Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  Only a few roads wide, but miles long, mixing clusters of thatched houses and farm enclosures with vineyards and market gardens all along its winding length, Auvers became a model for the postcard-perfect rural utopias depicted again and again in the mania of nostalgia that accompanied the depredations of industry. Once the railroad came, the same mania brought flocks of Parisians, all looking for vestiges of the lost past. Artists like Corot, Cézanne, and Pissarro followed Daubigny in capturing these pretty, rustic scenes for broader consumption, and dealers like Theo van Gogh sold thousands of their images of picturesque cottages, country lanes, and village folk, all advertising the reparative power of country life.

  But Vincent had a more specific promise for Theo. He had left his first encounter with Dr. Gachet discouraged, even scornful. But his new vision of family changed all that. The eccentric doctor now had a critical role to play in bringing Theo to Auvers. What better enticement to his sick brother than a reputable, sympathetic, attentive (and rich) physician? Vincent immediately shelved the letter he had written dismissing Gachet (“the blind leading the blind”) and substituted a glowing account of their budding friendship. “[He] has shown me much sympathy,” Vincent wrote. “I may come to his house as often as I want.” Indeed, he had found in the dotty doctor yet another lost brother. “Father Gachet is very, yes very like you and me,” he wrote, slipping into the fraternal “we” of earlier days. “I feel that he understands us perfectly, and that he will work with you and me to the best of his power, without any reserve, for the love of art for art’s sake.”

  To prove this alluring vision to his brother, Vincent took his easel to Gachet’s big hillside house, set it in the garden amid the chickens, turkeys, and ducks, and began a portrait of the strange man who had become both his bulwark against the storms and his best chance for a family of his own. He painted him in a thoughtful pose: seated at a table with his head turned to one side and propped comfortably on his hand, as if listening to his neighbor at a dinner party. His attentive posture, open face, and big blue eyes, fretted with concern, invite confidences of both body and soul.

  DR. PAUL GACHET (Illustration credit 42.1)

  On the table in front of him, Vincent placed a glass with sprigs of foxglove, as both an emblem of Gachet’s particular devotion to homeopathic remedies and a deeper promise of nature’s curative powers. Next to the glass, Vincent painted two books, their titles carefully inscribed as a message for Theo: Germinie Lacerteux and Manette Salomon—both by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the great model for all artistic brotherhoods: one, a cautionary tale of illness and death in the city; the other, a story of salvation through art. Together, they reassured Theo that this eccentric country doctor, with his funny white cap and too-heavy-for-summer coat, fully embraced the modern world of the mind, even as he worked to cure its inevitable ills.

  The portrait of Dr. Gachet marked the opening round in a fusillade of painted arguments for Auvers. In Drenthe, Vincent had sent magazine illustrations inviting Theo to share the “stern poetry” of the heath. In Arles, he had summoned his copains to the primitive nobility of the Midi with monuments of color and light. Now, from a makeshift studio in a back room of his hotel, he dunned his brother (and Jo) with dozens of advertisements for the healthy, happy, family-friendly life that could only be found in the rural utopia of Auvers.

  In a frenzy of work that began every morning at five and often left canvases, like letters, unfinished or loosely drafted, he painted the little village all up and down its length, devoting canvas after canvas to the quaint thatch-roofed cottages that were disappearing almost everywhere else on the Continent but still spoke eloquently of a simpler, steadier time. He painted Auvers’s unique marriage of country and village. Because of its long reach, the town had no real center; houses alternated with vineyards and gardens all along its two main arteries. Nature broke in everywhere. Every house that he painted sat in its own park, enveloped in greenery—a promise that comfort and repair never lay more than steps away from any door.

  So powerful was the spell of nature in Auvers that it transformed even the new middle-class “villas,” which Vincent despised everywhere else, into “pretty country houses.” He painted them, too: stately homes with regular façades and airy banks of windows—the kind of houses rich Parisians built, bought, or rented—houses fit for a prominent art dealer and his family. As if leading his brother on a tour of the neighborhood, Vincent painted glimpses down every thoroughfare and rutted back road of Auvers. He painted the great chestnut trees on the rue Boucher, the maisons of local notables, and the winding pedestrian paths up the riverbank, all lined and shaded by flowering trees, bushes, and wildflowers.

