Van Gogh (3 page)

And no one had roamed a more mysterious path than Vincent: a brief, failed start as an art dealer, a misbegotten attempt to enter the clergy, a wandering
evangelical mission, a foray into magazine illustration, and, finally, a blazingly short career as a painter. Nowhere did Vincent’s volcanic, defiant temperament show itself more spectacularly than in the sheer number of images that continued to pour forth from his ragged existence even as they piled up, hardly seen, in the closets, attics, and spare rooms of family, friends, and creditors.

Garden of a Bathhouse
,
PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER
, A
UGUST 1888, 23⅞ × 19¼ IN
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Illustration credit prl.1
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Only by tracing this temperament and the trail of tears it left, Theo believed, could anyone truly understand his brother’s stubbornly inner-driven art. This
was his answer to all those who dismissed Vincent’s paintings—or his letters—as the rantings of the wretched, as most still did. Only by knowing Vincent “from the inside,” he insisted, could anyone hope to see his art as Vincent saw it, or feel it as Vincent felt it. Just a few months before his fateful train trip, Theo had sent a grateful note to the first critic who dared to praise his brother’s work: “You have read these pictures, and by doing so you very clearly saw the man.”

Like Theo, the art world of the late nineteenth century was preoccupied with the role of biography in art. Émile Zola had opened the gates with his call for an art “of flesh and blood,” in which painting and painter merged. “What I look for in a picture before anything else,” Zola wrote, “is the man.” No one believed in the importance of biography more fervently than Vincent van Gogh. “[Zola] says something beautiful about art,” he wrote in 1885: “ ‘In the picture (the work of art), I look for, I love the man—the artist.’ ” No one collected artists’ biographies more avidly than Vincent—everything from voluminous texts to “legends” and “chats” and scraps of rumor. Taking Zola at his word, he culled every painting for signs of “what kind of
man
stands
behind
the canvas.” At the dawn of his career as an artist, in 1881, he told a friend: “In general, and more especially with artists, I pay as much attention to the man who does the work as to the work itself.”

To Vincent, his art was a record of his life more true, more revealing (“how deep—how infinitely deep”) even than the storm of letters that always accompanied it. Every wave of “serenity and happiness,” as well as every shudder of pain and despair, he believed, found its way into paint; every heartbreak into heartbreaking imagery; every picture into self-portraiture. “I want to paint what I feel,” he said, “and feel what I paint.”

It was a conviction that guided him until his death—only hours after Theo arrived in Auvers. No one could truly see his paintings without knowing his story. “As my work is,” he declared, “so am I.”

V
INCENT VAN
G
OGH, AGE
13 (
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O
F THE THOUSANDS OF STORIES THAT VINCENT VAN GOGH CONSUMED
in a lifetime of voracious reading, one stood out in his imagination: Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Story of a Mother.” Whenever he found himself with children, he told and retold Andersen’s dark tale of a loving mother who chooses to let her child die rather than expose him to the risk of an unhappy life. Vincent knew
the story by heart and could tell it in several languages, including a heavily accented English. For him, whose own life was filled with unhappiness, and who forever sought himself in literature and art, Andersen’s tale of maternal love gone awry possessed a unique power, and his obsessive retellings protested both a unique longing and a unique injury.

Vincent’s own mother, Anna, never understood her eldest son. His eccentricities, even from an early age, challenged her deeply conventional world-view. His roving intellect defied her limited range of insight and inquiry. He seemed to her filled with strange and “starry-eyed” notions; she seemed to him narrow-minded and unsympathetic. As time passed, she liked him less and less. Incomprehension gave way to impatience, impatience to shame, and shame
to anger. By the time he was an adult, she had all but given up hope for him. She dismissed his religious and artistic ambitions as “futureless wanderings” and compared his errant life to a death in the family. She accused him of intentionally inflicting “pain and misery” on his parents. She systematically discarded any paintings and drawings that he left at home as if disposing of rubbish (she had already thrown out virtually all his childhood
memorabilia), and treated works that he subsequently gave her with little regard.

