Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  Rather than disparage Mouret to his brother, Vincent now emphatically urged Theo to emulate him. “I wish we had Mourets in the art trade,” he wrote. “[They] would know how to create a new and larger buying public.… If you are no artist, then try to be a dealer like Mouret.” Finally, completely reversing his earlier indignation, he embraced Mouret’s shameless exploitation of women (“I want her, I will have her”), maintaining that any other attitude led only to emasculation and mediocrity. Transcribing long passages from the book, he urged Theo to “read your Mouret over again”—just as he had read Michelet—and he adopted as his own motto Mouret’s leering slogan: “Chez nous on aime la clientèle” (Here, we love our customers). He proclaimed himself the Mouret of the heaths, worshipping the sturdy, somber peasant women of Millet just as Zola’s hero worshipped the bourgeois housewives of Paris. “The two passions are one and the same,” he declared.

  Through the summer and fall of 1884, Vincent played out his new fantasy of self. In addition to “flattening the corn” with Gordina and no doubt others, he took up Mouret’s injunction to “act”: to take charge of one’s own fate. “Do a great deal or drop dead,” he proclaimed. Redoubling his campaign of the spring to make more salable works, he turned almost entirely to painting and to commercial subjects like peasant vignettes and country churches, “splendid sunsets,” and, in fall, the “chûte des feuilles” (fall of leaves). He returned to the water mills without Rappard and painted them repeatedly in both oil and watercolor.

  But it was no longer enough just to make more salable works. Mouret enjoined Vincent to sell them. Building on the frustration he felt toward Theo’s long inaction, he revived his scheme from two years before for a “combination” of artists—an art market run by and for artists—and continued to plan a trip to Antwerp, or even a move, in order to “get some connections” and “find my own way for my work.” At the end of the summer, he took a few of his paintings to a photographer in Eindhoven and had reproductions made in several sizes, with the intention of “sending them to some illustrated papers, to try to get some work, or at least to become known.” He probably also displayed his pictures at the store in Eindhoven, Baijens’s, where he bought his paints.

  Using his frequent trips into town for supplies, Vincent also began a concerted campaign to establish himself in Eindhoven’s tiny community of amateur artists and art lovers. Through the owner, Jan Baijens, he solicited introductions to the store’s bourgeois clientèle, no doubt advertising his connections to the house of Goupil and his training with Anton Mauve. Other times, he hung around the store “abundantly volunteering his insights,” according to one patron, holding forth on the sins of “chicness” (referring to Impressionism) and the joys of plein air painting. Baijens’s had a framing service, too, and Vincent monitored the paintings being brought in, searching for prospective students. On a visit to a printing shop, he saw some works by the owner’s son and persuaded the boy’s parents to send him to Nuenen for lessons. Twenty-two-year-old Dimmen Gestel was the first “student” to make the trek to the sexton’s house on the Kerkstraat. “There he stood,” Gestel recalled,

  the short square little fellow, who was called the little painter man by the farmers. His weather-beaten and tanned face was defined by a somewhat red and bristly little beard. Probably because of his painting in the sun his eyes were slightly inflamed. While he talked about his work, he mostly held his arms crossed in front of his chest.

  Others followed. Over the course of the fall and winter, Vincent successfully sold his services to several amateur painters in search of mentoring, although most took their lessons at their homes in Eindhoven and only rarely visited the studio in Nuenen. Unlike Gestel, these were not art students but “Sunday painters”—men who had grown up with the same bourgeois pastimes as Vincent himself. Willem van de Wakker often crossed paths with Vincent going from his boardinghouse in Eindhoven to his job as a telegrapher in Nuenen. “He was by no means an easy master,” Van de Wakker later recalled. Anton Kerssemakers, at forty-two, ran a successful leather tanning business and spent his leisure time painting. He had already begun to redecorate his office with a series of landscape murals when Vincent heard about the project through Baijens. Vincent marched straight to the tanner’s shop and offered his services. “There is indeed some good in this,” he told Kerssemakers after surveying his plans for the murals,

  but I advise you to make still-lifes first, not landscapes. You will learn a lot more from that. When you have painted about fifty of those, then you will see some progress, and I am prepared to help you with it and to paint the same objects with you.

