Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  The limited palette, careful rendering, and heads-of-the-people ambition of the Trabuc portrait announced yet another front in Vincent’s campaign of work: the past. He had emerged from the summer, as he always did from attacks, “overwhelmed with memories as by an avalanche.” Haunted equally by these hallucinatory visions and by the reality of his disintegrating family, Vincent fell into a reverie of regression. He reported feeling “homesick” and “swamped by over-melancholic nostalgia.” To placate these ghosts, he immersed himself again in his scrapbook of the past: his portfolio of prints. The Delacroix Pietà and Rembrandt angel had cracked open a door, an escape hatch, into a previous obsession as consoling to him in his isolation at Saint Paul as it was in The Hague. In the first week of September, he sketched out a grand plan to transform his collection of beloved images into a studio full of color paintings. If he could not find models among the strangers that wandered about him all day, he would find them in the intimates of his musée imaginaire.

  He began where his artistic journey had begun: with Millet. A decade earlier, when he escaped from the Borinage with nothing more than an ambition to be an illustrator, he had started by copying Millet’s famous series depicting laborers in the fields, Les travaux des champs. In his little room in Cuesmes, perched on his rickety camp stool with his sketchpad on his knees, he had made copy after copy, laboring intently over the scenes of woodcutters and sheep shearers, threshers and sheaf binders. Now, once again, he reached out to Millet’s rustic icons from the depths of the black country.

  Using the skills of squaring and enlarging that he had honed on his Japanese prints in Paris, he drew a grid on the tiny black-and-white images and transferred them one by one to canvas. He lavished each with contrasting colors—mostly yellows and blues in broken tones—and flights of impasto. He varied the sizes from very small (15½ inches by 9½ inches) to very big (three feet by two feet—as big as The Bedroom), and never felt bound by Millet’s uniform proportions. He took pains to fill in backgrounds and flesh out faces.

  ADRIEN LAVIELLE AFTER JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET, The Siesta, 1873, ENGRAVING, 5⅝ × 8¾ IN. (Illustration credit 40.1)

  Within two weeks, he had finished seven of Millet’s ten figures and started an eighth. By the end of a month, he had exhausted Les travaux and moved on to engravings of other artists’ works—although he begged Theo to send him more Millet: in particular, Les quatre heures de la journée (The Four Hours of the Day). His plans stretched months into the future—to more Delacroix and more Rembrandt, and then to Doré and Daumier—until he had amassed a collection “large and complete enough to give the whole to a school,” he said. And then he would attack the world beyond prints: drawings. Millet had done drawings that never made it onto canvas, after all, and painting them “might make Millet’s work more accessible to the great general public,” he imagined. “Perhaps I would be more useful doing that than doing my own painting.”

  Vincent gave various accounts of this bizarre, bottomless, backward-looking project. At first, he attributed it to the lucky “accident” of spoiling some prints and needing replacements as decorations. (“I don’t especially like to see my own pictures in my bedroom,” he explained.) As the task grew, he cited bad weather and lack of models as reasons for continuing it. Elsewhere, he defended it as essential to his recovery. The discipline of copying ensured a “clear mind” and “sure fingers,” he told Theo. One day he described it as a drudging necessity—like his drawing in the Borinage—the only way to make up for lost time and past failures (“those ten years of unfortunate studies that didn’t come off”). But another day, he claimed for his new direction a loftier artistic purpose. Rising to the rhetorical heights and evangelical fervor of The Hague, he argued that figures, far from being relics of a past art, pointed the way to Impressionism’s future. By applying the new gospel of contrasting color to these venerated icons of the primitive, he could do for figure painting what Monet had done for landscape.

  To justify this great turn backward in his imagination, this desperate “clinging to the affections of the past,” Vincent insisted that he wasn’t just copying these images, he was “translating them into another tongue”—much the way Jo translated books from English to Dutch. Instead of simply re-creating the palette of the original, he “improvised” the color in an effort to find “the vague consonance of colors that are at least right in feeling.” Thus, the new work became “my own interpretation,” he emphasized. “Isn’t it like that in music?” he asked, piling up ever more elaborate and poetic reasons for his recherché imagery. “When a person plays Beethoven, he adds his own personal interpretation.” Is that not what Jo did when she played the piano for Theo? Painting was the same for him, he argued. “My brush goes between my fingers as a bow would on the violin, and absolutely for my own pleasure.”

