By July 22, Vincent felt compelled to repeat a startling proposal he had first made in late June, the last time negotiations threatened to collapse. Setting aside all his dreams for the Yellow House and a studio in the Midi, he offered to go to Pont-Aven. “If Gauguin cannot pay his debts or his fare,” he wrote Theo, “why shouldn’t I go to him if we want to help him?…I lay aside all preference, either for the North or the South. Whatever plans one makes, there’s always a root of difficulty somewhere.” Only a few days later, however, his spirits rebounded when a letter arrived from Pont-Aven reporting Gauguin’s improved health and closing on an optimistic note: “While waiting to be reunited affectionately, I offer you my hand.” Vincent responded immediately, enclosing a sketch of his latest calling card for the Midi, La mousmé. But when weeks passed without another word—a form of torment by silence that Vincent knew well—his spirits sank again.
And so it went. Every surge of hope was followed by new obstacles, as Gauguin weighed his options and maneuvered to gain maximum advantage from the brothers’ invitation. To Vincent, he sent complaints about his isolation in Brittany. “The band of boors who are here find me completely insane,” he wrote, echoing back Vincent’s defiant alienation, “and that pleases me because it proves that I am not.” To Theo (whom he addressed with a mispelling, “Monsieur Van Gog”), he bewailed his “pestering creditors” and dangled promises of imminent sales, even as he solemnly pledged to Arles: “I am a man ready for sacrifices.”
The mixed messages coming out of Pont-Aven were matched by doubts in Paris. Reading Vincent’s urgent, exhortatory missives alongside Gauguin’s cool, tactical communiqués, Theo began to have second thoughts. The Frenchman was already taken aback by Vincent’s “intimidating” letters and lavish praise. Were his brother’s expectations too high? Would these two very different artists prove incompatible? Would his brother’s overweening ardor collide with Gauguin’s subtle self-advancement?
When these concerns inevitably leaked to Arles, Vincent reversed course completely. After months of mercenary frenzy, he disavowed any expectations of commercial success for the combination with Gauguin and offered up extravagant sermons on the folly of ambition and the perils of fame. The “treacherous public” would never warm to the “austere talent” of painters like Gauguin and himself, Vincent wrote, “[for] it likes only easy, pretty things.” To expect more from his art than “eternal poverty,” “social isolation,” and a “siege of failure” would only be to invite misery, he professed. “I neither care about success for myself nor about happiness,” he assured Theo, recanting his earlier excitement over Geffroy’s expression of interest in his work. “What I do care about is the permanence of this vigorous attempt by the impressionists.”
In mid-August, Vincent’s worst fears seemed realized when Gauguin, ever vigilant for advantage, signaled that he might go to Paris instead of coming south. “Gauguin is hoping for success and cannot do without Paris,” Vincent wrote despairingly. “He would feel that he was doing nothing if he were [here].” Only a few days later, a letter arrived from Bernard reporting on his visit with Gauguin in Pont-Aven. The letter included “not one syllable about Gauguin intending to join me,” Vincent wrote in anguish, “and not a syllable either about wanting me to come there.”
The ups and downs of these triangle negotiations cast Vincent into a perdition of anxiety. With every delay from Pont-Aven and every reservation from Paris, he felt his dreams of an artistic Paradou slip further from his grasp. Always one to see conspiracy instead of confusion, he sank deeper and deeper into rancor and depression—a state compounded by continued silence from Russell; perceived slights from MacKnight; more frustrations over models; another round of guilty spending; the resurfacing of old debts in Paris; and his reading of L’année terrible (The Terrible Year), Hugo’s pitilessly depressing account of the Paris Commune. He quieted his fears with long, arduous days in the blazing summer sun; endless cups of coffee, sometimes laced with rum; and dreamy evenings of absinthe—even more popular in Arles than in Paris. “If I thought about, if I dwelled on the disastrous possibilities,” he wrote, “I could do nothing, [so] I throw myself headlong into my work with abandon … If the storm within roars too loudly, I take a glass too many to stun myself.” He punished himself with the usual exertion and starvation. He cut off his beard and shaved his head.
