As a peasant boy, Vincent felt entitled to another prerogative of his humble class: sex. He had long subscribed to the bourgeois myth that peasants fornicated just as their beasts did: at will in the barnyard and the field, free of guilt or inhibition or entanglement, whenever instinct overtook them. Now these schoolboy fantasies merged in Vincent’s wishful imagination with Millet’s call to “immerse himself personally in peasant life.” By April, Gordina de Groot came to the Kerkstraat studio almost every evening, alone. Local tongues were already beginning to wag about the parson’s son and his peasant “Dulcinea.” Many suspected that he was drawing her in the nude.
WHEN HE READ ZOLA’S Germinal in May, Vincent found a new testament for his libidinous mission. Set in a workers’ hell that Vincent knew well—a coal mine in northern France—Germinal seethes with outrage at the brutality of the capitalist system and the suffering of its victims. But Vincent’s zeal looked right past Zola’s scathing indictment. In a novel filled with sympathetic workers led by a failed Romantic hero, Vincent fixed his autobiographical eye on the mine’s bourgeois manager, M. Hennebeau. It was Hennebeau’s envious fantasies of panting, steaming sex among the underclass that Vincent copied out for his brother as confirmation of his new calling, from the highest possible source:
Oh, that he could not let them sit down at his table and stuff them with his pheasant, while he went out to fornicate behind the hedges, tumbling the girls without caring a rap about those who had tumbled them before him! He would have given everything … if only he could have been for a single day the least of the wretches who obeyed him, master of his flesh … Ah! Live like a beast, having no possessions of his own, flattening the corn with the ugliest, dirtiest female coal trammer, and being able to find contentment in it.
But Vincent’s fanatic heart demanded pain more than pleasure. He found in Millet’s call to a simple life the same summons to self-mortification that he had found in Kempis’s or Christ’s. He dressed in rags that even the peasants pitied; he denied himself cover in the rain, and shade from the sun. When he stayed in the Kerkstraat studio, he insisted on sleeping in the attic with the dust and the spiders, rather than in his more comfortable room downstairs. “To have slept anywhere else,” his landlady recalled, “would have been pampering himself.” As if to deny himself the “luxury” of the studio itself, he never cleaned or tidied it. According to one horrified visitor, “great piles of ashes surrounded the stove, which had never seen a brush or polish.” Cane chairseats were left frayed and broken. Clothes and clogs, caps and hats for his models, tools and farm implements, specimens of moss and plants from his endless forays into the heath, all lay scattered about, gathering dust where they fell, disappearing under sheaf after sheaf of drawings as numberless and neglected as leaves.
He ate only the “black bread” sanctified by Millet, supplemented occasionally by morsels of cheese and always by coffee. When offered meats and cakes by friends like Kerssemakers and Van der Wakker, he would request a crust of dry bread instead. “I don’t eat fancy food,” he said, refusing meals that the De Groots would have devoured. “That would be pampering myself too much.” But moderation soon led to starvation, as it always did when ardor gripped him. As if to out-Millet Millet (“I consider myself below the peasants,” he said later), Vincent began to eat even less than his impoverished subjects. “I never saw a human being as skinny as Van Gogh,” recalled one of the boys who hunted nests with him in a countryside filled with people who survived on potatoes. Friends like Kerssemakers blamed Vincent’s strange self-abuses on his unaccountable poverty, but there was always money for cognac and tobacco. Vincent defended himself with another of Hennebeau’s fantasies in Germinal: “He also wanted to starve, to enjoy an empty belly, his stomach twisted by cramps that staggered his brains by fits of dizziness; perhaps this would have killed the eternal pain.”
