Van Gogh (73 page)

Predictably, Dorus threatened to block the marriage with yet another guardianship petition—a threat that launched Vincent into yet another round of bitter denunciations and furious defiance just as the new year began.

IT WAS INEVITABLE
that Vincent would take the fight with his father to the unpaved streets and garden paths of Nuenen. With a population smaller than Zundert, the little town on the sandy heaths of East Brabant was also a prisoner of its past. Bound to ancient methods of farming and a cottage weaving industry barely changed from the Middle Ages, Nuenen had fallen deeper and deeper into poverty and irrelevance as the rest of Holland, and Europe, raced toward a new century. Better cloth could be made more cheaply in big steam-powered factories all over the Continent, and better transportation had already triggered a worldwide agricultural depression that hit small farmers, like Nuenen’s, hardest. Without Zundert’s Napoleonsweg, the town had remained geographically isolated and ethnically inbred for most of its history. The railroad came too late.
By the time Dorus van Gogh arrived in 1882, Nuenen was a dying town, with low birth rates, high death rates, and a net outflow of the working-age population.

Only a summons from his beloved Society for Prosperity could have compelled Dorus to leave his comfortable semiretirement in Etten for one more tour of duty in another embattled outpost on the heath. A controversy over the Society’s stern treatment of tenant farmers (evicting a tenant with an incurable disease for nonpayment of rent) had opened an ugly rift with Society officials and bitterly divided the tiny congregation (a mere thirty-five souls in a town of fewer than two thousand inhabitants). Dorus had been sent to subdue the dissenters and quiet the seditious gossip that threatened to undermine the Society’s mission in East Brabant. The enemies of Protestantism would seize on any sign of weakness, any hint of scandal, to discredit the Society and the faith it served.

Prior to his arrival on Saint Nicholas Day in 1883, no one in Nuenen—not even the elders of Dorus’s church—had known that Vincent existed. The pastor had spoken not a word about his eldest son. The reason for his silence soon became obvious. In a campaign that seemed intended to mortify and embarrass his parents, Vincent boldly advertised his atheism to visitors, and bragged of his role as the family’s black sheep. His mysterious flight to The Hague on Christmas Eve—a time when every Protestant eye in Nuenen was fixed on the parson—announced to all the discord at the core of their congregation.

Although still capable of exquisite propriety with distant friends like Rappard and Furnée, Vincent gave no quarter to his parents’ circle. He confronted visitors to the parsonage with either brooding taciturnity or bristling challenges, or else avoided them altogether. He ostentatiously rejected social courtesies, dismissing them as “absurd” and “disgusting.” He decried the “narrow conventionality” of the town’s gentility—“prim, self-righteous prigs,” like his father—and subjected their polite opinions to withering assaults of what he called “honest observation.” Eventually, the Van Goghs had to discourage friends from visiting for fear of their son’s unpredictable reception. “How is it possible to behave so unkindly?” Anna wondered bitterly.

On his long walks through the village and into the surrounding countryside, Vincent did not have to make an effort to draw disapproving stares. Most residents of Nuenen and its tiny satellite hamlets had never seen a painter before, much less a painting parson’s son who swore vehemently, wore strange clothes, refused to eat meat, smoked a pipe incessantly, drank cognac from a flask, and lashed out sarcastically when challenged. “He was not friendly,” one villager recalled fifty years later. “He was strange.… He got angry. He scowled.” Another remembered that even Vincent’s ruddy beard seemed subversive of Dutch order: “One bristle stuck out this way and the other bristle that way.… He was extremely ugly.” The docile peasants of Nuenen had no place in their experience,
or in their language, for such a strange, insubordinate man. They called him simply
“schildermenneke”
—little painter fellow—or just “Red.” He called them “clodhoppers.” As he did in so many places, Vincent attracted knots of small boys who followed and mocked him everywhere he went, a torment that he claimed to relish. He dismissed his tormentors, as he dismissed the whisperers and the gossips, with a curled lip. “I cannot bother about what people think of me,” he said. “I go my own way.”

