Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

No doubt, Vincent saw the tableau of the De Groots at their table through a kaleidoscope of other images. From the monumental laborers of Millet to the idealized rustics of Breton to the bathetic simplefolk of Israëls, he had memorized the era’s narcissistic fascination with its own humble past. He had also absorbed scores of images of families at table, sharing both food and prayer. Since the seventeenth century, when English and Dutch Pietists put mealtime “grace” at the center of domestic religious life, artists from Jan Steen to Hubert Herkomer had celebrated this daily ritual in paintings and prints. Vincent ardently admired Charles de Groux’s Le bénédicité (The Benediction), a solemn, Last Supper–like panorama of a peasant family giving thanks; and he hung Gustave Brion’s version of the same scene in his room in Amsterdam. Masters of nostalgia like Israëls had revived the subject, with and without prayer, for the new, backward-looking bourgeois class.

  In The Hague, in 1882, Vincent had seen one of the many variations on Israëls’s hugely successful The Frugal Meal, and proclaimed Israëls “the equal of Millet.” Younger artists, inspired by Israëls, had taken up the subject, too, until heartwarming dinner table scenes had become ubiquitous. To find examples, Vincent had to look no farther than his portfolios of magazine illustrations, or the studio of his friend Anthon van Rappard, whose paintings of institutional “families” gathered around tables had impressed him on his visits to Utrecht.

  In the storm of argument to come, Vincent would claim all these, and more, as godfathers to his new work. But for a man who could still recite his father’s dinnertime blessing, no mere image could match the resonance of the empty chair at the head of the parsonage table. When Vincent looked at the strange, extended De Groot family gathered in the yellow lamplight, he could not help but see the oil lamp that lighted every dinner of his childhood, and the table at which he was no longer welcome.

  In the first week after the funeral, Vincent worked furiously to bring forth the image in his head. He made drawing after drawing of figures around a table, experimenting with their placement, their posture, the way they perched on their chairs. He returned again and again to the house on the Gerwen road to check his vision against Gordina’s ever-willing and seemingly oblivious clan. He sketched the cottage’s gloomy interior, with its beamed ceiling, its broken glass transom, and its yawning, soot-stained hearth. He peered into the darkness to make detailed studies of everything from the clock on the wall to the kettle on the fire to the knobs on the chairs.

  Back in the studio, the denizens of this world took form. Vincent may have started with life sketches of the De Groots and their housemates, the Van Rooijses, but his eager ambition soon transformed them into something new and strange. For all his practice, Vincent had never mastered the casual precision required to render the human face, especially on a small scale. His hand fell naturally into the exaggerations and shortcuts of caricature. In an era addicted to stereotypes, he found encouragement for his weakness everywhere. His hero Millet had portrayed peasants as simple beasts. Like Millet, Vincent had learned from the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology that a peasant’s features should echo those of his bestial cousins: the low forehead and broad shoulders of an ox, the sharp beak and small eyes of a rooster, the thick lips and saucer eyes of a cow. “You know what a peasant is,” he later wrote, “how strongly he reminds one of a wild beast, when you have found one of the true race.”

  Head of a Woman, 1884–85, CHALK ON PAPER, 15¾ × 13 IN. (Illustration credit 24.2)

  Like Millet, Vincent wanted his depictions to celebrate not just the peasants’ oneness with nature (their “harmony” with the countryside) but also their stolid resignation in the face of crushing labor—the same noble resignation he had admired in the old cab horses of London, Paris, and Brussels, hauling dung or ashes through the streets “patiently and meekly … await[ing their] last hour.” Throughout the winter, in his endless portrait heads, Vincent had worked to endow his models’ faces and hands with the immortality of toil. Now he brought all those lessons to bear on a final flurry of preparatory studies, both drawn and painted, for the figures around the table.

