Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  RIJKSMUSEUM, AMSTERDAM, SOON AFTER COMPLETION IN 1885 (Illustration credit 25.1)

  The controversy only inflamed public curiosity. In the first three months after the building opened in July, a quarter million visitors reportedly shuffled through its vaulted halls—an astonishing figure in a country of only four million inhabitants. Thus, even on a rainy Wednesday in early October, crowds still clogged the museum’s twin entrances and surrendered their soaking umbrellas to see Cuypers’s extravagant celebration of Dutch culture.

  Viewing paintings was always a slow and arduous process in nineteenth-century galleries, with their frame-to-frame, floor-to-ceiling honeycombs of images, and the Rijksmuseum was worse than most, both for the density of its hangings and the distracting profusion of its decoration. But progress that day was disrupted even more than usual by an odd-looking man who planted himself, like an island in the stream, in front of a single painting and would not budge. He wore a wet, hairy ulster and a fur cap that he refused to take off. “He looked like a drowned tomcat,” one visitor recalled. Underneath his sodden cap, he had the sun-beaten face of a sailor and a wiry red beard. At least one local thought he looked “like an ironworker.”

  The painting that had transfixed Vincent was Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride, a portrait of a merchant and his new wife, long famous for its fiery red-and-gold palette, ineffably tender gestures, and gorgeous brushwork. “What an intimate, what an infinitely sympathetic picture it is,” Vincent wrote afterward. Anton Kerssemakers, who had joined Vincent for part of the Amsterdam trip, continued through the museum without him. “He could not be torn away from it,” Kerssemakers recalled. When he returned to the spot later, he found Vincent still there: now sitting, now standing, now clasping his hands in prayerlike reverie, now staring intently only inches from the canvas, now stepping back and shooing people out of his sightline.

  Vincent had seen hardly any paintings, real paintings, since leaving The Hague two years before. He had not seen these paintings, some of his country’s greatest treasures, since the dark and stony days of studying for the clergy, when visits to the Trippenhuis or the Van der Hoop collection (the Rijksmuseum’s predecessors) had to be secreted between sermons. But even the paintings he knew well he was seeing with new eyes. For the first time, he pored over their surfaces not as a dealer or draftsman, but as a painter. He drank so deeply of their imagery that years later he could still recall every detail—the sheen of a fabric, the expression on a face, the fathom of a tone. He didn’t hesitate to feel a canvas, to follow a brushstroke with his thumb, or to lick his finger and touch it to the surface to deepen the color.

  The Jewish Bride was only one of dozens of images Vincent consumed that day. He and Kerssemakers would enter a gallery, and Vincent’s eyes would immediately light on a particular picture—an old favorite or a new discovery—singling it out from the cacophony of competing images. “My God, look at that,” he would exclaim as he rushed through the crowd toward it. “Look!” Ignoring the museum’s prescribed tour, he ran from gallery to gallery by an inner routing. “He knew precisely where to find what interested him most,” Kerssemakers recalled: here, a billowing skyscape by Ruisdael; there, two leafless oaks spotlighted against a stormbank by Van Goyen; there, Vermeer’s intimate, eavesdropping glimpse of a woman reading a letter. But of all the giants of the Golden Age on display, he sought out two with special fervor. “[I am] longing most of all for Rembrandt and Frans Hals,” he had written Theo when he first laid plans for the trip.

  The Rijksmuseum offered a feast of images to sate even Vincent’s insatiable longing: from Rembrandt’s Night Watch, an image so famous that Cuypers had built a special room for it, which he placed at the end of the navelike Honor Gallery like an altar; to Hals’s The Lean Company, a panoramic tour de force of brilliant portraiture and magical brushwork. Unfamiliar to Vincent until he entered the gallery where it hung, Hals’s huge painting of a proud company of Amsterdam militiamen struck him dumb. “I was literally rooted to the spot,” he reported to Theo. “That alone—that one picture—is worth the trip to Amsterdam.”