  The real reason was clear enough; and Vincent eventually admitted it. “Because I am ill at present, I am trying to do something to console myself,” he wrote. “I find that it teaches me things, and above all it sometimes gives me consolation.” A decade earlier in the Borinage—the last time Theo sent him Les travaux—Vincent had climbed out of the darkness with a vision of fraternal solidarity in the “land of pictures.” Now, only a fantasy of fraternal reunion could save him. The endless reworkings of Millet were just the most visible part of that fantasy. In search of comfort, his reveries took him back to Henri Conscience, the Belgian writer beloved of both brothers, whose evocations of life on the heaths “bucked me up,” he said. He laid plans to move to a farm for a year and “live with the ordinary folk.” As in Nuenen, he would take up the “virile and complete” life that could only be lived in the country.

  Theo welcomed the return of Vincent’s peasant delusions as a sign of recovery, and encouraged them by referencing the noble miners and puddlers of another Belgian, Constantin Meunier, along with images of farmers’ daughters “as fresh as young cows” and paintings done with the “wholesomeness of brown bread.” From these strands, Vincent wove a thrilling and consoling vision. Henceforth, he would live his life in mirror parallel with his brother: the rustic trueheart to Theo’s urban sophisticate (the “wooden clogs” to Theo’s “patent-leather boots”); the artist to his merchant; the monk to his married man; the creator to his procreator. On the mystic heaths of memory, laboring every day on images that “smelled of the earth” like Millet’s peasants, he would take up the country life that he knew Theo, in his heart, longed for over the din and distraction of Paris. He would live for both of them, he imagined, experiencing the “simpler and truer nature” that they would always share—in art as well as in thought—in a place where Jo could never intrude. “Oh, my dear brother,” he wrote, “a thing like that is not felt, nor even found, by any chance comer.”

  A DECADE EARLIER, Vincent had imagined his way out of the black country with a Barbizon-like fantasy and the promise of the Rijswijk road (“two brothers … feeling, thinking and believing the same”). At the asylum of Saint Paul, his new vision of a brotherhood of the imagination—a union more perfect than any marriage—lifted him out of the darkness. By mid-September, he reported “feeling completely normal” and “eating like a horse.” In the studio, he devoured canvas, too, as image after image appeared at the asylum door, stacked to dry. He begged Theo for copious quantities of new materials and sent off bundles of paintings to signal his resurgent strength. Step by step, he ventured from the safety of the studio and returned to the outdoors, painting as he went: first to the asylum garden; then to the enclosed field outside his window; and finally, as October began, to the world beyond the wall. “I have feasted upon the air in the hills and the orchards,” he announced triumphantly.

  He arrived just in time for fall. “We are having some superb autumn days,” he wrote, “and I am taking advantage of them.” Like a sailor on shore leave after a long voyage, he spent his brush profligately on the season’s voluptuous color. He painted a pair of poplars by the road as two jets of flame shooting into a
violet sky. He painted a simple mulberry tree—not much bigger than a shrub—as an orange-and-red Medusa with leafy ringlets filling an entire canvas. He tested his hand on all the styles of the past, from the thin paint and loose fabric of Paris to the sculptural impasto of Monticelli; from swarms of Impressionist brushstrokes to plates of Japanese color. He laid on paint with the lightest possible touch—mere glances of hue—to show the falling of leaves; then loaded his brush with spades of pigment to paint the serpentine web of bare tree limbs left behind. His palette, too, flexed all the ardors of the past: from the broken tones and quiet harmonies of Nuenen, to the pastel mirages of the Grande Jatte, to the pungent yellows and fathomless blues of Arles.

