by Ted Morgan
In 1947, French art critic and playwright Antonin Artaud, whose life had been a struggle between the sometimes conflicting and sometimes allied forces of madness and artistic expression, published a slim volume about a kindred spirit. It was entitled Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société. The tone of the book is one of barely controlled fury, and it seemed to derive from Artaud’s identification with the dead painter. Both men had suffered from sporadic attacks of mental illness and had been committed to institutions for the insane, Van Gogh voluntarily for about a year, Artaud against his will for nine years. Using Van Gogh’s case as an example, Artaud announced that doctors were the natural enemies of artists: Artists were subversives who challenged society’s established values, while the doctors who treated them were the guardians of those values, their unavowed mission to destroy the artist.
Artaud’s rambling indictment named the villain in Van Gogh’s death: the last doctor to treat him, Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, who lived in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, about twenty miles from Paris. “If Van Gogh had not died at thirty-seven,” Artaud wrote, “I don’t need the Grim Reaper to tell me with what supreme masterpieces painting would have been enriched. . . . Two days before his death, an evil spirit and improvised psychiatrist called Doctor Gachet was the direct, efficient, and sufficient cause of his death.
“I have acquired, in reading Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, the firm and sincere conviction that Dr. Gachet, psychiatrist, in reality hated Van Gogh as a painter, and above all as a genius.”
Artaud, more than fifty years removed from the event, had never met Dr. Gachet and did not have a shred of evidence to support his accusation. Dr. Gachet was known to have befriended and helped Van Gogh in the last period of his life, and when Vincent shot himself, it was Dr. Gachet who came to his bedside on a Sunday night and dressed his wound. Nevertheless, Artaud had a manic intuition that Dr. Gachet was somehow the cause of Van Gogh’s death. Is there any truth to Artaud’s theory, or can it be dismissed as the distorted view of a man who had himself been mistreated by doctors?
In 1888, Van Gogh was voluntarily committed to an asylum as the result of a violent scene with the painter Paul Gauguin and the partial mutilation of his left ear. His younger brother, Theo, arranged his admission to the sanitarium of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole on the outskirts of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, an asylum described as “a private establishment devoted to the treatment of the insane of both sexes.” In his letters to his brother, Vincent described the director, Dr. Peyron, as a gouty little widower who wore dark glasses; the treatment he used was based on hydrotherapy, and Vincent had many sessions in the bathtub during the year he spent in Dr. Peyron’s institution.
Vincent started working again at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole. First, he painted what he saw framed in the window of his cell, without the bars. In July, he had a fit, and Dr. Peyron took away his brushes. Vincent asked his brother to tell Dr. Peyron that painting was necessary for him. When he improved, he was allowed to paint in the garden, surrounded by inmates, and in the countryside, accompanied by a guard. The periods of work were interrupted by fits and other forms of erratic behavior. Once, when the guard was walking behind him, Vincent turned around and kicked him in the stomach. Then he apologized, saying he thought the Arles police were after him. Dr. Peyron, in his report on Van Gogh, wrote: “He tried on several occasions to poison himself, either by swallowing the oil color he needed for painting or by drinking kerosene which he stole from the boy when he was filling the lamps.”
One interpretation of Vincent’s fits at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole - that they were connected to events in Theo’s life - was advanced in 1953 by the French psychoanalyst Charles Mauron. Theo, who was working in Paris for the art gallery of Boussod and Valadon, had become engaged to a girl named Johanna Bonger. In the year that Vincent spent confined, Theo married Johanna and had a son by her, whom he named after his brother. Mauron established that the dates of Vincent’s fits closely followed letters from Theo announcing his marriage and the birth of his son. Mauron’s explanation was that Vincent, who was dependent on Theo financially, had formulated the following unconscious analysis: Theo is getting married, and it is right that he should devote himself completely to his wife and child. But he is diverting part of his resources from his family to keep me going and part of his affection in his support of me. This is not right, and I must not allow this situation to continue. But how can I change it, except by withdrawing from Theo’s life, and how can I withdraw except by destroying myself?
