He started in the garden, just as the early spring began to fade, with two of the “greenery nooks” that Theo prized: groundscapes of swirling, uncut grass and a carpet of dandelions among the gnarled tree trunks. But as he packed up his equipment in expectation of an imminent departure, he stayed more and more in the studio and confined his bursting brush to still lifes of flowers that he cut from the asylum garden: irises and roses—the last blooms of spring. He stuffed the already-listing flowers into ceramic vessels and, in a finish-line fury of work—“like a man in a frenzy”—filled one big canvas after another with expressions of his own impetuous heart and hope for the future.
The choice of subject wasn’t just a matter of season or circumstance. His painting of irises from the previous spring had won many accolades since it first appeared at the Indépendante show in 1889—especially from his brother Theo. What more gorgeous display of gratitude could he devise—what more convincing argument for success—than these humble blossoms, misshapen but proud in their ephemeral glory? He painted them quickly, with the lavish brush and limber wrist of his serene mountain retreat. The same unique alchemy that had conjured the sunflowers of Arles—the impossible combination of urgency and care, calculation and ease (“packing seems to me more difficult than painting,” he said)—now magically transformed the irises of Saint-Rémy into amethyst constellations of purple, violet, carmine, and “pure Prussian blue.”
He painted them twice: once against the electric yellow of Arles, generating a jolt of contrast as striking as anything he had done under the Midi sun; and once against a serenity of pearly pink, glistening in the very gemlike colors and monumental forms praised by Aurier. He did the same with the roses, piling them into a simple jug until it spilled over with white blooms just barely tinged with reds and blues against a wavy background of bonze green; and then again as a towering cloud of blossoms in the tenderest pink, achingly poised against a wall of spring green, the color of new life.
By the end, only one subject remained. He had packed off his trunk and penned a farewell letter to the Ginouxs, leaving most of his furniture at the Café de la Gare as both a remembrance and a hope of return. But he held back enough canvas, paints, and brushes to keep working, and arranged to have any canvases not dry in time shipped after him. That left him alone with only a few finished paintings, which he would take as gifts, and a handful of prints. Theo had sent some of them earlier in May, at Vincent’s request, and he had already turned two into grand paintings filled with color and meaning: Delacroix’s The Good Samaritan and Rembrandt’s The Raising of Lazarus. Because nothing terrified him more than idleness, he filled his last few days in the asylum—while he negotiated with Theo over the details of his travel—painting one final “translation” into color. He picked as his model not an image of rescue, like the Samaritan; or of rebirth, like the Lazarus. He chose instead a lithograph that he himself had made in The Hague in 1882. It showed an old man sitting by a fire with his head buried in his hands, overwhelmed by the woes and futility of life. It bore the legend he had lettered himself eight years earlier as another studio and another fantasy of family collapsed around him: “At Eternity’s Gate.” After all the protestations of health and hopes for the future, after all the bouquets of praise and plans for recovery, he still could not dispel the fear or escape the past. “I think of it as a shipwreck,” he said of his southern journey.
In a mortification of despair, he painstakingly transferred the pitiful self-portrait to a big canvas and filled it with orange and blue and yellow—the colors of his shipwrecked enterprise in the Midi. “I confess to you that I leave with great grief,” he wrote his brother. “Oh, if I could have worked without this accursed disease—what things I might have done.”
CHAPTER 42
The Garden and the Wheat Field
ON MAY 16, DR. PEYRON WROTE “CURED” ON VINCENT’S ASYLUM RECORD. The next morning, his train pulled in to Paris’s grand Gare de Lyon. Theo stood on the platform to welcome him. Other than their fleeting, hazy reunion in the Arles hospital, they had not seen each other in more than two years. They took a horse-drawn cab through Haussmann’s bright limestone canyons to Theo’s new apartment at 8, Cité Pigalle. A woman waved to them from a window. It was Jo Bonger, the new Madame van Gogh. She met them at the door. It was his first glimpse of her, and hers of him. “I had expected a sick person,” she later wrote, “but here was a sturdy, broad-shouldered man, with a healthy color, a smile on his face, and a very resolute appearance.”