More and more, Vincent pursued one path in particular that mortified and embarrassed his parents more than any other.

THEIR ROOMS WERE
as dark and close as prison cells. On sunny days, a few shafts of dusty light angled across the darkness. But sunny days were rare in Nuenen, especially in winter. “The rains, the fogs drown it in a constant moisture,” one traveler complained. “The inhabitants search with all their eyes for a sun that scarcely shines here.” On most days, dawn brought nothing more than a twilight gray to their airless rooms. After sunset, their work was illuminated by the faint red glow of fires kept low to conserve precious fuel, and the heatless yellow light of gas lamps suspended from the smoke-blackened beams.

Whether in shadow or in light, however, the work proceeded. From the packed-earth floor to the thatched-roof rafters, the rooms shuddered with the labor of the loom. It sat huge in its tiny cell, like a trapped insect, too big to crawl out the airhole windows or the stooping door. Its legs and arms, posts and beams, reached out in every direction, some as thick as a ship’s timbers, showing the sinewy distortions of the huge trees from which they were hewn, and big black knots where great limbs once hung. At its filigree center, two skeins of warp moved up and down, merging and unmerging in ghostly rhythm, as the shuttle flew between them trailing its weft, back and forth in endless escape.

Vincent had imagined drawing weavers for as long as he had been an artist. In 1880, he claimed to have seen “weavers’ villages” on one of his ill-fated sojourns out of the Borinage, and immediately compared their pale faces and dark workplaces to those of the miners he lived among. He found in their labors an artisanal kinship with his own new “handicraft,” he said, as well as a deeper connection with weavers he had seen as a child in Brabant. The combination of solidarity and nostalgia inspired him to a vision of weavers as otherworldly heroes (“that faraway look, almost daydreaming, almost a sleepwalker”) drawn from sources as diverse as the rural fantasies of Golden Age painters, the “mystic weavers” of Michelet’s histories, and the “disinherited race” of Eliot’s
Silas Marner
. In The Hague, he recruited this idealized image in the relentless arguments over Sien, praising the weavers as men of action, not contemplation. “[The weaver] is so absorbed in his work that he doesn’t think, he acts,” he
wrote in defense of his own reckless course. “It’s nothing he can explain, he just
feels
how things should go.” By the time he left The Hague, weavers had assumed a place beside peasant funerals and church graveyards in Vincent’s iconography of home. While in Drenthe, he may have heard rumors about Max Liebermann painting a weaver family in Zweeloo, and when he visited Rappard’s studio in December he no doubt saw his friend’s depictions of spinners, weavers, and looms.

Weaver
, 1884,
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER, 13 × 17⅜ IN.
(
Illustration credit 21.3
)

In Nuenen, Vincent found weavers at the end of virtually every street. One in four of the town’s adult males made some part of his meager living working at a loom. They worked the way they always had, at home, with the monstrous black looms filling their tumbledown cottages, and wives and children winding their bobbins. Nuenen’s brief experiment with modern factories had failed years before Vincent arrived, throwing the destitute weavers on the mercy of the entrepreneurs who supplied their yarn (hand spinning had all but disappeared) and a marketplace stalled in a Continent-wide depression. Most of Nuenen’s weavers used the same looms their great-grandfathers had used, their beams grimy with the sweat of generations. Most still rented their looms. They made what they had always made: brightly striped and checked material called
bontjes
. Some made kitchen towels; a few made linen for diapers. The work came
fitfully and paid miserably—pennies a day for numbing treadmill labor. Many weavers made ends meet by farming their small plots or taking odd jobs. One of these was Adriaan Rijken, who tended the garden of Parson van Gogh and cleaned the studio of his strange son, the painter. It was probably Rijken who first took Vincent down one of the sandy paths that led to the outskirts of town, to fulfill his long ambition to draw weavers.

