Van Gogh (83 page)

Finally, responding to an unknown mandate, he radically reimagined the characters in his narrative. Instead of four hungry peasants hovering over their meager meal, as remote from each other as livestock at a trough, Vincent painted a family. Instead of Gordina’s anarchic in-law household, with its coarse manners and strange relationships, he created a scene as familiar as a memory: at a table set with a tablecloth, a marital couple politely share a dish of potatoes, a matriarch pours coffee for all, and a child waits obediently to be served.

Lastly, Vincent added a new figure, a fifth person, seated in the back, a newcomer at this family ritual. He is an odd-looking man with an open, plaintive face and a hint of red hair.

FOR VINCENT, THE BOUNDARY
between life and art had always been porous. At some point during the winter of 1884–85, he crossed that line. Between his evenings at the De Groot house, his unwelcome nights at the parsonage, and his open estrangement everywhere else, he found in the verities and comforts of his art an irresistible haven.

Since Etten in 1881, Vincent had claimed the mantle of “a painter of peasants.” It was a fashionable designation. Like an entire generation of young artists, like Rappard, weaned on Romantic notions of nature, encouraged by governments to flatter an increasingly politicized peasantry, and lured by the commercial success of painters like Millet, Breton, Israëls, and Mauve, Vincent had answered the summons of
le doux pays
. The mandates of art, commerce, and camaraderie mixed with his burning nostalgia for the Zundert heath (where all the peasants were “simple and good-natured,” he imagined) to carry him past the actual frustration and hostility he encountered whenever he ventured into the countryside. “I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages,” he wrote on the eve of his departure for Drenthe (where the peasants regarded him as a “lunatic” and a “tramp”). “My mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”

Years of rejection by his bourgeois family and friends had only driven him deeper into the fantasy of a home among the peasants as “a painter of rural life.” To support this mirage of happiness, he drew heavily on another fiction: Alfred Sensier’s bestselling biography of Millet. “It interests me so much that I wake up at night and light the lamp and sit up to read,” he wrote in 1882. “What a big man Millet was!”

But Sensier was more than just Millet’s Boswell; he was his patron, collector,
and dealer as well. In order to provide iconic images like
The Sower
and
The Angelus
with a marketable creator legend, Sensier had dressed his subject’s provincial past in a self-serving finery of sentiment and cliché. Sensier’s Millet spent his childhood in the fields, sharing the “hard toil” and “rough farm-work [that] makes the daily life of the peasant.” The real Millet was a sensitive son of faded gentry, a studious boy who grew up as close to Virgil’s
Aeneid
as to the rocky soil of his native Normandy. If he experienced sowing and reaping at all, it was probably only in tending the family garden for a doting grandmother. With a state stipend arranged by well-connected relatives, he eagerly exchanged the
pays
of his birthplace for an apprenticeship in Paris with Goupil star Paul Delaroche, a favorite of Vincent’s uncle Cent.

Sensier’s Millet lived a life of solidarity with the impoverished subjects of his art. “He always had in his heart compassion and pity for the miserable poor of the country,” Sensier maintained. “He was a peasant himself.” In 1849, Millet escaped from city life in Paris to live among the simple people he loved, according to Sensier: to share their life of self-abnegation and poverty. He even wore their gray jersey and
sabots
(clogs)—the “livery of poverty”—so that an unsuspecting traveler might easily mistake the heavy-set, bearded man trudging through the fields for “one of those enthusiastic peasants.” The real Millet, a reckless spender, knew only indebtedness, not poverty. Endowed with a keen eye for the market and great skill with a brush, he painted strategically—from society portraits to nubile young women in teasing vignettes—and in his whole career, rarely lacked for patrons, commissions, or sales.

