Van Gogh (158 page)

Critics ratified the triumph. In
Art et Critique
, Georges Lecomte praised Vincent’s “fierce impasto,” “powerful effects,” and “vivid impression.” In Aurier’s magazine,
Mercure de France
, Julien Leclercq hailed Vincent’s “extraordinary power of expression” and advanced Symbolism’s claim to his art. “His is an impassioned temperament, through which nature appears as it does in dreams,” Leclerq wrote, “or rather, in nightmares.” He urged his readers to go and see for themselves these “fabulous” and “magnificent” new images: “ten paintings that bear witness to a rare genius.”

But no review could have meant more to Vincent than the one sent by his former companion in the Yellow House (whose letter, like Theo’s reports, languished unread in Peyron’s office). “I send you my sincere compliments,” Gauguin wrote. “Of the many artists on display, you are the most remarkable.” He called Vincent “the only exhibitor who
thinks,”
and paid his work the ultimate tribute: “There is something in it as emotionally evocative as Delacroix.” Gauguin, too, asked for an exchange.

It was one thing to seclude a troubled family member in the far-off mountain retreat at Saint-Rémy, away from the insults of daily life and public ridicule. It was quite another to imprison an artist that all of avant-garde Paris proclaimed a genius. As praise poured in and offers multiplied, as actual money appeared for the first time in Theo’s account book (in March, he deposited the check from Anna Boch for
The Red Vineyard
), the awkward questions mounted. What a pity it was—a crime, almost—that Vincent was not free to paint as he wanted. Why was he so often deprived of his studio and paints? Why was he treated like a misbehaving child, not the great artist that he was?

Under the onslaught of questions and doubts, Theo quickly capitulated. Only weeks before, he had resigned himself to the tragic irony of Vincent’s fate. “It is such a pity that just now his work is becoming very successful,” he wrote his mother in mid-April. But on May 10, not even two weeks after the latest “recovery,” Theo sent Vincent the hundred and fifty francs he needed for the journey north. Ever the pragmatist, he saw the commercial opportunities in his brother’s sudden success, as well as the obstacles that his isolation posed to the full realization of that success. He shared Vincent’s frustration at the long confinements and interrupted productivity. Business was slow (a broad economic downturn had dragged the entire art market into a slump), and the prospect of his brother finally supporting himself undoubtedly beckoned.

But Theo was a romantic, too. And just at the moment when he had finally resigned himself to the cruel inevitability of Vincent’s exile, the triumph at the
Indépendante
show allowed him to step back from the brink of fatalism and imagine a happy ending at last to his brother’s long, sad journey. “I should like for you to feel better,” he wrote Vincent with the simplicity of hope, “and for your fits of sadness to disappear.”

Over the first two weeks of May, Theo’s cautious fears fought a losing battle with his impetuous heart. He insisted that Vincent bear responsibility for his decision to leave Saint-Rémy (Vincent tried to characterize it as Theo’s plan), and admonished him not to have “too many illusions about life in the North.” He asked only that Vincent “act in conformity” with Peyron’s advice—a knot of circularity, since Peyron, who opposed the release as premature, would not give his blessing without Theo’s agreement. Over Vincent’s furious objections, Theo argued that the asylum should provide an escort on the train trip all the way to Paris, pointedly recalling the absolute disaster of Vincent’s unaccompanied excursion to Arles in February. On and on they went, in a duel of denial and delusion, indirection and defensiveness, thrashing toward a decision that neither wanted to claim.

But Vincent wasted no time. Convinced that his window of “complete calm” was closing fast (already reduced from a year to “three or four months” as the battle over his departure dragged on), he plunged back into painting. He had always come out of his attacks with a manic burst of belated energy and a profligate outpouring of paint, as if to make up for all the canvases forgone in his delirium. Never had the reservoir been so full. “I have more ideas in my head than I could ever carry out,” he wrote. “The brush strokes come like clockwork.”

