Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  60. In a letter to Theo in 1882, from The Hague, Vincent quoted a maxim from his hero Millet: “Il m’a toujours semblé que le suicide était une action de malhonnête homme.” (It has always seemed to me that suicide was the deed of a dishonest man.) BVG 212, 7/6/1882 (JLB 244, 7/6/1882). See chapter 15.

  61. Doiteau, p. 57.

  62. Gaston Secrétan died in 1943.

  63. “Vitus en vitesse” from the Lune Rousse of 1927, http://100ansderadio.free.fr/HistoiredelaRadio/Radio-Vitus/RadioVitus-20.html.

  64. “Il est charmant” (1932), “Avec le sourire” (1936), “L’habit vert” (1937), and “La fin du jour” (1939), http://www.omdb.si/index.php/ooseba/?i=636527.

  65. Doiteau, pp. 57–58. p. 22. See chapter 42.

  66. Doiteau, p. 57.

  67. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 57.

  68. Doiteau, p. 47.

  69. Referring apparently to a swim in the river, René told Doiteau: “We left [the gun] on the spot with all our fishing stuff, haversacks … and even our trousers … as fate would have it, the day Van Gogh used it, it worked” (p. 46).

  70. Dr. Paul Gachet to Theo, 7/27/1890, quoted in Distel and Stein, Cézanne to Van Gogh (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999): The Collection of Doctor Gachet, p. 265. Also see Bonger, Memoir, p. lii, in BVG. See chapter 43.

  71. “With the greatest regret I must disturb your repose. Yet I think it my duty to write to you immediately … I was sent for by your brother Vincent, who wanted to see me at once. I went there [to the Ravoux Inn] and found him very ill. He has wounded himself.” Quoted in BVG, p. lii.

  72. “[Vincent] is indeed very ill. I shan’t go into detail, it’s all too distressing, but I should warn you, dearest, that his life could be in danger.” b2066 V/1982, “Gogh, Theo van” to “Gogh-Bonger, Jo van,” 7/28/1890, in A Brief Happiness, edited by Leo Jansen and Jan Robert (Zwolle: Waanders, 1999), p. 269.

  73. b2066 V/1982, “Gogh, Theo van” to “Gogh-Bonger, Jo van,” 7/28/1890, in Jansen and Robert, p. 269. This may have been Theo trying to protect the young mother Jo from the traumatic truth—or the family name from yet another embarrassment. But his report of Vincent’s state is more convincing (and sounds more like Vincent) than the cliché of a bungled suicide already circulating on the streets of Auvers.

  74. Vincent had left discarded drafts and torn fragments of letters that he clearly never intended Theo to read among the papers on his desk. See chapter 42.

  75. See chapter 42.

  76. Tralbaut, pp. 337–40.

  77. “Ought I to have despaired then, jumped into the water or something? God forbid—I should have if I had been a wicked man” (BVG 193). See chapter 43.

  78. Ibid. See chapter 43.

  79. BVG 212 (7/6/1882). See note 60 above. See chapter 15.

  80. Ibid. See chapter 15.

  81. BVG 337 (10/31/1883). See Chapter 43.

  82. Despite several posthumous efforts to put a gun in Vincent’s hands prior to his death—by A. S. A. Hartrick in A Painter’s Pilgrimage Through Fifty Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), p. 42, and Paul Gauguin in Intimate Journals (Avant et après), translated by Van Wyck Brooks (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1963), pp. 126–27, as well as by the Gachets (see n. 93 below)—Vincent made his ignorance of (and disdain for) firearms clear in a letter from Saint-Rémy: “I ought to have defended my studio better,…Others would have used a revolver in my place” (BVG 605; c. Sept. 1889). See chapter 43.

  83. See note 48 above.

  84. See chapter 43.

  85. In Arles, Vincent defied the neighbors’ petition to commit him to an asylum by telling the city’s mayor that he was “quite prepared to chuck myself into the water if that would please these good folk once and for all.” See chapter 38.

  86. See chapter 41.

  87. Quoted in Pickvance, p. 216. Inevitably, Bernard’s story to Aurier heavily plays up the drama of the suicide. Before he died, Bernard wrote, Vincent had said that “his suicide was absolutely calculated and lucid” and had expressed “his desire to die.” Indeed, in an especially dramatic gesture, Vincent had threatened to “do it over again” if he recovered from his wound, according to Bernard. In Bernard, in Stein, pp. 219–20. This irresistible red herring was picked up by subsequent chroniclers such as Tralbaut (p. 328): “Gachet told [Vincent] that he still hoped to cure him. Vincent at once replied: I will do it all over again” (emphasis in original).

