Van Gogh (54 page)

Woman Sitting on a Basket with Head in Hands
, M
ARCH
1883,
CHALK ON PAPER
,
18¾ X 11⅝ IN
. (
Illustration credit 16.3
)

He held up as his ideal the power that a doctor exercised over his patients. “How well he knows how to banish their scruples,” he wrote enviously, “and to make them do exactly as he wishes.” He expressed special admiration for physicians who were “abrupt” in their handling of patients, and “less afraid to hurt [them] a little.” “In the future,” he vowed after observing one such doctor at work, “I shall try to handle my models the way he does his patients, namely by getting a firm hold on them and putting them straightway into the required
position.” One of his favorite images at the time depicted a group of policemen wrestling a criminal into a chair for a photograph, straining to keep the struggling suspect still. It was called
The Bashful Model
.

Vincent’s struggle with models echoed his struggle with materials (some of them “listen with intelligence and obey,” he said, while others are “indifferent and unwilling”) and ultimately the larger battle of art itself. “The artist always comes up against resistance from nature in the beginning,” he explained,

Only in his studio, with his models, could Vincent claim any advance in this mortal struggle. Everywhere else, victory eluded him: in his family, in his friendships, in his relations with his mentors, even in his endlessly compromised love for Theo. Only in his studio could he simulate the control that the world denied him elsewhere. Only here, directing his poor compliant models, could he make life submit to the images in his head. “If only one had to deal with people only inside the studio!” he exclaimed. “But personally I cannot get on well with people outside of it, and cannot get them to do anything.”

In this little world ruled by the draftsman’s fist, Vincent found a new family. Powerless and homeless everywhere else (the thought of going to Etten “gives me the shudders,” he said), Vincent found in the rituals of domination and submission enacted each day in the Schenkweg studio a facsimile of the ideal family that he had tried and failed so often to impose on his own parents and siblings. He chose what they wore and cast them in the roles they played. He posed them with a firm paternal hand: as a mother sewing by the window, as a sister doing chores, as a father quiescent by the stove. At mealtimes, they ate together around the heavy kitchen table. He gave parties for the children; and, at night, he almost certainly gave them shelter sometimes, too.

Although protective of his dominion, he worried endlessly about his models’ emotional well-being and longed to strengthen their pretend ties with the genuine bonds of affection. “I can draw the models better when I have come to know them well,” he argued. To flesh out this fantasy, he leaped at the opportunity to hire members of the same family to pose for him. Within the first few months, he had recruited a woman along with her young daughter and her aging mother. “They are poor people,” Vincent exulted, “and splendidly willing.”

IT WAS ONLY
a matter of time before Vincent longed to complete this flawed fragment of a family. In early May, he wrote to Theo declaring his love for the woman, a prostitute, who was pregnant. He revealed that he had been secretly supporting her and her family for months.

And he said he was going to marry her.

B
EYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, THEO KNEW OF HIS BROTHER’S
relationship with the prostitute Sien Hoornik long before Vincent confessed it. Always torn between concealment and defiance, Vincent had made only sporadic efforts to hide the affair after it began, probably in late January 1882—a remarkable act of hubris given the scandals of his own past, as well as the prying eyes and attentive ears of a city filled with family. Yet every time a family emissary visited the Schenkweg studio and found him at work with his “model,” he anguished for weeks that his secret might be revealed to Theo. Hints of displeasure from Paris prompted anxious, disingenuous queries (“Do you perhaps know something that I do not?”) and strange, abstract arguments about an inviolable “barrier between artistic and personal matters.”

Even without firsthand reports, Theo surely suspected something. At a time when the door between modeling and prostitution swung freely, and amorous liaisons between artists and their models were already a hoary art-world cliché, Vincent’s incessant talk of models could never avoid a sexual subtext. Both brothers had long traded in stories of whores and mistresses. Even during his religious years, Vincent obsessed over “fallen women” and “carnal man” and the dangers of “violent desire.” When he visited a prostitute in Amsterdam after the debacle at the Strickers’, he wrote Theo of his special affection for “those women who are so damned and condemned and despised.”

In late January 1882, he sent Theo another paean to prostitutes, along with this forthright instruction:

The very same week, Vincent reported triumphantly: “I have had a model regularly, every day from morning until evening, and she is good.” Soon after that, he announced that he had begun to draw from the nude.

Not until three months later did the truth come out. Squeezed between the fear that Mauve or Tersteeg would expose his deception, and the increasing financial demands of his new “family,” Vincent decided in April that he had to tell his brother about Sien. Instead of an outright confession, however, with its uncertain consequences, he chose to launch another campaign of persuasion. In eight letters over four weeks, he laid out his arguments with equal measures of calculation and ardor—part legal brief, part cri de coeur—in a bid to frame the coming revelation as sympathetically as possible.