But Vincent must have been drawn to the gloomy cottages at the ends of these paths for reasons more compelling than the competition with Rappard or the search for yet another icon of noble labor. In his first months in Nuenen, he spent hour after hour in the low, soot-stained workshops, sitting against the wall, only feet from the infernal machines and their relentless clattering. He came in the morning and stayed late into the night—far longer than he needed to make the rough, preliminary sketches that he took back to his studio. Yet despite these long hours, his finished works show a surprising inattention to the rudiments of how the looms actually worked—a failure of engagement uncharacteristic of Zundert’s obsessive creekbank collector and categorizer.

Nor did he look long or hard at the weavers themselves. In image after image, they sit impassively in their elaborate machines like birds in their cages, without distinctive features or visible expressions of emotion. Vincent rarely depicted their nimble, indefatigable hands, or the endless journey of their feet on the treadle. In some works, he admitted adding the figure of the weaver last, as an afterthought. He dismissed it as a mere “apparition”—a ghost in the machine hardly worth his notice. (In Nuenen, as in The Hague, Vincent never named or described his models.)

Yet clearly Vincent was drawn to these dens of noise and distraction, with their caged denizens isolated from him by the deafening clatter as surely as the orphan man Zuyderland was isolated by deafness. Like Eliot’s hermit weaver Silas Marner, Vincent seems to have found in the “monotonous response” of the loom an escape from the torments of memory and reflection, and from the furious, unwinnable battle with his father. It was the same escape he found in his art. “Every man’s work,” wrote Eliot, “pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.”

As subjects, the weavers and their looms could not have been more ill-suited to Vincent’s uncertain art. The complex cages of the looms presented insoluble problems in perspective. His efforts to use a perspective frame proved futile: the looms were too big, the rooms too small. “One must sit so close,” he complained, “that it is difficult to take measurements.” As a result, the images often collapsed in conflicting angles, especially when he added figures, or tried to depict the looms in their settings. Eventually he found a larger room with two looms, but he had to retreat to the hall to get a clear view.

The addition of the weavers only compounded the problem. Despite years
of trying, Vincent had yet to master the human figure. In The Hague, he had used the controlled environment of his studio, the perspective frame, tricks of posing, and endless trial and error to overcome the halting awkwardness of his earliest attempts. But in the cramped weavers’ cottages, his ineptitude was fully exposed. As the failures piled up, he tried posing the weavers beside their looms, with their backs to him, or revealed only in profile. He positioned them in front of windows, reducing them to simple silhouettes; or cast the whole room in such gloominess that their features were barely distinguishable—solutions that forced him to render the images darker and darker.

Still he persisted. With his usual monomaniacal zeal, he produced dozens of nearly identical drawings in the months after his arrival, lavishing extraordinary care on every cross-hatched knob, hook, beam, strut, and spindle. He labored over the same scenes in watercolor, always an agony for him. He even expended precious oil paints on the recalcitrant looms, filling big, expensive canvases with tentative, tenebrous images that gave him so little satisfaction he didn’t bother to sign them.

Why this effort?

The weavers may not have suited Vincent’s artistic struggle, but they perfectly suited his larger struggle. In Dorus and Anna’s book of bourgeois bogeymen, weavers ranked with peddlers and grinders as rootless men of unconventional habits and unaccountable means. “[One] was not quite sure,” wrote Eliot in
Silas Marner
, “that this trade of weaving, indispensable though it was, could be carried on entirely without the help of the Evil One.” Within the Van Gogh family, weaving was considered “unhealthy” and “harmful,” according to sister Lies. Weavers in Nuenen were seen abroad only at Sunday dusk—not a time for decent people to be out—when they came to exchange the past week’s linen for the next week’s yarn. Pale, spectral figures (Eliot called them “alien-looking men”), they usually traveled alone. Dogs barked at them. Rumor and legend attached to them. By the 1880s, labor militancy among weavers all over Europe had reinforced these old superstitions with new suspicions of political agitation and social insurgency.