When he “escaped” to the fashionably rustic hamlet of Barbizon in the Fontainebleau woods near Paris, the real Millet entertained a wide circle of sophisticated Parisian friends, not peasants, piling up debt and girth as amply as honorifics. Like other landed gentry, he often wore simple clothes, but he always insisted on being photographed in the splendid attire of a gentleman, and spent lavishly on tailors. In the company of artists like Charles Jacque and Théodore Rousseau and writers like George Sand, he rode the great wave of artistic discontent that rolled forward from the Revolution of 1848, with paintings like
The Sower
in 1850 and
Harvesters Resting
in 1853, the year of Vincent’s birth. Soon afterward, the same wave swept Millet and the rest of the Barbizon artists to triumph at the Universal Exhibition and the Salon of 1855.

But Vincent saw only Sensier’s Millet: a sentimental man-child with a vivid, maverick imagination; misunderstood by the public, spurned by critics, and hounded by creditors; a melancholic loner given to uncontrollable fits of weeping and suicidal musings; an artist filled with defiant passion and inexplicable guilt. “I don’t want to stop feeling pain,” Sensier quoted his subject. “Pain is what makes the artist express himself most distinctly.” From the moment he first read Sensier’s “great work,” Vincent began layering autobiography onto hagiography
in his search for consolation and direction. Despite having seen little of Millet’s art except in prints, he imagined himself as a satellite to his “sun,” and claimed the Frenchman as inspiration for his return home from The Hague in 1883. “[When] all the influences of the past dragged me more and more out of nature,” Vincent wrote, “it was [Millet] who took me back into nature.”

After his own father’s death, Vincent fully entered into a delusion of solidarity with the man—or the image of a man—he had always referred to as “Father Millet.” He imagined his hero—and himself—living lives of tireless labor and selfless dedication to the “truth” of peasant painting. He cast Millet as both a Christlike martyr for the suffering of his noble, neglected subjects, and a prophet calling every errant, luxury-loving artist back to the humble and the infinite in art. By mid-April 1885, as his drawings and paintings of a group of peasants around a table began piling up and filling the walls in the Kerkstraat studio, Vincent had found a new father, a new faith, and a new mission. “Millet is
father Millet,”
he declared, “a leader and mentor in
everything
[and] an example to painters as a human being.”

In the spring that year, after the weather warmed and planting began, Vincent rose early every morning to join his flock in the fields. He dressed himself in a coarse blue linen blouse, stiff with sweat and faded by the sun to the color of a robin’s egg. He always wore a hat—straw in fair weather, black felt in damp—but his face was still “weathered and tanned,” according to one witness, the distinctive leather color that marked all those who worked the land. As he left the parsonage, he stepped into a pair of heavy, rough-hewn Brabant clogs, their insteps polished by use. Early-rising neighbors would have seen him clomping hurriedly toward the outskirts of Nuenen, sketchbook in hand, to catch the first furrow of the day. He planted himself in the fields and farmyards, beside whatever labor he could find. “I attack the very first thing I see people do,” he wrote: pitching winter rye, chopping beanstalks, drawing water. When the fields were idle, he watched the cows being milked or the sheep being shorn, or knocked on cottage doors hoping for a chance to sketch their “splendid interiors.” He wandered miles out into the heath, “traipsing and trudging” from sunup to sundown, “out in the fields just like the peasants,” he boasted. He returned at twilight, “dog-tired” but uncomplaining. He assured his brother that “through exposure to the elements,” his “constitution [had] become virtually like that of a peasant.”

Sometimes he didn’t come home at all, but stayed the night with peasant families far out on the heath where rumors of Nuenen’s strange
schildermenneke
had not yet reached. “I have made some friends there among the people,” he reported gleefully, “with whom I am always welcome.” He shared their black bread and straw beds, and reassured himself that there would always be other strangers’ houses, other fields “where nothing will be expected of me, as a stranger
among strangers.” Claiming to be “sick of the boredom of civilization,” he saw less and less of his family, and devoted himself entirely to “observing peasant life at all hours of the day.” He studied them in their silent “musing by the fire” and in their superstitious gossip. Dispensing both money and liquor to earn their confidence, he learned how they “sniffed the wind” to foretell the weather, and where the local witches lived. (He boldly paid a call on one of them, only to find “she was up to nothing more mysterious than digging her potatoes.”)

