Van Gogh (34 page)

V
INCENT ALWAYS NEEDED ART: BOTH TO ESCAPE THE WORLD, AND TO
reshape it. Despite his protestations of undeviating purpose and piety, religion never preempted that need. From his monastic seclusion in Paris in 1876, he wrote a letter to his parents “only about paintings.” On his Bunyanesque wanderings on the country roads of England, he visited the royal collection at Hampton Court, with its portraits by Holbein and Rembrandt and its galleries of Italians, including a Leonardo. “It was a pleasure to see pictures again,” he confessed to Theo. In Dordrecht, at the very moment he was recapturing his ardor and resolving to follow in his father’s footsteps, he repeatedly visited the art museum there. Within just a few days of arriving in Amsterdam, he began making side trips to the city’s treasure house of the Golden Age, the Trippenhuis.

Everywhere he went, Vincent filled his solitude with images. Prints covered the walls of every room he inhabited. He had begun his studies in Amsterdam with a brave vow to curtail his obsession with collecting prints. But before long he was frequenting the bookstalls and printsellers that lined the route to Mendes’s apartment in the Jewish Quarter. “I have the chance of picking up prints cheaply,” he rationalized to Theo. He needed them to “give my little room some atmosphere,” he said, “to get new ideas and freshen my mind.” He bought prints with “Latin and Greek themes,” claiming they would advance his studies, along with images of evangelists, vicars, vestries, and baptisms. He rechristened old secular favorites with religious titles so they, too, would fit the new mission.

But religious images never displaced the sentimental images that sustained Vincent’s vision of an alternate, better reality. His pictures of idealized sufferers and biblical tales, of Christs in the Garden and Mater Dolorosas with dewy, upturned eyes, shared the walls of his study with little boys marching to school,
little girls skipping home from church, old men trudging through snow, and stoic mothers fetching coals for the family fire.

Even as his father and Uncle Stricker berated him for his slack effort and “manifold mistakes,” Vincent’s mind increasingly sought refuge in this other world. In church, an old woman dozing in a pew nearby made him think of a Rembrandt etching. In his studies, the battle of Waterloo took the form of a painting he had once seen depicting the siege of Leiden. He read books and imagined the illustrations that should accompany them, and which artist should paint them.

For inspiration, he propped portraits of historical figures on his desk as he studied. A book called
Old Testament Legends
led him to another by the same author,
Legends of Artists
. On his walks along the wharves, he saw not topics for sermons, but subjects for paintings. He brought prints to his lessons with Mendes and often stayed afterward to “discuss his former occupation, the art trade,” Mendes recalled. The only new acquaintance he mentions in all the Amsterdam letters was a clerk at Uncle Cor’s gallery. Even as he pledged himself yet again to unremitting study and imposed on himself a brutal regimen of long days and punishing nights, he escaped to his uncle’s store to immerse himself in back issues of art magazines, in which, he confessed, “I found many old friends.”

In the summer of 1877, two events made it possible for Vincent to combine, finally, the great consuming passion of his life: family reconciliation through religion; and the great consoling preoccupation of his life: art.

One was a sermon Vincent attended in the Oudezijds Chapel early on the morning of Sunday, June 10. The preacher that day was not Uncle Stricker but a sprightly younger man with a bald pate and bushy side-whiskers. Eliza Laurillard represented a new generation of Dutch preachers willing to engage the new bourgeois culture on its own terms. Better known for his popular books than for recondite sermons, Laurillard brought a message that was at once reassuringly familiar and startlingly new. His text: the parable of the sower. “Jesus walked in the newly sown field,” he began.

It was a common theme of the “nature sermons” that had made Laurillard one of the most sought-after preachers in Holland. Using simple, vivid images, he portrayed a Christ not only
in
nature, but also intimate with the processes of nature (plowing, sowing, reaping), and inseparable from the beauty of nature. Both Dorus van Gogh and Charles Spurgeon had preached the gospel of fertile seeds, fruitful vineyards, and “healing” sunbeams. Karr and Michelet had found God in flower beds and on tree branches. Carlyle had declared the “divineness of Nature.” But Laurillard and others went further. Finding beauty in nature was not just one way of knowing God, they proposed; it was the only way. And those who could see that beauty and express it—writers, musicians, artists—were God’s truest intermediaries.

