Van Gogh (62 page)

In the studio, Vincent pursued his new vision of salvation with a frenzy of drawing. Throughout the fall, he drew not only Sien and her family and the orphan man Zuyderland, but others from the almshouse and orphanage, and workmen from the carpenter’s yard nearby. He made drawings of horses on the street, paying owners to still their beasts while he scribbled madly. “I am working with all my strength,” he wrote, as he reported completing stack after stack
of studies. “The more one makes the more one wants to make.” As an homage to his new Kempis, he started a series of portraits like those that Herkomer had done for
The Graphic’
s “Heads of the People” series. These images, drawn from models but intended to represent broad, identifiable types (The Miner, The Fisherman, The Field Worker), had attracted Vincent’s attention even before the summons of Herkomer’s article. He had sent copies of the
Graphic
illustrations to Theo in June.

In mid-October, Vincent began moving the perspective frame closer to his models, creating multiple large-scale, head-and-shoulder portraits of Sien, her mother, and Zuyderland. He posed them each in distinctive headgear (hat, cap, bonnet, sou’wester), the shorthand of typology that he hoped would render them universal. Freed from the constraints of portraiture (
“the type
[is] distilled from many
individuals,”
he instructed Theo), he let his pencil obsess over the rough paper, working the bold outlines into moody, deeply shadowed cartoons of character. Of the scores of portraits he made that winter, only a few—one of Sien’s ten-year-old sister with her hair shorn for lice and a suspicious look in her eye; another of the bookseller Jozef Blok, with his intense brow and impatient gaze—hint at something deeper than Herkomer’s impassive secular icons.

In November, Vincent produced the truest testament to his new gospel. Again inspired by Herkomer’s
Sunday at Chelsea Hospital
, he set out to capture the same pathos of inexorable death. The burden of mortality had haunted him since his own dark journey in the Borinage. He pulled from his portfolios a drawing he had done the previous year in Etten of an old man sitting with his head buried in his hands, weighed down by the trouble and futility of life. It was titled
Worn Out
. He carefully posed Zuyderland in the same position, set up his perspective frame, and traced the outline of this wounded, woeful figure. Not since
Sorrow
had he lavished more care on an image or invested it with more meaning. “I have tried to express … what seems to me one of the strongest proofs of the existence of
‘quelque chose là-haut’
[something on high],” he explained in a lengthy sermon of commentary. “In the infinitely touching expression of such a little old man … there is something noble, something great that cannot be destined for the worms.”

For Vincent, however, no vision of salvation was complete without the promise of reconciliation with his family—the wellspring from which all his manias flowed. Here, too, Herkomer offered hope. Not only was he himself a successful, wealthy illustrator, but he preached a message of opportunity and plenty to win the heart of any Van Gogh. “[In] an age of quick recognition and reward,” Herkomer promised in the same article, an artist who specialized in wood engravings could readily earn a living and be free from the anxiety of sales. Why? Because in the new era of bourgeois consumerism (an era of “utility and haste,” he called it), wood engravings would be more in demand than any
other art form. Cheap, reproducible, and “reasonably comprehensible to most minds,” wood engravings offered “pleasure and edification” to the masses, and the masses would always “clamour loudly for good work.”

Worn Out
, N
OVEMBER 1882, PENCIL ON PAPER, 19¾ × 12⅛ IN.
(
Illustration credit 18.4
)

Such reassurances fell like manna on Vincent’s faltering artistic enterprise. Despite the rhetorical battles with Mauve and Tersteeg, Vincent still clung to the ambition he had brought out of the Borinage: self-sufficiency. His letters to Theo zigzagged between lofty claims of artistic integrity and solemn rededications to commercial success. Herkomer’s words promised release from this whiplash of ambivalence. Through the medium of mass-produced wood engravings, a simple, sincere art could touch people directly, he argued, bypassing the “poisonous influence” of dealers like Tersteeg; and a simple, sincere artist could reap the rewards of success without sacrificing his soul.

Within days of reading Herkomer’s article, Vincent set out to create an image that struck this perfect balance. Using the phenomenally popular
Chelsea Hospital
as his model, he announced his plan to “produce a work of Art in black and white of a striking subject that would attract attention and fix a reputation.” By doing so, he imagined, he, like Herkomer, could reverse the disdain of his peers, the rejection of his family, and the indifference of the world.

In late October, Theo inadvertently enabled his brother’s great new ambition. In a letter, he described some recent developments in lithography, a traditional method for mass-producing images that had been largely eclipsed by more modern printing techniques like photoengraving. Because it involved drawing directly on a lithographic stone (from which copies were made), lithography was widely admired for its faithfulness to the artist’s vision as well as the expressive moodiness of its velvety blacks. But the practical challenges (and expense) of working with a grease crayon on a limestone block limited lithography’s popularity, especially among younger artists. Theo’s letter reported on a new technique that allowed artists to draw an image with lithographic crayon on a special paper, which could be transferred mechanically to a stone, thus bypassing the most difficult and expensive step in the process. “If this is true,” Vincent wrote back instantly, “send me all the information you can pick up about the way in which one has to work on this paper, and try to get me some of it, so that I can give it a trial.” When Theo failed to respond immediately, Vincent marched to an art supply store, Smulders, and bought some of the new paper on his own. With no idea how to use it, he took the paper home, copied onto it one of his drawings of the orphan man Zuyderland, and returned it to the astonished clerk at Smulders for printing, all within a few hours. The resulting print so excited him that, without waiting for Theo’s reaction, he laid elaborate plans for a whole series of similar prints—“not too elaborate, but
vigorously
done”—and reserved six stones at Smulders. He chose as his model Millet’s
Les Travaux des Champs
, the icons of redemptive toil that had guided him out of the black country. He started with an image of “a woman with a bag of coals on her head”—yet another variation of
Worn Out
—and laid plans for the next image in the series, a “small caravan” of women miners.