  88. In his account to Aurier, Bernard gave his version of the incident a twist of Christian martyrdom: “From the violence of the impact (the bullet passed under the heart) [Van Gogh] fell, but he got up and fell again three times and then returned to the inn where he lived … without saying anything to anyone about his injury.” Bernard, in Stein, p. 220. See chapter 43. For Bernard’s similarly bogus Christian gloss on the story of the ear incident in Arles, see chapter 41.

  89. R. R. Ross and H. B. McKay, Self-Mutilation (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1979). According to Ross and McKay, “There is in the action of the self-mutilator seldom an intent to die and often very little risk of dying. Although a self-mutilator could engender his own death by his behavior, in the vast majority of cases, this does not happen. His behavior is actually counter-intentional to suicide rather than suicidal” (p. 15). See also the important discussion of the issue in Barent W. Walsh and Paul M. Rosen, Self-Mutilation: Theory, Research, and Treatment (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1988), pp. 3–53. Walsh and Rosen argue, “The similarities between suicide and self-mutilation can be deceiving. Both forms of behavior are self-directed, and both result in concrete physical harm. Nonetheless, when the behaviors are analyzed using the framework of Shneidman’s 10 commonalities, it is evident that the behaviors are different in many facets, and in several ways are even opposites” (p. 51).

  90. Tralbaut, p. 335. See chapter 43.

  91. See Tralbaut, p. 333.

  92. Even Bernard’s melodramatic account acknowledges as much: “The innkeeper told us all the details of the accident,” he wrote to Aurier (b6918 V/1996, “Bernard, Émile” to “Aurier, Albert,” in Bernard, in Stein, pp. 219–20).

  93. In “La curieuse figure de Docteur Gachet” (“The Curious Case of Doctor Gachet”) (pp. 278–79), Doiteau reports a later story circulated by the doctor’s son, Paul, in 1957 that Vincent had threatened his father with a pistol after an argument over an unframed painting in the doctor’s collection. We dismiss this as an audaciously inventive attempt to connect this argument to Vincent’s death, by gunshot wound, shortly afterward. See chapter 42.

  94. In the asylum at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, Vincent reported dropping many of his prints into oil or paint, or spilling on them, thus ruining some of his favorites. See chapter 40.

  95. In a study of 464 suicides by firearm, Di Maio found that only eight (2 percent) of the suicidal handgun wounds were in the chest or abdomen. Vincent J. M. Di Maio, Gunshot Wounds: Practical Aspects of Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Technique (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 1999), chapter 14 (see Table 14.1), p. 358.

  96. “You reached [the wheat field] by climbing a rather steep slope shaded by big trees.” Carrié-Ravoux, in Stein, p. 215.

  97. Paul Gachet, quoted in Doiteau and Leroy, pp. 169–92, quoted in Tralbaut, p. 327. See chapter 43.

  98. “Allez me chercher le docteur … je me suis blessé dans les champs…je me suis tiré un coup de revolver là.” “Hirschig, A. M.” to “Bredius, Dr., A.,” 8/1911, b3023V/1983, partly published in Jan van Crimpen, “Friends Remember Vincent in 1912,” p. 86. In assessing Hirschig’s recollections, one has to allow for his notoriously poor French, described by Adeline Ravoux as “laughable” (Carrié-Ravoux, in Stein, pp. 211–12), and for Adeline’s contrary account, that Vincent said nothing when he entered the inn that night (ibid.).

  99. “Hirschig, [A. M.]” to “Bredius, Dr. A.,” published in Oud-Holland in 1934, quoted in Tralbaut, p. 328.

  100. Compare the three very different accoun
ts Adeline gave of the same event (Vincent’s return to the Ravoux Inn after the shooting) in the following sources: (1) Maximilien Gauthier, “La femme en bleu nous parle de l’homme à l’oreille coupée” [“The Woman in Blue Speaks to Us of the Man with the Severed Ear”], in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, April 16, 1953; (2) Carrié-Ravoux, in Stein, pp. 211–19; and (3) Tralbaut, pp. 325–26.

