Neither his first sale nor the glowing art review did Vincent’s mental health any good in the long run. He would suffer another attack—whether from epilepsy or from nibbling or inhaling the paints or from depression—that spring. And perhaps, deep down inside, he felt it was time to swim upriver like a salmon—to go north to his brother Theo, whom he loved dearly, and meet Theo’s wife, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, for the first time, and see the new life in his nephew named after him, and take advantage of the pause from the attacks he expected to reappear.
Even as he was planning the journey, concerns mounted about the state of his mental health and whether it was advisable for him to leave, especially unaccompanied by anyone who could keep an eye on his fragile health. He seemed to think that he was stable enough to do so. On May 4, 1890, just before he left, Vincent wrote to his brother:
First, I categorically reject what you say that I should be accompanied throughout the journey. Once on the train I no longer run any risk, I’m not one of those who are dangerous—even supposing I have a crisis, aren’t there other passengers in the carriage, and besides, don’t they know what to do in all the stations in such a case?
You’re giving yourself worries here that weigh on me so heavily that it might directly discourage me.
I’ve just said the same thing to Mr. Peyron, and I pointed out to him that crises like the one I’ve just had have always been followed by three or four months of complete calm. I wish to take advantage of this period to move—I want to move in any event, my desire to leave here is now absolute.142
Once in Paris, he would examine the paintings from his two-year stay in Arles and Saint-Rémy, consider how to improve upon those works of art with some “touchings” or new copies, and then head outside France’s capital for the final chapter of his life.
15
Deaths of Two Brothers
Before departing for Paris, Vincent spent two weeks getting his life in order, finishing paintings, and making sure that the canvases could spend the next month in the room to dry143 before being sent after him to Paris. Van Gogh was focused again. He took with him thirty kilos of luggage,144 the French box, painting supplies, and articles of clothing.
On April 17, 1890, Vincent traveled north. He boarded the train that would travel for fifteen hours from Arles to Paris. He had ample time to decompress, and he did not worry about the reoccurrence of an attack, since he wouldn’t be alone on the train that would make several stops along the way. He reflected on what had taken place during his years in the South of France, including his one-year self-imposed exile at the asylum, and looked forward to a fresh start, a reset—as well as to meeting Jo van Gogh-Bonger, his sister-in-law, and his nephew, named after him, for the first time. The destination was important in other ways. It would be a return to a city where he was introduced to the Impressionist movement of Gauguin, Monet, Pissarro, Bernard, and other great masters.
From the rolling train, Vincent gazed out at the spring fields of green wheat and the thousands of stalks of sunflowers not yet ready to bloom, and thought about all of the art, the hundreds of paintings and sketches and drawings that he had sent by the very same railway.
When he finally arrived in Paris in the morning, he was greeted by his brother. They walked over to Theo and Jo’s new apartment at 8 Cité Pigalle and climbed up four flights of stairs.
Vincent knew he wouldn’t be staying long, as did his brother. For one, the hectic pace of city life no longer suited Vincent’s needs or mental state, as a person or as an artist. He wasn’t sociable. And whatever desire he had ever had to converse with strangers had been diminished by his year in the asylum. It was no longer people and streets that provided him with the stirring “models” from which to paint; instead, he looked outward to the countryside with its riot of bright colors. He anticipated—or feared—that his attacks in Paris might be fiercer during the extremes of heat and darkness. So Theo and his close friend, Impressionist artist Camille Pissarro, felt it would be best to send Vincent out into the country nearby to be looked after.
After arriving at the apartment, Vincent reviewed the few paintings that Theo kept in Vincent’s room, The Potato Eaters hanging in the dining room and The Orchard in Bloom in the bedroom; a number of others from The Hague, Arles, and Saint-Rémy were stashed under the bed and in the closets.145
Next, Theo took his brother to Tanguy’s shop in the Rue Clauzel. The visit was a shock for Vincent: “My paintings and those of other painters piled haphazardly. A real mess! In vain did I grumble, Tanguy opposed me his usual affable smile: ‘Where do you want me to put your paintings, Vincent! You know I lack space.’”146
The conditions he saw stressed Vincent to the point that he wanted to find a new home to store his paintings. He worried about holes and bedbugs. He must have wondered about the arrangement Theo made with Tanguy. In those stacks of paintings, Vincent’s canvases from Arles and the asylum were showing signs of accelerated aging, as well as the impacted impasto, the cracking and chafing from being rolled up and stacked on top of one another.