  But there were many others. The walls were studded with dark windows into both masters’ imaginations: Rembrandt’s veiled and deeply mysterious explorations of the sublime, and of himself; Hals’s delighted documentation of the human condition: roguish soldiers and red-cheeked drinkers, love-struck grooms and their bemused brides, self-satisfied burghers and their world-weary wives. Still, it wasn’t enough for Vincent. He dragged Kerssemakers directly from the Rijksmuseum to another museum, the Fodor, and from there to Uncle Cor’s gallery on the Keizersgracht, where, at the last minute, he balked at going inside. “I must not show myself to such a proper, rich family,” he told his puzzled companion. Kerssemakers left Amsterdam that same evening, but Vincent delayed his return to Nuenen for another day, spending precious pennies on a hotel so he could spend yet another day in the Rijksmuseum.

  The frantic three-day trip to Amsterdam was one of two trips Vincent took that fall. Sometime after Theo’s departure in August, he and Kerssemakers also traveled to Antwerp, in another reprise of his brother’s tour with Dries Bonger. Why this sudden restlessness after years of abjuring city life and threatening to disappear deeper into the heath? Despite repeatedly vowing to seek out buyers for his work in cities like Antwerp, Vincent had successfully resisted leaving Nuenen for almost two years, making only a single day trip to Utrecht (to visit Margot Begemann) since Christmas 1883. Even after his patron Hermans offered to give him the money for a journey of his choice, Vincent preferred the verities of his life on the Kerkstraat to the vagaries of travel. In announcing his new wanderlust in September 1885, Vincent claimed a long-suppressed urge to “see pictures again,” and explained that he needed to “take a trip now and then” in order to “find buyers for my own work.” But when he finally did leave, he took no paintings to show, either to Antwerp or to Amsterdam.

  In fact, Vincent had other, more compelling reasons to absent himself from Nuenen.

  BY THE END OF July 1885, Gordina de Groot’s pregnancy could no longer be hidden. The sight of the unmarried thirty-year-old Gordina big with child brought months of festering rumors to a boil. Combined with unanswered questions over Margot Begemann’s misfortune and general suspicion of Vincent’s strange, godless ways, the gossip soon reached toxic levels. Vincent’s vehement denials fell on deaf ears. This was the same schildermenneke, after all, who drank publicly, quarreled with passersby, consorted outside his class and religion, invited unmarried women to his room, and, it was rumored, drew them naked.

  Eventually, the condemnation grew so pervasive that Vincent reported feeling “a dose of malice” every time he left the studio. Only months after lionizing them, Vincent lashed out bitterly at the “God-fearing natives in the village who persist in suspecting me.” Rather than retreat from the accusations, he defiantly pressed his hunt for models in the teeth of communal hostility, offering larger and larger baits of money to peasants idled after the summer harvest, even as he cursed their mercenary ingratitude. “They do nothing for nothing here,” he fumed.

  Vincent’s persistence soon brought a visit from the local Catholic priest, Andreas Pauwels, as both spokesman for and guardian of his outraged parishioners. He cautioned Vincent against fraternizing with “people of lower station,” according to Vincent’s account, and instructed his flock not to allow themselves to be painted, no matter how much money they were offered. Far from being chastened, Vincent erupted in a defensive rage. (He later admitted that in Pauwels’s scolding he heard the voice of his dead father.) Fueled by these unburied antagonisms, he launched a furious assault on all clergymen for not “sticking to their own sphere of more abstract concerns.” Rather than resolve the scandal discreetly, as both his family and Gordina’s would surely have preferred, Vincent took the matter directly to the most public forum, the town Burgomaster.

  In his letters, he absolved himself of any blame for “the accident” of Gordina’s pregnanc
y and excused the peasants for their complicity in his persecution by heaping blame on the ancient common enemy in Rome. Just as he had accused a meddlesome priest in The Hague of sabotaging his relationship with Sien, Vincent came to see Pauwels as the source of all his woes. In arguments tinged with paranoia, he accused the priest of fomenting the peasants’ hostility against him. If they refused to pose, it was because the priest had promised them money to stay away, he told Theo. If they blamed him for Gordina’s pregnancy, it was because Pauwels was harboring the real father in his own congregation. Vincent foresaw a popular insurrection on his behalf against Pauwels’s edict and vowed to fight the forces arrayed against him “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” confident that his models would return by winter.