Vincent had one crisis in January 1890 and another in February, which lasted two months. He wrote Theo that he could not improve in the asylum, surrounded as he was by madmen. Their madness, he felt, was contagious. He asked Theo to find some other place he might go, and Theo went to the painter Camille Pissarro for advice. Pissarro knew a doctor who specialized in nervous ailments and was friendly with a number of impressionist painters. The doctor, Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, had a house in the pleasant village of Auvers-sur-Oise where he had collected the works of Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Èdouard Manet, and other new painters. He himself painted under the pseudonym of Van Ryssel. Just the man, thought Pissarro, who would understand Vincent’s problems.
Theo wrote Vincent on March 29: “I am very happy to be able to tell you that I met Dr. Gachet, that physician Pissarro mentioned to me. He looks like a man of understanding. Physically he resembles you a bit. . . . When I told him how your crises came about, he told me that he didn’t believe it had anything to do with madness and that if it was what he thought, he could guarantee your recovery. . . .”
Vincent was delighted at the prospect of leaving the asylum and of being treated by a doctor, who, without even having met him, thought he could cure his condition. He urged Theo to press for his release.
In May, Theo wrote Dr. Gachet: “You had given me hope that under your care he might recover his normal state. . . . I would be most grateful if you could find out about an inn or boarding house where he could stay if he came to Auvers.”
Vincent left Saint-Paul-de-Mausole on May 16 and went to the nearby town of Tarascon to take the train to Paris. Theo, so concerned about Vincent’s traveling alone that he had spent a sleepless night, fetched him the next day at the Gare de Lyon and took him home to meet his infant nephew and namesake and his sister-in-law. Johanna, surprised at how healthy and vigorous he looked, thought he was in better condition than Theo.
Vincent wanted to leave for Auvers as soon as possible - Paris made him nervous - and on May 19, with a letter of introduction from Theo, he arrived at Dr. Gachet’s house, walking up the twenty-two front steps and waiting in a drawing room crowded with paintings, bric-a-brac, and black antique furniture. Dr. Gachet soon appeared, a short man of sixty-two with a long nose, a prominent chin, bright and darting eyes, and stiff red hair that stuck out from his head like the bristles in a hairbrush.
Dr. Gachet told Vincent not to think about his illness, to work quietly, keep regular hours, and eat moderately. He was sanguine about Vincent’s chances of recovery and prescribed no medication. He sent the patient to a nearby boarding house, but Vincent quickly found a more modest establishment on the Place de la Mairie, Chez Ravoux, where room and board was only three francs fifty a day.
Two days later, Vincent wrote Theo and Jo: “I have seen Dr. Gachet, who gives me the impression of being rather eccentric, but his experience as a doctor must keep him balanced enough to combat the nervous trouble from which he certainly seems to be suffering at least as seriously as I. He piloted me to an inn where they ask 6 francs a day. All by myself I found one where I shall pay 3.50 Friday. . . . The impression I got of him was not unfavorable. When he spo
ke of Belgium and the days of the old painters, his grief-hardened face grew smiling again, and I really think that I shall go on being friends with him and that I shall do his portrait. Then he said I must work boldly on and not think at all of what went wrong with me.”
Vincent evidently wanted to show his brother, who in each of his letters enclosed a neatly folded fifty-franc bill, that he had found the cheapest pension possible. He kept carefully itemized accounts to show Theo exactly where all of his money went.
Far more interesting, however, was his first impression of Dr. Gachet. In the intervals between his fits, Vincent was completely lucid, and in his letters to Theo, he showed a remarkable understanding of the personalities of others as well as his own. He was not in the habit of questioning the mental stability of the people he met because he knew how precarious the balance of the mind could be. Still, after a single meeting with Dr. Gachet, Vincent was convinced that he, too, was unbalanced.
What was there about Gachet to justify Vincent’s judgment? Certainly, he was no ordinary doctor. Born in Lille in 1828, he was an early convert to homeopathy, the school of medicine that believes the cure of a disease is effected by minute doses of drugs capable of inducing symptoms similar to those of the disease being treated. He was outspoken in his low opinion of surgeons and organic medicine, but he completed his studies at the school of medicine in Montpellier, writing his thesis on melancholy. He then practiced in Paris, where he befriended painters, particularly the impressionists. Cézanne was his house guest in Auvers, and Manet, Pissarro, and Renoir were all close friends.