  Vincent directed all his new students to the easier execution of still lifes, rather than the devilish figure drawing he had championed for so long. “Painting still-lifes is the beginning of everything,” he told Van de Wakker, reversing years of fervent rhetoric on behalf of both drawing and figures. He himself painted dozens of still lifes that winter, filling canvas after canvas with the comfortable, conventional imagery that he had long eschewed: bottles and jugs, mugs and bowls, and even flowers.

  But two Mouret-like projects, in particular, dominated the summer of 1884: one artistic, one amorous.

  Antoon Hermans was a rich man—no doubt the richest of Baijens’s customers. He had built his fortune on the new bourgeoisie’s taste for the oldest form of wealth: gold. With a goldsmith’s skills and a trader’s instincts, he had made enough to retire in opulence by the age of fifty-seven. A jovial, enthusiastic man, he wore his wealth lightly, but openly. No one could miss the big new house he built on the Keizersgracht in the shadow of Eindhoven’s equally ambitious new church, St. Catharina. In fact, he had so admired the spiky-towered church that he hired its architect, Pierre Cuypers (the architect of the new Rijksmuseum nearing completion in Amsterdam), to design his retirement palazzo. Hermans fancied himself both a pious man and an art patron, and the new Gothic style perfectly suited his twin tastes for richness and spirituality. He traveled extensively in search of art and antiques to fill his new house, and took a personal role in finishing its lavish interiors. At sixty, he turned his artisan’s hands to a new craft, painting, and immediately set to work on an ambitious plan to cover the walls of his dining room with religious images “in a modern Gothic style.”

  As soon as Vincent heard of Hermans’s project, he hurried to the house on the Keizersgracht to offer his services. Instead of the mock-medieval cabinet of saints that Hermans had envisioned, Vincent urged him to undertake a more modern theme: peasants at work. “I told him that the appetites of those sitting at the table would be considerably more stimulated,” he wrote Rappard, “if they saw scenes from the rural life of the district on the walls instead of mystical Last Suppers.” He proposed a series of scenes symbolizing the four seasons: sowing in autumn, wood gathering in winter, herding in spring, and harvesting in summer. Hadn’t “medieval” painters like “Peasant Breughel” taken up just such subject matter? he asked.

  As was his habit, Vincent argued vehemently on behalf of his vision, even offending the pious Hermans with his antireligious rhetoric. But for the new Vincent, commerce trumped conscience. When Hermans hired him, but demanded that he fill six spaces instead of four, Vincent revised his scheme to fit. When Hermans wanted more figures in each image, not just two or three, Vincent added them. When Hermans decided to paint the panels himself, Vincent agreed to make scaled-down preliminary sketches—cartoons—to help guide him. When Hermans asked for full-scale oil sketches so that he could copy them more easily, Vincent obliged. After years of excoriating Rappard for debasing his talent with “undignified” projects—and only a few months after declaring “seriousness” his only standard—Vincent reveled in the success of his “decorations” for Hermans’s house, explaining to Theo how his designs “harmonized with the woodwork and the style of the room.”

  At times, Vincent expressed a certain condescending fondness for his aging patron, who was almost exactly his father’s age. “It i
s really touching,” he wrote Theo, “to see how a man of sixty tries hard to learn to paint with the same youthful enthusiasm as if he were twenty.” At other times, he disparaged Hermans’s abilities (“What he makes is not beautiful”), criticized his color choices, called his antiques “ugly,” and referred to him belittlingly as “my art lover.” But he continued to meet Hermans’s every request, working long days to curry and keep the old man’s favor—working so hard, in fact, that Pastor Dorus complained of Vincent becoming “irritable and over-excited” because of “the exertion of going back and forth in the heat to Mr. Hermans and talking about the work.”

