEN WERE SURPRISED TO FIND A HANDSOME stranger at their door—a young man with both the title and the manners of a noble lineage: Anthon Ridder van Rappard. Even more surprising was his companion: the Protestant pastor’s odd and annoying son, the schildermenneke, Vincent van Gogh. With their sketchpads under their arms, the mismatched pair were ranging across the spring landscape, knocking at the doors of weavers and farmers in search of subjects—or, better yet, models.

  Vincent had campaigned furiously for his friend’s visit. To lure Rappard from his busy bourgeois life in Utrecht, he dangled every kind of bait, from the beauty of the Brabant countryside to the availability of his sister. Replaying many of the same arguments he made to Theo from Drenthe, he promised a paradise of picturesque subjects and plein air painting. In addition to almost a dozen of his own drawings, like The Kingfisher, he sent page after page of transcribed poetry to fill out this enticing vision. He fawned shamelessly over Rappard’s work (“Your brushstroke often has an individual, distinctive, reasoned, deliberate touch”) and hinted heavily that he could enlist his brother’s assistance to further his friend’s career. He even interrupted his fierce feud with Theo to plead Rappard’s case as “one of the people who will count.” “If you should feel personal sympathy for Rappard’s work,” he wrote, “he would certainly not feel indifferent toward you either.” Shrugging off Rappard’s harsh criticism of his weaver drawings, he cast himself as a good-natured bohemian Puck willing to poke fun at himself as well as at the pretensions of others. Giving no hint of the winter’s many trials, he summoned his friend to an artists’ May Day on the heaths of Brabant.

  Despite their similar blue blouses and felt hats, the two men made an odd couple indeed on the sandy streets and country byways of Nuenen. Rappard, who was accustomed to frequent, extended sketching trips, traveled light, carrying only his sketchpad, a tiny tripod easel (knee-height when unfolded), and a book-sized paint box—a burden so light he had one hand free for a stylish walking stick. Vincent, on the other hand, brought his studio with him: a folding chair, a heavy combination paint box, larger sketchbooks, and the cumbersome perspective frame. Even inattentive field workers must have marked the difference in their gaits: the one, brisk and self-assured, with a straight back and outthrust chest; the other, plodding and round-shouldered under his burden. The villagers and farmers they approached would have found the contrast even more striking close up: Rappard’s thick, dark hair and finely trimmed beard, Vincent’s bristly, short-cropped hair and wild whiskers; Rappard’s soft, slightly crossed eyes, Vincent’s crystalline blue-green glare.

  For ten days, Vincent did everything in his power to erase the differences between the two men. Aft
er introducing Rappard to the weavers who had obsessed his imagination for so long, he indulged his friend’s interest in more picturesque subject matter. He led expeditions to some of the ancient mills that dotted the countryside around Nuenen—exactly the kind of conventional imagery that Vincent had spurned in the past. (He had to ask directions to find some of them.) The two spent hours in the town tavern, where Vincent entertained the cosmopolitan Anthon with jokes about the locals, and no doubt pleaded anew all the arguments for solidarity that had filled his letters over the previous months: the brotherhood of painters, the dangers of “studio style,” the mystery of “present-day trends” like Impressionism, and especially the loneliness of the artist’s life—complaints that must have sounded sad and strange to Rappard, who had just celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday by founding yet another social club for his fellow artists in Utrecht.

  But one subject never failed to bring them closer: women.

  Even before his friend’s arrival, the topic was much on Vincent’s mind. The final breakup with Sien had left him without any prospect of physical intimacy. “I have always lived with a certain warmth,” he told Theo in despondent euphemisms. “Now everything is getting grimmer and colder and more dreary around me.… I will not stand it.” He turned first, as always, to prostitutes (which he probably found in Eindhoven, a larger commercial center, where he also bought his paints). He sent his brother elaborate rationalizations and a bitter lament: “I have not yet had enough experience with women.” He claimed as his new example their womanizing uncle Cent, whose motto, according to Vincent, was this winking license: “One may be as good as one likes.” In the very same breath, he began demanding more money for models and bemoaning the difficulty of finding them. He may have signaled his ultimate intention by complimenting the Impressionist Édouard Manet (whose work he barely knew)—especially Manet’s paintings of nude women.

  Rappard’s impending visit only stoked the fire. Ever since their joint expeditions to the Marolles, Brussels’s red-light district, in 1881, sex had been the other passion the two men shared. Vincent set the tone for the coming encounter by sending not only sheaves of his drawings, but also a little “Arabian fable” from which he teased images of erotic abandon and even suicide by sex. The subject of models carried both these torches at once. After returning from Utrecht in December, where he had admired Rappard’s painting of a woman spinning, Vincent bought a spinning wheel, apparently in hopes of luring women to pose privately rather than having to draw them in their own houses at their own wheels.

  But even if a woman succumbed to such inducements, Vincent had no place to take her. For unknown reasons, he had moved his studio out of the parsonage’s windowless laundry, with its prying eyes and prisonlike spareness, and into a shed-roofed outbuilding that, according to Vincent, “adjoined the coal hole, sewers, and dung pit.” (Dark and wet when it rained, dark and dusty when it didn’t, the cramped space would later be used as a chicken coop.) Immediately after Rappard wrote in April telling of his work with models, Vincent began an all-out push for a better studio. “I need [it] in order to work from the model,” he announced. No doubt eager to put distance between Vincent and the parsonage, Theo sent extra money for the move, but with a warning to avoid the mistakes of the past, to which Vincent responded blithely: “One may try one’s best, or act carelessly, the result is always different from what one really wanted.”