  He climbed to the top of the high bank and showed Theo the winding Oise with its modern railroad bridge, putting Paris an easy commute away. From there, he only had to turn around to reveal the fertile plateau of the Île-de-France. The change from riverbank to plain was a dramatic one: from a sunken valley of lush verdure to an unbroken expanse of crop rows and furrows, plots and fields, as far as the eye could see. Vincent painted the sudden vista in all its Crau-like mosaic splendor. All this, he pledged in painting after painting, could be Theo’s to share.

  A magical land demanded magical inhabitants, and Vincent painted these, too: ambling the verdant paths and traffic-free streets, promenading along shaded walks with parasols or straw bonnets. Almost all were women, or girls, often in twos, leaning together in deep conversation—a promise of companionship to a Dutch girl stranded in Paris. No one in Vincent’s enchanted Auvers works. Here and there, figures tend the little gardens or vineyards outside their doors, but they never stoop or kneel or use a tool. No onerous Millet labor mars the pristine beauty of the fields above Auvers, either, even in the middle of the harvest season.

  Vincent painted one local girl posed in the midst of ripe wheat stalks. But she sits serenely in a long polka-dot dress, wearing a clean apron and a neatly knotted bow on her bonnet. Her red cheeks and full round breasts speak not of hard labor but of healthy living and wholesome milk. He painted children, too: chubby, smiling children, ensconced in nature, beaming with good health and humor. Finally, in a hint of the future, he painted a hearty young lad with a mop of Theo’s signature red-blond hair. He clenches a cornflower rakishly in his teeth: a sign—a guarantee—of robust adolescent blood.

  Like all Vincent’s reveries of reunion, however, his campaign for Auvers argued more ardently for the past than the future. The thatched cottages of his advertisements for the Oise valley looked less like those he saw on his walks in the village than like the storybook cartoons that he had drawn and painted during his nostalgic delirium in Saint-Rémy earlier that spring: his “Reminiscences of the North.” At that time, he intended to repaint all the dark images of his past, even The Potato Eaters, using the color of the South to transform them into icons for a new age. In Auvers, he resumed this project of personal redemption through artistic renovation. He filled canvas after canvas with familiar scenes of country life—as redolent of Brabant as Auvers—in the colors and forms of the new art: the luminous poppy fields of Monet, the gay riverbank of Renoir, the doux pays of Puvis. He found a modern villa that looked like the parsonage in Nuenen and painted it under the starry night sky of the Midi—exactly as he had intended to paint the Yellow House.

  Fulfilling a specific vow he made to Theo in April, he carried his easel to the Gothic church that overlooked the town of Auvers and set his brush to the most difficult task of all: repainting the forbidding church tower in Nuenen where his father lay buried. Using an even bigger canvas, he transformed the gloomy stone hulk of the past into a glass palace of color. The twelfth-century walls and buttresses spring from the wildflower-strewn grass in bright shades of violet and ocher. The busy silhouette of transept, apse, and tower plays irrepressibly against the “simple, deep, pure cobalt” sky. A slab of bright orange roof jars the rambling old building to life. Below, a sandy path “with the pink flow of sunshine” surrounds a
nd embraces it.

  As soon as it was done, Vincent pronounced a triumphant verdict on all his efforts to reimagine the past and reclaim his brother: “Once again it is nearly the same thing as the studies I did in Nuenen of the old tower and the cemetery,” he wrote, “only now the color is more expressive, more sumptuous.”