He started in the garden, just as the early spring began to fade, with two of the “greenery nooks” that Theo prized: groundscapes of swirling, uncut grass and a carpet of dandelions among the gnarled tree trunks. But as he packed up his equipment in expectation of an imminent departure, he stayed more and more in the studio and confined his bursting brush to still lifes of flowers that he cut from the asylum garden: irises and roses—the last blooms of spring. He stuffed the already-listing flowers into ceramic vessels and, in a finish-line fury of work—“like a man in a frenzy”—filled one big canvas after another with expressions of his own impetuous heart and hope for the future.

The choice of subject wasn’t just a matter of season or circumstance. His painting of irises from the previous spring had won many accolades since it first appeared at the
Indépendante
show in 1889—especially from his brother Theo. What more gorgeous display of gratitude could he devise—what more convincing argument for success—than these humble blossoms, misshapen but proud in their ephemeral glory? He painted them quickly, with the lavish brush and limber wrist of his serene mountain retreat. The same unique alchemy that had conjured the sunflowers of Arles—the impossible combination of urgency and care, calculation and ease (“packing seems to me more difficult than painting,”
he said)—now magically transformed the irises of Saint-Rémy into amethyst constellations of purple, violet, carmine, and “pure Prussian blue.”

He painted them twice: once against the electric yellow of Arles, generating a jolt of contrast as striking as anything he had done under the Midi sun; and once against a serenity of pearly pink, glistening in the very gemlike colors and monumental forms praised by Aurier. He did the same with the roses, piling them into a simple jug until it spilled over with white blooms just barely tinged with reds and blues against a wavy background of
bonze
green; and then again as a towering cloud of blossoms in the tenderest pink, achingly poised against a wall of spring green, the color of new life.

By the end, only one subject remained. He had packed off his trunk and penned a farewell letter to the Ginouxs, leaving most of his furniture at the Café de la Gare as both a remembrance and a hope of return. But he held back enough canvas, paints, and brushes to keep working, and arranged to have any canvases not dry in time shipped after him. That left him alone with only a few finished paintings, which he would take as gifts, and a handful of prints. Theo had sent some of them earlier in May, at Vincent’s request, and he had already turned two into grand paintings filled with color and meaning: Delacroix’s
The Good Samaritan
and Rembrandt’s
The Raising of Lazarus
. Because nothing terrified him more than idleness, he filled his last few days in the asylum—while he negotiated with Theo over the details of his travel—painting one final “translation” into color. He picked as his model not an image of rescue, like the Samaritan; or of rebirth, like the Lazarus. He chose instead a lithograph that he himself had made in The Hague in 1882. It showed an old man sitting by a fire with his head buried in his hands, overwhelmed by the woes and futility of life. It bore the legend he had lettered himself eight years earlier as another studio and another fantasy of family collapsed around him: “At Eternity’s Gate.” After all the protestations of health and hopes for the future, after all the bouquets of praise and plans for recovery, he still could not dispel the fear or escape the past. “I think of it as a shipwreck,” he said of his southern journey.

In a mortification of despair, he painstakingly transferred the pitiful self-portrait to a big canvas and filled it with orange and blue and yellow—the colors of his shipwrecked enterprise in the Midi. “I confess to you that I leave with great grief,” he wrote his brother. “Oh, if I could have worked without this accursed disease—what things I might have done.”

O
N MAY 16, DR. PEYRON WROTE “CURED” ON VINCENT’S ASYLUM RECORD
. The next morning, his train pulled in to Paris’s grand Gare de Lyon. Theo stood on the platform to welcome him. Other than their fleeting, hazy reunion in the Arles hospital, they had not seen each other in more than two years. They took a horse-drawn cab through Haussmann’s bright limestone canyons to Theo’s new apartment at 8, Cité Pigalle. A woman waved to them from a window. It was Jo Bonger, the new Madame van Gogh. She met them at the door. It was his first glimpse of her, and hers of him. “I had expected a sick person,” she later wrote, “but here was a sturdy, broad-shouldered man, with a healthy color, a smile on his face, and a very resolute appearance.”

