Van Gogh (53 page)

No doubt with that refusal in mind, Vincent struck a defiant note in his very first request for money from his new home. After spending all one hundred guilders that Mauve had lent him on furniture and “ornaments” for his apartment, he laid his predicament at his brother’s feet. “I am in for it now, and the die is cast,” he wrote unapologetically. “Of course I must ask you, Theo, if you will occasionally send me what you can spare without inconveniencing yourself.” Within a week, the mask of deference was ripped away, and Vincent’s tone turned demanding: “Theo, what’s the matter with you?…I have not received
anything…
send me at least part of [the money] by return mail.”

Theo’s delay in sending a second payment in February sealed Vincent’s anxiety and condemned their relationship to an unending cycle of resentful pleading and guilty scheming. Buffeted by a dependence that he loathed and an indebtedness that he could not deny, Vincent careered back and forth between petulant demands and grudging gratitude. He appeased his brother with pledges to dress better, to socialize more, and, most of all, to make salable art—in Vincent’s assurances, always just around the corner. He placated Theo with promises of hard work and harsh economies, and charades of financial acumen (calculating down to the day when he would next be “absolutely penniless”). He spun vivid, Camille-like tales of fainting spells brought on by “scarcity of funds.” He complained of being harassed and feverish with worry when Theo’s money failed to arrive on time. He protested that every franc Theo withheld was a detriment to his art, reminding him again and again in endless variations that “the
success or failure of a drawing also depends greatly on the mood and condition of the painter.”

He also threatened. With increasing directness, he warned Theo of the calamities that would befall him if more money were not forthcoming: the embarrassment, the discouragement, the sickness (headache and fever), the depression—and especially the mental problems. “Don’t forget that I shall break down if I have too many cares and anxieties,” he wrote, waving the red shirt of the Borinage and the family upheaval over Gheel. “All the worry and troubling over my drawings is hard enough,” he hinted heavily. “If I had too many other cares … I should lose my head.”

Meanwhile, he continued to spend money with a defiant disregard for the limits of Theo’s purse. Vincent had always been a spendthrift, never budgeting and never saving. He cited the aristocratic Van Rappard as his example. “I see again in Rappard how practical it is to use good stuff,” he explained. “Rappard’s studio is very good and looks very comfortable.” Even so, he should have been able to get by on the hundred francs that Theo sent every month. The average workman earned about twenty francs a week and often supported a whole family on that. While Vincent had expenses no workman did, he also received shipments of his favorite (expensive) paper from Theo, and extra income from his “sales” to Uncle Cor and Tersteeg. No, when Vincent pleaded poverty or missed rent payments, it was because he had spent his last pennies on books, or “special” penholders, or a new easel, or more models, or improvements to his apartment, or additions to his growing collection of prints and illustrations. (Five months after arriving in The Hague, he had more than a thousand of them.) And through it all, he never did without the little girl he paid to sweep his studio.

The problem went beyond simple profligacy. Vincent had come to believe that he deserved to be supported. Whether as an angry challenge or a desperate self-justification, or both, he argued that his hard work and noble purpose entitled him to his brother’s money. Thus when Theo pressed him to make more salable works so that he could earn his own living, he countered airily: “It seems to me that it is much less a matter of
earning
than of
deserving
.” Armed with this delusional sense of entitlement, Vincent loudly asserted his artistic prerogative; eschewed formal training; disdained taking a job to help defray expenses; and demanded a large, well-stocked studio, prodigious supplies of materials, and a steady flow of private models—all while he was still little more than an unpromising novice. He passed his mounting debts on to Theo with only the faintest expressions of regret (“I see no other way”) while covering the indignity of his dependence with a flood of self-justifying letters that argued his right to even more money. He mocked the “poor wretches” who bought lottery tickets “paid for with their last pennies, money that should have gone on food,” even as he
undertook projects and purchased luxuries without a cent in his pocket, on the expectation of Theo’s next letter.