The months of uncertainty roiled his sleep, upended his stomach, and jangled his already frail nerves. “It has cost me a carcass pretty well destroyed,” he admitted to Theo in an unguarded moment, and “my mind pretty well cracked.” His sole occasional companion, the lieutenant Milliet, described Vincent as racked by mood shifts as wild as the mistral: one minute seized by “hotheaded” fits of anger (“when he was mad, he seemed crazy”); the next, by “exaggerated sensitivity” (“sometimes reacting like a woman”). His letters skidded from exuberance to anger to resignation. He continued to wage furious battles against every objection and impediment even as his confidence collapsed in gasps of despair: “All that one hopes for, independence through work, influence on others, all comes to nothing,” he cried, “nothing at all.” He dolefully tallied the amount Theo had sent him over the years (“15,000 francs”) and joked blackly that the money might have been better spent buying other artists’ work. In a feisty moment, he blamed his plight not on Gauguin but on “an ungrateful planet”—“the worm-eaten official tradition” that left all avant-garde artists “isolated, poor, [and] treated like madmen.”
In a spasm of optimism, he tacked up thirty of his canvases in the Yellow House, treating himself to an exhibition of his own work while he waited for the paint to dry so he could send them to Paris. “We have gone too far to turn back,” he cheered his brother unconvincingly. “[I] swear to you that my painting will improve. Because I have nothing left but that.” In bleaker moods, he saw the inescapable hand of fate—“[Perhaps] the hope of doing better is rather a fata morgana, too”—and acknowledged the cost of resisting it. “I do not feel I have strength enough left to go on like this for long.… I am going to pieces and killing myself.” Still, he choked on the prospect of yet another failure. “You see that I have found my work,” he wrote his sister and confidante, Wil:
and you see too that I have not found all the rest that belongs to life. And the future? Either I shall become wholly indifferent to all that does not belong to the work of painting, or … I dare not expatiate on the theme.
But no act of will could prevent his thoughts from slipping into darker realms. With increasing frequency, he referred to himself as “mad” or “cracked” or “crazy”—sometimes in self-conscious jest, sometimes in deadly earnest. Being treated like a madman, he warned pointedly, can lead to “actually becoming so.” Even after shaving his head, he looked in the mirror and saw the sunken cheeks and “stunned” expression of Hugo van der Goes, the “mad painter” famously depicted by Émile Wauters as hirsute, wild-eyed, and clutching himself—an image of artistic torment that had haunted Vincent’s imagination since before he became an artist.
These demons were already loose in his head when word arrived at the end of July that Uncle Cent had died. At the age of sixty-eight, the venerable dealer had finally succumbed, outlasting all but one of his brothers despite decades of ill health. Although alerted in advance to Cent’s imminent demise, Vincent took the news like a hammer blow. All the ghosts of Holland descended on the stalemate with Gauguin. His letters filled up with long ruminations on death and mortality—surrogates for past mistakes, lost opportunities, and imminent failure.
Infuriated by Wil’s report that the unyielding Cent had died in “peace and calm,” he dismissed his uncle’s—and his father’s—comforting certainty of an afterlife as nothing more than the vanity of old women. But the possibility of an unforgiving void terrified him. To fill it, he threw up a teetering edifice of speculation on the possibility of other, “invisible” worlds. Combining his call for a rebirth of modern art with his unmet need for personal re
demption—now further foreclosed by Cent’s death—he wondered if there might be “another hemisphere” of life where artists were recognized for themselves, not just for their sales; where the burden of guilt was lifted; the sins of the past, forgiven. “It would be so simple,” he imagined, “and would account so much for the terrible things in life, which now amaze and wound us so.”
He took long walks at night, peering into the sky and pondering the new reports of distant planets and unseen worlds, imagining a paradise that he seemed unable to make in his own world. “I always feel I am a traveler,” he wrote, “going somewhere and to some destination. If I tell myself that the somewhere and the destination do not exist, that seems to me very reasonable and likely enough.” He compared life to “a one-way journey in a train”: “You go fast, but cannot distinguish any object very close up, and above all you do not see the engine.”
Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is this: that while we are alive we cannot get to a star, any more than when we are dead we can take the train.
Caught in a maelstrom of dark musings, Vincent grasped for the only sure consolation he knew. On a large canvas, he sketched out a familiar image more comforting than any promise of paradise: a sower. The idea came to him during his work on harvest paintings in the Crau. It came as a vision, not as a vignette. In June, the fields were filled with reaping, not sowing, which would not start until the fall. Like his views of the Langlois Bridge, it sprang from a deep, burning nostalgia. “I am still enchanted by snatches of the past,” he wrote at its conception, “and have a hankering after the eternal, of which the sower and the sheaf of corn are the symbols.”
With no one to pose, he was forced to rely on his memory of Millet’s iconic version of the subject, which he had seen only as a print and, briefly, in a pastel rendering. But no matter. The image of the proud, striding figure with the sack of seeds slung over his shoulder and his arm outstretched had haunted him with hope since the depths of the Borinage. In the years since—in Etten, in The Hague, in Drenthe, in Nuenen—he had tried again and again to express the promise of redemption through persistence that his father preached, that Millet gave form, and that all the heroes of his imagination, from Eliot to Zola, confirmed. But every attempt had failed. “I have been longing to do a sower for such a long time,” he lamented as he watched the harvest finish in Arles, “but [it] never comes off. And so I am almost afraid of it.”
He attacked and retreated from the harrowing image in a struggle as furious and fraught as the parallel struggle with Gauguin and Theo over the future of the Yellow House. The battleground canvas recorded every surge and every rout of confidence. It began, like The Boats at Saintes-Maries, as another affirmation of the new Cloisonnist gospel, as he described to Bernard: in the foreground, “a definite purple” of plowed earth; at the horizon, a line of ripe wheat of “yellow ochre with a little carmine”; a giant sun in a sky “chrome yellow, almost as bright as the sun itself”; and a single sower in “blue smock and white trousers.” Only a week later, his hopes for the image had spiraled upward toward something “done completely differently.” Invoking the older complementary gospels of Blanc and Chevreul, and their messiah, Delacroix, he imagined painting his sower just as Delacroix had painted Christ on the Sea of Galilee: an icon of calm in the storm, of serenity in rejection, of reincarnation through suffering. “I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken,” he struggled to explain, “and therefore utterly heartbreaking.”
He thrust himself deeper into the image with a vision of Christ as a “great artist” who spread the light-filled art of redemption just as the striding figure in the field spread the seeds of rebirth. “What a sower,” he exclaimed, “what a harvest!” Around the same time, he painted a strange, impossible self-portrait depicting himself “on the sunny road to Tarascon”—the path to eternity—striding confidently and shouldering his load of sketchpads, canvases, pens, and brushes: the seeds of his new faith. “I consider making studies like sowing,” he once said, “[and] I long for a harvest time.”
Driven by such metaphysical ambitions, Vincent worked and reworked the simple image he described to Bernard. Channeling all his frustrations with the present and expectations for the future, he cast and recast the pose of the lone sower, bringing it more into line with his memory of Millet’s talismanic figure. He layered and relayered the canvas with new colors, dashing green into the yellow sky to brighten the sun and accent its radiations; adding orange into the purple field, laying on thick shingles of paint in a votive obsession of Impressionist brushwork. He claimed for all these worried reworkings the same mandate he claimed for his worried dreams of the Yellow House: Corot’s deathbed summons to a deeper truth. “I couldn’t care less what the colors are in reality,” he boasted to Bernard, as long as they satisfied his “hankering after the eternal.”
Sower with Setting Sun, AUGUST 1888, REED PEN AND INK ON PAPER, 9⅝ × 12⅝ IN. (Illustration credit 31.7)
But the image continued to confound him. He dismissed the result of all his hard work as merely an “exaggerated study”—yet another seed that failed to take root. He set it aside in his studio, “hardly daring to think about it.” But it continued to “torment” him, he confessed, “making me wonder if I shouldn’t attack it seriously and make a tremendous picture of it. My Lord I want to. But I keep asking myself if I have vigor enough to carry it off.” In letters to Theo, he taunted himself with his own cowardice: “Could one paint the Sower in color … yes or no? Why, yes. Well, do it then.” Finally, with a great heave of frustration, he consigned the image to the same uncertain fate as his dream for the Yellow House. “There is certainly a picture of this kind to be painted of this splendid subject,” he wrote, “and I hope it will be done someday, either by me or by someone else.”