  He tested his mind as well as his hand. On one of his first excursions outside the asylum walls, he ventured into an olive grove, a subject fraught with the perils of Gethsemane. He not only painted the rows of twisted trees and silvery leaves, he found someone to sit for a portrait. The hospital’s chief warden, Trabuc, lived beside the grove, and his wife, Jeanne, agreed to Vincent’s importunings. Not since Madame Roulin, the inspiration for La berceuse, had a woman modeled for him. With a confidence that seemed unthinkable only weeks before, he painted a careful likeness of her “tired, withered, sunburned face,” using a panel, not a canvas, just as Monticelli had often done.

  Before long, he ventured farther still—into the foothills of the Alpilles, where the winter wind already howled. It had been three months since that wind upended his easel and his sanity. “But never mind,” he wrote his sister Wil, “now my health is so good that the physical part of me will gain the victory.” He descended into a “very wild ravine” and somehow secured a huge canvas at the edge of the rocky stream that ran through it. He painted the looming cliffs “all in violet,” with a hardy pair of hikers making their way through the shadowy gorge. Pleased with the result, he imagined himself strong enough to do a whole series of such “stern” alpen scenes, boasting “I am more up to it.”

  Next, he trekked to the edge of the quarries, not far from the site of his collapse in July. He anchored his easel with rocks and painted a sumptuous, defiant canvas of color and light. The bright Midi sun plays off the rocks in streaks of pink and blushes of blue. Light reaches to the very back of the cave, filling it with lilac and lavender. Out of its craggy mouth, a figure strides fearlessly forward, unfazed by loneliness or vertigo.

  With every successful expedition, every safe return, every new canvas propped outside the studio to dry, the fear of another attack ebbed and his confidence surged. “I have become more master of myself,” he crowed, “my health has steadied.… I have not got soft yet.” His doctors, too, saw light at the end of the tunnel. When Peyron visited Theo in late September, he marveled that his patient seemed “absolutely healthy”—not yet ready to leave the asylum, perhaps, but clearly on that path. The good report to his brother elated Vincent and sent his own thoughts racing into the future. Theo boosted his spirits still higher with a report from Pissarro about a doctor in Auvers, a bucolic town north of Paris, who might take Vincent in when the time came. “What you say of Auvers is a very pleasant prospect,” Vincent shot back, “we must fix on that.”

  In the same letter, Theo heaped praise on the latest paintings to arrive from Saint-Rémy, the fruits of Vincent’s rehabilitation. They had, he said, “that unshakable something which nature has, even in her fiercest aspects.” He also announced the arresting news that his friend Jozef Isaäcson planned to write an article about Vincent for a Dutch art review, De Portefeuille (The Portfolio). But this was only part of a curious pattern, Theo reported. More and more often, people in Paris were approaching him and asking to view Vincent’s work. They had seen it at the fall Indépendante show, where both the first Starry Night—the one from Arles—and the Irises of May shared the walls with works by Seurat, Signac, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Or at Tanguy’s. Or they had heard that Vincent was invited to show in January with the Belgian group Les Vingt (The Twenty)—the premier showcase for avant-garde art outside Paris. Only the year before, Gauguin had been invited to exhibit there, but not Vincent.

  The good reports from both Theo and Peyron brought Vincent’s ambitions bounding back. Only a month earlier, still shadowed by the weeks of attacks, he had almost withdrawn from the Vingt show. “I’m conscious of my inferiority,” he had written then, wondering dolefully if the show’s organizers would even remember that they had asked him to participate, and, indeed, if “it might be preferable if they did forget all about me.” After months of shying away from his old comrades, he boldly wrote to both Gauguin and Bernard: chiding and cajoling, patronizing and browbeating, as if the storms of summer had never happened. “I intend to return to the charge,” he told Bernard (whom he had not written in a year). Reasserting his rightful place in the vanguard of the new art, he proposed exchanges and requested updates on both artists’ latest work. He flattered and joked and reaffirmed their shared commitment to the primitive beauty and truth of japonisme. Without revealing the demons of the summer, he vehemently warned them against using religious imagery in their work and summoned them instead to brotherly solidarity in the quest for the deeper truth—“something one has a firm faith in”—that he had found in Millet, not the Bible.