  To give these humble beasts the solemnity and significance they deserved, he set them in their natural habitat: darkness. He had long been fascinated with the gloomy cottages—“caves,” he called them—in which families like the De Groots lived. But not even his darkest palette could penetrate the almost total obscurity of these thatch-roofed hovels. In the past, he had solved the problem by placing his figures against the bright light of a window, or by carving them out of the darkness in a woodcutter’s economy of highlights. Even before he became an artist, his imagination had been seized by the drama of objects emerging from shadows, or silhouetted against coronas of backlight. To him, “effects” like these revealed an immortal dimension, and as early as Etten he had begun experimenting with them. “I want something broad and audacious, with silhouette and relief in it,” he said of his group drawings in The Hague. In his images of weavers, he enlisted both shadow and silhouette to confer sublimity on his simple subjects, as well as to conceal his awkward drawing.

  For his new tableau of peasants around a table, he sketched the scene both ways: at a midday meal in front of a window, and at supper in the chiaroscuro of lamplight. He quickly decided on the latter, darker vision: he would portray his diners in the blackness of their night meal, revealed only by the yellow light of the oil lamp over the table. He had already practiced this Stygian palette in several paintings in March, creating elaborate mixes of hues to achieve a narrow range of brown-green, green-blue, and blue-black—what he called “the color of dark soft soap.”

  Almost no pigment traveled from tube to canvas untouched, uncut, unbroken by his relentless pursuit of these minute variations in tone. Pleats in a skirt or objects on a wall were differentiated with only the slightest lightening or darkening. Highlights on the table or the hands engaged a host of hues—Prussian blue, Naples yellow, organic red, brown ocher, chrome orange—to achieve an unnamably neutral gray. Vincent had recently steeped himself in color theory, reading books by Eugène Fromentin and Charles Blanc (he copied out long passages from the latter). Following Millet’s example, he had even started taking piano lessons, convinced that musical tones could teach him more about color tones. But he subordinated all these “scientific” lessons to his poetic vision of the cavelike cottage (“a glimpse into a very gray interior”) and months of championing “a low scale of colors.”

  Only days after completing the portrait-sized study, he attacked a larger canvas (two and a half by three feet) with his broad, dark brush. In the week after Easter, working “continually from morning till night,” he struggled to find a new and better expression of the scene he imagined. Frustrated, as always, with the mysteries of the human body and the complications of modeling in such a limited range of colors, he fought a “tremendous battle” with his materials, he reported, working and reworking the figures until the paint became too dry to manipulate, but too wet to paint over. Although he trudged many nights to the De Groot house to refresh his imagination in the lamplight, he relied increasingly on his portrait studies of the winter for the faces and hands around the table. To emphasize the claustrophobia of the little cottage, he lowered the beamed ceiling, crammed more of the room into the picture frame, and crowded it with more and more domestic details: a mirror, a clog filled with utensils, a devotional print of the Crucifixion.

  Finally, responding to an unknown mandate, he radically reimagined the characters in his narrative. Instead of four hungry peasants hovering over their meager meal, as remote from each other as livestock at a trough, Vincent painted a family. Instead of Gordina’s anarchic in-law household, with its coarse manners and strange relationships, he created a scene as familiar as a memory: at a table set with a tablecloth, a marital couple politely share a dish of potatoes, a matriarch pours coffee for all, and a child waits obediently to be served.

  Lastly, Vincent added a new figure, a fifth person, s
eated in the back, a newcomer at this family ritual. He is an odd-looking man with an open, plaintive face and a hint of red hair.

  FOR VINCENT, THE BOUNDARY between life and art had always been porous. At some point during the winter of 1884–85, he crossed that line. Between his evenings at the De Groot house, his unwelcome nights at the parsonage, and his open estrangement everywhere else, he found in the verities and comforts of his art an irresistible haven.

  Since Etten in 1881, Vincent had claimed the mantle of “a painter of peasants.” It was a fashionable designation. Like an entire generation of young artists, like Rappard, weaned on Romantic notions of nature, encouraged by governments to flatter an increasingly politicized peasantry, and lured by the commercial success of painters like Millet, Breton, Israëls, and Mauve, Vincent had answered the summons of le doux pays. The mandates of art, commerce, and camaraderie mixed with his burning nostalgia for the Zundert heath (where all the peasants were “simple and good-natured,” he imagined) to carry him past the actual frustration and hostility he encountered whenever he ventured into the countryside. “I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages,” he wrote on the eve of his departure for Drenthe (where the peasants regarded him as a “lunatic” and a “tramp”). “My mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”

  Years of rejection by his bourgeois family and friends had only driven him deeper into the fantasy of a home among the peasants as “a painter of rural life.” To support this mirage of happiness, he drew heavily on another fiction: Alfred Sensier’s bestselling biography of Millet. “It interests me so much that I wake up at night and light the lamp and sit up to read,” he wrote in 1882. “What a big man Millet was!”