For Vincent, this was an electrifying new ideal of art and artists. Before, art had always
served
religion: from the ubiquitous emblem books that taught children moral lessons, to the devotional prints that hung in every Van Gogh room. But Laurillard preached a “religion of beauty” in which God was nature, nature was beauty, art was worship, and artists were preachers. In short, art
was
religion. “He made a deep impression on me,” Vincent wrote as he returned again and again to hear Laurillard preach. “It is as if he paints, and his work is at the same time high and noble art.” He compared Laurillard to two giants of his imagination, Andersen and Michelet. “He has the feelings of an artist in the true sense of the word,” he wrote Theo.

The comparisons to Andersen and Michelet, both objects of shared passion with his brother, were carefully chosen. Vincent was responding to the other seminal event of the summer of 1877: Theo’s announcement that he wanted to be an artist.

ONLY JUST TURNED TWENTY
and already afflicted by bouts of depression that would eventually cripple him, Theo had been thrown into an existential crisis the previous winter after his third disastrous love affair in as many years. In May, after his refusal to end the affair triggered his father’s wrath, he saw no choice but to leave The Hague and start a new career and a new life someplace else. But that plan set off even louder alarms in Etten. A private scandal was abhorrent, but another family shame would be a catastrophe. “These are new worries and very big ones,” Dorus wrote as he hastily arranged an emergency trip to The Hague to head off Theo’s “crazy” plan. “I beg you not to take any rash steps … I beg you to wait until we have talked.”

Theo had already shared with Vincent his plan to quit Goupil, probably earlier that spring before his parents knew that he had resumed the affair. At the same time, no doubt, he broached the idea of becoming an artist. Elated that his brother would spurn the firm that had spurned him, Vincent rallied to Theo’s cause. He sent the usual flood of support: paeans to the admirable “life and work” of artists they both loved (Breton, Millet, Rembrandt) and a copy of
Legends of Artists
. In mid-May, on his way to Amsterdam, he stopped in The Hague so the two brothers could visit Anton Mauve, their cousin by marriage, who was a widely admired and successful painter.

Theo had recently begun seeing Mauve often, both at his home in the city and at his studio near the shore at Scheveningen. Charming and accomplished, with a young family and a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle, Mauve offered a perfect model of the successful artistic career that Theo no doubt imagined for himself. Vincent’s visit provided the final push. Soon after he left for Amsterdam, Theo informed his parents of his intention to quit Goupil. Vincent reveled at
the thought of his brother breaking with convention and setting off on a new path—just as he had done. The vindication of it thrilled him. “My past comes to life again when I think of your future,” he wrote.

Seeing fulfillment of his vision on the Rijswijk road within his grasp—two brothers “bound up in one … feeling, thinking and believing the same”—Vincent proclaimed the brotherhood of preachers and artists even more boldly than Laurillard did. He found “a resemblance” between the works of artists like Millet and Rembrandt and “the work and life of Father.” And he claimed for Theo’s new calling the same transformative power he claimed for his own: “When I see a painting by Ruysdael [or] Van Goyen,” he wrote, “I am reminded again and again of the words, ‘Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.’ ”

But Theo could not go through with it. Within only a few days of making his momentous announcement, he rushed to Etten to retract it, not even waiting for his father to come to him. Whether from failure of conviction or excess of duty, he would stay at Goupil. At first, he asked to be transferred someplace else—to Paris or London. But Dorus talked him out of even that. Uncle Cent advised his ambitious, “golden-tongued” nephew not to “spoil his future with haste.” Instead, Theo should “concentrate on making himself indispensable,” Cent counseled. Both flattered and chastened, Theo quietly let the matter drop, bringing to a quick close the first in a career filled with similar periodic feints of rebellion.

Vincent, on the other hand, could not let go so easily. Emboldened by Laurillard’s ideas and driven by the image of perfect brotherhood, he continued to encourage Theo’s artistic ambitions long after Theo had retreated from them. For the rest of his life, Vincent would taunt his brother and torture himself with the vision of brotherly solidarity that he enjoyed for barely a week in the summer of 1877.