  Theo heard and saw his brother’s pleas. But, as always, Vincent demanded too much. He had begun rationally enough (only a day after leaving Paris) with a simple “I’d be very glad if some time you were to come here one Sunday with your family.” But soon his expectations had escalated to “a month of absolute rest in the country.” Next, he pressed Theo to cancel his customary three-week summer holiday in Holland and come to Auvers instead. Their mother would miss seeing the little one, he conceded, but she “would surely understand that it was really better for the baby.” Finally, he imagined “living together for years.” Theo managed, as always, to parry his brother’s wilder schemes while never dashing his hopes entirely. He didn’t write at all until early June, and even then he responded only vaguely to weeks of ardent invitation. “At some time or other I shall have to go there,” he wrote, “and I shall be pleased to lend a willing ear to your proposal to come with Jo and the little one.” He mulled the possibility of splitting the distant summer holiday (with a brief stop in Auvers on the way to Holland), but committed to nothing.

  Then suddenly, he announced a visit. After all Vincent’s exertions, it had taken only a casual invitation from Dr. Gachet, who dropped in at the Paris gallery, to make the impossible happen. “He told me that he thought you entirely recovered,” Theo reported about Gachet’s brief visit, “and that he did not see any reason for a return of your malady.” Even after accepting the invitation, however, Theo refused to “absolutely promise” until the appointed day arrived, and wouldn’t have gone at all if the weather hadn’t been clear.

  As it happened, Sunday, June 8, was a beautiful day, and Vincent spent a sublime afternoon with his brother’s little family in the Eden of Auvers. He met them at the train station clutching the gift of a bird’s nest for his four-month-old namesake. They had lunch on Gachet’s terrace overlooking the Oise. Vincent insisted on carrying the baby into the yard and thrusting him at all its feathery inhabitants “to introduce him to the animal world,” Jo recalled. The roosters, hens, and ducks scattered before him, raising an alarm that terrified the child. Vincent tried to calm him by imitating the sound of the crowing cock—“cocorico”—but that only made the baby scream louder. He took the family on a walking tour of the paradise that he had shown them so often on canvas and in dreams. Then they loaded the pram onto the train and left.

  Theo no doubt hoped the brief excursion would appease his demanding brother. But it had just the opposite effect. If anything, the fleeting visit only emboldened Vincent’s vision of a new family, together forever in the peaceful valley of the Oise. “Sunday has left me a very pleasant memory,” Vincent wrote afterward; “you must come back soon.” He immediately imagined a whole string of successive visits because “we live so much closer to each other now.” He even ventured to commit his most precious wish to words: “I should very much like you two to have a pied à terre in the country along with me.”

  As in Drenthe, Vincent strained every sinew of his imagination to make that wish come true.

  To allay Theo’s fear that the attacks could return at any time, he never missed a chance to proclaim his good health. Bolstered by Gachet’s oblivious optimism, he dismissed the previous two years as a bad dream from which he had finally awoken. “My Northern brains were oppressed by a nightmare,” he wrote, again blaming his affliction on “a malady of the South” and promising that “the return to the North will free me from it.” Indeed, “the symptoms of the disease”—especially the nightmares—had “quite disappeared,” he claimed. He wrote to Dr. Peyron as if discharging him (“I shall certainly never forget him”), and pleaded his recovery to his mother and sisters, recruiting them to his crusade for a second chance. “It makes me happy,” sister Lies wrote Theo, “that Vincent is back again in an environment of healthy minds and can enjoy life more naturally.”

  Of all those healthy minds, none impressed Theo more than Paul Gachet. “I hope you [two] will become friends,” he wrote enviously. “I should like very much to have a friend who is a doctor.” In response, Vincent sent a crescendo of boasting reports about his relations with the good doctor. “I have found a true friend in Dr. Gachet,” he wrote, “something like another brother, so much do we resemble each other physically and also mentally.”

  He claimed that Gachet showed “much sympathy” for his work and visited his little hotel studio two or three times a week “for hours to see what I am doing.” “The gentleman knows a good deal about painting,” Vincent wrote, “and he greatly likes mine.” Gachet had invited him to work in the villa garden and even to stay overnight if he wished. He took frequent meals at Gachet’s elaborate table (“four- or five-course dinners,” Vincent groaned) where he befriended the widower’s two children: sixteen-year-old Paul fils and twenty-one-year-old Marguerite. To Theo, he described his evenings at the villa as reminders of earlier, fonder times: “those family dinners which we ourselves know so well.”