On the third day back in Paris, Vincent packed for the next, and last, leg of his journey: he was heading to Auvers-sur-Oise, a rural country town northwest of Paris.
Upon arrival, he met Dr. Paul Gachet. He would be the last doctor to care for Vincent, a physician who had been referred to Theo by Camille Pissarro. Old man Gachet had narrow eyes and a high, square forehead cut by a receding hairline. The odd look was emphasized by a thick, amber-highlighted mustache with a speckle of hair beneath his lower lip. The look caught Vincent’s artistic eye. But the rent to live at Dr. Gachet’s home was twice what he would end up paying across town at Auberge Ravoux, a bed-and-breakfast inn in its day. Dr. Gachet steered his patient to the quaint inn across town, saying: “daily bed and board priced at 1 franc and 2.50 francs respectively.”147
By declining Gachet’s steeper price of six francs a day, Vincent had money left over to drink, enabling a return to the mind-bending blur of absinthe that stoked his demons and bedazzled his imagination with a radiance of bright yellow colors. He was once more surrounded by the beauty of wheat fields, and he felt the desire to paint again, as he did when he first arrived at Saint-Rémy a year before.
Painting at a rapid pace—eighty paintings over his last seventy days—Vincent wrote to his mother and sister on July 14, 1890:
For my part, I’m wholly absorbed in the vast expanse of wheatfields against the hills, large as a sea, delicate yellow, delicate pale green, delicate purple of a ploughed and weeded piece of land, regularly speckled with the green of flowering potato plants, all under a sky with delicate blue, white, pink, violet tones.148
The last letter Vincent wrote to his brother Theo—less than two weeks later—had a change in tenor at the outset: “I’d perhaps like to write to you about many things, but first the desire [to paint] has passed to such a degree, then I sense the pointlessness of it.”149
Without missing a beat, Vincent wrote on discussing family issues and tidings before he moved on to Paul Gauguin’s Brittany paintings that he found “beautiful” and moving; he also added remarks on other artists. Although he admired his peers’ artwork, he spoke little about his paintings other than applying himself “to my canvases with all my attention.”150 The pointlessness he referred to might have been a sense of hopelessness that he felt begin to well up deep inside him. He must have sensed the end was near. If he did, he put on a good mask.
On a hot Sunday afternoon, July 27, 1890, right after lunch, Vincent left the inn for the field with his easel and folding stool. As the day progressed, with the suffocating heat bearing down on him, Vincent suffered attacks once more, whether from sunstroke or seizures or a bioaccumulation of toxins. Either way, the nomad artist was staring into the abyss, the great void in his life. He saw darkness. He took out a pistol he had acquired the day before and stared at the bright yellow madness of the sun as it snarled at him. His usually steady hand began to waver with the gun sitting heavy i
n his palm, his fingers wrapped around the metal stock instead of the customary wooden paintbrush. Desperate, he aimed the barrel at his chest. But when he squeezed the trigger, his trembling hand dropped, and he shot himself in the stomach instead. Struck with immense pain, but not yet dead, Vincent watched the sunset come and go. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a murder of crows disperse to the sky, scared off by the thunderbolt strike. The crows flew away just as he had imagined them scattering in a raucous flight in his last painting, Wheat Field with Crows.
By nine o’clock that evening, he staggered back to the inn. The innkeeper and his wife, Madame Ravoux, were sitting on the front porch, worried about why Vincent was late for dinner. Seeing him clutch his stomach, Mme. Ravoux asked Vincent if he was okay, and he wheezed, “No….”
