Van Gogh (65 page)

The austere allure of lithography—which he undertook just as Theo began to apply serious pressure for more color—recharged Vincent’s obsession with black. He convinced himself that his previous attempts to make reproducible drawings had failed because the blacks he used—whether pencil, charcoal, or chalk—were not black enough. For a few months, the lithographic crayon, a dense bar of greasy black the consistency of soap, seemed to Vincent the grail of blackness he had long sought. Unlike regular crayon, the lithographic crayon also adhered to pencil marks, so that he could complete a drawing in pencil, fix it with milk, and then rework the image with the crayon, achieving the “glorious black” he craved. He also discovered that if he soaked the drawing in water, the crayon marks softened enough that he could work them with a brush, like paint, achieving deep, velvety blacks that reminded him of English illustrations. He called this strange and risky procedure
“painting in black.”

Even after the lithography project faltered, he continued to use the lithographic crayon, arguing that it “gives the same depth of effect, the same richness of tone value as in a painting.” But before long, he found an even blacker black. Rummaging around his cluttered studio, he discovered a few pieces of “natural” black chalk that Theo had brought from Paris the previous summer.
“I was struck by its beautiful black color [and]
beautifully warm tone
,” he reported to Rappard. Perhaps because he admired its rugged authenticity (at a time when most chalks were fabricated), Vincent dubbed it
“bergkrijt”—
mountain chalk. “There’s soul and life in that stuff,” he declared. “I like nothing better than to work with it.”

With this five-inch-long stick of black, sharpened to a point, Vincent fended off all Theo’s calls for cheerfulness, for color, for light, and for Impressionism. The drawings that Theo received after the elaborate soup kitchen preparations in March 1883 summed up his brother’s long preoccupation with black almost categorically: combining mountain chalk, lithographic crayon, black watercolor, and ink. From Theo’s point of view, these unbudging images must have looked virtually indistinguishable from the drawings he had seen in Vincent’s studio the previous summer, or even the summer before that in Etten: dark, cheerless, charmless images—exercises in defiance and denial.

THE SQUABBLES OVER ART
only rehearsed the deeper antagonisms over Vincent’s utter dependence on his brother. His pleas for money grew increasingly shrill. “I need it as much as a meadow needs the rain after a long drought,” he wrote. And no matter how much Theo sent, he always needed more. He spent with a blitheness that surely appalled his brother, he often bought on credit, and he never stopped making improvements to his studio. As always, Vincent attributed his high expenses to his hard work and the demands of his art, but when he alluded cryptically to “household costs” and “heavy cares,” Theo must have suspected other, unwelcome claims on his largesse.

When Theo reported in May that business at Goupil had been slack and his own finances were “rather straitened,” Vincent retreated not an inch. “Let us redouble our energy,” he instructed. “I will be doubly intent on my drawings, but you must be doubly intent on sending the money.” Calling the money absolutely indispensable, he warned Theo that “cutting it down would be something like choking or drowning me. I mean, I can do as little without it now as I can do without air.” He brushed aside Theo’s pleas for patience and sacrifice with calls for more models, and turned back every demand that he find a paying job.

The combination of profligacy and laxness in the pursuit of self-sufficiency brought a sharp rebuke from Paris. But instead of withdrawing in the face of Theo’s disapproval, Vincent was emboldened by it. He openly rejected the prospect of a job as a “nightmare” and testily reminded Theo that his fraternal duty was to “comfort” his brother, not to “distress or dishearten” him.

More and more, Vincent seemed pulled by hidden, contrary currents of animus: answering generosity with ingratitude, devotion with resentment. He compared his dependence on his younger brother to a kind of captivity—“like
the beetle which is bound to a thread and can fly a little way, but is inevitably stopped.” While he still offered occasional appeasements and declarations of fraternal love, his counterattacks grew sharper. He refused Theo’s repeated requests to pay professional calls and to dress better (arguing that his art would suffer if he improved his appearance). When Theo dared to intimate that Vincent had not advanced very far in his two years as an artist, Vincent blamed Theo’s inattention and inadequate funding for his slow progress. His comments about dealers grew increasingly venomous; not just in his conspiratorial rants to Rappard but directly to Theo.