  Vincent sealed this inviting tableau of family temps perdu with paintings, starting with his portrait of “père” Gachet portrayed as both healer and sympathetic paternal ear, as well as rich patron of the new art. In late June, Vincent seemed to float the possibility of an even more direct family connection with the announcement that he had done a portrait of Gachet’s daughter Marguerite. In its ambitious scale and careful rendering, the painting of a well-dressed young woman intently playing an upright piano gave rise to speculation—probably at the time and certainly later—of an unrevealed love on one side or the other.

  But Vincent painted Marguerite less as an object of desire than as a sister: an earnest, cultured piano player like his sister-in-law Jo—the perfect partner for Beethoven à quatre mains—a different but no less potent promise of family connection and enlightened urbanity in the bosom of nature. “I imagine Jo would soon be friends with her,” Vincent wrote. Only days after the portrait was done, he sent Theo a renewed invitation: “I think that it would be a good plan for you to come and stay here—with Gachet—with the little one.”

  —

  Marguerite Gachet at the Piano, JUNE 1890, OIL ON CANVAS, 40¼ × 19¾ IN. (Illustration credit 42.2)

  FOR ALL ITS ODDITIES, the Gachet house offered comfort, station, and artistic companionship—all the refinements of the city in addition to breathtaking views of the river valley. The family of Gustave Ravoux offered a different, more urgent version of the pastoral ideal. Vincent had come to Ravoux’s little inn across from the town hall because of its low price. But in his narrative of perfect retreat, the Ravouxs—recent refugees from the city—exemplified the “enormous effect of country air.” “The people at the inn here used to live in Paris, where they were constantly unwell, parents and children,” he wrote Theo pointedly. “Here they never have anything wrong with them at all.”

  Ravoux’s infant son “came when he was two months old,” Vincent reported with special gravity, “and then the mother had difficulty nursing him, whereas here everything came right almost at once.” To bolster these arguments, he painted two more portraits: one, of the Ravouxs’ thirteen-year-old daughter Adeline—pink-cheeked, ponytailed, and rendered in the deepest, most serene blues he could conjure; the other, of her young sister Germaine as a towheaded two-year-old fondling a fresh orange. “If you come with Jo and the little one,” he summed up, “you could not do better than stay at this same inn.”

  THE RAVOUX FAMILY IN FRONT OF THE RAVOUX INN (Illustration credit 42.3)

  Vincent’s portraits of the men, women, and children of Auvers sprang from the same invitation as his lavish landscapes of the Oise valley. “I am looking forward to doing the portraits of all of you in the open air,” he wrote Theo in a rapture of antic
ipation: “yours, Jo’s and the little one’s.” Like the paintings of his mother and father that he was forever imagining he would do, even in the darkest days of Drenthe and Nuenen, but never did, the unpainted portraits of his brother’s family haunted all the images from Auvers with their conspicuous absence. In a letter to Wil, Vincent explained his undying love for portraiture in words that spoke with equal poignance of striving for artistic perfection and longing for human connection:

  What impassions me most—much, much more than all the rest of my métier—is the portrait, the modern portrait.… I would like to paint portraits which would appear after a century to people living then as apparitions. By which I mean that I do not endeavor to achieve this by a photographic resemblance, but by means of our impassioned expressions —that is to say, using our knowledge of and our modern taste for color as a means of arriving at the expression and intensification of character.

  The portraits that increasingly lined Vincent’s studio also announced his reborn ambitions to commercial success—without which no vision of paradise was complete. “In order to get some clients for portraits,” he wrote in early June, “one must be able to show different ones that one has done. That is the only possibility I see of selling anything.” Over the next month, while he labored relentlessly on his slideshow of rural utopia, he signaled his commercial determination by painting flowers (always sure sellers); planning a café exhibition in Paris; writing sales pitches to critics; imagining forays into new media, like posters and prints; and negotiating complex exchanges of his works (both for other artists’ paintings and for services rendered). But he never stopped clinging to the delusion that had gripped him since Antwerp: that he could make money doing what he loved most—portraits.