Tersteeg’s threat—“I will see to it that there is an end to this”—threw Vincent into a self-righteous panic. “How is it possible, and what’s got into him?” he wrote, frozen by the fear that Tersteeg and Mauve might conspire with his like-minded brother to cut off his funding—“to try and take my bread away from me.” He sought reassurances of Theo’s support with pleas for sympathy (“I have struggled through this winter as best I could”) and with howls of pain: “Sometimes it seems as if my heart would break.”

But also with defiance. Rather than moderating his claims of entitlement, Vincent escalated them. Instead of one hundred francs a month, he now wanted one hundred and fifty—almost half of Theo’s salary. And he wanted a new studio—bigger, because “it is much better for posing.” And, most of all, he wanted a guarantee. “I insist upon its being arranged so that I no longer need be afraid that what is strictly necessary will be taken from me,” he dictated, “nor always feel as if it were the bread of charity.” No matter what Vincent did—or refused to do—the money should continue to flow, because, he declared, “a workman is worthy of his wages.” It was a demand for nothing less than financial independence without financial means, an unprecedented arrangement, and Vincent argued his brother to paralysis over it.

Theo had arrived at the same bitter impasse as Mauve and Tersteeg: Vincent refused to give up, or even moderate, his obsession with figure drawing. With religious absolutism, he had declared himself a disciple of the human body, banishing all compromises as surrender and answering all challenges with indignant defiance. Even the failure to match his passion constituted an act of intolerable moral cowardice, as Breitner and De Bock and the artists of the Pulchri had learned.

Why was drawing figures so important that Vincent was prepared to antagonize two of the most influential figures in Dutch art and even defy his benevolent brother? Why would he sacrifice his best chances for success, collegiality, and even survival on an art form for which he had demonstrated no talent and resisted all efforts at instruction? Was it purely his contrarian nature: his draftsman’s fist, still shaking angrily at the world after the twin blows in Amsterdam and Etten? Or was something more at stake?

The answer had to be apparent to anyone who visited the little apartment off the Schenkweg.

It wasn’t much: a single room with a potbellied stove flued into a fake fireplace, an alcove for a bed, and a window looking out on a cluttered carpenter’s yard and the neighbor’s laundry lines. The building, nondescript and cheaply built, sat in a sparsely developed new area on the outskirts of The Hague just beyond the Rijnspoor station: an area of garden plots and cinder paths and the
ceaseless belch and scream of trains only a few steps from the front door. Not really city, not really country, it was a no-man’s-land where “nice” people rarely ventured, and never settled.

Still, the neighbors must have wondered at the strange parade of visitors who made their way to the second-floor rear apartment at Schenkweg no. 138. Sometimes Vincent brought them; sometimes they arrived unaccompanied. They came and went throughout the day, from morning until evening: boys and girls, sometimes with their mothers, sometimes without; old men and young men, old women and young women—but never ladies. None was dressed for visiting. They all wore “everyday clothes”; many clearly had nothing else.

These were Vincent’s models. He recruited them wherever he could: in soup kitchens and train stations, in orphanages and old people’s homes, or just off the street. At first, he tried hiring experienced models like the ones Mauve used, but they cost far more than he could afford. Besides, he seemed to find an odd pleasure in accosting strangers and asking them to pose for him. With its combination of persuasion and intimidation, the “hunt” (his word) for models perfectly suited his missionary mind-set. But it was far harder in The Hague than it had been in rural Etten, where he could convincingly claim a
droit d’artiste
. “I have great trouble [finding] models,” he complained soon after arriving.

Some refused to make the long trek to his outlying studio; some promised to come but never showed up. Some came once but never returned. Some refused because they feared “they would have to strip naked”; some could come only on Sundays. Some spurned him because he wore shabby, paint-spattered clothes, others because he wore a fine coat. Money weighed on every encounter. Parents demanded exorbitant sums for children to pose, forcing Vincent to recruit orphans; returning models demanded extra payment for the long commute. He tried saving money by asking people just to freeze in place while he sketched them, but he found these attempts deeply unfulfilling. “The result was always a great longing in me for a longer pose,” he said, “the mere standing still of a man or a horse doesn’t satisfy me.”

