Van Gogh (55 page)

Pieter Hoornik fathered eleven children by his wife, Maria Wilhelmina Pellers, and then struggled unsuccessfully to support them until the effort killed him in 1875, at the age of fifty-two. By that time, three of his children had already died. The three oldest boys were set loose to fend for themselves, and the other three (all younger than ten) were sent to an orphanage. Only the eldest and the youngest children, both daughters, stayed with their mother, Maria. By that time, the eldest, twenty-five-year-old Clasina, had already borne her first illegitimate child. It died a week later.

Clasina (called “Sien”), along with her three-year-old sister and her forty-six-year-old mother, did what had to be done. Her brothers could drift between menial jobs—thatching roofs, cleaning stores, repairing furniture—earning just enough to pay for their alcohol and tobacco, while fathering the next generation of illegitimate children in the dense warren of the Geest. But the new era offered no such mercies to poor women on their own. Capitalism brought a flood of new jobs to commercial centers like Amsterdam, but few factories had been built in the harborless Hague. Unregulated workshops paid pennies for long hours in horrendous conditions; and piecework that could be done at home, mostly sewing, was unreliable, underpaid, and underlit (often leading to blindness). Not even benevolent employers thought to pay a living wage to women, whose incomes were always considered merely supplementary.

Both Sien and her mother claimed at various times to work as seamstresses or charwomen, but such terms were used loosely, by both victims and officials, to cover the shame of destitution and its inevitable concomitants. (In England, “milliner” became a euphemism for streetwalker.) On the birth certificate of her second illegitimate child, who was born in 1877, Sien was described politely as
“zonder beroep”
—without profession. Church charity and public assistance provided the thinnest possible insulation from catastrophe, but for anything more, a woman had no choice but to find a man—whether for life, or for the night.

Prostitution offered money, but hardly security. Competition was fierce. Work that required no training and minimal speaking drew women not just from the countryside but from other countries. Most prostitutes lived a nomadic existence, moving from neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city, or even country to country, every few months. To find security for her mother, sister, and newborn, Sien could have applied to one of the city’s official brothels—legacies of Napoleon’s “French system” of state-regulated prostitution. But that meant the humiliation of registering with the authorities as a “public woman”—a
“woman of the people”—carrying the notorious red card and subjecting herself to regular health exams. The paperwork and public opprobrium (this was Holland, not France) kept most women, like Sien, off the official books.

But a resourceful woman could find plenty of opportunities for sponsorship, if not security, in the scores of beer halls, bars, cafés, and cabarets that lined the narrow streets of the Geest. Outside the official system, prostitution flourished. Engorged on the same new money and bourgeois consumerism as the booming print market, prostitution had become more lucrative and ubiquitous than ever. Repeated campaigns for public health and decency, popular in conservative rural areas, had succeeded only in pushing both prostitutes and their patrons into fewer and larger enclaves in cities like The Hague, creating a busy underworld of carnal sweatshops and piecework every bit as crushing and inescapable as its daytime counterpart.

Survival in this world had taken its toll on Sien Hoornik. In 1879, she bore her third illegitimate child, a boy who died after four months. When she met Vincent less than two years later, she looked a decade older than her thirty-two years. Pale and gaunt, with sunken cheeks and impassive eyes, she had long since lost whatever attractions she once held for wayward husbands and adventurous young men. In
Sorrow
, Vincent had done her a favor by posing her with her head buried, hiding her faceful of smallpox scars. “This ugly, faded woman” is how he himself described her at the time, “no longer handsome, no longer young, no longer coquettish, no longer foolish.” Years of rough clients, public humiliation, and official indifference had wrung the last refinements from her. Ill-tempered and prone to fits of anger, she swore like a sailor, bathed rarely, smoked cigars, and drank like a man. A persistent throat affliction had left her with a strange, husky voice.