IN MID-AUGUST, the terms of Uncle Cent’s will were revealed. As expected, the old man left his impoverished nephew Vincent not a cent. Indeed, he had taken the opportunity to lash out one last time at his ne’er-do-well namesake. Even as he lavished large sums on family retainers and distant relatives, he disinherited Vincent not once, but twice. And not by discreet omission. “I want to make the clear statement that it is my intention that Vincent Willem van Gogh, oldest son of my brother Theodorus van Gogh, will have no share of my estate,” he scolded from the grave. Elsewhere, he excluded Vincent “and his progeny”—a spitting expression of the family’s undying suspicion that Vincent had fathered Sien’s infant son.
But he had also left special bequests to both Theo and his mother, as well as more than a quarter of his sizable estate to Dorus’s children upon the death of Cent’s wife Cornelia. The double legacy relieved Theo of both current and future financial burdens. But it also left him with a great weight of guilt. “It’s a pity,” he wrote to his mother on behalf of his rejected brother. (Anna was unmoved.) Within days, he wrote both Vincent and Gauguin promising to use Cent’s legacy to “carry out [their] combination.” He offered Gauguin the same favorable terms he had long provided his brother: a monthly stipend of one hundred and fifty francs in exchange for twelve paintings a year. He would also pay Gauguin’s debts and travel expenses. Only a few days later, a letter arrived in Arles. “I have had a note from Gauguin,” Vincent reported ecstatically. “He is quite ready to come South as soon as the opportunity arises.”
By the twisted, hidden currents of Van Gogh family hearts, the unforgiving old dealer had thrown a lifeline to Vincent’s most improbable bid for rehabilitation, and brought him within sight of his Paradou.
CHAPTER 32
The Sunflower and the Oleander
THE PETALS CAME LAST. WITH A FULL BRUSH AND A TURN OF THE WRIST, he applied the twisting yellow and orange strokes one at a time, one after the other. The pan-sized composite flowers, with their sunburst aureoles of ray flor
ets and densely packed centers of multihued disc florets, opened the floodgates of Vincent’s fevered imagination and manic brush. At their last blooming, a year before in Paris, he had brooded obsessively over the details of these giant flowers listing on their rigid stalks. But now, in Arles, on the eve of Gauguin’s arrival, he saw only extravagant form and brilliant color.
Against a background of the most intense turquoise—a hue pitched perfectly between acid green and sublime blue—he sketched three huge flower heads. In a squall of tiny strokes, he transformed their spiraled discs into color wheels of complementaries: dashes of lavender for the yellow petals, cobalt for the orange. A slashing sortie draped a great floppy leaf over a lime-green vase, glazed and glistening in the bright light of his new studio. Another sortie, another leaf. He jabbed at the tabletop in a blaze of reds and oranges and then polished it with glancing strokes in every color on his palette.
He painted the way he talked: thrust and parry, assault and retreat. Barrages of brushwork swept across the canvas again and again, like summer storms. Furious exhortations of paint, as intense as fireworks, were followed by wary, ruminating reassessments as he recoiled from the image, arms folded, plotting his next volley. Then, just as suddenly, his brush would dart to his palette, dabbing and stirring, dabbing and stirring, searching for a new color; then rush to the canvas, bursting with new arguments and fresh fervor. “[He] became a fanatic as soon as he touched a paint brush,” recalled the Zouave Milliet disapprovingly. “A canvas needs to be seduced; but Van Gogh, he, he raped it.” Another witness described how Vincent attacked the canvas with both paint and words—muttering and sputtering, coaxing and cajoling, bullying and railing—giving voice to his arguments even as his hand gave them form, texture, and color.
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