Van Gogh (15 page)

Vincent undoubtedly heard stories about the new movement: its roots in shared outings in the Dutch countryside; the importance of
plein air
(outdoor) painting; and the new mandate to capture “the virgin impression of nature” that artists like Israëls had brought back from a distant woodland village in France called Barbizon. Vincent eagerly added the works of the “new” Dutch painters, and their French cousins such as Camille Corot and Charles Jacque, to the already crowded walls of his
musée imaginaire
(museum of the mind), while Tersteeg cautiously began testing the market for them.

Still, it would be another decade before the Barbizon painters found a prominent place on Goupil’s brocaded walls. And with a revolution stirring in Dutch art, no one paid much attention to another group of French painters who had taken the Barbizon lessons about light and impressions in a very different direction. In the fall of 1871, the arrival in Holland of a young French painter named Claude Monet went virtually unnoticed on the Plaats.

Even as Vincent attended the birth of a new movement in art, his most important education was taking place in the Goupil stockroom, in the kaleidoscope of images that came across his desk every day—in woodcuts, engravings, etchings, lithographs, photogravures, photographs, artists’ albums, illustrated books and magazines, catalogues, monographs, and special publications. Goupil had by now mastered the art of selling images across markets and using a painting’s success to sell prints of it like stock in a booming company. Popular images came in all sizes and shapes, at every level of quality and cost—in some cases right up to the original painting itself.

The result was an explosion of imagery: everything from the richly detailed historical fantasies of Paul Delaroche to the domestic icons of Hugues Merle; from Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro biblical scenes to Ary Scheffer’s devotional images of Jesus (images that would define Christ for more than a century); from Bouguereau’s fetching shepherdesses to Gérôme’s oriental seductresses; from stirring battle scenes to sentimental vignettes of Italian peasant life; from romantic canalscapes of Venice to nostalgic visions of seventeenth-century Holland; from tiger hunts in Africa to the English parliament in session; from games of whist to vast sea battles; from New World magnolias to Egyptian palms; from bison on the American plain to Queen Victoria on her throne. All of these images crowded Vincent’s keen and insatiable eye. “A continual spur for rousing the imagination,” one observer called Goupil’s huge catalogue of prints. “When we see them, how many voyages do we take in imagination, what adventures do we dream of, what pictures do we sketch!”

Vincent kept a salesman’s open mind about the images passing across his
desktop. Indeed, for the rest of his life, he rarely singled out either a work or an artist for criticism. Rather than drowning in this sea of images, his enthusiasm seemed buoyed by it.
“Admire as much as you can,”
he advised Theo about this time;
“most people do not admire enough.”
When he tried to write down his “favorites,” the list grew to unwieldy proportions—sixty names of artists both famous and obscure. He included Dutch Romantics, French orientalists, Swiss landscapists, Belgian peasant painters, British Pre-Raphaelites, Hague School neighbors, Barbizon newcomers, Salon favorites, “[and] then there are the old masters.” “I could go on like this for I don’t know how long,” he added in exasperation. Even so, it wasn’t until a decade later that Vincent owned up to his liking for the gaudy, silly pictures of courtly life by Italian and Spanish painters of the era. “Those brilliant peacock’s feathers,” he recalled guiltily in 1882, “I thought them splendid.”

For a while, it seemed that Vincent had truly turned a corner, that he had laid aside the brittle frustrations of his youth as surely as he had put down his fishnet and bottle. In some ways, the years of angry, self-imposed solitude had given him the perfect skills for his new job. The close observation and discernment he had practiced on birds’ nests and beetle legs could now be applied to the subtle degradations of late impressions or the stylistic variations between different engravers’ renderings of the same painting. His limitless energy for collecting and categorizing, combined with an astounding memory, helped him master everything from the stockroom’s flood of images to the paint department’s huge inventory of artists’ supplies. The lonely, meticulous care he had lavished on his bug collection could now be put to use in the packing room or the display case.

A congenital arranger, Vincent excelled especially at seeing the relationships between images: not just in subject matter or artist, but in materials, style, and intangibles of mood and “weight.” (A painting by Mesdag, he observed, had a “ponderous” effect beside a Corot.) He advised friends (and, no doubt, customers) on compiling the newly fashionable “scrapbooks”—blank books in which one could paste favorite images. “The advantage is that you can arrange [them] any way you like,” he explained. He began a print collection of his own (starting with the “peacock feather” Italians) that he would add to and edit, arrange and rearrange for the rest of his life, honing ever more subtle notions of order and context.

Whether because of his knowledge and enthusiasm, or because of his family connections, Vincent was soon allowed to deal directly with the public in Goupil’s plush, parlorlike gallery, where paintings in elaborate gilt frames filled the dark walls and gentlemen in top hats lounged on Turkish divans. Within a few years, Vincent was dealing with some of the firm’s best clients. He demonstrated an instinctive savvy about value and rarity, fashion and demand, and no reticence whatsoever about the imperative to sell. By 1873, he had joined
the annual sales trips to Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and elsewhere to court clients and show the
nouveautés
, the latest additions to the Goupil catalogue. At some point, he learned accounting. So confident was Vincent in his new role that he reassured his parents he would never again have to look for a position.

G
OUPIL
G
ALLERY
, T
HE
H
AGUE
(
Illustration credit 5.2
)

But no success, or promise of success, could console his loneliness. A decade later, Vincent recalled his early years in The Hague as “a miserable time.” At first he may have blamed his unhappiness on the trauma of leave-taking, which he always dreaded. “The beginning is perhaps more difficult than anything else,” he warned Theo when he left home and started work in 1873. “I know so well how strange you must feel.” But after two years, he had to recognize that the problem went deeper than homesickness. Despite the cosmopolitan distractions of the city; despite the familial comforts of a community planted thick with relations; despite the long hours of busy labor, Vincent had brought his unshakable isolation with him from the moors of Zundert.