  Vincent’s new confidence also revived other, older aspirations. “If I again start trying to sell, to show, to make exchanges,” he wrote Theo, empowered by the news of exhibitions and outreach to old comrades, “perhaps I shall succeed a little in being less of a burden to you.” To prove his commercial bona fides, he immediately began a series of “autumn-effect” paintings: conventional scenes of shadowy forest canopies and tree-lined, leaf-strewn paths, all colored in muted tones and brushed with a schooled restraint. These overhead versions of the ivy-laced garden corners that Theo loved so much showed little of the imaginative freedom, extravagant brush, or spontaneous form of his Alpilles horizons or midnight visions of the summer sky. But they were salable, according to his dealer brother. “You are stronger when you paint true things,” Theo wrote in late October, singling out the “the underbrush with ivy” as a particular favorite.

  Vincent’s new pursuit of sales eventually forced him to renounce the great visions of summer. Theo’s advice also singled out the more recent Starry Night, the one painted in June, for special criticism. “The search for some style is prejudicial to the true sentiment of things,” he wrote, dismissing all such “forced” images as the product of an errant “preoccupation.” Gauguin’s recent works had shown a similar trend toward abstraction, Theo lamented, using the word to refer to any image that had no basis in reality. As a result, the entresol storeroom was filling up with Gauguin paintings “less saleable than those of last year.” Theo’s disapproval extended not just to the biblical scenes that frightened Vincent, but to all the pretentious exertions of Symbolism. “Those things that satisfy one most,” he said, “are the wholesome, true things without all that business of schools and abstract ideas.”

  Vincent not only agreed in principle (“it is better to attack things with simplicity than to seek after abstractions”), he confessed to having erred in the past with images like La berceuse and the second Starry Night, both of which he dismissed as “failures.” “I allowed myself to be led astray into reaching for stars that are too big,” he wrote, “and I have had my fill of that.” To prove to Theo his determination to do better, he immediately followed the autumn scenes with a project of far grander commercial ambitions. What Monet had done in Antibes and Gauguin in Brittany, he would now do in the South. In a vast projected series of paintings he dubbed “Impressions of Provence,” he would capture the primitive essence—“the true soil”—of the country.

  The series would include images of sunrises and sunsets; of “the olive and the fig trees, the vineyards and the cypresses”; of “the scorched fields with their delicate aroma of thyme”; and of the Alpilles set against “the sun and the blue sky”—all painted with “their full force and brilliance.” With
images such as these, he imagined, he could “disentangle the inner character” of the place using not abstraction but simplicity, not “vaguely apprehended” symbols but “feeling and love.” The scale and promise of the plan for success so possessed him that he wrote Theo’s friend Isaäcson urging him to delay his article until the new series was complete. Only then could he “feel the whole of the country,” Vincent insisted, invoking the godfather of the new art: “isn’t that what distinguishes a Cézanne from anything else?”

  He began his grand new project with another round of paintings in the olive groves. Theo had already approved the subject, and in late September Vincent had announced his intention to “do a personal impression of them, like what the sunflowers were.” Here amid the storied trees with their gnarled trunks and silvery leaves, he could both prove his strength against the demons of the past and demonstrate his allegiance to Theo’s commercial imperatives of “wholesomeness” and “true sentiment”—of art without affectation.

  Olive Grove, JUNE 1889, OIL ON CANVAS, 28⅜ × 36⅛ IN. (Illustration credit 40.2)

  One after another, Vincent painted four big canvases in the first weeks of November, each one showing the ancient groves from a different angle, at a different time of day, in a different mood: against a rising sun and a setting sun; under a yellow sky, a green sky, and a pale blue sky. He painted them with a red-and-green ground, with a blue-and-orange ground, and against a lavender-and-yellow mountain vista. He painted them with their emerald foliage flaming like the cypresses, and with their silvery underleaves sparkling like stars. He painted not with the loaded brush of Arles (Theo disapproved of his heavy impasto), but with a loose fabric of short strokes evoking the atmosphere of Seurat and the brushwork of Gauguin. In his descriptions to Theo, he stressed the roots of these images in “hard and coarse reality”—“[they] smell of the earth,” he said—not in studio calculations.