  101. Carrié-Ravoux, in Stein, p. 214.

  102. Adeline claimed to have been present at only “a majority” of the events she related. “Obviously,” she told one interviewer, “I did not witness the agony of Van Gogh.” Carrié-Ravoux, in Stein, p. 215. Hearsay evidence is generally considered unreliable in courts of law and therefore inadmissible. There are exceptions to this rule, such as deathbed statements and declarations against interest, but we do not believe that any of these exceptions apply to Adeline’s accounts where they involve hearsay. An example is her account of the police interview with Vincent. Despite offering a word-for-word reconstruction of the interview, she does not claim to have been present in the room, and it is unlikely that, as a thirteen-year-old girl, she would have been invited to attend.

  103. For example, in her first (1953) account, Adeline said that Vincent entered the inn and went up to his room “without saying a word.” In her second (1956) account, she recalled that Vincent had a brief exchange with her mother on his way upstairs. In her third (1960s) account, she added this dramatic interlude to Vincent’s passage to his room: “He leant for a few minutes against the billiard table in order not to lose his balance, and replied in a low voice: ‘Oh nothing, I am wounded.’ ” Another example: In Adeline’s first account, her father first hears the sound of moaning coming from Vincent’s room. In a later account, it is Adeline herself who first hears Vincent’s moans and summons her father to his aid.

  104. Adeline filled her various accounts with examples of her father’s kindness, attentiveness, and especially his protectiveness toward the painter during his final agony. For example: When the police came to question Vincent about the shooting, her father “preceded the officers into the room [and] explained to Vincent that French law prescribed in such cases an investigation, which the officers were coming to make.” When the gendarme spoke to Vincent “in an unpleasant tone,” her father “begged him to soften his manner.”

  105. In her first (1953) interview, Adeline gave only a brief summary of the interview that the police conducted with Vincent as part of their investigation into the shooting. In her second (1956) interview, however, she quoted the participants in lengthy word-for-word exchanges.

  106. According to Adeline’s first (1953) account, her father went to Vincent’s room and found him wounded, at which point “[Vincent] showed him his wound and said that, this time, he really hoped he hadn’t missed.” In her second (1956) account, she gave the two men this extended interaction: “ ‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked Father. ‘Are you sick?’ Vincent then lifted his shirt and showed him a small wound in the area of the heart. Father exclaimed, ‘You poor man, what did you do?’ ‘I wanted to kill myself,’ answered Van Gogh.” By the time of her third and final account (1960s), this exchange had grown into a complete dramatic scene: “The door was not locked, and my father went in and saw Monsieur Vincent lying on his narrow iron bedstead with his face turned to the wall. My father gently asked him to come and eat downstairs. There was no answer. ‘What is the matter with you?’ my father went on. Then Monsieur Vincent turned carefully over towards my father. Look…he began, and taking his hand he showed him the place on his body at the bottom of his chest where there was a small bleeding hole. Once again my father asked: ‘But what have you done?’ And this time Monsieur Vincent replied: ‘I shot myself … I only hope I haven’t botched it.’ ”

  107. For example, in her second (1956) account, Adeline added the detail that Vincent fainted when the gun went off, apparently in order to explain why, if he intended suicide, he did not take a second shot. By the time he regained consciousness, night had fallen and he could not find the gun in the darkness—although he did make a search “on all fours,” she clarified, still hoping to “finish himself off.”

  108. Tralbaut, pp. 325–26.

  109. In subsequent interviews, Adeline explained why her father’s connection to the gun had not come out before, first by saying that her father had simply forgotten it belonged to him (i.e., he was “so upset that he did not at once remember that he had lent his pistol to Monsieur Vincent” [quoted in Tralbaut, p. 326]), and then by saying that he had, in fact, revealed it to the police at the time (when the gendarme asked Vincent “Where did the pistol come from?” her father “hastened to explain that it was he who had lent it,” and Vincent would neither confirm nor deny this, according to her account [quoted in Tralbaut, p. 329]).

  110. In 1877, during his pastoral studies, Vincent noted with approval that the Romans believed that if a crow “landed on the head of anyone, it was a sign that heaven approved of them and blessed them” (BVG 114; 11/24/1887). For more on Vincent’s lifelong love, knowledge, and fearlessness of birds, see also chapter 3.