Vincent reported that other people found Sien “repulsive” and “unbearable.” A creature of café and sidewalk by night, soup kitchen and railroad station by day, she had little time left for her sister or her daughter (“a sickly, neglected chit of a girl,” Vincent called her). Years of drinking and smoking, malnutrition, multiple pregnancies, at least one miscarriage, and the wear of her nightly work had reduced her body to a “miserable condition,” according to Vincent, “a worthless rag,” racked by pain, anemia, and the “ugly symptoms” of consumption. Her only apparent joy in life, other than gin and cigars, was a weary, streetwise cleverness in securing advantage. Almost certainly she could not read, and, although nominally Roman Catholic, she could not afford the luxury of religious convictions—or any other enthusiasms that might handicap her daily struggle. Even motherhood. Within a few years of meeting Vincent, she gave away both her surviving children to relatives.

To Vincent, however, she was “an angel.”

Where others saw a sinner and temptress—a cautionary example of unbridled
female lust, justly “damned” for her wanton lifestyle—Vincent saw a wife and mother. “I have a feeling of being
at home
when I am with her,” he said. “She gives me my own
‘hearth and home.’
” He listed her domestic virtues—quiet, thrifty, adaptable, helpful, useful—and wrote proudly about the way she mended his clothes and cleaned his studio. He counted her cooking among “things that make life worth living,” and compared her favorably to a nurse who had cared for him and Theo in Zundert. “She knows how to quiet me,” he wrote, “and that is something I am not able to do for myself.”

Where others saw a canny, scheming survivor, Vincent saw a passive and unquestioning “lass,” too helpless to make her own bed. He called her a “poor creature”—“as meek as a tame dove.” He compared her to the innocent stray animal in the parable of the “poor man who had but one single little ewe lamb.” “It had been raised in his house—it ate from his bread and drank from his cup and slept in his arms, and it was like a daughter to him.” In Sien’s blank, impenetrable gaze, Vincent saw an expression like that of “a sheep that would say, ‘If I must be slaughtered, I won’t try to defend myself.’ ”

Rather than an angry and vulgar whore, Vincent saw a Madonna. “It is wonderful how pure she is,” he said. He praised her delicacy of feeling and good heart, and told her that no matter what she had done in the past, “you will always be
good
in my eyes.” He cast her as a heroine in peril and himself as her rescuer. The more depraved her story, the stronger the fantasy of rescue and redemption grew, until finally he invoked the greatest of all reclamations through love. Quoting Christ’s pledge in the Garden of Gethsemane—
“Fiat voluntas”
(Thy will be done)—he promised to save Sien just as he had saved the injured miners in the Borinage.

Vincent saw her face everywhere: in a Mater Dolorosa by Eugène Delacroix, in the idealized dark ladies of Ary Scheffer (painter of the
Christus Consolator
), in the heroine of a Victor Hugo novel. When he leafed through his portfolio of prints, he saw her as the brave matriarch defending her family from deportation in
Irish Emigrants;
as the desperate woman forced to choose between selling her body and starving her children in
Her Poverty but Not Her Will Consents;
as the heartbroken mother surrendering her infant at an orphanage door in
The Foundling;
and as the desperate wife watching as her husband is seized by police and marched away in manacles in
The Deserter
. “She looks just like that,” he said of each one.

Finally, he saw in her pockmarked face an image of Christ—“a sorrowful look like an
Ecce Homo,”
he said, “only in this case it is on a woman’s face.”

VINCENT DID NOT
just see images, he inhabited them. With his boundless curiosity, obsessive ardor, exquisite receptivity, and astounding recall, he wove them
into his consciousness as deeply as reflexes. Emerging from a childhood defined by images—images that preached, cajoled, cautioned, inspired—he continued to order and describe the real world by reference to the depicted one.

He judged people by the prints that hung in their rooms, or the images they most resembled. He used images to woo, and to chastise; and limned his own tortuous progress by reference to the changing gallery on his walls. In his letters to Theo, he invoked images to support his arguments or express his feelings until the brothers spoke a virtual private language of imagery: tree roots and shepherdesses, meadow paths and churchyards, innkeepers’ daughters and revolutionary youths. Every time either brother fell in love with a lower-class woman, the mere mention of a Mater Dolorosa sufficed to explain all. He dreamed in Andersen, he said, and had nightmares in Goya.