First, he escalated his attacks on Tersteeg and Mauve, casting himself as a martyr to their implacable enmity. The one opposed his art and the other resented his peculiarities of manner and dress, he insisted, clearly aiming to undermine the credibility of both as unbiased commentators on his private life.

Then he recast his art. Invoking for the first time the rhetoric of Breitner’s “painter of the people,” he said that his art
demanded
that he lower himself to the level of the “laborers and poor people” who posed for him. He claimed as his true inspiration the social-realist illustrations of English magazines that he had seen eight years earlier in London—images that had made no apparent impression on him at the time. “Where do the draftsmen who work for the
Graphic, Punch
, etc., get their models?” he asked, in a question so loaded that Theo may have taken it as confirmation of any suspicions he had. “Do they not personally hunt for them in the poorest alleys of London—yes or no?”

If he did not mix well in the dandified company of Hague artists, if his manner did not please the bourgeois Mauve or the honorable
gérant
, it was because he belonged to a “different sphere from most artists,” Vincent argued. His art demanded something deeper, something truer to nature. “I do not want the beauty to come from the material,” he said, dismissing all complaints about the crudity of his drawings, “but from within myself.” That truth, that beauty, of course, was love. Not just any love, but love for a woman who
also
belonged to that other sphere—a “woman of the people.”

To conclude his brief, Vincent reminded Theo of his unrequited love for Kee Vos, and of the storm that descended on their family when he was denied the object of that desire. “Last year I wrote you a great many letters full of reflections on love,” he said. “Now I no longer do so because I am too busy putting those same things into practice … Would it have been better to have kept thinking
of her always and to have overlooked what else came my way?” In a scarcely veiled hypothetical, he asked what else he could do if a model said to him, “I will come not just today, but tomorrow and the day after tomorrow; I understand what you want.
Do as you like
.” If that happened—
when
that happened—Vincent claimed that all his problems would be solved: his drawings would improve, they would start to sell, and (most important to Theo) family peace would be restored: “Father and Mother will come to see me,” he promised, “and on both sides this will produce a change in our feelings.”

Sorrow
, A
PRIL 1882, CHALK ON PAPER, 17½ × 10½ IN
. (
Illustration credit 17.1
)

As always, Vincent’s arguments found their fullest expression in images. In mid-April, he sent Theo a drawing that summarized all his earnest pleadings. It showed a naked woman, her legs pulled up to her chest, arms crossed, head bowed—a knot of angular limbs rendered in the bold outline of the Bargue
académie
on which her pose was based. Her folded figure almost fills the 17½-by-10½-inch sheet, as if she is trapped in a box. Her drooping breasts and bulging stomach announce her pregnancy.

Onto this image of stark vulnerability, Vincent layered all his arguments on behalf of the still-hidden relationship. He invoked not only the graphic magazine illustrations of homeless, victimized mothers that he had seen in London, but also Michelet, whose embracing view of love excused all; and Millet, whose woodcut of a shepherdess offered another icon of vulnerable womanhood. He filled in the background with a profusion of carefully chosen symbolic plants—lilies for innocence, snowdrops for purity, ivy for fidelity—and added a budding tree to represent renewal of hope and redemption by love. He raised again the unhealed wound of Kee Vos—“the void in the heart that nothing will fill.” Finally, he wrote a single English word at the bottom of the image—“Sorrow”—as a caption for all his pleas.

Vincent called it “the best figure I have drawn yet.”

At the last minute, with exposure imminent, he sent another drawing surrounded by another frame of words. It showed a skeletal black tree with its mangled roots exposed by a storm—another study in vulnerability and tenacity in the face of hardship. “I tried to put the same sentiment into this landscape as I put into [Sorrow],” he explained: “the convulsive, passionate clinging to the earth, and yet being half torn up by the storm. I wanted to express something of the struggle for life in that pale, slender woman’s figure, as well as in the black, gnarled and knotty roots.”

By early May, time had run out. Convinced that his secret was no longer safe, Vincent finally confessed the truth. Adopting a tone of righteous indignation, he laced his confession with all the previous month’s defenses: “I am suspected of something … it is in the air … I am keeping something back, Vincent is concealing something that mustn’t see the light of day,” he began, addressing his offstage enemies Mauve and Tersteeg as well as Theo:

WHO WAS THIS WOMAN?

Clasina Maria Hoornik grew up in a Hague invisible to Van Gogh eyes. Her father, Pieter, a porter, may have carried Van Gogh packages or delivered letters to a Carbentus townhouse. Pieter’s brother, a carriage driver, could have ferried a Van Gogh guest or taken a Carbentus to shop. Pieter’s mother, also Clasina,
might well have bedded a randy Van Gogh uncle slumming in the Geest in the sixteen years between Pieter’s birth and her marriage to a blacksmith, who probably shod a Van Gogh horse. The skeletal public record suggests a vivid tale of illegitimacy, forced marriages, infant mortality, divorces, remarriages, and making do.