  Inevitably, the battle extended into the studio. Deprived of models, Vincent defiantly reaffirmed his devotion to Millet’s peasants in a series of still lifes. Instead of posing figures digging or picking, he arranged baskets of the potatoes they dug and the apples they picked, and lavished on them the dark, missionary vision of The Potato Eaters. In a challenge to Theo every bit as bitter as his challenge to Pauwels, Vincent made the new works even darker and pressed his claims for their color using the same strident tones in which he argued his innocence to the Burgomaster. Summoning the authority of yet another book on color, Félix Bracquemond’s Du dessin et de la couleur (On Drawing and Color), he sent his brother elaborate inventories of the calculations that had gone into his impenetrable grays, and ringing defenses of his “dull” imagery. He took his big, dark brush and painted a sulfurous basket of apples over a bright still life of flowers that he had painted as a memento mori after his father’s death—an act of vandalism directed at all the “reverend gentlemen of the clergy” who had hounded him, and hounded him still.

  Looking around his studio, Vincent found another perfect subject to protest his solidarity with the peasants who shunned him. On the branches of a fallen tree limb, he had arranged more than thirty of the birds’ nests that he and his young recruits had collected since his arrival in Nuenen. On these childhood talismans of home and heath, Vincent now focused all his frustrated powers of depiction. In a palette even more “de terre” than his apples and potatoes, he traced with his muddy brush every feature of their fragile domesticity: the skirling straw of the wren’s nest; the mossy lining of the sparrow’s; the woolly bowl of the golden oriole, still attached to its web of lofty branches. Vincent’s obsessive eye and indefatigable hand transformed these aerial hovels into monuments of nature, symbols of his abiding kinship with the natives of the heath. They argued, more persuasively than his reassuring words ever could, that Father Millet would ultimately triumph over Father Pauwels, and that his errant family of peasants would return to their nest in the end.

  But they did not return. As autumn came to a close, Vincent remained alone in his studio, surrounded by the detritus of his Millet fantasy. By the time he left for Amsterdam and the Rijksmuseum, the peasants who peopled that fantasy had abandoned him altogether. They no longer dared come to the Kerkstraat studio, they barred him from their homes, and in the fields they ran away “frightened” at his approach.

  NOT EVEN HALS and Rembrandt could dethrone the noble peasant in Vincent’s imagination all at one time in a brief three days. His obsessions were rooted far too deep for a road-to-Tarsus conversion. Despite the months of ostracism and abuse, despite the confrontation with Theo, despite the collapse of his friendship with Rappard, despite the distant criticism of Portier and Serret, Vincent returned from Cuypers’s temple to the gods of Dutch art seemingly reconfirmed in his defense of The Potato Eaters and rearmed for his battles with the world. Another artist might have been crushed by the contrast between the ignominy of his own misfortune (the threat of a forced sale by creditors) and the glories of the Golden Age. But not Vincent.

  Instead, he read the Rijksmuseum the way he read a book: autobiographically.

  He looked at the ranks of famous images and found his favored “deep tones” everywhere: from the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt’s portraits to the dark clouds of Ruisdael’s skies. “The more I see of those pictures,” he wrote Theo in a long report of his visit, “the more I am glad that my studies are found too black.” In Hals’s bravura brushwork and Rembrandt’s scumbled surfaces, he saw his own imprecision. The “great masters” did not “polish faces, hands and eyes,” he pointed out, but were guided instead “by that conscience which is called sentiment.” He celebrated the peasant subjects of Brouwer and Van Ostade and praised Hals’s mastery of gray. He recruited virtually the entire museum as an endorsement of his artistic godfather Israëls (who was nowhere on view), and as a rebuff to “bright” painters like Theo’s beloved Impressionists. “Every day I hate more and more those pictures which are light all over,” he wrote, dismissing the style as “that fashionable impotency.”

  But even as he defiantly girded himself for another round of defenses, Vincent began remodeling the vast architecture of arguments that propped up his claims for The Potato Eaters. His trip to the Rijksmuseum had exposed—even to Vincent’s stubborn eyes—the yawning gap between his rhetoric and his art. He could bridge that gap only in the labyrinths of obsession. He had justified his dreary browns and dull grays as the only colors befitting the meager life of the De Groot household. But in Amsterdam, he celebrated Millet’s earthy palette in subjects as far from the dusty heath as Hals’s cavaliers and Rembrandt’s cadavers. He imagined even the exotic, voluptuous nudes of the Italian Renaissance painted in “a color like mud.” As surely as the peasants of Nuenen had disowned him, Vincent began to dissociate them from his quest for expressive color.