Not even rejection by the peasants themselves could alter Vincent’s vision of a life spent toiling and sacrificing in their name. By all accounts, people like the De Groots and the Van Rooijses considered Vincent’s daily visits, at best, a profitable nuisance; at worst, a menace. The boys who brought him nests were both fascinated and repulsed by his bizarre excesses in a community that punished any hint of deviation. They took his money but mocked him mercilessly behind his back. One of them recalled venturing into the Kerkstraat studio to find Vincent at work on a painting, dressed in long woolen underwear and a straw hat, furiously smoking his pipe:
It was a strange sight. I had never seen anyone like him. He stood some distance from the easel with his hands folded over his chest—he often did that—and stared at the painting for a long time. Suddenly he would leap up as if to attack the canvas, paint two or three strokes quickly, then scramble back to his chair, narrow his eyes, wipe his forehead and rub his hands … They said in the village that he was mad.
Another boy recalled Vincent in the fields, searching for a spot to place his easel. “He stood here, and then there, and then over there, and then back again, and then ahead again, until the people said, ‘that nut is at it again.’ ” His piano teacher in Eindhoven abruptly discontinued his lessons, according to Kerssemakers, because Vincent spent so much time “comparing the tones of the piano with Prussian blue and dark green, or dark ochre with bright cadmium that the teacher thought that he was dealing with a madman.” Even those who knew him only by sight, like the customers in Baijens’s paint store, referred to him simply as “that crazy little man from Nuenen.”
Vincent heard the scoffs and the giggles, but pushed himself on with claims of persecution and vows of even greater effort. Millet had turned a “deaf ear to such taunts,” he said, “so it would be a disgrace should one so much as waver.” He would just go deeper into the heath—“go and live in a peasant’s cottage so as not to hear or see educated people—as they call themselves—any longer.” He defended what he called his “enthusiasm” and “impulsiveness” against the fears and ennui of the world, and claimed, for all artists, a duty of madness: “Le grain de folie qui est le meilleur de l’art”—the grain of madness that is the best of art.
By the beginning of May, the delusion was complete. In the evenings, he imagined himself not as a painter returning to his studio with the day’s studies, but as a laborer coming in from the fields to exchange his hoe for a brush—“I am ploughing on my canvases as they do on their fields,” he wrote—transforming himself from a peasant painter into a painting peasant. (He emphatically defined a masterpiece as a painting “made by a peasant who can paint.”) Railing against the “so-called civilized world” that “banished [me] because of my clogs,” he claimed a martyrdom of solidarity with all the “common people”—not just the potato eaters of Nuenen, but also the groundlings of Zundert, and the miners of the Borinage. He laid plans to return to the black country and “bring home about thirty studies in a month.” In a fantasy of denial, he begged Theo to join him in his new life as a painter-peasant: to seize Sensier and Germinal as his twin gospels; to “go about in clogs,” eat black bread, and “live like a beast.” “What pictures you could make then!” he exclaimed.
This was no delusion, Vincent insisted. The world was delusion. Millet’s “enchanted land”—a place “where one is free”—did indeed exist, he assured Theo. The promise of it filled his head with images:
It is a good thing in winter to be deep in the snow, in the autumn deep in the yellow leaves, in summer among the ripe corn, in spring amid the grass; it is a good thing to be always with the mowers and the peasant girls, in summer with a big sky overhead, in winter by the fireside, and to feel that it always has been and always will be so.
His mother and sisters watched in horror as Vincent disintegrated before their eyes. They had certainly heard about his previous breakdowns—in London, in Paris, in Amsterdam, in The Hague—but had never before seen one unfolding under the same roof. More than her husband, Anna van Gogh had always treasured the social distinctions and privileges of a parson’s life. From
the moment he arrived, Vincent had laid siege to that special status: in his strange behavior and dress, in his Catholic models and Catholic studio, in his relentless public rebellion against her husband, in his never-ending dependency, in his embarrassing art. Now, after driving her beloved Dorus to his grave, Vincent had declared himself a peasant! Every day that he left the parsonage and struck off toward the fields—just as he had done as a boy in Zundert—to wander aimlessly and alone among the temptations of the heath, and every night that he returned from his strange doings in the filthy hovels of the potato-eating papists, Anna must have seen God’s fulfillment of all her darkest maternal prophecies.