Once Vincent managed to pay, plead, or cajole someone into his studio, he took possession of them. “He was anything but meek,” one of his models recalled. Somewhere in the one-room apartment, he redressed them in the clothes he provided and then shuffled them into position. He re-created poses from the Bargue
Exercices
, from his print collection, and from his own previous drawings. He reworked favorite poses again and again with the same models in different clothes, or with different models. He re-created scenes he had sketched in the street: a boy pulling a tow rope along a canal; a woman wandering near a madhouse. He wrung as many poses as possible from each model, as if he feared it was his last. He drew each pose from the front, back, and side.

Even though he worked quickly, a drawing usually took at least half an
hour—and that was after the long and tedious business of finding the right light and adjusting the pose until it was exactly what he wanted. When he ran out of poses, he drew studies of heads, necks, breasts, shoulders, hands, feet—devouring each model with his tireless pencil and charcoal until the sunlight disappeared from his south-facing window. When the winter weather warmed even a little, he took them outside or instructed them to meet him at a particular time and place so he could fix the position of a figure in a drawing, or see where the light touched it. It was “hard work” for the models as well as for him, he admitted, and when the light or the pose or the pencil frustrated him, he would “fly into a rage” and leap from his chair screaming “Damn it, it’s all wrong!” or worse. His models often complained, and sometimes they simply walked out on him—just as friends did in his other life.

Despite the problems, Vincent could never get enough of models. In Etten, he could have models every day because most were uninitiated rustics who cost him only four francs a week. Even then, he complained it was not enough. In The Hague, professional models charged the same amount
per day
, but still he hired them until his money ran out. Soon he began tapping The Hague’s demimonde of poor and homeless willing to do almost anything for pennies. (Mothers on public assistance received only three francs a week.) But the lower expense of amateur models only prompted him to hire more of them, more often. Within a month, he had models “every day from morning until evening.” When he found models he liked, he nervously offered inducements to keep them coming back, including regular pay (whether or not he used them), raises, and advances. By March, he had at least three models “under contract” in this way, for a promised payment of two francs a day: a total of sixty francs a month—almost two-thirds of what Theo sent him. And he was already planning an elaborate summer campaign of drawing from the nude.

To justify this extraordinary expenditure, Vincent hammered his brother with every imaginable argument. The more he spent on models, he insisted, the better his work would become. He warned that working without a model would be his “ruin,” and that trying to draw a figure from memory was “too risky.” He argued that his models gave him the courage he needed to succeed. Because of them, he said later, he “feared nothing.” He vowed to sacrifice everything else, from food to art supplies, in order to spend more on models. The desperation of his arguments unmoored him from the principles he had recently espoused so furiously to Mauve and Tersteeg. On the one hand, he proclaimed the moral superiority of figure drawing as “the surest way to penetrate deep into nature.” On the other hand, he argued for drawing from the model as the surest way to guarantee commercial success, citing popular magazine illustrators who “have models almost every day.”

These muddled justifications masked a single, far deeper one: in his studio,
Vincent was master. By his own account, he dominated his models, or tried to, approaching every encounter as a struggle for control with only two possible outcomes: to submit, or to force submission. The quality he admired most in models was “willingness,” he said, and he spoke longingly of “getting my own way with the models” and “making those I want to pose for me do so, wherever I want them, and as long as I want them.” He repeatedly compared models to whores, extolling submissiveness as the ultimate virtue in both. He often posed his models in the posture of submission—knees bent, heads bowed, faces buried—and his accounts of models are filled with the language of coercion and domination.
“Take
the model,” he advised. “Do not become the slave of your model.”