Van Gogh (49 page)

As if gasping for air, Vincent arrived unannounced at Mauve’s house in The Hague in late November, straight from the catastrophe in Amsterdam. He did not return home or even tell his parents where he was going. Mauve had promised to visit Etten that winter to initiate Vincent into the “mysteries of the palette.” Now, instead, Vincent had come to Mauve. With his heart “beating quite hard” for fear of another rejection, he begged his cousin to let him stay “for a month or so” and allow Vincent to “occasionally trouble [him] for some help and advice.” By way of explanation, he offered only a cryptic French expression,
to convey the urgency of his distress:
“J’ai l’épée dans les reins”
(literally, I have a sword in my gut).

He stayed at an inn nearby and walked every day to Mauve’s comfortable canalside studio on the city’s east side. Because Vincent insisted on making salable works, Mauve introduced him to watercolor, a lucrative but difficult medium at which Mauve excelled. “What a splendid thing watercolor is,” Vincent exulted after making a portrait of a peasant girl with only a few strokes of muted color. “[It] expresses atmosphere and distance so that the figure is surrounded by air and can breathe.” Under his cousin’s guidance, Vincent began to sense progress almost immediately—“a glimmering of real light,” he called it. “I wish you could see [my] watercolors,” he wrote Theo in yet another cautious surge of hope. “I reckon that I am now at the beginning of the beginning of doing something serious.”

As Vincent recovered his artistic confidence, his imagination began to repair the damage wrought by the storms of the previous months. To save face with Theo, he said almost nothing about the debacle in Amsterdam except that “Uncle Stricker was rather angry.” He blamed Kee for the failure of his mission. Her silly notions of “mystical love” had proved to him that he needed a
real
woman, he said—that is, a prostitute.

He sent his brother a detailed report of his encounter with just such a woman immediately after leaving the Stricker house in Amsterdam. In a narrative as “realistic” as any of the French novels his father rejected, he described her “modest, little room” and her “perfectly simple bed.” She was “coarse, not common,” he said, and “no longer young, perhaps the same age as Kee Vos.” Like Kee, she had a child, and “life had left its mark on her.” But unlike Kee, “she was strong and healthy”—not imprisoned by “frozen” devotion to a dead husband.

To revenge himself on his father, Vincent renounced religion as well as romantic love. “There is no God!’ ” he proclaimed. “For me, the God of the clergymen is as dead as a doornail.” He boasted to Theo that his father and Uncle Stricker “consider me an atheist,” and blithely dismissed their accusations with Sarah Bernhardt’s famous quip:
“Que soit”
(so what). In religion, as in love, Vincent imagined himself as spurning, not spurned. He compared his long enthrallment to Kee to “leaning too long against a cold, hard whitewashed church wall,” and now declared himself liberated from the debilitating detentions of both heart and soul.

In these sweeping renunciations, Vincent imagined reversing all the bitter defeats of the winter in a single stroke—and escaping the judgments of the past a little longer. “You cannot imagine the feeling of liberation I am beginning to have,” he wrote. Through the first weeks of December, he bolstered this new
myth of redemption through “realism” with pledges to “become more realistic in everything,” and with page after page of “realistic” images of Dutch peasants and vignettes of country life.

Donkey and Cart
, O
CTOBER 1881, CHARCOAL AND CHALK ON PAPER, 16⅜ × 23¾ IN.
(
Illustration credit 15.3
)

No doubt sensing the delusiveness of this resolution, he mightily resisted returning to Etten, where it would be tested against reality. “I should like to stay here longer,” he wrote from The Hague, “even renting a room here … for a few months (and perhaps even longer).” He pleaded with Theo to send more money and defended his heavy expenses for models and materials with one simple explanation: “It is a little risky to remain a realist.”

A week before Christmas, alarmed by Vincent’s prodigal spending, Dorus came to The Hague to retrieve his troublesome son yet again. Vincent appealed in vain to Mauve, who appeased him with a promise to visit Etten and a vague commitment to continue his apprenticeship in the spring. With Mauve’s support, Vincent extracted from his father a promise that he could rent a separate studio in Etten and an agreement not to interfere with his artistic project. “Father must stay out of it,” he wrote Theo. “I must be free and independent, that goes without saying.”

But it was no use. The end was determined from the moment Vincent set foot back in the parsonage. For a few days he tried the usual tonics of enthusiasm and work to distract him from the inevitability of what followed. He even
located a possible studio, a shed in nearby Heike, where he had often sketched and recruited models. But on Christmas Day, less than a week after his return, the whole precarious delusion came crashing down.

It started when Vincent refused to attend holiday church services. “I naturally told them that it was completely out of the question,” he told Theo, “that I thought their whole system of religion horrible.” The flames quickly spread from God to Kee Vos to Gheel and beyond, until the entire landscape of the previous four years was engulfed in a firestorm of guilt and recrimination. “I do not remember ever having been in such a rage in my life,” Vincent admitted.

In the “violent scene” that followed, Vincent unleashed all his pent-up frustration in a fury of righteous indignation and profane curses. He had spared his father’s feelings and weathered his intolerable insults for too long, he said. “I could no longer contain my anger.”