In 1883, when Manet’s leg became infected, and his doctors recommended amputation, Dr. Gachet went to see him and said he could cure him without an operation. But before Gachet had a chance to demonstrate his curative powers, Manet’s leg was amputated; the artist died ten days later. Gachet did, however, treat Pissarro with homeopathic remedies, and Renoir had once asked him to treat a little girl, a model, who was suffering from tuberculosis. Dr. Gachet saw the child, but on February 25, 1889, Renoir wrote him: “Dear doctor, the little girl you were kind enough to look after, unfortunately too late, has died. I am nonetheless grateful for the relief you brought her, although we were both convinced it was in vain.”
Homeopathic remedies were no more successful in saving Dr. Gachet’s own wife, who died of tuberculosis in 1875, leaving him with a son and daughter. After her death, he fell into periodic fits of despondence.
Dr. Gachet seemed drawn to anything that was bizarre or extravagant. He was a free-thinker, a nonconformist, a lover of the new and the original. He founded the Society for Mutual Autopsy, whose members agreed to have their bodies cut open after their deaths and their vital organs examined. He tried in vain to recruit Renoir, telling him how important it would be for science to have a great artist’s brain to inspect. He was involved in phrenology and palmistry. He invented anti-rheumatic and anti-constipation powders and used electric shock treatment to cure urinary ailments. He thought of himself as an innovator and a specialist in nervous diseases. Perhaps part of his attraction to the impressionist movement was that it was damned by the establishment of the day.
This, in any case, was the man to whom Theo had confided his sick brother. In his second letter to Theo and Jo, around the end of May, Vincent wrote: “Today I saw Dr. Gachet again. . . . He seems very sensible, but he is as discouraged about his job as a doctor as I am about my painting. Then I told him that I would gladly swap jobs with him. He said to me besides, that if the melancholy or anything else became too much for me to bear, he could easily do something to lessen its intensity and that I must not feel awkward about being frank with him.”
Dr. Gachet’s treatment, although based mainly on infusions of optimism, seemed to be doing Vincent some genuine good. The doctor was against confinement and sensed that Vincent could best improve by living a normal life among other people and working as well as he could, which was very well indeed. Van Gogh had started painting at the age of twenty-eight and would die at the age of thirty-seven; his entire career as a painter lasted only nine years, during which he produced 900 paintings and 100 drawings and watercolors. The seventy days he spent in Auvers, the last seventy days of his life, were his most productive. He completed seventy paintings, an average of one a day, and thirty drawings. He would begin a new canvas before the previous one was dry, rising at dawn and trudging out into the Oise valley with his easel under his arm, returning punctually for meals with the other boarders, and retiring at nine to his whitewashed garret on the third floor with its one dormer window.
On Sunday, May 25, Dr. Gachet invited Vincent to lunch in the garden, after which the doctor handed him a dry point and a polished copper plate and sat as a model for the only Van Gogh etching in existence, Portrait of Dr. Paul Gachet. Two days later, Vincent painted Dr. Gachet’s garden. In the beginning of June, he wrote his younger sister Wilhelmina in Holland: “I have found a true friend in Dr. Gachet, something like another brother, so much do we resemble each other physically and also mentally. He is a very nervous man himself and very queer in his behavior. . . .” Instead of being put off by the doctor’s strange ways, Vincent considered them part of their bond.
On June 4, Vincent wrote Theo - who had been faithfully sending him fifty-franc notes, canvas, sketching paper, and tubes of paint - that he was working on the doctor’s portrait. “He certainly seems to me as ill or distraught as you or me,” Vincent wrote, “and he is older and lost his wife several years ago, but he is very much the doctor, and his profession and faith still sustain him. We are great friends already. . . . I am working at his portrait. . . .” Dr. Gachet admired the portrait so much that he asked Vincent to make a second version, which was quite different from the first. It had, Vincent wrote Gauguin, with whom he was reconciled after the falling out at Arles, “the heart-broken expression of our time.”