  But Sensier was more than just Millet’s Boswell; he was his patron, collector, and dealer as well. In order to provide iconic images like The Sower and The Angelus with a marketable creator legend, Sensier had dressed his subject’s provincial past in a self-serving finery of sentiment and cliché. Sensier’s Millet spent his childhood in the fields, sharing the “hard toil” and “rough farm-work [that] makes the daily life of the peasant.” The real Millet was a sensitive son of faded gentry, a studious boy who grew up as close to Virgil’s Aeneid as to the rocky soil of his native Normandy. If he experienced sowing and reaping at all, it was probably only in tending the family garden for a doting grandmother. With a state stipend arranged by well-connected relatives, he eagerly exchanged the pays of his birthplace for an apprenticeship in Paris with Goupil star Paul Delaroche, a favorite of Vincent’s uncle Cent.

  Sensier’s Millet lived a life of solidarity with the impoverished subjects of his art. “He always had in his heart compassion and pity for the miserable poor of the country,” Sensier maintained. “He was a peasant himself.” In 1849, Millet escaped from city life in Paris to live among the simple people he loved, according to Sensier: to share their life of self-abnegation and poverty. He even wore their gray jersey and sabots (clogs)—the “livery of poverty”—so that an unsuspecting traveler might easily mistake the heavy-set, bearded man trudging through the fields for “one of those enthusiastic peasants.” The real Millet, a reckless spender, knew only indebtedness, not poverty. Endowed with a keen eye for the market and great skill with a brush, he painted strategically—from society portraits to nubile young women in teasing vignettes—and in his whole career, rarely lacked for patrons, commissions, or sales.

  When he “escaped” to the fashionably rustic hamlet of Barbizon in the Fontainebleau woods near Paris, the real Millet entertained a wide circle of sophisticated Parisian friends, not peasants, piling up debt and girth as amply as honorifics. Like other landed gentry, he often wore simple clothes, but he always insisted on being photographed in the splendid attire of a gentleman, and spent lavishly on tailors. In the company of artists like Charles Jacque and Théodore Rousseau and writers like George Sand, he rode the great wave of artistic discontent that rolled forward from the Revolution of 1848, with paintings like The Sower in 1850 and Harvesters Resting in 1853, the year of Vincent’s birth. Soon afterward, the same wave swept Millet and the rest of the Barbizon artists to triumph at the Universal Exhibition and the Salon of 1855.

  But Vincent saw only Sensier’s Millet: a sentimental man-child with a vivid, maverick imagination; misunderstood by the public, spurned by critics, and hounded by creditors; a melancholic loner given to uncontrollable fits of weeping and suicidal musings; an artist filled with defiant passion and inexplicable guilt. “I don’t want to stop feeling pain,” Sensier quoted his subject. “Pain is what makes the artist express himself most distinctly.” From the moment he first read Sensier’s “great work,” Vincent began layering autobiography onto hagiography in his search for consolation and direction. Despite having seen little of Millet’s art except in prints, he imagined himself as a satellite to his “sun,” and claimed the Frenchman as inspiration for his return home from The Hague in 1883. “[When] all the influences of the past dragged me more and more out of nature,” Vincent wrote, “it was [Millet] who took me back into nature.”

  After his own father’s death, Vincent fully entered into a delusion of solidarity with the man—or the image of a man—he had always referred to as “Father Millet.” He imagined his hero—and himself—living lives of tireless labor and selfless dedication to the “truth” of peasant painting. He cast Millet as both a Christlike martyr for the suffering of his noble, neglected subjects, and a prophet calling every errant, luxury-loving artist back to the humble and the infinite in art. By mid-April 1885, as his drawings and paintings of a group of peasants around a table began piling up and filling the walls in the Kerkstraat studio, Vincent had found a new father, a new faith, and a new mission. “Millet is father Millet,” he declared, “a leader and mentor in everything [and] an example to painters as a human being.”

