Van Gogh (85 page)

Eventually, he had to physically wrest it away from himself. At the very end of April, he carted the big canvas, still wet, to Eindhoven and placed it in the custody of Anton Kerssemakers with the instruction to “make certain I don’t spoil it.” Nevertheless, a few days later, he returned to his friend’s studio and attacked it again with a small brush, laying down a welter of “finishing touches” on top of yet another (fourth) layer of varnish. Before those changes had a chance to dry, he hauled the painting back to Nuenen, hoping to send it to Theo for his birthday, May 1. But it sat in the Kerkstraat studio only a day or two before he loaded it up again and carried it through the dusty streets to the little house on the Gerwen road, determined “to give it some last touches from nature.” He arrived to find the De Groots and Van Rooijses at dinner in front of a window rather than under the hanging lamp. The sight of them silhouetted in the waning daylight so moved him—“Oh, it was splendid!” he exclaimed—that he immediately fell on the painting again, making the hands and faces darker still (“the color of dull brass”) and adding touches of “the most tender faded blue.” He wrote Theo afterward in despair, “I shall never think my own work ready or finished.”

Even as he tormented the painting with alterations, he covered it in a relentless varnish of words, desperately trying to shape Theo’s reaction before sending it off. “I’ve held the threads of this fabric in my hands all winter long and searched for the definitive pattern,” he wrote, “and although it is now a fabric of rough and coarse appearance, the threads have nonetheless been chosen with care.” He complimented its lively color and “originality.” He framed its flaws in the pathos of its subjects (“It comes from the heart of the peasant’s life”) and the righteousness of his purpose. “I wanted to convey a picture of a way of life quite different from ours, from that of civilized people,” he explained, cutting off objections to its crudeness.

On the eve of sending it off, a last wave of panic swept over him. He worried about the painting’s size, and nervously suggested painting it all over again on a much smaller canvas. He worried about its darkness, and invoked a pantheon of masters to support the desperate notion that light paintings were not as light as they looked and dark paintings, like his, not as dark. He worried that Theo would reject the work outright, and entertained not sending it to him at all. He fretted miserably over the correct freight charges, imagining that if any were due on arrival, the painting would be more likely to disappoint. Always convinced that his work looked best when viewed in the context of quantity, he sent a package of ten painted studies to prepare Theo’s eye, and soften his heart, for the long-promised picture.

Finally, on May 6, he shipped the painting to Paris, packed in a cheap crate that he boldly marked “V1.”

—

THERE HAD NEVER BEEN
the slightest chance that Theo would like
The Potato Eaters
. Vincent had labored for a month—indeed, for a winter—on a painting that defied years of gentle urgings to light, color, and charm. How Vincent could have argued so vehemently for and invested so much hope in such an image must have mystified Theo as much as the image itself did. He had openly criticized his brother’s messy, slapdash technique the year before. They had been engaged in an on-and-off argument about his “drab” palette since Vincent took up a brush. Was it reasonable—was it rational?—to respond to Theo’s Salon offer with a painting so determined to displease?

The Potato Eaters
, A
PRIL
1885,
LITHOGRAPH, 10¼ × 12⅝ IN
. (
Illustration credit 24.3
)

As usual, Theo dared not speak his mind. Worried about his widowed mother and her continued vulnerability to Vincent’s misbehavior, he put family peace far above personal candor. Tactful from birth, subtle by disposition, and trained in the rarified diplomacy of Parisian retail, Theo had negotiated the perils of his brother’s enthusiasm for this strange image with typical finesse throughout its long gestation. When he first heard about it at their father’s funeral, he said
little, if anything, but signaled his displeasure by neglecting to take any of the preparatory drawings home with him. Once back in Paris, he relayed discouraging news about the public’s (not his) indifference to Millet’s (not Vincent’s) work. He followed Vincent’s absurd instruction to show the image to
Le Chat Noir
and reported the editor’s refusal with studied neutrality. He objected to the high cost of making a lithograph of the image (not to the image itself); and after seeing a copy, criticized it only on technical grounds (“the effect is wooly”). He had balanced his own conspicuous coolness with Portier’s tepid comment about “personality,” and sent pacifying reports to their mother, which he knew Vincent would read. “I was happy that I could give Vincent good news recently,” he wrote her in April. “He has not sold anything yet, but that will come. In any case it is certain that when someone like [Portier] sees something in it, there will be others who will think likewise.”

When he received the painting, Theo promptly sent his brother a letter that both flattered his peasant subjects (“One can hear the clogs of the guests clacking”) and called him to task for lapses in draftsmanship and murky colors. To soften even those glancing blows, he enclosed an extra payment of fifty francs and sent their mother another inflated reassurance. “Several people have seen his work,” he wrote, “and especially the painters think it is highly promising. Some find a lot of beauty in it, especially because his figures are so true.” (Theo only ever mentioned showing
The Potato Eaters
to one painter, Charles Serret, an aging genre painter of his acquaintance. “[Serret] could see that it was done by someone who has not been working long,” he reported to his mother, “but he found much in it that was good.”)

Theo preferred to convey his harshest critique through indirection and example. He had already tried several times to steer his brother toward the art of Léon Lhermitte, a Salon artist renowned, both as a painter and as an illustrator, for his images of peasants at work. He had sent Vincent some Lhermitte prints in response to the lithograph of
The Potato Eaters
, hoping no doubt to discipline his brother’s heavy-handed drawing and awkward figures with the example of Lhermitte’s meticulous draftsmanship and dynamic poses. Vincent lavished praise on the prints (“full of sentiment … superb”), but ignored the lesson. Theo tried again after receiving the finished painting, enclosing a review of the 1885 Salon that hailed Lhermitte as “Millet’s successor” and praised both artists for the light and color of their work.