It ended only when Dorus cried “Enough!” He ordered his son to leave the parsonage and not to return. “Get out of my house,” he thundered, “the sooner the better, in half an hour rather than an hour.” This time there would be no delay and no appeal. It was the banishment that Vincent had long feared. As he left, he heard the door lock behind him.

VINCENT NEVER RECOVERED
from the events of Christmas Day 1881. “It is and remains a wound which I carry with me,” he wrote two years later. “It lies deep and cannot be healed. After years it will be the same as it was the first day.” To him, it represented the culmination of all the injuries and injustices of the years that preceded it, many of which had plunged him into self-consuming throes of despair. This time, however, he did not wander into the black country. This time, he had a new light to follow: a new religion, realism; and a new preacher, Anton Mauve.

When Vincent was still in The Hague, Mauve had taken him into the studio and set up a still life of a pot, a bottle, and a pair of clogs. “This is how you must hold your palette,” he said as he showed him the oval of colors.

“With painting,” Vincent wrote his brother excitedly, “my real career begins.”

V
INCENT HEADED STRAIGHT BACK TO THE HAGUE, CONSUMED IN BITTERNESS
and rage. The fiery trials of the previous years—the repeated clashes with his father, the months of doing battle over Kee Vos, both climaxing in the events of Christmas Day—had brought his ardor to a boil of indignation and hardened his defensiveness into an armor of resentment. “I used to have many regrets and be very sad and reproach myself because things between Father and Mother and me were going so badly,” he wrote. “[But] that’s over and done with, once and for all.”

Brazenly violating his agreement not to return to Mauve for at least three months, he went directly to his cousin’s house and begged to resume his apprenticeship immediately. In a move clearly intended to appall and alarm his family, he borrowed enough money from Mauve to rent a room nearby. Defying his father’s accusations of profligacy, he spent extravagantly on decorating it. In a brazen declaration of his intent to stay, he filled it with furniture he had purchased, not rented. He bought a raft of new prints to ornament the walls, and flowers for the table. Within a week of his arrival, his last penny was gone. Then he sat down and wrote to his parents, proudly announcing what he had done, declaring their relationship ended, and caustically wishing them a happy new year.

He wrote Theo, too, unapologetically detailing his new life (“I have a real studio of my own, and I am so glad”) and hinting darkly that he might be forced to borrow again from Mauve if Theo did not replenish his empty pockets—or even go to Tersteeg for money. Fearing another family embarrassment, Theo sent the money, but not without blistering his brother for behaving so badly toward their parents. “What the devil made you so childish and so shameless?” he scolded. “One day you will be extremely sorry for having been so callous in this matter.”
Vincent exploded at the rebuke, responding to his brother’s accusations in a long and furious rebuttal. “I offer no apology,” he declared. To Theo’s charge that such bickering threatened their aging father’s health, Vincent replied acidly: “The murderer has left the house.” Instead of softening his demands, he complained that Theo had not sent
enough
money, and insisted that Theo guarantee further payments because “I must know with some certainty what to expect.”

This was the spirit of anger and defiance in which Vincent launched his artistic enterprise. Art was not just a calling, it was a call to arms. He compared his career to “a military campaign, a battle or a war,” and he vowed to “fight my battle, and sell my life dearly, and try to win.” “Persistence,” he cried, “is better than surrender.” He raged against his critics—“the persons who suspect me of amateurism, of idleness, of sponging on others”—and promised to fight them even “more fiercely and savagely” until he vanquished them with his “draftsman’s fist.”

Only one person seemed immune from Vincent’s reflexive, indiscriminate belligerence: Anton Mauve. A sensitive, decorous man, struggling to maintain family decorum without being dragged into the family’s darkest melodrama, Mauve opened both his house and his studio to his homeless cousin. “He helped and encouraged me in all sorts of practical and friendly ways,” Vincent wrote. Despite their obvious differences in age (fifteen years) and disposition, Mauve may have seen in the younger man a dim reflection of his own past. The estranged son of a preacher, he had left home at fourteen to become an artist, dashing the family’s plan for him to succeed his father in the ministry.

Like Vincent, Mauve had spent his early years as an impoverished artist set on achieving commercial success by making copable, conventional images. Like Vincent, Mauve threw himself into his work with an industry that verged on mania. In order to finish a painting, he sometimes locked himself in his studio for days at a time. “He gives each picture and drawing some small part of his life,” Vincent observed admiringly. Outside of work, Mauve, too, found consolation in nature. He shared Vincent’s love of long walks, especially in the evening, as well as his keen sensitivity to the sublime. Although he preferred music to literature (he often hummed Bach while working), Mauve, too, admired the fairy tales of Andersen, which he often recited to his children in a tableau of family intimacy that surely tugged at Vincent’s exiled heart.

Mauve’s generosity to Vincent represented an extraordinary sacrifice for the one and an unprecedented opportunity for the other. An intensely private man, Mauve rarely admitted guests to his family circle and even more rarely allowed visitors into his studio. He did not take students. Although active and widely admired in the art world of The Hague, he remained generally aloof from social activities. He entertained guests one at a time, choosing his friends for their refined
tastes and “gifts of good sense and humor.” Crowds and “empty chatter” made him nervous. Despite his love of music, he refused to attend concerts because he found the rustle of the audience upsetting. He resented any disturbance or “violence” in taste or temperament that might jar what he called the “lyric” quality of his sensibilities.