The pair took van Gogh upstairs to his room, then went to fetch Dr. Gachet, who dressed the wound that night. By the next day, the innkeeper had sent a telegram to Vincent’s brother in Paris. Theo was on a train to Auvers-sur-Oise later that morning to see his dying brother one last time.
By his bedside, Theo urged his brother to live, strive on, not to give up. But for Vincent, there was no turning back, no more heading down to the wheat fields to paint, no more sunsets or sunrises, no more handshakes or letters to write, no more absinthe to mute his pain, no more nightmares or attacks. No more hopelessness.
Vincent rebuffed his brother’s pleas, stating, “The sadness will last forever.”
He then fell into a coma. At 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday night, July 29, 1890, Vincent van Gogh was pronounced dead by the innkeeper. By the next day, word had spread. Many of his fellow artists came to Auvers to join the funeral procession.
The death of Vincent was a cold blade plunged into Theo’s heart.
The younger brother, whose own health had been failing for years, must have felt his own mortality and been shaken by it. Theo had contracted syphilis a few years before his marriage to Jo Bonger; the disease must have gnawed at his mind. The death of Vincent more than wounded Theo’s heart—it had to be a psychological and physical blow as well. Suffering and aware of his coming demise, he knew time was short.
16
Widow’s Intuition
With news of Vincent’s death reaching the studios and the Salon in Paris, prominent members of the French art world, including the young Post-Impressionist Emile Bernard, art critic Albert Aurier, artist Tom Hirschig, and Andries Bonger, among others, met with Theo van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise on July 30, 1890, to attend the funeral. (The Salon was the greatest annual art event in Europe, dating back more than 150 years. It was Paris’s official art exhibition, the exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.)
The innkeeper Adeline Ravoux, in her memoir of Vincent van Gogh, recalled: “The house was in mourning as if for the death of one of our own. The door of the café remained opened but the shutters were closed in front. In the afternoon, after the bier was set out, the body was brought down to ‘the painter’s room.’”151
Vincent was lying in the coffin. Albert Aurier wrote of the scene:
On the walls of the café where the body lay all his last canvases were nailed, forming a sort of halo around him, and rendering his death all the more painful to the artists who were present by the splendor of the genius which radiated from them.152
Emile Bernard painted the funeral scene of men dressed in black suits. Dr. Paul Gachet was heartbroken, as was the sobbing Theo. They interred Vincent with his painter’s easel, folding stool, and paintbrushes, which were placed into the grave before the coffin.
Though much was lost that day, there was also something gained as Andries Bonger met one of Vincent’s old and influential friends, Emile Bernard, at the funeral. Andries was not just a relative of van Gogh. He was also an art collector. Soon he would be tasked with creating the catalogue des oeuvres of van Gogh, which would include the paintings that Theo cared for in France.
When the funeral was over, Theo removed all of Vincent’s paintings from his lodgings and sent them back to Paris. Before he could inventory the hundreds of paintings that he possessed in France—which didn’t include the ones Vincent had given away to Dr. Rey, railway postman Joseph Roulin, Dr. Paul Gachet, artists such as Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, or the ones he had sent back to their family in Holland—he was struck down by the latent, slow-acting disease of syphilis. After Theo was committed to a hospital for paralytic dementia, he quickly faded away.
Jo van Gogh-Bonger was a young widow with little money in the form of liquid assets. But she sensed she was sitting on a goldmine; she just had to wait for the day the market for French Impressionism paintings took off. Since her brother Andries was an art collector and knew the Paris art scene well, and had also worked in the insurance field, he would be a good accountant for putting together a ledger, an inventory of all van Gogh paintings stored in her apartment and in Tanguy’s shop and house. All those were owned by the van Gogh-Bonger families in France.