  Vincent never said how much Hermans paid for these extraordinary efforts. Indeed, he staunchly maintained to his brother that the affable goldsmith was, in reality, “stingy rather than generous,” and, as a result, he ultimately made “a whole lot less than nothing” on the project. He boasted to Rappard, however, that Hermans agreed to pay not just for his materials, a considerable expense, but also for his models—a very lucrative arrangement for a man with Vincent’s voracious eye.

  Margot Begemann was a spinster daughter of Nuenen’s richest Protestant family. She and her two older sisters, also spinsters, lived next door to the parsonage. Their father, a previous pastor in Nuenen, had built the grand brick house called Nuneville on the eve of his retirement, assuming, no doubt, that his three daughters (out of a total of eleven children) would never marry. He died two years later, his wife a year after that, leaving the three middle-aged sisters alone in a grandeur of disappointment on the town’s main thoroughfare. At forty-three, Margot was the youngest of the three. Born in Nuenen and never educated outside her home, she hardly knew the world. Her parents’ punitive piety and her own homely appearance had condemned her to a life of private pleasures and earnest helpfulness. Within her extended family, she was known for her “sensitive spirit and good heart,” according to her niece, and for her tireless attentions to sick friends and relatives. A single romantic injury in the distant past and decades of withdrawal had left her in a permanent state of fragility, high-strung and histrionic, her sole emotional attachment the sympathy she felt for the afflicted in her care.

  It was on one of her missions of mercy that Margot first met the neighbors’ unknown son, Vincent. She had flown to Anna van Gogh’s bedside as soon as she heard of her accident in January. She returned again and again over the next six months, tending to Anna’s wardrobe, reading to her, assuming her parsonage duties. “We have such precious help in Margot Begemann,” Dorus wrote to Theo. Margot no doubt admired Vincent’s like devotion to his mother’s recovery, and she immediately took a schoolgirl’s interest in the enigmatic painter thirteen years her junior. And in his art. Indeed, it may have been Margot’s well-meaning but unwelcome curiosity—about his sales, about his relations with Goupil, about “why others sell and you don’t”—that triggered Vincent’s demand in March for a new, face-saving arrangement with Theo. (“A constant watch is being kept on what I do with my work,” he had written, “trying to find out everything about it.”) According to her niece, Margot rose every morning “before the crack of dawn” to watch from the big windows of Nuneville as Vincent set out on his sketching trips, “bashful and deep in thought, and always dressed the same.” In his odd burden and lonely labor, his seriousness and solicitude, she had finally found a kindred spirit.

  For the first seven months after he met her, Vincent said nothing to his brother about Margot Begemann. By the time Rappard arrived in May, Margot was visiting the studio on the Kerkstraat, but Vincent apparently did not introduce her to his friend, nor did he refer to her in any subsequent letter. He and Rappard made a sketching trip to a linen mill owned by the Begemann family, but Vincent either kept his connection secret or considered it not worth mentioning. As Margot joined him more and more often on walks, Vincent began to take some pleasure in her self-abasing attentions. “Recently I have been getting on better with people here than I did at first,” he reported to Theo, without mentioning names. “One decidedly needs some distraction; if one feels too lonely, the work always suffers.”

  MARGOT BEGEMANN (Illustration credit 22.1)

  Sometime that summer, the advantages of a liaison entered his thoughts. Margot was not just the youngest Begemann sister, she was a part owner of the family business, having used her own legacy to rescue her brother Louis from bankruptcy in 1879. Vincent’s family was struggling financially, with medical bills to pay and daughters to dower. In July, his youngest brother Cor, now seventeen, had to withdraw from school and take a job at another nearby factory owned by the Begemann family. At about the same time, Vincent began to encourage Margot’s affections with gifts of books and flowers and, of course, his own art. They hid their relationship from both their families (although Dorus suspected something). Both would have disapproved: the Begemanns for fear of Vincent’s ultimate intentions; the Van Goghs for fear of the inevitable embarrassment.