IN A RAPTURE
of enthusiasm, he imagined that his album of prints would surely secure him a job as an illustrator, or at least give him “prestige in the eyes of … the magazines.” He proposed going to England to apply for work, convincing himself that the magazines there would experience a shortage of competent draftsmen once the revival of lithography got under way—which he expected to happen any day. In London, he planned on meeting with Herkomer himself, as well as the editors of the fabled
Graphic
. “I don’t think it’s every day that [they] find somebody who considers making illustrations his speciality,” he wrote. Among the first drawings he recreated for his new stones were two with English titles, including
Sorrow
.

So strong was Vincent’s vision of success that setbacks only prompted him to greater leaps of fantasy. From the outset, he had hoped that the album would
bind him even more closely to Anthon van Rappard and planned for his friend to contribute drawings to it. But as soon as Rappard expressed reservations about the project, Vincent proposed a new and even grander conception: he would recruit a community of artists, all of whom would contribute to the great effort—with both illustrations and money—working together just as the English illustrators had cooperated in the glory days of
The Graphic
.

Women Miners
, N
OVEMBER 1882, WATERCOLOR ON PAPER, 12⅝ × 19¾ IN
. (
Illustration credit 18.5
)

Through every leap of unreality, Vincent argued his cause with the same combination of delusional invention and earnest calculation, of inspiration and cerebration, that would ultimately shape his art. He cast the project as nothing less than a moral duty and rallied his brother with the revolutionary rhetoric of 1793: One should “act, not deliberate … Great things can be done.… 
En avant et plus vite que ça
[Move on, quick as possible].” He drew up a detailed contract for the revolutionary artists’ group he envisioned, a manifesto that dictated not just the artistic program (materials, subject matter, and price), but also profit shares, voting rights, shareholder duties, and distribution of assets.

All to no avail. Yet again, his grand plans fell victim to his overheated expectations. Theo, who had learned to speak to his volatile brother on certain subjects only in measured silences, never responded directly to the album proposal. In truth, not even Vincent seemed persuaded by the promises of commercial success he repeatedly made and retracted, sometimes in the same letter. His attitude toward popularity also took a series of abrupt U-turns. At first, he
dismissed public recognition, saying, “[it] leaves me absolutely cold.” But when he heard that the workmen at Smulders had asked to hang one of his prints on the shop wall, he hailed the discernment of “the man in the street” and set himself the goal of hanging his prints in “every workman’s house and farm.” Only weeks later, however, he was again expressing contempt for the public taste.

The images, too, betrayed him. No medium could bear for long the weight of ardor, nostalgia, and vindication that Vincent brought to his art. But lithography proved especially intractable. The results disappointed him at every turn. The double transfer—from drawing to stone and from stone to print—introduced a host of vagaries into the creative process. The loss of control gave him fits of frustration. In the printing process, ink ran and blotted, spotting some images and blurring others. In its own way, transfer lithography was as unforgiving as watercolor: once the greasy crayon touched the paper, there was no going back. He tried erasing the crayon with the scraper intended for the stone, but that reduced even the heaviest paper to shreds. He tried “touching up” the drawings themselves with autographic ink—yet another “treacherous” medium. But when the drawing was wetted during transfer, the ink dissolved—leaving “nothing but a black blot instead of your drawing,” he moaned. Then he tried making changes directly on the stone, using his pocketknife as an eraser. Finally, he took finished prints and treated them as drawings in gestation, using a pen to elaborate details and add background.

He complained endlessly to Theo about how much of the drawings was “lost in transferring them”; how the prints were less striking than the originals, drained of “animation” and “diversity of tone.” He reported impressions that turned out “spoiled” and “misprinted.” Even the best ones he found unsatisfactory; the worst he declared (to Rappard) “failures” and “sorry abortions.” He sent copies to Theo with hand-wringing apologies. At the end of November, after only four weeks and six images, he pronounced the project’s epitaph: “I tell you that dissatisfaction about bad work, the failure of things, the difficulties of technique can make one dreadfully melancholy.”

The final blow came from the most unexpected source:
The Graphic
. In the 1882 Christmas issue, the editors of the magazine directly challenged Herkomer’s jeremiad. They denied the charges of artistic decline and dismissed Herkomer’s dire warnings of a shortage of competent draftsmen. “Besides our professional artists,” they boasted, “we have no less than
two thousand seven hundred and thirty
friends scattered all over the world, sending us sketches or elaborate drawings.” The editorial exploded Vincent’s remaining arguments for his project’s commercial viability. In an apparent attempt to limit the damage, he sent Theo a copy of the magazine accompanied by a furious denunciation.