The more Theo pushed him to make salable works, the more bitterly Vincent resisted, until, in the summer of 1883, he tried to end the argument once and for all with an ominous threat: “If you should
insist
on my going to ask people to buy from me,
I would do so,”
he wrote, “but
in that case
I should perhaps get melancholy … Brother dear, human brains cannot bear everything; there is a limit.… Trying to go and speak to people about my work makes me more nervous than is good for me.”

With all these tensions hanging fire between them, Theo made plans to visit The Hague on his annual leave in August 1883. The two brothers had not seen each other since the previous summer, when Theo had tried unsuccessfully to oust Sien from the Schenkweg apartment. A year later, the topic still shadowed all their arguments. The prospect of another confrontation filled Vincent’s letters with anxiety for the future and with memories of past betrayals running in an unbroken line back to the Zundert parsonage. “Father used to ponder over the story of Jacob and Esau with regard to you and me,” he wrote a few months later, recalling the biblical story of another usurping younger brother, “not quite wrongly.”

ONLY ONE ISSUE
brought the feuding brothers together in absolute agreement: Theo’s mistress.

Women had always been Theo’s weakness. In a life otherwise bounded by duty and an almost monastic selflessness, excursions of the heart offered the only escape. As an attractive, sociable twenty-five-year-old bachelor in the most sociable of all cities, he did not have to look far. Paris was teeming with women in search of advantageous entanglements. Economic dislocations all over Europe, but especially in rural France, had swept tens of thousands of unmarried women toward the City of Light. Many were educated, even cultivated: the daughters of provincial tradesmen and shopkeepers. Not all were bound for prostitution—at least not in the traditional sense. Often with the blessings of their families, they eagerly volunteered in the great upswelling of social mobility that drew everything, even love, into the new bourgeois equation. They came to
Paris hoping to find marriage and money, although not necessarily together and not necessarily in that order.

Among them was a girl from Brittany named Marie.

Marie’s last name, like so much of her story, is missing from the record. She and Theo met, apparently, in late 1882 under what Vincent described tantalizingly as “dramatic circumstances.” Given Theo’s cosmopolitan circuit of galleries and deluxe shops by day, fashionable restaurants and cafés by night, this is no hint at all. In Paris, ablaze with the glamour of money and new electric lights, every encounter held out the promise of “dramatic circumstances.” Vincent may have been referring to the melodramatic dilemma in which Marie presented herself for Theo’s rescue: abandoned by a feckless lover, penniless from paying his debts, stricken by a cruel but unspecified affliction.

Not a word about her appearance survives, but Theo clearly found her charming and attractive. The childless daughter of a Catholic family that Vincent described as decent and middle class, she must have been young. She could read, and was “not without culture.” Theo spoke lovingly of her provincial
“je ne sais quoi”
even as he fretted fondly over her naïveté. He pictured her to Vincent as a fresh country girl, with the salt air of the Brittany coast still in her hair, a gamboling maiden from a painting by both brothers’ favorite, Jules Breton, caught up in a sordid urban misadventure out of a Zola novel. With his usual dutiful resolve, Theo committed himself not just to a sexual liaison, but to a complete rehabilitation. He lobbied bureaucrats on her behalf, put her up in a hotel room, and tried to find her employment. As impetuous in love as he was cautious in everything else, he considered marrying her almost immediately.

Vincent responded to every detail of his brother’s amorous confessions with almost delirious enthusiasm. Arguments over art and money were swept aside by heartfelt expressions of solicitude and even offers of sacrifice. “To save a life is a great and beautiful thing,” Vincent wrote. “Do not deprive
her
for my sake.” When Theo’s joy succumbed, as it always did, to brooding over the future, Vincent launched a campaign of consolation that echoed the poetry album campaigns of previous years, filling letter after letter with advice and comfort for his lovesick brother. Asserting his superior knowledge in affairs of the heart, he offered everything from practical guidance on keeping a mistress (“It would be desirable for her to be elsewhere than in a dreary hotel room”) to detailed instructions on wooing (“Show her unmistakably that you cannot live without her”). He sent lists of romantic readings (especially Michelet) and a lover’s gallery of images, including the inevitable Mater Dolorosa.

