Van Gogh (61 page)

In Rappard, Vincent found not just a second to his obsessions, but a lone voice of sympathy and support for a mission that must have seemed increasingly hopeless. “He is a man who understands my intentions, and who appreciates all the difficulties,” Vincent wrote to Theo after Rappard’s visit in May. When Rappard spoke kindly of his drawings, Vincent melted with gratitude:

Onto his absent friend, Vincent could project all the frustrations, angers, disillusionments, and fears that had accumulated through the long winter of battles and brooding: his astonishment at the abusive behavior of his fellow Hague artists; his paranoia that Mauve and Tersteeg might still “play tricks” on him; and, of course, his martyrdom of thankless toil.

In his favorite martial cadences, Vincent enlisted Rappard in his battle not just with their community, but with their era. “I believe it would be a good thing for us to focus our attention on the men and works of former days,” he wrote, “so it will not be said of us, ‘Rappard and Vincent may also be reckoned among the
decadent
fellows.’ ” In passages that must have puzzled and amused the conventional, congenial Rappard, Vincent lamented their shared fate as artistic pariahs and social outcasts. “They look upon you and me as unpleasant, quarrelsome nonentities,” he wrote in a delusion of solidarity. “They consider us ponderous and boring in our work and in our persons.” “Prepare to be misunderstood, despised, and slandered.” Even as Rappard enjoyed the comforts of his parents’ home in Utrecht, socialized with a large circle of friends, and eagerly joined an
array of artists’ clubs, Vincent rallied him to a lonely, priestlike life of artistic devotion. “One feels weaker as an artist the more one associates with other artists,” he wrote. “I believe Thomas à Kempis says somewhere, ‘I never mingled with human beings without feeling less human.’ ”

Against this tide of nostalgia and obsession, self-vindication and fraternal longing, painting did not stand a chance. In mid-August, Vincent learned that Rappard had returned from his expedition with sketchbooks full of figure drawings. By then Sien had recovered enough to start posing again. The retreat began soon after that, announced by a figure study done in both charcoal and oil with “very little color.”

In mid-September, Vincent announced a new ambition: “I want to make groups of people,” he said, “at the soup kitchen, in the waiting room of the station, the hospital, the pawnshop … talking in the street or walking around.” Images like these, which had been staples of
The Graphic
and other magazines, would require “innumerable separate studies and sketches of each figure”—in other words, more models. Within a few weeks, however, the new initiative foundered, undone by the hostility he encountered whenever he went out to sketch in a crowd, and by his decision to use watercolor—probably to satisfy Theo—a medium that he found especially frustrating in attempting to render the elusive human form.

Vincent never explicitly renounced painting. But the proof of his retreat filled the studio. By late September, he was back ensconced in his Schenkweg world, with his charcoals and pencils and his family of models, churning out figure drawings at the rate of a dozen a day. He still occasionally protested his love for painting or color or landscape—primarily to parry Theo’s concerns about salability—but his work returned almost exclusively to the black-and-white of his prints and his
fraternité
with Rappard. He took all the canvas left over from his few weeks of painting and used it to cover the studio windows in order to create a more sympathetic light for his models.

AFTER THE FAILURE
of his crowd scenes, Vincent turned for inspiration to another famous
Graphic
image, Hubert Herkomer’s
Sunday at Chelsea Hospital
. The depiction of an ancient war veteran slumped dead in his chair at a meeting of old comrades was so well received when it first appeared in 1871 that Herkomer made a painted version, which went on to win international acclaim under a more sentimental title,
The Last Muster
(another painting that Vincent had seen in London in 1874 but not commented on).

In September, Rappard began a series of drawings at the institute for the blind in Utrecht, a project that promised many similar heart-tugging images. At almost exactly the same moment, as if responding to a shared initiative, Vincent
began recruiting models at the almshouse in the Geest. He approached many of the elderly pensioners with his strange request, but only one came back again and again. His name was Adrianus Jacobus Zuyderland.

H
UBERT VON
H
ERKOMER
,
The Last Muster: Sunday at Chelsea Hospital
(detail), 1871,
ENGRAVING, 11½ × 8⅞ IN.
(
Illustration credit 18.2
)

Vincent may have known his name, but he never mentioned it. Nor could Zuyderland have responded if Vincent had called him by name: he was deaf. Like all the pensioners at the Dutch Reformed Old People’s Home, he wore a number on his sleeve for identification; his was 199. He also wore the uniform of all male pensioners: tailcoat and top hat—a frayed faux gentility that marked him everywhere as a charity case. On cold days, Zuyderland wore a long double-breasted overcoat like the ones worn by the veterans in Herkomer’s
Chelsea Hospital
. Despite the military-style coat and the medal pinned to his lapel, the seventy-two-year-old Zuyderland would never be mistaken for either a soldier or a gentleman. His unruly white hair stuck out from under his hat and cascaded over his collar. The hat covered a perfectly bald pate. Dense mutton-chop whiskers
hung on his cheeks. He had a broad, hooked nose; large, protruding ears; and small, heavy-lidded eyes. Vincent called him
“echt”
—the real thing.