Inside, the apartment greeted him with a ghostly procession from the past: in the dining room, The Potato Eaters from Nuenen; in the living room, a view of the Crau and the Starry Night from Arles. In the bedroom, a Midi orchard bloomed above the bed that Theo and Jo shared. A flowering little pear tree stood watch over the lace-draped cradle where three-and-a-half-month-old Vincent lay. The brothers gazed silently at the sleeping child, Jo recalled, until tears welled up in their eyes.
In the next two days, he whisked through gallery after gallery: from a modest exhibition of Japanese prints to the grand halls of the Champs de Mars where the spring Salon was still on view. Having seen nothing but his own easel work for so long, he was overwhelmed by Puvis de Chavannes’s gigantic mural Inter artes et naturam (Between Art and Nature) with its marriage of “primitive” archaic form and modern simplicity. “When one looks at it for a long time,” he wrote in a rapture, “one gets the feeling of being present at a rebirth, total but benevolent, of all things one should have believed in, should have wished for.”
In the apartment, his paintings filled not just the walls, but the closets and drawers as well—painting after painting that he had packed up and sent off to his brother, sometimes before the paint had dried. “To the great despair of our housekeeper,” Jo wrote, “there were huge piles of unframed canvases under the bed, under the sofa, under the cupboards in the little spare room.” Pile by pile, Vincent dragged them onto the floor and into the light, studying each “with great attention,” Jo recalled. He visited the storage room at Tanguy’s, too, and reviewed the stacks of familiar images there, gathering dust along with a gallery of his fellow painters.
He had come promising a short stay, but dreaming of a long one. To allay Theo’s fear of an attack far away from medical supervision, Vincent had talked of moving on to Auvers “as soon as possible” after arriving—perhaps even leaving his luggage at the station. But secretly he imagined “a fortnight” in Paris, at least—time enough to reconnect with his beloved brother and the young family he knew only from a photograph. “What consoles me,” he had written Theo two weeks earlier, “is the great, the very great desire I have to see you again, you and your wife and child … as indeed I never cease thinking of them.”
He carried proof of that great desire on his back: a heavy load of easel, canvas, stretchers, paints, and brushes. He had plans to take his equipment into the streets—starting “the day after my arrival”—and paint all the “essentially modern subjects” of Paris that had haunted his long exile. “Yes, there is a way of seeing Paris beautiful,” he said. Then, perhaps, he would paint a portrait of Jo. Nothing could do him more good, he maintained, nothing could better protect him from the dangers of the outside world than “spending some days with you.”
But on May 20—only three days after arriving—Vincent abruptly packed his things and returned to the station. He boarded the northbound train carrying the same burdens he had brought, with a few paintings from Saint-Rémy added to the load. His paint box hadn’t been opened. He arrived in Auvers about an hour later. When the train pulled away, he was alone again. Paris had passed like a drunken revel or a dream: months of longing spent in a flash of hours. Stunned at his sudden solitude, he wrote Theo: “I hope that it will not be unpleasant to meet oneself again after a long absence.”
Just as in the past, Vincent blamed his quick departure on Paris itself. “I felt very strongly that all the noise there was not for me,” he explained after the fact f
rom Auvers. “Paris had such a bad effect on me that I thought it wise for my head’s sake to fly to the country.” But his welcome in Paris had always been uncertain, and his ambitions for the visit always conflicted. He had pleaded with Theo to “insist” that Aurier not write any more articles about his painting. “I am too overwhelmed with grief to be able to face publicity,” he wrote on the eve of leaving the asylum. “Making pictures distracts me, but if I hear them spoken of, it pains me more than he knows.” Still, he made plans to see the critic while in Paris (plans that fell through), and he despaired when neither Gauguin nor Bernard bothered to come see him, even though both were in Paris at the time.