Perhaps at his mother’s instigation, perhaps in anticipation of it, Theo had recommended that Vincent leave the parsonage—leave Nuenen altogether—immediately after Dorus’s funeral. Vincent had often threatened to go elsewhere, and only a few months earlier had contemplated moving into his studio. But Theo’s suggestion froze him in place. “I personally see no good in moving,” he wrote. “I have a good studio here and the scenery is very beautiful.” Millet had regretted leaving his homeland; Vincent would not make the same mistake by abandoning Brabant. “I have no other wish than to live deep, deep in the heart of the country,” he wrote, vowing defiantly to “stay here the rest of my days.”
But Vincent had not reckoned on his sister Anna, who had remained in Nuenen after the funeral to help her stricken mother. Already the formidable matron of her own household, thirty-year-old Anna quickly took charge of the parsonage. Her first order of business was to eject her brother Vincent. “He had made himself impossible,” she recalled years later. “He gave in to every urge, sparing nobody. How Pa must have suffered from all that.” Vincent argued furiously with his sister, defending his “way of life.” But Anna had inherited her mother’s iron will. With the support of her sisters, she made his life in the parsonage a daily misery. Even Wil, Vincent’s favorite, sided against him—an especially bitter betrayal. Still, it wasn’t until Anna accused him of trying to kill their mother, just as he had killed their father, that Vincent’s resistance finally collapsed. Wounded and bitter, he packed his bags and left home for the last time.
To Theo, he covered his retreat in a veil of charity. “It is so much for the better this way,” he wrote, pretending it had been his choice. “I think those at home very, very far from sincere.” He cast their dispute as solely artistic and blamed his departure on the fundamental incompatibility between “people who seek to maintain a certain social standing and a painter of peasant life who gives the matter no thought.” In the same spirit of martyrdom for his art, and hoping to placate his mother and sisters, he renounced any claim to his father’s modest estate. “Inasmuch as during the last years I had lived in great discord with my father,” he grandly informed Rappard, “I relinquished my share in the inheritance.”
But neither the living nor the dead were appeased. When the day came for the estate to be inventoried, Vincent returned to the parsonage to find his uncle Stricker, Kee Vos’s father, representing the interests of his absent siblings, including Theo. Nobody other than his father had been witness to so many of Vincent’s past failures. When the probate official arrived, he took one look at Vincent—with his “wild appearance and farmer’s clothing,” according to sister Lies—and demanded, “Shouldn’t that man leave?” Anna van Gogh replied: “That is my eldest son.” Whether because of the shame in his mother’s voice, or the haunting presence of his disapproving uncle, or the slow tallying of his father’s life, Vincent fled the house in the middle of the inventory—“without giving reasons therefor,” the official noted in his report.
Vincent may have offered a glimpse of his reasons in a rare, Lear-like moment of clarity in April. Lamenting that his mother, like his father, was “unable to grasp the fact that painting is a faith,” he heard the pastor’s damning judgment from the grave. “This is exactly what is the matter between her and me—as it was between Father and me, and remained so. Oh dear.”
By early May, he had moved everything into the cluttered Kerkstraat studio, a few blocks from the parsonage. On the easel sat a third and final attempt to paint The Potato Eaters, wet with endless reworkings. In the furor of his battle with his own family, he had begun an even bigger canvas, almost three by four feet, trying again to capture the phantom of familyhood in his head. He had painted and drawn and imagined the figures at the table so often that he didn’t need to refer to his sketches or studies any longer. “I paint it by heart,” he said.
Vincent had been obsessed with the image throughout his slow, painful expulsion from the parsonage. After he finished the second attempt in mid-April, he immediately announced his intention to make a lithograph of it. Without waiting for Theo’s opinion of the image or the venture, he went to Eindhoven and contracted to print fifty copies. As his own home life fell apart, he reworked the image again on the stone and laid ambitious plans for an entire series of lithographs based on the same theme: “les paysans chez eux”—peasants at home. He sent Theo repeated sketches of the image, urging him to show it to friends and fellow dealers. He wondered if the editor of Le Chat Noir, a chic Parisian art magazine, “might want a rough drawing of those potato eaters,” and offered to make one in any size.