  Even with such dim prospects, Vincent plunged ahead. “The man of faith, of energy, of warmth … will not be put off so easily,” he wrote Theo, quoting Octave Mouret. “He wades in and does something and stays with it, in short, he violates, he ‘defiles.’ ” Vincent would later describe the months of his clandestine courtship in terms taken directly from Mouret’s manual. He was merely “disturbing the tranquility of a woman,” he insisted; “hurling [her] back into life, into love.” He compared Margot to “a Cremona violin that has been spoiled by bad, bungling repairers”—“a rare specimen of great value” that was “rather too damaged,” but could still be played upon. Vincent may not have wooed Margot for her money, as Mouret would have done; but her money, like her wounded spinsterhood, no doubt played a role in his Mouret fantasy of advantageous conquest. “I had her in my power,” he boasted.

  Unlike Zola’s cad, however, Vincent had no experience with the power of being loved. While he clung blithely to his fantasy, the relationship rushed toward inevitable catastrophe. On their long walks, Margot would confide, “I too have loved at last,” and profess her readiness to die for him. But Vincent “never paid any attention,” he later admitted. Not until mid-September did her pleading vows of love unto death and other unspecified “symptoms” begin to unsettle him. Fearing that she might be developing “brain fever,” he consulted a doctor and quietly alerted her brother Louis.

  But the warnings didn’t alter the image of amorous daring in his head. Only a day or two later, he maneuvered himself onto a sofa with Margot when her sisters were out of the house. A niece, come to pick blackberries in the garden, saw them together and reported their shocking intimacy to her mother. The alarm sounded throughout the Begemann clan, according to the niece’s later account. “That degenerate son of the minister” who “fancies himself a painter” and “is always broke” had compromised Margot’s maidenhood and “sullied the good name of the family Begemann.” Vincent and Margot were immediately summoned to a Begemann family council, where the sisters excoriated Margot for her indiscretion and mocked her protestations of love. Vincent listened with rising fury until he finally exploded. “I will marry her,” he announced, pounding the table, “I want to marry her. I must marry her.”

  The assembled Begemanns took his surprise proposal as a confession that Margot was pregnant. The council erupted in reproach. One of the sisters leaped into Vincent’s face and screamed “Cad!” Marriage was unthinkable. Margot was too old, they insisted: too old to marry, too old to bear children, too old to be so foolish. She must be sent away immediately. To avoid scandal, a friendly, discreet doctor must be found to take her in and deal with the consequences of her indiscretion, whatever they might be. Vincent protested mightily, according to his later account, defending his actions and Margot’s honor, denouncing the charges against them as “groundless and malicious.” “I gave as good as I got,” he claimed. He repeated his proposal of marriage, only this time as an angry ultimatum: “It has to be now or not at all.”

  But nothing he said could
reverse his banishment, or hers. A few days later, on the eve of her departure for Utrecht, Margot met Vincent in a field on the outskirts of town—a furtive and surely forbidden final encounter. In a letter to Theo, Vincent described what happened next. It was his very first mention of Margot Begemann:

  She slipped to the ground. At first I only thought it was weakness. But it got worse and worse. Spasms, she lost her power of speech and mumbled all kinds of things that were only half intelligible, and sank to the ground with many jerks and convulsions … I grew suspicious and said, “Did you swallow something?” She screamed “Yes.”

  Like Madame Bovary, she had taken strychnine. But not enough to kill her. Vincent forced her to vomit and rushed her to a doctor in Eindhoven, who administered an antidote. Family honor immediately closed over the incident and Margot left for Utrecht amid private opprobrium and public suspicion. It was given out that she had “gone abroad.”

  The “terrible” events of September poisoned Vincent’s fantasy of la joie de vivre. In a flurry of letters, he tried desperately to save it. He decried Margot’s mistreatment at the hands of her family, heaping special blame on her sisters for their false accusations that drove “so many nails into the patient’s coffin.” He broadened his indictment to include all “respectable people” with their bourgeois small-mindedness and their “damnable icy cold” religion. “They are perfectly absurd,” he fulminated, “making society a kind of lunatic asylum, a perfectly topsy-turvy world.” He even invoked the Revolution’s call for “a change in the social position of women … with equal rights, equal freedom.”