Theo welcomed him heartily, even tearfully, but the years of sacrifice and secret illness had taken a terrible toll that Vincent saw etched in his brother’s sunken face, pale complexion, and rattling cough. (Jo later admitted her shock at how much healthier Vincent looked when the two brothers stood side by side.) Despite their years apart, Theo spent most of Vincent’s brief visit working long hours at Goupil, where a Raffaëlli show filled his mezzanine gallery and a strategy to recapture Monet as a client preoccupied his mind.
Not enough time had passed, however, to erase the stains of the past. Still feeling unwelcome at his brother’s workplace, Vincent failed to attend the Raffaëlli show or even to see Gauguin’s latest paintings from Brittany. Indeed, everything about Theo’s new life in Paris seemed to scold or exclude him: from his brother’s poor health to the piles of unsold paintings hidden away under beds and in Tanguy’s bug-infested storeroom; from the bright bourgeois apartment on Cité Pigalle (“which is certainly better than the other one,” Vincent admitted) to the Dutch that Jo insisted on speaking. Even in the baby’s colicky wails, Vincent heard the judgment of his family and his past. “I can do nothing about my disease,” he wrote guiltily from his banishment in Auvers.
I do not say that my work is good, but it’s the least bad that I can do. All the rest, relations with people, is very secondary, because I have no talent for that. I can’t help it.
WHEN VINCENT AWOKE from his three-day dream of Paris, everything had changed and nothing had changed. He could walk the streets of Auvers without an escort, but all the faces still belonged to strangers and all still eyed him with suspicion. He could buy whatever food he wanted and choose the hotel where he stayed, but Theo still had to pay the bills. “Send me some money toward the end of the week,” he wrote, already broke, the day after his arrival. “What I have will only last me till then.” In his haste, he had left Paris without arranging new “terms” with his brother, so his very first letter plunged him back into the torment of dependency. “Is it 150 francs a month,” he was forced to inquire, “paid in three installments, as before?”
In Auvers, Vincent could finally be treated by a doctor who understood artists. In his forty years of practice, Paul Gachet had tended to the afflictions, both physical and mental, of an avant-garde honor roll that included Manet, Renoir, and Cézanne, as well as Van Gogh colleagues like Pissarro and Guillaumin. But when Vincent went to see Gachet on the day of his arrival, he found the sixty-one-year-old doctor as detached and distracted as the ophthalmologist Peyron. Surrounded by a house full of cats and dogs and a yard full of fowl, the dyed-blond Gachet greeted him with complaints about the medical profession, nostrums of encouragement (“he said that I must work boldly on”), and offers of a mysterious “booster” treatment if Vincent should fall prey to depression “or anything else became too great for me to bear.” To Theo, Vincent bleakly dismissed any hope that Gachet could provide meaningful medical oversight—the hope that had drawn him to Auvers in the first place. “We must not count on Dr. Gachet at all,” he wrote. “First of all, he is sicker than I am, I think … Now when one blind man leads another blind man, don’t they both fall into the ditch?”
In Auvers, for the first time in years, Vincent could meet people at will—circulate, start fresh, without the terrible rumors that followed him everywhere in Arles. Paris lay only twenty miles over the pastoral horizon, and the cottage-lined streets bustled with cosmopolites—retired, seasonal, even weekend refugees who shared none of the superstitions or prejudices that had dogged his past ventures into the countryside. (In the summer, Auvers’s population swelled from two to three thousand.) But Vincent brought his exile with him. Despite the beautiful scenery (“There is a great deal of color here,” he wrote of the picturesque riverbank town), he laid plans to lock himself in his hotel room and redraw the Bargue Exercices yet again.
With unlimited access to pen and paper, he could write to anyone he wanted. But his mind wandered and his hand faltered. He started letters multiple times and left completed drafts unsent. With his work, too, freedom thwarted resolution. He talked hazily about painting some more “translations” of his old drawings and perhaps “working a little at the figure.” “Some pictures present themselves vaguely to my mind,” he reported listlessly, “which it will take time to get clear, but that will come bit by bit.”