Over the next year, Zuyderland came to the apartment on the Schenkweg often—probably as often as he could, given that pensioners were only allowed out three days a week and had to return by sundown. For fifty cents a day (all of which Zuyderland was obliged to surrender to the home), Vincent finally had a model commensurate to his capacity for drawing. With the patience of Job, Zuyderland stood frozen for hours while Vincent drew him in every conceivable position: standing, sitting, bending, kneeling—front, back, side. Sometimes he appears frail and stooped, sometimes erect as a soldier. He posed with a cane, with a stick, with an umbrella; with a top hat, with a cap, hat in hand, bareheaded. Vincent gave him props—a handkerchief, a glass, a cup, a book, a pipe, a broom, a rake—and posed him eating, drinking, reading, and doing chores. He joined with Sien, her mother, her daughter, and her baby for “family portraits.”

Despite the almshouse prohibition on pensioners’ wearing “any outer clothing outside the home other than that supplied by the governors,” Zuyderland compliantly donned the costumes and carried the attributes of the “types” that peopled Vincent’s imagination. A smock, a cap, and a peat basket transformed him into a peasant; a shovel, into a digger; a sou’wester, into a fisherman; a pickax, into a miner; a pipe and blouse, into an artist. Vincent sat him at a table, posed him praying, and drew him as a paterfamilias saying the mealtime benediction. He draped a bag over the old man’s sloped shoulder and drew him again and again as The Sower.

Zuyderland endured every pose with the stoicism of the dray horses that Vincent admired so much. For Vincent, who rarely could get models for more than one or two sessions and even then had to plead for their indulgence and race their impatience, Zuyderland’s patience amounted to a gift from the gods. It freed him not only to try more poses, but to do and redo each one until the correct outline emerged—a crucial condition for success given Vincent’s lottery-like approach to studies. It also allowed him to take more time with each successful outline, to focus his extraordinary powers of observation on the play of shadows in the folds of a coat or the creases in a shoe. He returned to the larger size and bold strokes of
Sorrow
—which he still considered his best drawing—but added to it the vigorous hatching of the English engravings that filled his portfolios.

Over the long winter months in the Schenkweg studio, Vincent grew attached to his patient, compliant, stone-deaf model. Like the old pensioners in Herkomer’s
Last Muster
, Zuyderland must have looked to Vincent like a castaway from the past, one of the disappearing “faithful veterans” from the era of Millet and Dickens. Homeless, wifeless, childless, friendless, and penniless, Zuyderland, too, was a Robinson Crusoe in the world, marooned in the passionless
present. Vincent often referred to him using a name given to all the “poor old fellows from the workhouse.” He called him
“weesman”
—orphan man.

Old Man with a Stick
, S
EPTEMBER-NOVEMBER 1882, PENCIL ON PAPER, 19¾ × 12 IN.; AND
Old Man in a Tail-Coat
, S
EPTEMBER-DECEMBER 1882, PENCIL ON PAPER, 18¾ × 10⅛ IN
. (
Illustration credit 18.3
)

IT WAS ONLY
a matter of time before Vincent’s new enthusiasm for drawing, for Van Rappard, and for the past coalesced into one of the driving manias that inevitably overtook him. In late October, a letter arrived from Rappard that fanned all these fires of ardor into a single, perfect flame of obsession. It contained a summary of an article by Hubert Herkomer that had appeared in an English magazine. In language as emotional as
The Last Muster
, Herkomer championed black-and-white imagery and celebrated the English illustrators (himself
included) for bringing the form to its highest expression. In words that must have seemed to have jumped directly from Vincent’s thoughts onto the page, Herkomer hailed the bygone glories of wood engraving, and made the astonishing claim that the illustrations that appeared in a single magazine,
The Graphic
, represented as “true and complete” an artistic expression as all the paintings on all the walls of all the museums in the world.

In Herkomer’s “energetic words,” Vincent found vindication for all the impassioned arguments he had made on behalf of his repudiated art. An artist’s sincere heart mattered more than his agile hand, Herkomer argued; his bravery more than his expertise; his mettle more than his training. He extolled the “moral advantages” of drawing over other art forms and exalted draftsmen above all other artists. He praised tone over color and vigor over care. In words that transformed Vincent’s alienation and nostalgia into badges of courage, Herkomer warned against the dangers of “morbid conventionalism” and bewailed the decadence of recent trends in art (even at
The Graphic
), taking particular aim at the “foolish school” of Impressionism, founded by “half-formed minds” who painted “anything [and] everything they see in Nature, irrespective of all claims to beauty, or interest in [the] subject.”

As a German-born, American-raised outsider in the closed club of English art, Herkomer painted a picture of his early career (he was only four years older than Vincent) that consoled Vincent’s darkest fears. Herkomer, too, had experienced poverty and neglect. He, too, had been unable to pay the rent, scrounged for models, and suffered persecution. Even Herkomer’s dense, overwrought English, so much like Vincent’s, seemed to speak on Vincent’s behalf. “The whole thing is thoroughly sound, strong, honest,” Vincent wrote of the article. “To me it is an inspiration, and it does my heart good to hear someone talk this way.”

Herkomer’s polemic, by turns stirring and consoling, fired Vincent’s ministry of black-and-white drawing to an evangelical fervor. As in Amsterdam five years earlier, earnest devotion gave way to fanatic zeal. After a long absence, religious images reappeared in his letters, along with sonorous biblical cadences and actual scripture. He described his collection of prints as “a kind of Bible” that put him in a “devotional mood.” Like a latter-day Savonarola, he railed against the decadence and decay of the new art and “today’s deteriorating society”; against the onrushing tide of superficiality and conventionality; against the elevation of “material grandeur” over “moral grandeur.”