Van Gogh (35 page)

For Vincent, angels would always be the instruments of God’s consolation, the messengers of His comfort: hovering, always hovering “not far away from us—not far from those who are broken-hearted and dejected in spirit.” Despite the encroachments of an increasingly skeptical world and modern notions of a godless universe, despite his own bold and desperate straining to create an embracing
it
that superseded his father’s demanding faith, Vincent clung to these earlier incarnations of divine possibility, these nuncios of the sublime. Till the end of his life, they continued to hover over his imagination, embodying his last delusional hope for reconciliation with a Father both abandoned and abandoning. In the asylum at Saint-Rémy, between images of sowers and cypresses and starry nights, he painted a radiant portrait of the archangel Raphael.

In Amsterdam, Vincent immediately began experimenting with the new ideas he was formulating. “Happy the one who is taught by truth,” he argued, “not by fleeting words but by itself, showing itself as
it
is.” In addition to collecting prints, copying out passages, and recording examples on his walks, he tried to capture
it
in the medium he knew best: words. Going beyond the simple word paintings that had long filled his letters to Theo, he tried to evoke not just images, but complete moments: fragments of experience suffused with deeper significance—with
it
. His new vision was at work in December when he described the dockyards outside his window:

Vincent clearly saw creations like this as something new and significant. Later that month, he collected “a few writings” that he had done, and took them to a bookseller to have them bound.

Vincent had already learned to layer words and images in the pursuit of what he called “the finest expression.” A dense thicket of Bible verses, hymns, and poetry filled the margins of his print collection. But the search for
it
—for “deep significance and different aspect”—transformed these composite images, just as it did his word paintings, into deeply creative explorations.

In his description of a twilight walk along the bank of the IJ River, he struggled to express—for the first of many times—the solace he found in the night sky. He began with the “shining moon” and “that deep silence.” He added poetry (“God’s voice is heard under the stars”), literature (Dickens’s “blessed twilight”), and scripture (“twilight, when two or three are gathered together in His name”). Recalling a drawing he had seen, he reimagined the night sky as a backdrop for a Rembrandt biblical scene in which “the figure of our Lord, noble and impressive, stands out serious and dark against the window through which the evening twilight radiates.” For Vincent, this promise of redemption was the comforting Truth—the
it
—in every moonlit night or starry sky.

Portraits, too, were transformed by the search for
it
. The “stormy, thundery expression” in an old engraving of a seventeenth-century Dutch admiral reminded him of his religious hero, Oliver Cromwell. A noble portrait of Anne of Brittany summoned up images “of the sea and rocky coasts.” The portrait of a young boy from the French Revolution,
Citizen of the Year V
, that had hung on his wall for years, suddenly resurfaced in his imagination, carrying in its resigned young face all the passion and adversity of Vincent’s own religious coming of age. (“He is astonished to find that he is still alive after so many catastrophes.”) Vincent’s synthesizing eye combined the “splendid” portrait of the boy in the
bonnet rouge
with Michelet, Carlyle, Dickens, and all his reading on the Revolution so that it made “a good and beautiful whole.”

But no composite portrait he “painted” that winter was more vivid than the one he painted of himself. Looking through old art magazines at his uncle’s
bookstore, he ran across an etching entitled
A Cup of Coffee
, which he described to Theo:

Vincent added to this unblinking self-portrait his own prescient postscript: “Such work is not always the worst; for what is wrought in sorrow, lives for all time.”

At some point, he took the final step. Instead of layering his words on others’ drawings, he layered his drawings on their words. It was an easy line to cross. Vincent had grown up making drawings as gifts and as records. After leaving home, he made them as a way of sharing with his family and others his life away from them: his room, his house, his church. Whenever his parents moved, he made a drawing of each new parsonage. When he left a place, he invariably made drawings as mementos, to interleave with his memories.

The Cave of Machpelah
, M
AY
1877,
INK ON PAPER
, 2⅞ ×
6⅛ IN
. (
Illustration credit 11.1
)

The first drawings he did in the summer of 1877 were no different from these. Only now, the home that he wanted to share was not on any map. “Last week, I got as far as Genesis 23,” he reported to Theo on the progress of his Bible studies, “where Abraham buries Sarah in the cave of Machpelah; and I spontaneously made a little drawing of how I imagined the place.” The drawing he enclosed was small (less than six by three inches) but it contained a world. With tiny strokes from a fine pen, he drew the dark cave opening in the center and, above it, a marker stone with an infinitesimal inscription. On the right, a path
wanders by, discernible by its weedy border, and a disappearing trio of knotty, crooked trees; on the left, a flock of birds alights from a distant field. Next to the marker he drew a tiny bush, each of its rangy limbs defined by a stroke as fine as a hair and topped with a straggle of blossoms drawn with a conviction that suggests he knew exactly what kind of bush it was.

After hearing Laurillard preach, Vincent’s ambitions for these drawings changed. They were no longer merely records of places, whether real or imagined; they became
expressions
. “What I draw, I see clearly,” he wrote. “In these [drawings], I can talk with enthusiasm. I have found a voice.” He immediately tried his new voice on a biblical image that always obsessed him: the wandering, Christlike Elijah. “I did [a drawing] this morning, representing Elijah in the desert under a stormy sky,” he reported to Theo.