In Auvers, he could finally see the night sky without looking through a barred window. But the stars still spoke of loneliness and distant loved ones. Sitting alone in his empty hotel room (his trunk had been delayed), bereft of companionship, or even attention, Vincent’s thoughts returned inexorably to the family he had left behind in Paris. “Often, very often I think of my little nephew,” he wrote only a few days after arriving.
Is he well? I take an interest in my little nephew and am anxious for his well-being. Since you were good enough to call him after me, I should like him to have a soul less unquiet than mine, which is foundering.
With this plaintive, confessional plea, Vincent began the last great campaign of his life. The days in Paris had been brief, but even the fleeting sight of his brother’s wife and child had triggered a longing that overtopped all those that preceded it. In the cell-like solitude of his Auvers hotel room, he dreamed a scheme—a final “castle in the air”—commensurate with that longing. He would bring Theo’s family to Auvers and make it his family.
The idea had formed by the time he left Paris; perhaps even before then. It was the same vision of reunion that he had shouted from the wilderness of Drenthe when he demanded that Theo—and his mistress—“join me” in a cottage on the heath to form a “family of painters.” It was the same vision that comforted him in 1887 when Theo first proposed to Jo Bonger and Vincent imagined the three of them sharing a “country house” filled with one brother’s children and the other’s paintings. With the same vision, he had beckoned Theo, in words and images, to make the Yellow House his home in the South so they could jointly foster the next generation of Impressionists.
But this time the family was real, not imaginary. Vincent had held the child in his arms only days before. It bore his name.
His first lonely days in Auvers turned that vision from a wistful dream into a driving obsession. When he first committed it to paper, in a letter addressed to Jo as well as Theo on May 24, it came out not as a plea but as an accusation. “At present it seems to me that while the child is no more than six months old yet, your milk is already drying up,” he scolded his sister-in-law. “Already—like Theo—you are too tired.… Worries are looming too large, and are too numerous, and you are sowing among thorns.” He chastised the young parents for shirking their duty to their child by staying in the city where all three were forever “on edge and worn out.” If they continued on that reckless path, Vincent warned, “I foresee that the child will suffer later on for being brought up in the city.” In short, they risked condemning their son to a life of “suffering” and “ruin”—a life, that is, like his uncle’s.
Vincent never sent that letter. No doubt deeming it too harsh and too honest, he set it aside and drafted a different, less dire invitation: “Often, very often, I think of your little one and then I start wishing he was big enough to come to the country. For it is the best system to bring them up here.” But the fire of obsession burned no less brightly in the weeks
of persuasion that followed. “Auvers is very beautiful,” he wrote, “really profoundly beautiful … decidedly very beautiful.” He called it “the real country, characteristic and picturesque … far enough from Paris to be real country … an almost lush country [with] much well-being in the air.” He compared it to Puvis’s mural of a quiet, ancient, unstained Eden—only lovingly tended like a Dutch garden, not Zola’s untamed Paradou—“no factories, but lovely greenery in abundance and well kept.”
For Jo, he promised escape from the choking air and noise of the city, less pressure on her overworked husband, more “solid nourishment,” and better health for all—especially the baby. “I honestly believe that Jo would have twice as much milk here,” he wrote. Again and again, he appealed to the mother’s duty to her young child. “I often think of you, Jo, and the little one, and I notice that the children here in the healthy open air look well.” He sympathized over the “terrible difficulty” of raising children in the city: of “keeping them safe and sound in Paris on a fourth floor.” He had heard the child’s relentless wails and seen the mother’s exasperation at what she called his “hot-headedness”: his “screaming as if someone is killing him.” All he needed, Vincent insisted, was country air, better milk, the soothing distractions of animals and flowers, and “even more, the little bustle of other children that a village has.”
For Theo, Auvers needed no introduction. The medieval town along the Oise River, a tributary of the Seine, had entered the French imagination as early as the 1850s, when Charles Daubigny anchored his studio barge at the water’s edge and began to record its archetypal charms. Fixed in the rich alluvial margin between the river and the surrounding plateau, and dependent for centuries on the fish-rich waters of the Oise, the town had grown along the riverbank like a vine, not outward onto the surrounding plateau.
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