As he reeled from crisis to crisis, Vincent placed greater and greater demands on images: altering, combining, and layering them into increasingly sophisticated “expressions,” like the
Pilgrim’s Progress
of his Richmond sermon. In his effort to console (and be consoled), his eye turned more and more to his imagined world of prodigal sons, persistent sowers, and little boats on stormy seas, and less to the real world around him.

The succession of disasters that began in 1879—Borinage, Gheel, Kee Vos, and now Sien—drove him fully into the embrace of this comforting alternative reality. He looked at the blighted landscape of the Borinage and saw “the medieval paintings of Brueghel.” A wagon full of injured miners reminded him of a print by Jozef Israëls; an aging prostitute registered as “some quaint figure by Chardin or Jan Steen.” A wood engraving of a coal miners’ strike, perused in the comfort of his studio in The Hague, seemed more real—more moving, more inspiring—than his actual experience of such a strike three years earlier. Any poverty or suffering was best glimpsed through the correcting lens of art, and all love’s real lessons could be learned from his portfolio of prints. Even as he loudly protested his “feeling for things themselves, for reality,” Vincent insisted that the “reality” of Millet or Maris “is more real than reality itself.” “Art,” he declared, “is the essence of life.”

In Vincent’s reality, images told stories. For him, coming out of a tradition of children’s emblem books and illustrated lessons, images could never shirk their narrative duties. In England, he taught lessons from prints. Preparing for his university exams in Amsterdam, he used images as study aids and conjured illustrations for texts that didn’t have them. As a preacher, he filled the margins of his religious prints with bits of scripture and poetry in a running narration of piety. He was always fascinated by episodic sequences of images (“The Life of a Horse,” “The Five Ages of a Drinker”) and would later ponder interminably over arrangements of his own works in an effort to create a whole more eloquent than its parts.

He described pictures to Theo with a storyteller’s delight in unfolding a narrative:

Vincent’s portfolios of prints were filled with images like this one (Israëls’s
Silent Dialogue
) that distilled their narratives into titles, legends, or captions: “At Death’s Door,” “A Helping Hand,” “Hopes and Fears,” “The Light of Other Days,” “Home Again.” In his own early works, like
Sorrow
, Vincent observed the Victorian fashion for art that told stories and taught lessons. The very first nude drawing he sent Theo in April 1882, showing a woman sitting bolt upright in bed, came with an explanatory narrative:

He gave it a title, too:
The Great Lady
. For Vincent, no image was complete without a bold or suggestive caption—whether or not it was written at the bottom—and he soundly rejected works that defied this narrative imperative, such as the murky, “mystical” visions of his friend Breitner.

In Vincent’s reality, images also had to have “significance.” Any image that did not reach beyond its immediate subject in search of a deeper meaning, a broader relevance, he dismissed as a mere “impression”—an ephemeral artifact, like a sketch, useful only to the artist in his continuing quest for something more “noble and serious.” To achieve significance, an image had to strip away the specifics of the observed world and “concentrate on what makes us sit up and think.” An image that “rises
above
nature,” he said, “is the highest thing in art.”

In an imagination steeped in metaphor and medieval notions of immanence, any subject could aspire to significance. Even the old horses in Mauve’s beach painting preached to Vincent “a mighty, deep, practical, silent philosophy”: “Patient, submissive, willing … They are resigned to living and working somewhat longer, but if they have to go to the butcher tomorrow, well, so be it,
they are ready.” Vincent’s world was filled with “significant” images like these “ill-treated old nags”: wayfaring pilgrims, tree-lined roads, cottages in the wilderness, church steeples on the horizon, old women stoically sewing by the fire, old men despairing, families at dinner, and legions of laborers. “There is more soul in Millet’s
Sower,”
he proclaimed, “than in an ordinary sower in the field.”