In his quest for “complete expression,” these early efforts were soon replaced by another form of imaginary landscape: maps. Vincent’s fascination with geography and maps must have begun with his childhood in a stopover town on a busy transcontinental road, with one uncle who sent reports from places as distant as the beaches of southern France and the Alps of Switzerland, and another uncle who explored corners of the planet as impossibly exotic as Borneo and Java. The same fascination made him a ready audience throughout his life for pseudoreligions and science fictions that promised different worlds on distant planets; and stayed with him to the end, when he looked into the night sky and saw a map of eternity.

In Amsterdam, despite the heavy workload, he produced maps with the profligate energy that marked all his great obsessions. He spent his precious extra money on “penny” maps, and made special trips to Stricker, Reverend Meyjes, Mendes, and Uncle Cor’s bookstore to see and copy the magnificent volumes of hand-colored maps produced by the century’s great mapmakers, Spruner and Stieler, with their panoramic formats, evocative topography, and meticulous lettering. “The work of
real artists
,” he called them.

The distinction between map making and art making had never really been recognized in Holland, with its simultaneous mandates to explore and describe. In the Golden Age, Johannes Vermeer’s
Art of Painting
had included a map so precise that one could set sail by it. Vincent added maps to the prints on his wall and recommended that Theo do the same. He used maps, like prints, to create composite images. He made elaborate maps of the countries he studied, then copied long extracts from his texts onto the same sheet, “thus making a whole of the two.” A map of Normandy called for a page of Michelet. To a map of France he added “a list of everything I can remember concerning the French Revolution.” He embellished a map of Paul’s route across Asia Minor with excerpts from the saint’s letters. Despite the increasingly intense pressure of his studies,
he labored painstakingly over each map, copying it again and again until it “finally has the quality I want,” he said, “namely that it has been made with feeling and love.”

One map preoccupied him more than any other that winter. Borrowing a book on the geography of Palestine from Uncle Stricker, he set out to create a map of the Holy Land. On a huge sheet of paper, almost three by five feet, he carefully drew all the cities and regions, rivers and mountains, valleys and oases, of this unseeable world. He shaded in their contours and washed their borders with color. In one corner, he set a plan of Jerusalem, with its jagged city walls and citadel, its Mount of Olives, its Golgotha—the landmarks of his last three years—all drawn in an eager, naïve hand—all “made with loving devotion,” he explained.

When his father came to Amsterdam in February 1878 for his third review, Vincent had the map ready to give him—as proof of his dedication, perhaps, or a plea for patience. But in his tortured retelling of the events of those days, Vincent never mentioned presenting it to him. Ten days later, he took a copy of the same map, drawn in red crayon, to the dark basement classroom of a little chapel near the Jewish Quarter and hung it there. “I thought that little room would be a nice place for it,” he wrote Theo. “It is only a very small light … but let me keep it burning.”

AFTER THE DISASTROUS MEETING
with his father, Vincent clearly knew he would never succeed in his studies. “It is very doubtful that I shall ever pass all the examinations,” he wrote Theo in what had to be a painful admission. But he could not give up. Nor, despite his relentless exhortations to Theo and his increasingly elaborate invocations of
it
, did he consider becoming an artist himself. Instead, he vowed fresh determination and spun new delusions of success. “I must push on,” he said. “There is no remedy but to set to work again, since it is clearly my duty to do this, whatever it costs.”

And then a different path opened up. On February 17, only days after his father left, Vincent broke from his usual Sunday routine and visited the Waalse Kerk (French Church). In the lofty pulpit stood a visiting clergyman “from the vicinity of Lyon” who delivered a sermon unlike any Vincent had heard before.

The same industrial revolution that had brought great wealth to some, like Uncle Cent, had thrown hundreds of thousands of others into unimaginable poverty. As the center of French industry, especially the weaving industry, Lyon had suffered more than most places with inhuman working conditions, subhuman living conditions, child labor, and unchecked disease. This pandemic of exploitation and suffering, which had inflamed a workers’ movement that was
already the most militant in France, was the subject of the sermon delivered in the Waalse Kerk that morning. The preacher spoke of the workers’ plight using “stories from the lives of the working people in the factories,” Vincent recalled.

Vincent responded not only to the heartbreaking imagery, which he always found more vivid than reality, but also to the messenger: an awkward, earnest foreigner struggling with his words. “One could hear that he spoke with some difficulty and effort,” he reported to Theo, “but his words were still effective because they came from the heart—only such are powerful enough to touch other hearts.”

Vincent grasped his example like a lifeline. In the Frenchman’s tales of evangelical outreach to the poor workers of Lyon, Vincent found a new model for his foundering enterprise to become “a real Christian”: He would do “good works.” Almost overnight, references to his studies virtually disappeared from his letters. So did the endless philosophical ruminations, dense knots of scripture, and flights of homily and rhetoric. “Better to say but a few words, but filled with meaning,” he corrected himself. He argued with his tutor about the value and relevance of his lessons. “Mendes,” he said, “do you really think such horrors are necessary for someone who wants what I want?” In place of sermons and studies, he proposed work as the ultimate expression of spirituality, and exalted the “natural wisdom” of the peasants over book learning. Instead of a scholarly parson like his father, Vincent now aspired to be a “laborer” for the Lord. “Laborers, your life is full of suffering,” he wrote to Theo, echoing a French evangelical pamphlet. “Laborers, you are blessed.”