Ignoring his brother’s repeated discouragement, he seized triumphantly on the report that one of Theo’s colleagues, a minor dealer named Arsène Portier, had “seen something” in his earlier work. He immediately wrote Portier a long letter “giving him arguments for his own instinctive feelings” and exhorting him to stand fast in his opinion. Portier’s polite compliment (he said Vincent’s work had “personality”) whipped Vincent into a froth of anticipation in the last weeks of April. When the lithographs came back from the printer, he sent copies to Theo, Rappard, Portier, even his old Goupil colleague Elbert Jan van Wisselingh—giving them out like cigars at a birth, celebrating not just the image, which continued to change with every iteration, but the new mission that it represented. “It is a subject that I have felt,” he said. “There is a certain life in it.”
Even as he passed out copies of the lithograph and made plans for another, Vincent returned again and again to the canvas on his easel. For the last three weeks of April, as he fought for his place at the parsonage table, he endlessly reworked his vision of a peasant family dinner. He painted and repainted the heads, exaggerating their coarse features, aging and scarifying their faces and hands. Only Gordina and the “fifth man” escaped his cruel revisions. He fussed over the finest gradations of tone, hewing to his claim that “the best way to express form is with an almost monochrome coloring.” He would leap to the canvas to tame an overeager highlight, and spent hours mixing shades of gray on his palette.
From each reworking, the image emerged, if anything, even darker. After laboring for weeks on the heads, he determined that his formula for flesh color was “much, much too light” and “decidedly wrong,” so he repainted the faces yet again; this time “in the color of a very dusty potato,” he said, “unpeeled of course.” He fought to keep his dark colors as dark as possible. He tinted his varnishes with bitumen and mixed his paints with balsam, a natural resin that prevented oil in the paint from sinking into the canvas, thus leaching the gloss out of dark colors and turning them matte. The balsam also kept his paint softer longer—making it a more suitable medium for his restless vision. But the softer paint dulled the bravura brushstrokes he had developed on the portrait heads over the winter, and forced him to wait even longer to make the inevitable alterations.
Vincent kept at it, week after week, working at all hours: doing in the morning, redoing in the afternoon, undoing at night, in an endless argument with himself. He claimed for all these hairsplitting revisions the loftiest possible purpose: “to put life into it.” But as April ran out and the gloomy scene in the De Groot hovel barely changed under his manic ministrations, even Vincent realized he had a problem: he couldn’t stop.
He had always tended to overwork
images, especially the ones that mattered to him (“I couldn’t keep my hands off them,” he confessed about some spoiled drawings in The Hague). And no image mattered more than this one. He may have successfully avoided Theo’s Salon challenge, but the aura of high stakes and last chances still hung over the unfinished painting. Vincent himself continued to raise the stakes with promises of “something more important,” and assurances that Portier, or Theo, could send it to an exhibition when it was done. “I know for sure there is something in it,” he assured Theo, something “completely different than you have ever seen in my work.” The fever fed on itself. The more he raised expectations, the more he revised, the more he delayed.
Eventually, he had to physically wrest it away from himself. At the very end of April, he carted the big canvas, still wet, to Eindhoven and placed it in the custody of Anton Kerssemakers with the instruction to “make certain I don’t spoil it.” Nevertheless, a few days later, he returned to his friend’s studio and attacked it again with a small brush, laying down a welter of “finishing touches” on top of yet another (fourth) layer of varnish. Before those changes had a chance to dry, he hauled the painting back to Nuenen, hoping to send it to Theo for his birthday, May 1. But it sat in the Kerkstraat studio only a day or two before he loaded it up again and carried it through the dusty streets to the little house on the Gerwen road, determined “to give it some last touches from nature.” He arrived to find the De Groots and Van Rooijses at dinner in front of a window rather than under the hanging lamp. The sight of them silhouetted in the waning daylight so moved him—“Oh, it was splendid!” he exclaimed—that he immediately fell on the painting again, making the hands and faces darker still (“the color of dull brass”) and adding touches of “the most tender faded blue.” He wrote Theo afterward in despair, “I shall never think my own work ready or finished.”
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