At work, the demands of the understaffed store would have made socializing difficult even for a sociable person. As the only two apprentices, Vincent and Teunus van Iterson could not take breaks or vacations at the same time. Vincent’s family connections, underscored in the beginning by his uncle’s frequent visits to the store, also undoubtedly separated him from other employees, even if
his odd, prickly personality did not. By now, sickly and frustrated, Cent had become a nagging, oppressive overseer, whose departures for Paris or the Riviera were welcomed with relief by Tersteeg and no doubt others. “[He] was a difficult, cross-grained gentleman,” Tersteeg later recalled, “harping on endlessly about the same subject.”

In the winter of 1870, Cent was stricken by a near-fatal illness, and Tersteeg assumed full control on the Plaats. Almost immediately, his attitude toward his patron’s nephew changed. From the beginning, the smooth, dignified Tersteeg had been bothered by Vincent’s strange, unpolished manner, which he attributed to his rustic upbringing. (He compared Vincent’s father unfavorably to the sophisticated Cent.) Now, that disdain began to show itself in angry words and sharp-witted disparagement. Vincent responded with the same bitter ambivalence that he felt toward his father: withdrawing into deference and “timidity” in his boss’s presence (“I kept my distance,” he recalled), while nursing a wound of rejection that would never heal.

As Christmas 1870 approached, after a year and a half in The Hague, Vincent was still miserable. The house where he lived, not far from the store, was crowded with members of the owner’s family, the Rooses, along with several boarders Vincent’s age (including his coworker, Iterson). But none, apparently, offered companionship. He retreated into old habits of solitude, preferring lonely walks in the nearby countryside to skating parties with his housemates. Both Vincent’s parents and his uncle Cent complained bitterly that Vincent “failed to seek out good company” during his years in The Hague, despite multiple opportunities and relentless encouragements. But socializing required money, and Vincent’s meager salary did not even cover the cost of his room and board at the Rooses’; his father had to supplement his wages. “Real poverty” is how he later described his condition. As for Christmas, the train trip to Zundert was expensive, and there was always a chance that Tersteeg would cancel his Christmas leave—as in fact he did—because the holiday season was the store’s busiest.

Then, in November 1870, truly devastating news arrived from home: the family was leaving Zundert. After twenty-two years, Dorus had taken a position in Helvoirt, about twenty-five miles east of Breda, where another declining Brabant congregation needed the persistent sower. The Van Gogh family celebrated its last Zundert Christmas that year. By February 1871, they had left the parsonage, the garden, the creek, and the heath forever.

In a wave of nostalgia precipitated by the move, Vincent reached out to his only parsonage ally: Theo.

At first, his efforts to reconnect with the brother who once adored him met with failure. Theo’s friends in Helvoirt, sons of the
junker
family that had persuaded Dorus and Anna to leave Zundert, saw in Vincent only what everyone
else saw: a strange and “difficult” young man—“good for nothing,” in their estimation. When he came to visit, they made fun of him behind his back. Years later, they remembered that Theo shared their low opinion of his visiting brother—“and he spoke it out loud,” one of them recalled. “There was not much closeness between them.”

Then, in August 1872, probably after intense lobbying by Vincent, Theo came to visit him in The Hague. He was fifteen now, almost the same age as Vincent was when he left home. He stayed for some time—long enough for Vincent to grow accustomed to his companionship. They visited the Mauritshuis, where Vincent could show off his astonishing new knowledge. But mostly they just walked. One day, they struck out for the beach at Scheveningen. Vincent chose a route not along the fashionable, villa-lined boulevard but via a secret path through the woods. (He called them “my woods.”) Another day, they headed in the opposite direction: east, toward Rijswijk, probably to attend a family celebration.

The two brothers walked the towpath that ran atop the dike beside the Rijswijk canal. Occasionally, a barge glided by under sail. On windless days, horses (and people) still used the towpath to pull their waterborne loads. They stopped at a seventeenth-century mill built to drain the meadows beyond the dike. A twenty-foot water wheel still carried on the Sisyphean labor. From a window at the base of the mill, the miller sold baked eel and milk from a cow on the premises for a penny a glass. They drank and walked on to the party at a house on the banks of the canal. They stood next to each other in the back as the assembled guests posed for a picture: Theo obediently still for the long exposure, Vincent almost as restless as the blur of children in the front row.

The walk to Rijswijk that day, like the rainy farewell in Zevenbergen, soon assumed mythic significance for Vincent. Years later, he would recall with aching nostalgia “that time long ago when … we walked together along the Rijswijk road and drank milk at the mill.” He called the memory of that day “perhaps the most beautiful I have,” and lamented that “it would have been impossible for me to put what I saw and felt on paper.” For the rest of his life, he spoke of that day as a lost Eden of “sympathy” and sharing between two brothers “bound up in one … feeling, thinking and believing the same.” Whether it was true—whether Theo had put aside his friends’ mockery and low opinions of his brother—didn’t matter. Lonely at work, estranged from his parents, evicted from his childhood home, Vincent needed to believe that he had found a companion at last.

Rijswijk set the pattern; and it would not change for the rest of his life: nostalgia as antidote for loneliness; the past as remedy for the present. Immediately after Theo’s departure, Vincent began writing him:
“Waarde Theo”
(Dear Theo), “I missed you the first few days; it felt strange not to find you there when I came
home in the afternoons.” It was the beginning of a correspondence that would grow into one of the great documents of the human experience.