  111. JH2117.

  112. In the new edition of the Collected Letters, the letter in which Vincent reports having completed the painting of crows in the wheatfield (JH2117) is dated July 10, 1890 (JLB Letter 898, n. 4.). See chapter 42.

  113. Wilfred Arnold, Vincent van Gogh: Chemicals, Crises, and Creativity (Boston: Birkhaüser, 1992), p. 259.

  114. See John Rewald, Post-Impressionism from Van Gogh to Gauguin, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), p. 403, n. 35. The footnoted text appears on page 380.

  Acknowledgments

  We are profoundly grateful to our many friends at the Van Gogh Museum who welcomed us into one of the most intellectually exciting and professionally rewarding scholarly institutions in the entire world of art. No artist other than Vincent van Gogh benefits from a dedicated research institution on a scale comparable to an American presidential library. This book would not have been possible without the decades of accumulated archival work, research, and scholarship of the Museum’s extraordinary staff.

  In particular we want to thank Leo Jansen, curator and editor of the Complete Letters, who, despite a mercilessly demanding schedule, read much of this book in manuscript and pointed out mistakes of both fact and nuance. Fieke Pabst and Monique Hagemann, the Museum’s archivists, both generously shared with us their encyclopedic knowledge of Van Gogh and warmly embraced us as friends. Fieke also read the manuscript with enormous care, pointing out errors, recommending improvements, and even directing us to little-known photographs, some of which are making their first public appearance in this book. (With expert assistance such as this, it should be clear—but is worth emphasizing—that we have no one but ourselves to blame if any errors remain.) Rianne Norbart, the Museum’s director of development, offered her infectious encouragement, astute advice, and vital support at every turn. Finally, we are grateful to Axel Rüger, the Museum’s director, who extended his support and friendship from the moment he assumed the leadership of the Museum toward the end of our long project. Leo, Fieke, Monique, Rianne, and Axel were all generous enough to visit us at our home in Aiken, South Carolina (not a common tourist destination), and to extend their extremely warm hospitality during our stays in Amsterdam.

  Also at the Museum, we benefited greatly from the expertise of curators Sjraar van Heugten, Louis van Tilborgh, and Chris Stolwijk, all of them major scholars in the study of Van Gogh’s art and life. We thank them not only for sharing their scholarship but also for making us so welcome at the Museum. We will never forget the time we spent with Sjraar in the Museum’s “Vault” opening one Solander box after another filled with Vincent’s most glorious drawings. Heidi Vandamme, the Museum’s director of publicity, has also been enormously supportive of our efforts, as have Maria Smith and Femke Gutter in the Rights and Permissions Department, without whom this book would not be the rich tapestry it is.

  Hans Lui
jten and Nienke Bakker, Leo Jansen’s colleagues in the Letters Project, also deserve our profuse thanks. Van Gogh studies have been permanently transformed by their remarkable, fifteen-year-long retranslation and annotation of Van Gogh’s letters—a six-volume monument of scholarship which the Guardian rightly called “the book of the decade.” During the decade we spent writing this book, it was a source of constant consternation that we were working just ahead of their great scholarly project. Fortunately, the editors made their website available to us early and, in the last years, their work overtook ours, giving us the opportunity to take full advantage of this incredible resource in finalizing our book.

  No list of acknowledgments would be complete without a word of thanks to Theo van Gogh and his wife, Johanna Bonger. All of Van Gogh scholarship owes a vast debt of gratitude to Theo for saving so many of Vincent’s letters (and those of other family members); and to Johanna for safeguarding this treasure and undertaking the first publication and translation of Vincent’s letters. Her English translation, while not literal or scholarly, still rings with the cadences of Vincent’s Victorian voice and the authenticity of firsthand acquaintance. Jo and Theo’s son, Vincent’s godson and namesake, continued his parents’ work by generously donating the letters along with many works of art to the Dutch nation for the enjoyment and enrichment of the world.

  Several other people read the manuscript for us, and we want to express our gratitude to them as well. Marion and George Naifeh read an early draft, as did Elizabeth Toomey Seabrook. We are very grateful for their recommendations and profoundly saddened that Steve’s father, George; Greg’s parents, William and Kathryn Smith; and Liz Seabrook did not live to see their inestimable contributions come to fruition. Carol Southern, the editor of our biography of Jackson Pollock, also read the manuscript and gave it the same sage guidance that proved such a benefit to the previous book.