Freed from his vow of silence by Theo’s new romantic dilemma, Vincent relentlessly drew parallels between Marie and Sien (“We both stopped and followed the human impulse of our hearts”). When Marie was hospitalized for an operation in February, Vincent saw it as a reprise of Sien’s medical crisis and
used it to right old wrongs and reclaim old prerogatives. He listed the similarities to Sien’s case in numbered paragraphs and lectured Theo on the curative powers of “love and loyalty.” “Yes, I truly think her life may depend on it,” he said.

In May, Theo finally worked up the courage to ask his parents for permission to marry Marie. When they refused (“There is something immoral in a relation with a woman of a lower station in life,” Dorus explained), Vincent’s fantasy of vindication seemed complete. He rained condemnation on the parson and his wife, calling them “unutterably pretentious and downright ungodly.” In the direst terms, he urged his brother to break with their parents and join him in open rebellion. After months of wavering, he began lobbying clamorously for marriage, insisting it was the right thing to do “even if one does not know beforehand how this woman will turn out later.” He even urged Theo to make the ultimate commitment—the surest, most irrevocable break with their parents: “I think it
desirable
that there be a child.”

Vincent made a special effort to drive the wedge deeper between his brother and his father. He railed against the inhumanity and wickedness of Dorus’s behavior. “Thwarting the interests of such a woman,
preventing
her rescue, is
monstrous
,” he wrote. “You and I also sometimes do things which are perhaps sinful; but for all that, we are not merciless, and we feel pity.” Vincent drew only the thinnest curtain over his divisive intentions, calling the argument over Marie “a crisis that may cause some to become more firmly attached to each other, whereas on the other hand, it may cause others to become estranged.”

Yet even as he raged against his father, another contrary current pulled Vincent closer to him and widened the rift with Theo. Dorus traveled to The Hague in May, and Vincent reported the most amicable visit between the two since 1877, when Dorus had spent “a glorious day” with him in Dordrecht. Despite the irrepressible rancor filling Vincent’s letters, they spoke only briefly about Sien, and not at all about Marie. Afterward, Vincent laid plans to draw his father’s portrait, and described him in warm, forgiving terms unprecedented in the long history of their antagonism. In the ultimate role reversal, Vincent cast himself as family peacemaker. “I should be glad,” he wrote Theo, in words that surely left his brother blinking in disbelief, “if, with a little good will, peace might be preserved.”

But it was no use. In the end, Theo chose duty over love; family over fraternity. As he always did. No doubt offended by Vincent’s attacks on their parents and probably uneasy under his brother’s militant tutelage (and perhaps alert to his designs), Theo arranged to keep Marie at arm’s length, setting her up financially, making discreet arrangements with her parents, while continuing to see her—exactly contrary to Vincent’s advice.

By the end of July, less than a month before his planned visit to The Hague, Theo had regained his parents’ favor and shattered Vincent’s illusions of correcting
what he called a “false position” with his brother. Theo would arrive at the Schenkweg studio newly emboldened by his own sacrifices to demand the same of Vincent.

AS THE DAY
of reckoning approached, Vincent rushed to make amends for the year of dissension and disappointment since Theo’s last visit. In a campaign driven by ever-shifting combinations of fraternal love, guilt, and resentment, he sought to appease his brother in images and words. In May and June, he created a series of drawings that he billed as evidence of his dedication to doing the more elaborate work that Theo urged on him. These big scenes, crowded with figures, all portrayed groups engaged in a common labor: digging potatoes, hauling coal, cutting peat, moving sand. He bragged to Theo about the complication and variety of these images, and assured him, “[They] will please you more than those single studies.”

In June, Vincent promised Theo that he would return to watercolor again in the near future—“probably before your arrival.” It wasn’t until a month later, however, that he took his rarely used paint box into the countryside and managed “a few watercolors by way of a change.” Even then, he put off any further attempts until his brother’s visit, “when we shall decide together whether I shall make a number of small watercolors for you—just as an experiment.” Oil painting, too, made a sudden reappearance in the months before Theo’s visit. Vincent identified some “splendid things to paint” and professed to being “just in the mood for [painting] now.” He reported doing some landscapes, his brother’s favorite, on sketching trips to the country and to the beach at Scheveningen.