Obsessed by that vision and guided by Laurillard, Vincent’s powerful imagination continued to shape new connections between art and religion, binding them together in an ever tighter unity. They shared not just common roots in Nature, he said, but a whole catalogue of Romantic imagery: from starry skies to “overflowing eyes.” To Vincent, those images now spoke not just of lost love, but of “the Love of God.” They shared a common source—“a deeper source in our souls,” he said—a source beyond the conscious mind or the clever hand. Both promised renewal, whether through revolution or apocalypse, and both offered “something of the spirit of the resurrection and the life.”

Like Carlyle’s divinity, both resided in the particularity of this world, not in the perfection of the next: in a swaybacked draft horse patiently awaiting its next burden; in the corkscrew twist of a tree branch, or a battered pair of walking boots. All were “noble and beautiful,” he maintained, “with a peculiar, weird beauty.” They shared a common language, too. Not just the symbolism of suns
and sowers, but a common mode of expression—a “simplicity of heart and simpleness of mind” that Vincent found in works as different as Michelet and the Book of Kings. Nor was this a language that required years of study to master. “It could be understood by everyone,” he insisted, because “it has an eloquence which wins the heart because it comes from the heart.”

Finally, art and religion shared the signature power of Vincent’s imagination, the power to console—the power to “bring light into darkness,” to transform suffering into solace, sorrow into rejoicing. “For this is what great art does,” he declared: “cheer you and feed your inner life.” This was the power that brought tears to Vincent’s eyes over a passage of scripture, an Andersen story, or the sight of “the sun shining through the leaves in the evening.” When Vincent felt this power—for it was more a feeling than a perception—he recognized it instantly.
“Dat is het,”
he would exclaim. “That is
it
.”

Vincent had first heard the phrase from Mauve, years before in The Hague. Then, it applied only to art—a painter’s eureka of tribute to the rightness of an image, the successful capture of a subject’s ineffable essence. Now he applied it to anything that evoked this new and mysterious conjunction of art and religion. “You will find
it
everywhere,” he said; “the world is full of it.” He found
it
in a group of old houses on a little square behind the Oosterkerk—a vignette of humble persistence just waiting for an artist to see. He found
it
in a sermon on the death of a child—“This was it,” too, he said. Whether encountered in a painting or a sermon,
it
evoked feelings of joyful consolation.
It
both illuminated the human condition—the way art had always done—and, like religion, gave life meaning in the face of inevitable suffering and inescapable death. Preachers and artists alike could provide the consolation of
it
, Vincent argued, as long as they “applied themselves heart, mind and soul.” His father had
it
, of course. But in Vincent’s union of art and religion, Uncle Cent had
it
, too: “something indescribably charming and, I should say, something good and spiritual.”

He found
it
in everyday experience. “There are moments when the common everyday things make an extraordinary impression,” he wrote, “and have a deep significance and a different aspect.” A little girl he saw in the flower market, knitting while her peasant father sold pots, had
it:
“so simple in her little black bonnet, and with a pair of bright, smiling eyes.” Old people, like the wizened sexton at the Oosterkerk, had
it
. What they had in common, he observed, was “soul”—a term he used to refer to any burden, affliction, or sadness (such as poverty or age) that separated them from the soulless beauty found both in Salon paintings and in church pews. Always sensitive to his own rough appearance, he increasingly saw outward ugliness as a sign of “spirituality” within. “I would rather see a homely woman,” he argued after seeing a voluptuous Gérôme nude, “for what does a beautiful body really matter?”

In Vincent’s relentlessly visual imagination,
it
also had a face. Years of deep, obsessive immersion in the Bible had imprinted on him an image that could not be erased: the image of an angel. “It is also good to believe that now, just as in olden days, an angel is not far from those who are sad,” he wrote Theo in the midst of his crisis. In England, he swore he saw the “countenance of an angel” when his father preached. In Amsterdam, he fixated on the story of Elijah being “touched by an angel” as he lay sleeping, alone in the wilderness. He wrote Theo about the angel who told Paul, “Fear not,” and about the angel that visited Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane and “gave strength unto Him Whose soul was sorrowful even unto death.” He bought an engraving of Rembrandt’s
The Angel Leaving the Family of Tobias
, a dramatic depiction of the moment when the archangel Raphael, after restoring sight to the blind Tobias, reveals himself and rises into the air in a burst of light and a swirl of weightless robes.