Inside, the apartment greeted him with a ghostly procession from the past: in the dining room,
The Potato Eaters
from Nuenen; in the living room, a view of the Crau and the
Starry Night
from Arles. In the bedroom, a Midi orchard bloomed above the bed that Theo and Jo shared. A flowering little pear tree stood watch over the lace-draped cradle where three-and-a-half-month-old Vincent lay. The brothers gazed silently at the sleeping child, Jo recalled, until tears welled up in their eyes.

In the next two days, he whisked through gallery after gallery: from a modest exhibition of Japanese prints to the grand halls of the Champs de Mars where the spring Salon was still on view. Having seen nothing but his own easel work for so long, he was overwhelmed by Puvis de Chavannes’s gigantic mural
Inter artes et naturam
(
Between Art and Nature
) with its marriage of “primitive” archaic form and modern simplicity. “When one looks at it for a long time,” he wrote in a rapture, “one gets the feeling of being present at a rebirth, total but benevolent, of all things one should have believed in, should have wished for.”

In the apartment, his paintings filled not just the walls, but the closets and drawers as well—painting after painting that he had packed up and sent off to his brother, sometimes before the paint had dried. “To the great despair of our housekeeper,” Jo wrote, “there were huge piles of unframed canvases under the bed, under the sofa, under the cupboards in the little spare room.” Pile by pile, Vincent dragged them onto the floor and into the light, studying each “with great attention,” Jo recalled. He visited the storage room at Tanguy’s, too, and reviewed the stacks of familiar images there, gathering dust along with a gallery of his fellow painters.

He had come promising a short stay, but dreaming of a long one. To allay Theo’s fear of an attack far away from medical supervision, Vincent had talked of moving on to Auvers “as soon as possible” after arriving—perhaps even leaving his luggage at the station. But secretly he imagined “a fortnight” in Paris, at least—time enough to reconnect with his beloved brother and the young family he knew only from a photograph. “What consoles me,” he had written Theo two weeks earlier, “is the great, the very great desire I have to see you again, you and your wife and child … as indeed I never cease thinking of them.”

He carried proof of that great desire on his back: a heavy load of easel, canvas, stretchers, paints, and brushes. He had plans to take his equipment into the streets—starting “the day after my arrival”—and paint all the “essentially modern subjects” of Paris that had haunted his long exile. “Yes, there is a way of seeing Paris beautiful,” he said. Then, perhaps, he would paint a portrait of Jo. Nothing could do him more good, he maintained, nothing could better protect him from the dangers of the outside world than “spending some days with you.”

But on May 20—only three days after arriving—Vincent abruptly packed his things and returned to the station. He boarded the northbound train carrying the same burdens he had brought, with a few paintings from Saint-Rémy added to the load. His paint box hadn’t been opened. He arrived in Auvers about an hour later. When the train pulled away, he was alone again. Paris had passed like a drunken revel or a dream: months of longing spent in a flash of hours. Stunned at his sudden solitude, he wrote Theo: “I hope that it will not be unpleasant to meet oneself again after a long absence.”

Just as in the past, Vincent blamed his quick departure on Paris itself. “I felt very strongly that all the noise there was not for me,” he explained after the fact from Auvers. “Paris had such a bad effect on me that I thought it wise for my head’s sake to fly to the country.” But his welcome in Paris had always been uncertain, and his ambitions for the visit always conflicted. He had pleaded with Theo to “insist” that Aurier not write any more articles about his painting. “I am too overwhelmed with grief to be able to face publicity,” he wrote on the eve of leaving the asylum. “Making pictures distracts me, but if I hear them spoken of, it pains me more than he knows.” Still, he made plans to see the critic while
in Paris (plans that fell through), and he despaired when neither Gauguin nor Bernard bothered to come see him, even though both were in Paris at the time.