Together they would create the Catalogue des Oeuvres de Vincent Van Gogh. In the ledger marked by Andries’s handwriting, they ended up listing 364 paintings.153 Many were portraits of Vincent, some were copies of several studies, and others, like the Millets, “translations” (“copies”); for these, Andries used the same number over and over, so the original number was 308 and would evolve to 364. That catalogue, published in 1891, would become known as the Andries Bonger List—or A. B. List.154
There is a striking absence in the A. B. List. Nowhere is there any mention of the Champs de blé avec Cyprès—Wheat Field with Cypresses. Nowhere in the ledger book could one find Vincent’s stirring landscape study that he had begun in June 1889 at Saint-Rémy, with a drawing, and finished in September, after taking most of the summer off because he was overwhelmed by his maladies and the heat. One of Vincent van Gogh’s top ten masterpieces is entirely absent from the A. B. List; there is no mention of any of the versions. Not the First version. Not the Small version. Not the Final version. In the case of the latter two versions, the absence can be explained by the paintings’ history, which will be discussed below; not so when it comes to the First version.
With the A. B. List in hand, Jo van Gogh-Bonger sensed an opportunity was awaiting her and her brother-in-law’s paintings back in the Netherlands, where art collectors would appreciate the new Dutch master. Jo, together with her brother Andries and the hordes of paintings and letters, would travel north over the border, through Belgium, and into Holland, where she would keep tight control of the exhibits, the publicity about Vincent, the consignments, and ultimately the sales of the paintings.
Before Theodorus van Gogh—named after his father—had been committed to the insane asylum in a complete collapse in October 1890, he made sure he gave his wife Jo and her brother Andries—“Dries”—strict instructions on what to do with Vincent’s massive collection of artwork, as well as his troves of letters stored in a cupboard. He insisted on the need to make and keep an inventory of the paintings, and tried to explain to her how to sell the art in the years to come.
Art dealer Theo was a great instructor; he knew exactly what to do and communicated that to his wife. Jo, for her part, was an even better listener and would become the gatekeeper to her brother-in-law’s masterworks, introducing Vincent van Gogh to the world. Ever the wise woman, she would wait for the right time to sell some of the paintings after the Impressionist new school painters’ art market took off.
She would bring a woman’s touch to selling Vincent’s “peasant genre,” a woman’s intuition to knowing whom to trust, and a woman’s patience to selling the paintings at the right time for the right price while keeping many pieces of art in the family and not flooding the market with too many van Goghs. That tactic, strategy, and execution were repeated and perfected by the auction houses of the day, driving an air of exclusivity both for the artists and their particular artwork. Jo also took meticulous care in transcribing and organizing the 850 or so letters written in French, as well as translating th
em first into Dutch, then eventually German, and, during the last decade of her life, from the 1910s to 1925, into English.
Along with Theo’s letters and others that Vincent had kept, she would publish the archival record of communications of all of the letters between Vincent, Theo, and their mother and sister, and the letters from doctors Ray and Peyron, Postmaster Joseph Roulin, and Jo herself.
Jo van Gogh-Bonger was twenty-eight years old when Theo died on January 25, 1891, in the asylum in Utrecht, Netherlands. He was clinically insane. When he died his death certificate read: “dementia paralytica.” It was thought to be caused by “heredity, chronic disease, overwork, sadness.”155
In 1914, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger would have Theo’s body exhumed from his native Dutch soil and his body sent back to Paris to be buried alongside his brother Vincent, where today their headstones sit side by side—the master artist and the art dealer brother.156
By 1914, Vincent van Gogh was one of the most famous, celebrated, and renowned artists in the world. Jo put her brother-in-law on that trajectory, an ascendancy that would continue long after she passed away in 1925.
17
Wheel Ruts in the Road
The 1890s became known as the “Gay Nineties” in America and the “Naughty Nineties” in Great Britain, the result of decadent art created by Aubrey Beardsley and playwright Oscar Wilde.157 Meanwhile, in Paris, for the Post-Impressionist new artists, it would be another hard, decade-long slog to gain exposure and sell paintings.
Initially, Vincent’s death didn’t set the world on fire in terms of art sales or name recognition. He first became a known entity in his native Holland, due to the spot-on business instincts of Johanna van Gogh-Bonger who, with the help of her brother Dries, took her infant son Vincent and “almost the entirety of Vincent’s painted and graphic oeuvre” with her north of the border.158
Breaking van Gogh Page 12