In the same letter, Theo recommended to Vincent Fritz von Uhde’s
Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me
. He could hardly have found an image more a rebuke to Vincent’s bestial cave dwellers than Uhde’s delicate, sweet updating of the Gospel story, showing a line of ragged peasant children shuffling toward a seated Christ. Each is individualized in gesture and expression, without a hint of exaggeration or caricature. Although rendered in the same “green soap” palette
as
The Potato Eaters
, Uhde’s scene is bathed in a soft light that both reveals the dark interior and touches the towheaded children with golden highlights. Despite its impeccable technique, the painting glows with emotion—what Vincent would call “true sentiment.” Like Millet, Uhde had managed to convey the sublime nobility of his humble subjects without resort to drab color or coarse drawing.

Vincent found in his brother’s suave scoldings all the provocation he needed to join the battle he always sought. He would not be denied his martyrdom for art. “I believe the fuller of sentiment a thing one makes is,” he wrote, further equating art and artist, “the more it is criticized and the more animosity it rouses.” With his peasant fantasy and Millet messianism, he had raised the stakes so high that concession was unthinkable. Rebuffing all of Theo’s examples as “cold” and “orthodox,” he insisted on the uniqueness of his art and the individuality of its creator. “Let us paint,” he pleaded, “and, with all our faults and qualities,
be ourselves.”
For the rest of the summer, he battered Theo with rebuttals and new outbursts of argument, each bent on the delusional goal of reversing his brother’s judgment on
The Potato Eaters;
and thus on him.

L
ÉON
L
HERMITTE
,
La moisson
(
The Harvest
), 1883,
OIL ON CANVAS, 92 × 104⅜ IN.
(
Illustration credit 24.4
)

—

THEO’S CRITICISM OF
the painting’s colors triggered an especially fierce storm of dispute. No subject had been more worked over in their arguments, and no objection was more predictable. But Vincent addressed his brother like a schoolmaster on the first day of class, drilling him on the basics of “scientific” color theory that he had been studying all winter in books like Charles Blanc’s
Les artistes de mon temps
and
Grammaire des arts du dessin
(
Grammar of the Visual Arts
), also by Blanc, the Michelet of color. He had sent Theo lengthy transcriptions from both books in April, as if preparing for this very battle.

All of nature was composed of only three “truly elementary” colors, according to Blanc: red, yellow, and blue. Combining any two of these “primary” colors produced one of three “secondary” colors: orange (red + yellow); green (yellow + blue); or violet (blue + red). Drawing on the work of the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, Blanc peered deep into the relationships among these six interlocking hues. He attached great significance to the fact that each secondary color was
missing
one of the primary colors: orange lacked blue; green lacked red; violet lacked yellow. He referred to the relationship between these pairs of unrelated colors as “complementary”—they completed each other—but he found in their interaction a fierce struggle for separation and supremacy: blue against orange, red against green, yellow against violet. The eye read their struggle as “contrast.” The starker their opposition—the closer their proximity, the brighter their tone—the more violent the struggle, the more intense the contrast. Blue never looked bluer than when set next to orange; red never looked redder than next to green; yellow never yellower than when opposed by violet. At their most vivid, Blanc warned, these juxtapositions could heighten the contrast “to such a violent intensity that the human eye can hardly bear the sight of it.”

Blanc offered corollaries for controlling these fierce clashes of complementary colors. (Blanc framed all his “rules” in the language of battle, no doubt another attraction to Vincent.) One could mix them in unequal proportions so that “they only partially destroy each other,” producing a grayish
ton rompu
(broken tone) that favored one or the other of the constituent hues. The
ton rompu
(gray-green, for example) could then be juxtaposed to its complementary (red) to create a less intense contrast (an “unequal fight”), or to a
ton entier
(pure tone), like blue, to create a tonal harmony. Thus even the subtlest variations of tone could, theoretically, create distinct contrasts (gray-green and red-gray) or unifying sympathies (green and green-gray), and all the shades of conflict in between. Following Chevreul, Blanc called these rules about the interactions of colors “the law of simultaneous contrast.”

These were the “rules” of color, Vincent announced to his brother: scientific, unchanging, unchallengeable. Blanc had done for color “what Newton did for
gravitation,” he said. “Those laws of color are a ray of light … absolutely certain.” To prove it, he cited everything from the colorful works of Blanc’s hero, Delacroix, to the bright plaids of Scottish tartans. “[They] get the most vivid colors to balance each other,” Vincent explained, “so that instead of the fabric being a jumble, the overall effect of the pattern looks harmonious from a distance.” He insisted again and again that
The Potato Eaters
observed all of Blanc’s rules and therefore any criticism of its color was necessarily “arbitrary” and “superficial.” Where Theo and others saw monotone darkness, Vincent claimed a cornucopia of colors—broken but still vibrant—waging little guerrilla wars of contrast. For his impenetrable browns and grays, he claimed skeins of delicately modulated broken tones, juxtaposed in ways that untutored eyes simply could not appreciate. The painting’s “green soap” tone was, in fact, a multicolored cheviot of hues, he insisted, “woven” by his brushstrokes “into a harmonious whole.”