  In the spring that year, after the weather warmed and planting began, Vincent rose early every morning to join his flock in the fields. He dressed himself in a coarse blue linen blouse, stiff with sweat and faded by the sun to the color of a robin’s egg. He always wore a hat—straw in fair weather, black felt in damp—but his face was still “weathered and tanned,” according to one witness, the distinctive leather color that marked all those who worked the land. As he left the parsonage, he stepped into a pair of heavy, rough-hewn Brabant clogs, their insteps polished by use. Early-rising neighbors would have seen him clomping hurriedly toward the outskirts of Nuenen, sketchbook in hand, to catch the first furrow of the day. He planted himself in the fields and farmyards, beside whatever labor he could find. “I attack the very first thing I see people do,” he wrote: pitching winter rye, chopping beanstalks, drawing water. When the fields were idle, he watched the cows being milked or the sheep being shorn, or knocked on cottage doors hoping for a chance to sketch their “splendid interiors.” He wandered miles out into the heath, “traipsing and trudging” from sunup to sundown, “out in the fields just like the peasants,” he boasted. He returned at twilight, “dog-tired” but uncomplaining. He assured his brother that “through exposure to the elements,” his “constitution [had] become virtually like that of a peasant.”

  Sometimes he didn’t come home at all, but stayed the night with peasant families far out on the heath where rumors of Nuenen’s strange schildermenneke had not yet reached. “I have made some friends there among the people,” he reported gleefully, “with whom I am always welcome.” He shared their black bread and straw beds, and reassured himself that there would always be other strangers’ houses, other fields “where nothing will be expected of me, as a stranger among strangers.” Claiming to be “sick of the boredom of civilization,” he saw less and less of his family, and devoted himself entirely to “observing peasant life at all hours of the day.” He studied them in their silent “musing by the fire” and in their superstitious gossip. Dispensing both money and liquor to earn their confidence, he learned how they “sniffed the wind” to foretell the weather, and where
the local witches lived. (He boldly paid a call on one of them, only to find “she was up to nothing more mysterious than digging her potatoes.”)

  On Sundays, he took long scouting trips “far, far across the heath,” looking for new subjects, “beautiful hovels,” and, of course, models. Unencumbered by anything but the smallest sketchpad, he struck off from the rutted roads and beaten paths, through country so remote that he compared it to the American West. These expeditions often attracted the attention of local boys, bored and restless after Mass. Vincent still suffered their torment and mockery when he went out to paint, with his strange load of gear and even stranger images; but he welcomed them on these Sunday sojourns. He had learned to co-opt their ridicule with coins. He would pay five or ten cents for every birds’ nest they brought him, depending on the rarity of the bird and the condition of the nest. “I told him I knew where there was a longtail golden oriole,” one of the boys remembered years later,

  a very unusual little bird. “Let’s go to the tree and keep a watch out,” he said. We went and waited but no bird came out. “I don’t see anything,” Van Gogh said. I said, “There, there.” “That’s a knot,” he said. So I kicked the tree and the little bird flew out and startled him. Oh, that was something. He fetched a ladder and neatly cut out the nest.

  He recruited boys everywhere he went, and often accompanied them on long, elaborate hunts across the heath, for birds as well as nests. He hung nets between hedges and sent his helpers to flush the birds from their redoubts. He used slingshots, too, that he made himself. He gave one to a mischievous young companion who used it to shoot out the windows of the school.

  Before long, Vincent had attracted a cadre of searchers, happy to be paid for a walk on the heath, even in the company of the “ugly” and “eccentric” gentleman with the “scruffy red beard.” He “was always dressed so poorly,” one of them recalled, “that you wanted to give him something rather than accept something from him.” On these long rambles in the company of peasant boys, Millet’s mandate from the past fused with Vincent’s longing for his own lost childhood of birds’ nests and creekbanks. “I wish you had been with me,” he wrote Theo after one of his Sunday adventures. “We had to wade through a brook for half an hour, so I came home quite covered with mud.” He compared his needs and pleasures to those of other “peasant boys” and, in a reverie of regression, complained of the “everlasting drivel” he had suffered from “my parents and my teachers.”