The doctor, who had a theory for everything, told Vincent that he understood his work by virtue of his own study of natural history. Vincent, as he saw it, was a Dutch Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who celebrated nature, producing a peasant art made of wooden clogs that was nevertheless as refined as Japanese art. When he saw Vincent’s Arlésienne, Dr. Gachet, after some hesitation, exclaimed: “How difficult it is to be simple!”
In the June 4 letter, Vincent mentioned Dr. Gachet’s attractive blonde daughter, Marguerite, for the first time: “I shall most probably also do the portrait of his daughter, who is nineteen years old and with whom I imagine Jo would soon be friends.”
Vincent was feeling good and working well, like a highly volatile substance that a chemist has succeeded in stabilizing. “I also hope that this feeling I have of being much more master of my brush than before I went to Arles will last,” he wrote in the same letter. “And M. Gachet says that he thinks it most improbable that it [his illness] will return, and that things are going on quite well. . . . Altogether, father Gachet is very, yes very like you and me. . . . I feel that he understands us perfectly and that he will work for you and me to the best of his power, without any reserve, for the love of art for art’s sake.” For Vincent, Dr. Gachet had become the indispensable man, the healer who understood him and made his work possible.
Dr. Gachet, too, was convinced that his curative powers were at work on Vincent. “Dr. Gachet came to see me yesterday,” Theo wrote his brother on June 5, “but at any rate, he told me that he thought you entirely recovered and that he did not see any reason for a return of your malady.”
On June 8, Theo, Jo, and their son came to Auvers to spend the day, and the infant Vincent played in Dr. Gachet’s yard with the numerous dogs, cats, chickens, pigeons, rabbits, and geese. It was a pleasant Sunday outing, with Vincent relaxed and surrounded by his real and surrogate families. In the days that followed, Vincent was so absorbed in his work that he did not write Theo again until the end of June to describe a new portrait: “Yesterday and the day before, I painted . . . [Marguerite] Gachet’s portrait, which I hope you will see soo
n. The dress is red, the wall in the background green with orange spots, the carpet red with green spots, the piano dark violet; it is forty inches high by twenty inches wide. It is a figure that I enjoyed painting - but it is difficult. He [Gachet] has promised to make her pose for me another time at the small organ.”
Then Vincent’s peace of mind was shattered by a letter Theo sent on June 30. “We have gone through a period of the greatest anxiety,” Theo wrote. “Our dear little boy has been very ill. . . . At present, we do not know what we ought to do. There are problems . . . the rats Boussod and Valadon are treating me as though I had just entered their business and are keeping me on a short allowance.” Misfortune was piling up on Theo from several directions. He was thinking of setting himself up as an independent art dealer, but that would make his financial situation even more precarious. However, he promised Vincent to keep him going.
Once again, Vincent was reminded that he was entirely dependent on Theo’s support. The letter, although it did not contain a single word of reproach, reminded Vincent of his great dilemma: All he could do was paint, but he could not sell his paintings; and Theo and Jo had to scrimp and save so that Vincent could continue with his work.
As Mauron suggested, events in Theo’s life tended to precipitate Vincent’s crises, and so it was after the June 30 letter.
One of the many works by artist friends that Dr. Gachet kept in disorderly piles in the rooms and corridors of his house was a painting by Armand Guillaumin of a woman, naked to the waist, lying on a bed and holding a little Japanese fan. Dr. Gachet’s Guillaumin nude was unframed, and Vincent told him it was unforgivable to leave a masterpiece without a frame. Gachet promised to have one made by a local carpenter, who was slow delivering it.
Shortly after receiving Theo’s letter, Vincent, seeing the painting still unframed, stood dumbfounded in front of it and then began shouting at Gachet, working himself up into an irrational fury until he was screaming unintelligibly in Dutch, pacing up and down the room. Suddenly, he stopped and dug his right hand deep into the pocket of his trousers. Dr. Gachet, afraid he was armed and remembering when he had attacked Gauguin with a razor, remained calm and stared down Vincent until he skulked out of the room.