  But rather than pick an isolated shed far from town—as he had in Etten right before the Christmas expulsion in 1881—Vincent found a studio close to home. The little two-room apartment sat on the main road, the Kerkstraat, only a thousand feet south of the parsonage, literally in the shadow of the big new Catholic church, St. Clements. Indeed, the space had been used as a “prayer and knitting school” by the church before Vincent moved in that May. Even more awkward for the Protestant parson Van Gogh, the house was owned (and occupied) by the sexton of St. Clements, Johannes Schafrat. Vincent told Theo nothing about the studio’s high visibility or his Catholic landlord, but described it only as “large and quite dry.” Rather than apologize for the added expense, he boldly announced his plans for the new studio: “I again have space enough to be able to work with a model,” he wrote. “There’s absolutely no saying how long it will last.”

  By the time Rappard arrived in late May, Vincent had decked out the front room of the handsome, brick-faced house on the Kerkstraat exactly like the Schenkweg apartment, filling the walls with his drawings and paintings and the other “ornaments” of a proper artist’s studio. He had retrieved all his models’ costumes and attributes from storage in The Hague and organized them for the coming campaign of figure drawing. The new spinning wheel was positioned in the middle of the room. He hung his prized drawing of Sien, Sorrow, in a place of honor. Everything was ready for the “hunt” (his word) to begin.

  “Rappard and I have made long excursions,” he reported to Theo, “visited house after house and discovered new models.… I get back my high spirits, as if I were twenty.” In approaching a house, even one where he was known, Vincent pushed the younger man forward. Rappard’s good looks and ingratiating manner found willing subjects almost everywhere—especially among the women—even without the incentives of money, liquor, tobacco, and coffee that Vincent had to offer.

  It was probably on one of these hunting expeditions with Rappard that Vincent first secured Gordina de Groot as a model. As a neighbor of Pieter Dekkers, a weaver whom Vincent had drawn at his loom, Gordina no doubt knew the schildermenneke, at least by reputation, by the time he appeared at her door with his handsome companion. Vincent probably knew just enough about the twenty-nine-year-old Gordina, too. Her father had recently died and she lived with her mother, two younger brothers, and a strange extended family of aging unmarried relatives, all crowded together in a little hut on the road to Gerwen. Over the next year, she made many trips to the studio on the Kerkstraat, posing at the spinning wheel and elsewhere for Vincent’s relentless hand. Her name was Gordina. Locals called her Stien. Vincent, for reasons he never shared, called her Sien.

  But this was not the same Victorian fantasy of rescue as in The Hague. In response to the bitter disappointments of the previous year, Vincent had fashioned a new vision of happiness—a new vision of himself. “Fortune favors the bold,” he declared, “and whatever may be true about fortune or ‘la joie de vivre,’ as it is called, one must work and dare if one really wants to live.” In a fever of self-reinvention, he renounced a lifetime of anguished introspection and proclaimed himself a man free of scruples or regrets—a man of action, not contemplation; instinct, not reflection. He would take from life what he wanted—in women, in business, in art—without concern for the consequences. “Whether the result be better or worse, fortunate or unfortunate,” he declared, “it is better to do something than to do nothing.… Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm—but that’s a lie.”

  For this new life, Vincent had a new vision. Instead of the solicitous policeman of English illustrations or Michelet’s enlightened suitor or Dickens’s humble goodheart, he saw his new example in the cynical, streetwise antiheroes of his favorite French authors, especially Zola.

  Increasingly, he imagined himself as one character in particular.

  Vincent had first encountered Octave Mouret in Zola’s Pot-Bouille (Pot Luck). A provincial pitchman and roué, come to Paris to make his fortune, Mouret was Zola’s ultimate modern man: the feral product of the new era’s freedom from traditional restraints—moral, entrepreneurial, and amorous. He hawks and woos his way to success (marrying a rich widow) in a novel seething with scorn for the “nullity” of bourgeois convention. In the dark winter of 1882, isolated on the Schenkweg with only his high principles and abused love for consolation, Vincent had condemned Zola’s apartment-house Don Juan as crass and shallow. “He doesn’t seem to have any other aspiration except the conquest of women,” he marveled disapprovingly, “and yet he does not really love them.”
He saw Mouret, as he saw everything modern, as an insult to his beloved bucolic past and sublime aspirations—in short, “a product of his time.” A year later, in Drenthe, he warned his brother away from Mouret’s example: “You are deeper than that,” he implored, “not really a man of business, [but] an artist at heart, a true artist.”

  But in the long months since then, Vincent had picked up Au Bonheur des Dames, the latest installment in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart saga of the human condition, and seen Octave Mouret with new eyes. In this sweeping socioeconomic allegory, the scheming street-salesman of Pot-Bouille has ridden the wealth of his now-dead wife to the heights of haut-monde Paris. As the captain of a huge department store called Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Delight), Mouret conquers women shoppers by the thousands and seduces an entire city with the aphrodisiac of consumerism. After the claustrophobic Pot-Bouille, Zola gives the tawdry Provençal a stage as grand as a Haussmann boulevard to ply his marketing prowess, both commercial and sexual, and parade the earthly rewards of la joie de vivre.

  This time, Vincent found much to admire. “I like him much better than I did in the first book,” he wrote of Zola’s predator protagonist. Instead of pitying Mouret’s cynical, opportunistic view of life, Vincent envied his manliness and passion. He lauded his unapologetic egoism, boundless enthusiasm, and take-no-prisoners boldness. He cited approvingly Mouret’s determination to “live intensely,” and copied out his carpe diem philosophy: “Action is its own reward—to act, to create, to fight against the facts, to conquer them or be conquered by them, is the source of all human joy.” The test was simply this, said Mouret: “Are you enjoying yourself?”