After her death, only a few of the letters and works of art Vincent had sent her were found in her possession. In the final years of his life (she outlived him by seventeen years), she wrote to him less and less often, and, when he was hospitalized
toward the end, she never came to visit, despite frequent travels to see other family members. Even after his death, when fame belatedly found him, she never regretted or amended her verdict that his art
was “ridiculous.”

Vincent never understood his mother’s rejection. At times, he lashed out angrily against it, calling her a “hard-hearted” woman “of a soured love.” At times, he blamed himself for being a “half-strange, half-tiresome person … who brings only sorrow and loss.” But he never stopped bidding for her approval. At the end of his life, he painted her portrait (from a photograph) and appended a poem with the
plaintive question: “Who is the maid my spirits seek / Through cold reproof and slanders blight?”

A
NNA
C
ARBENTUS
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ANNA CORNELIA CARBENTUS
married the Reverend Theodorus van Gogh on a cloudless day in May 1851 in The Hague, home of the Dutch monarchy and, by one account, “the most pleasant place in the world.” Reclaimed from sea-bottom mud containing the perfect mix of sand and clay for growing flowers, The Hague in May was a veritable Eden: flowers bloomed in unrivaled abundance
on roadsides and canal banks, in parks and
gardens, on balconies and verandas, in window boxes and doorstep pots, even on the barges that glided by. Perpetual moisture from tree-shaded ponds and canals “seemed every morning to paint with a newer and more intense green,” wrote one enchanted visitor.

On the wedding day, Anna’s family sprinkled flower petals in the newlyweds’ path and festooned every stop on their route with garlands of greenery and blossoms. The bride made her way from the Carbentus house on Prinsengracht to the Kloosterkerk, a fifteenth-century jewel box on an avenue lined with linden trees and surrounded by magnificent townhouses in the royal heart of the city. Her carriage passed through streets that were the envy of a filthy
continent: every windowpane freshly cleaned, every door recently painted or varnished, every copper pot on every stoop buffed, every lance on every bell tower newly gilded. “The roofs themselves seem to be washed each day,” marveled one foreigner, and the streets were “clean as any chamber floor.” Such a place, wrote another visitor, “may make all men envy the happiness of those who live in it.”

Gratitude for idyllic days like these, in idyllic places like this—and the fear that they could all be lost in a moment—shaped Anna Carbentus’s life. She knew that it had not always been this way, either for her family or for her country.

In 1697, the fate of the Carbentus clan hung by a single thread: Gerrit Carbentus, the only member of the family to come through the wars, floods, fires, and plagues of the previous hundred and fifty years alive. Gerrit’s predecessors had been swept up in the panoramic bloodletting of the Eighty Years’ War, a revolt by the Seventeen Provinces of the Low Countries against their brutal Spanish rulers. It began, according to one account, in 1568 when
Protestant citizens in towns like The Hague rebelled “in a cataclysm of hysterical rage and destruction.” Victims were tied together and heaved from high windows, drowned, decapitated, and burned. The Spanish Inquisition responded by condemning every man, woman, and child in the Netherlands, all three million of them, to death as heretics.

For eighty years, back and forth across the placid Dutch landscape, army fought army, religion fought religion, class fought class, militia fought militia, neighbor fought neighbor, idea fought idea. A visitor to Haarlem saw “many people hanging from trees, gallows and other horizontal beams in various places.” Houses everywhere were burned to the ground, whole families burned at the stake, and the roads strewn with corpses.

Now and then the chaos subsided (as when the Dutch provinces declared their independence from the Spanish king in 1648 and the war was declared over), but soon enough a new wave of violence would wash over the land. In 1672, the so-called Rampjaar (Year of Catastrophe), little more than a generation after the end of the Eighty Years’ War, another fury boiled up from the tranquil
and impeccable streets of The Hague as crowds swept into the city
center, hunted down the country’s former leaders, and butchered them to pieces in the shadow of the same Kloosterkerk where Anna Carbentus would later celebrate her marriage.