On Sundays, he took long scouting trips “far, far across the heath,” looking for new subjects, “beautiful hovels,” and, of course, models. Unencumbered by anything but the smallest sketchpad, he struck off from the rutted roads and beaten paths, through country so remote that he compared it to the American West. These expeditions often attracted the attention of local boys, bored and restless after Mass. Vincent still suffered their torment and mockery when he went out to paint, with his strange load of gear and even stranger images; but he welcomed them on these Sunday sojourns. He had learned to co-opt their ridicule with coins. He would pay five or ten cents for every birds’ nest they brought him, depending on the rarity of the bird and the condition of the nest. “I told him I knew where there was a longtail golden oriole,” one of the boys remembered years later,

He recruited boys everywhere he went, and often accompanied them on long, elaborate hunts across the heath, for birds as well as nests. He hung nets between hedges and sent his helpers to flush the birds from their redoubts. He used slingshots, too, that he made himself. He gave one to a mischievous young companion who used it to shoot out the windows of the school.

Before long, Vincent had attracted a cadre of searchers, happy to be paid for a walk on the heath, even in the company of the “ugly” and “eccentric” gentleman with the “scruffy red beard.” He “was always dressed so poorly,” one of them recalled, “that you wanted to give
him
something rather than accept something from him.” On these long rambles in the company of peasant boys, Millet’s mandate from the past fused with Vincent’s longing for his own lost childhood of birds’ nests and creekbanks. “I wish you had been with me,” he wrote Theo after one of his Sunday adventures. “We had to wade through a brook for half an hour, so I came home quite covered with mud.” He compared his needs and pleasures to those of other “peasant boys” and, in a reverie of
regression, complained of the “everlasting drivel” he had suffered from “my parents and my teachers.”

As a peasant boy, Vincent felt entitled to another prerogative of his humble class: sex. He had long subscribed to the bourgeois myth that peasants fornicated just as their beasts did: at will in the barnyard and the field, free of guilt or inhibition or entanglement, whenever instinct overtook them. Now these schoolboy fantasies merged in Vincent’s wishful imagination with Millet’s call to “immerse himself
personally
in peasant life.” By April, Gordina de Groot came to the Kerkstraat studio almost every evening, alone. Local tongues were already beginning to wag about the parson’s son and his peasant “Dulcinea.” Many suspected that he was drawing her in the nude.

WHEN HE READ ZOLA’S
Germinal
in May, Vincent found a new testament for his libidinous mission. Set in a workers’ hell that Vincent knew well—a coal mine in northern France
—Germinal
seethes with outrage at the brutality of the capitalist system and the suffering of its victims. But Vincent’s zeal looked right past Zola’s scathing indictment. In a novel filled with sympathetic workers led by a failed Romantic hero, Vincent fixed his autobiographical eye on the mine’s bourgeois manager, M. Hennebeau. It was Hennebeau’s envious fantasies of panting, steaming sex among the underclass that Vincent copied out for his brother as confirmation of his new calling, from the highest possible source:

But Vincent’s fanatic heart demanded pain more than pleasure. He found in Millet’s call to a simple life the same summons to self-mortification that he had found in Kempis’s or Christ’s. He dressed in rags that even the peasants pitied; he denied himself cover in the rain, and shade from the sun. When he stayed in the Kerkstraat studio, he insisted on sleeping in the attic with the dust and the spiders, rather than in his more comfortable room downstairs. “To have slept anywhere else,” his landlady recalled, “would have been pampering himself.” As if to deny himself the “luxury” of the studio itself, he never cleaned or tidied it. According to one horrified visitor, “great piles of ashes surrounded the stove,
which had never seen a brush or polish.” Cane chairseats were left frayed and broken. Clothes and clogs, caps and hats for his models, tools and farm implements, specimens of moss and plants from his endless forays into the heath, all lay scattered about, gathering dust where they fell, disappearing under sheaf after sheaf of drawings as numberless and neglected as leaves.