  Freed from the oppression of metaphor, he saw nothing in his tubes of paint but color. “Just now my palette is thawing,” he noted in late October, almost bewildered by the change. “Colors follow of their own accord, and taking one color as a starting-point, I have clearly before my mind what must follow … Colors indeed have something to say for themselves.”

  In a letter written after returning from Amsterdam, Vincent marked his changed mission with an extraordinary description of a painting he had not seen in a decade: Paolo Veronese’s The Marriage at Cana. This enormous canvas, which hung in the Louvre, depicted the Gospel story of Jesus attending a wedding feast. But in Veronese’s vision, the humble ceremony is transformed into a lavish imperial banquet staged on a palace plaza overlooked by marble colonnades and gilded balconies filled with spectators. Scores of wedding guests in bright, bejeweled garments drink from great jugs of wine and eat from barges of food carried by servants in turbans and red slippers, while musicians play, courtesans jape, and well-fed dogs doze contentedly. No place, real or imagined, could have been further from the dirty hovels of Brabant and their potato-eating denizens. But Vincent’s imagination recalled in this unlikely image a single patch of gray that released him from the de terre literalism of Millet—a gray that simultaneously reaffirmed the palette of The Potato Eaters and opened up a new world of color for its own sake:

  When Veronese had painted the portraits of his beau-monde in the Marriage at Cana, he had spent on it all the richness of his palette in somber violets, in splendid golden tones. Then—he thought still of a faint azure and a pearly-white—which does not appear in the foreground. He detonated it on the background—and it was right … So beautiful is that background that it arose spontaneously from a calculation of colors. Am I wrong in this?…Surely that is real painting, and the result is more beautiful than the exact imitation of the things themselves.

  On his easel, Vincent’s art could finally match his arguments. Almost as soon as he returned from Amsterdam, in the waning days of autumn, he dragged his paint gear into the deserted landscape and set a big canvas where a curving alley of oaks ended in a clearing. He squeezed tube after tube of carmine and cobalt onto his gray-caked palette and applied them fearlessly: swaths of red-orange for the dusty clearing, dapples of pure yellow and orange for the sun-struck trees; bright blue s
ky, luxurious lavender clouds. Not a soul and hardly a shadow darkens the vivid contrasts of blue and orange, yellow and violet.

  As if reimagining the previous two years in color, he returned to the parsonage garden and painted its autumnal spareness in his bright new palette. The great pen drawings of the spring of 1884 were reborn in the vivid oranges and ochers of The Jewish Bride. He robed the naked pollard trees beyond the garden gate in a golden cloak of leaves set against a lavender winter sky. In the studio, he rejected the dusty apples and potatoes of the previous month with a large still life of brightly colored fruit and vegetables rendered in bold complementary contrasts. “A painter does better to start from the colors on his palette,” he wrote, announcing his altered gospel, “than to start from the colors in nature.”

  In these and a dozen more paintings he tore through in the first weeks after returning from Amsterdam, Vincent displayed another new freedom he had learned at the Rijksmuseum: speed. In this, too, his arguments had long outpaced his art. From the very beginning of his career, he had worked like a man possessed, running through reams of paper in siege after siege of the Bargue exercises, working and reworking the same drawing, scraping and rescraping the same canvas. Easily frustrated and desperate for signs of progress, he justified his manic (and expensive) work habits by arguing that quantity would yield quality in the end, and therefore speed mattered more than the precision he could never master. As a draftsman, he declared his ultimate goal “to draw quick as lightning.” When he took up painting, he pledged “to paint quick as lightning,” and “to get more brio into my brush.” The only “healthy and virile” way to apply paint to canvas, he maintained, was to “dash it on without hesitation.” By the spring of 1885, in his endless preparatory heads for The Potato Eaters, Vincent had sharpened this argument to an obsessive mantra, bragging that he could complete a study in a single morning and vowing to work “even more quickly.” “You must set it all down at once,” he instructed Kerssemakers, “and then leave it alone.” “Paint in one rush,” he coached himself, “as much as possible in one rush.”