Van Gogh (89 page)

Freed from the oppression of metaphor, he saw nothing in his tubes of paint but color. “Just now my palette is thawing,” he noted in late October, almost bewildered by the change. “Colors follow of their own accord, and taking one color as a starting-point, I have clearly before my mind what must follow … Colors indeed have something to say for themselves.”

In a letter written after returning from Amsterdam, Vincent marked his changed mission with an extraordinary description of a painting he had not seen in a decade: Paolo Veronese’s
The Marriage at Cana
. This enormous canvas, which hung in the Louvre, depicted the Gospel story of Jesus attending a wedding feast. But in Veronese’s vision, the humble ceremony is transformed into a lavish imperial banquet staged on a palace plaza overlooked by marble colonnades and gilded balconies filled with spectators. Scores of wedding guests in bright, bejeweled garments drink from great jugs of wine and eat from barges of food carried by servants in turbans and red slippers, while musicians play, courtesans jape, and well-fed dogs doze contentedly. No place, real or imagined, could have been further from the dirty hovels of Brabant and their potato-eating denizens. But Vincent’s imagination recalled in this unlikely image a single
patch of gray that released him from the
de terre
literalism of Millet—a gray that simultaneously reaffirmed the palette of
The Potato Eaters
and opened up a new world of color for its own sake:

On his easel, Vincent’s art could finally match his arguments. Almost as soon as he returned from Amsterdam, in the waning days of autumn, he dragged his paint gear into the deserted landscape and set a big canvas where a curving alley of oaks ended in a clearing. He squeezed tube after tube of carmine and cobalt onto his gray-caked palette and applied them fearlessly: swaths of red-orange for the dusty clearing, dapples of pure yellow and orange for the sun-struck trees; bright blue sky, luxurious lavender clouds. Not a soul and hardly a shadow darkens the vivid contrasts of blue and orange, yellow and violet.

As if reimagining the previous two years in color, he returned to the parsonage garden and painted its autumnal spareness in his bright new palette. The great pen drawings of the spring of 1884 were reborn in the vivid oranges and ochers of
The Jewish Bride
. He robed the naked pollard trees beyond the garden gate in a golden cloak of leaves set against a lavender winter sky. In the studio, he rejected the dusty apples and potatoes of the previous month with a large still life of brightly colored fruit and vegetables rendered in bold complementary contrasts. “A painter does better to start from the colors on his palette,” he wrote, announcing his altered gospel, “than to start from the colors in nature.”

In these and a dozen more paintings he tore through in the first weeks after returning from Amsterdam, Vincent displayed another new freedom he had learned at the Rijksmuseum: speed. In this, too, his arguments had long outpaced his art. From the very beginning of his career, he had worked like a man possessed, running through reams of paper in siege after siege of the Bargue exercises, working and reworking the same drawing, scraping and rescraping the same canvas. Easily frustrated and desperate for signs of progress, he justified his manic (and expensive) work habits by arguing that quantity would yield quality in the end, and therefore speed mattered more than the precision he could never master. As a draftsman, he declared his ultimate goal “to draw quick as lightning.” When he took up painting, he pledged “to
paint
quick as
lightning,” and “to get more brio into my brush.” The only “healthy and virile” way to apply paint to canvas, he maintained, was to “dash it on without hesitation.” By the spring of 1885, in his endless preparatory heads for
The Potato Eaters
, Vincent had sharpened this argument to an obsessive mantra, bragging that he could complete a study in a single morning and vowing to work “even more quickly.” “You must set it all down at once,” he instructed Kerssemakers, “and then leave it alone.” “Paint in one rush,” he coached himself, “as much as possible in one rush.”

But the creation of his magnum opus had been nothing at all like that. An agony of starts and stops and doubling back,
The Potato Eaters
had been calculated and adjusted innumerable times in a painstaking process that stretched over several canvases and as many months. Paint built up in thick layers as he waited for previous “mistakes” to dry so he could cover them with varnish and try again. The preparatory heads, with their swirling bonnets and dashed-off faces, may have been done at a breakneck pace, but those were mere
études—
studies to be hoarded in the studio or sent en masse to Paris to prove his work effort—certainly not to show or sell. No matter how many times he urged on himself, and others, the virtues of working boldly “in one rush,” Vincent had never been able to break from the ideal of
tableaux
—well-painted pictures of flawless finish and mystifying means—as an artist’s truest expression.

The Rijksmuseum changed all that. “What struck me most on seeing the old Dutch pictures again,” he wrote, “is that most of them were painted quickly; that these great masters…
dashed off a thing from the ‘premier coup’
[first stroke] and did not retouch it so very much.” Looking at these familiar images for the first time as products of labor rather than objects of admiration, Vincent could unwind each passage and replay each stroke: the attack, the finish, the angle of the brush, the weight of the hand. He could track every gesture and revisit every decision in the light of his own experience.

He found in the happy fire of Hals’s brushwork, in particular, the fulfillment of all his calls to “paint in one rush.” For a moment, the thrill of it even jolted him out of his defense of
The Potato Eaters
. “What joy to see a Frans Hals,” he wrote, seeming to forget his own painting’s endless groomings. “How different it is from those pictures where everything has been carefully smoothed down in the same way.” Vincent found the same license everywhere he looked, in images as different as a Rubens sketch and a Rembrandt portrait—passages “done with a single stroke of the brush without any retouching whatever.” And he found them not pinned on a studio wall but framed in gold and enshrined in Cuypers’s cathedral of
tableaux
.

Vincent couldn’t even wait until he left Amsterdam to test the new freedom. On three eight-by-ten-inch panels he had brought in a small paint box, he finally gave his hand the courage of his arguments. In a blur of brushstrokes, he
captured three snapshots of the rainy city: its river skyline, its forested quays, its vast new rail station. He caught them “on the wing,” as he put it, working on his lap or at a café table. When Kerssemakers arrived at the station on October 7, he found Vincent sitting at the window in the third-class waiting room “fervently working” on one of his little pictures, “surrounded by a crowd of conductors, workmen, tourists, etc.”

Forced by the small scale to use smaller brushes, he fell naturally into the blazing shorthand of his letter sketches, dashing off images like glimpses from a moving train. But they were no longer just
études
. Vincent called them “souvenirs”—a word he had reserved in the past for his most meticulous renderings—and he treated them like
tableaux
. As soon as he returned to Nuenen, he packed up two of them, barely dry, and sent them to Paris in a crate marked “V4,” accompanied by a proud boast: “If in an hour’s time I want to dash off an impression somewhere, I am learning to do so in the same way as others who analyze their impressions … It is pleasant work to dash something off in a rush.”

Back in the Kerkstraat studio, he took his broad brush and carried the argument even further. Emboldened by his visit to the Rijksmuseum, and by a newfound passion for eighteenth-century art, Vincent gave himself over to the sheer materiality of paint. His new heroes—artists like Boucher and Fragonard—championed painting, not peasants. Their airy, pastel-colored works celebrated nothing more profound than the frolicsome fantasies of the ancien régime, but they applied paint with a combination of daring economy and
presto
brushwork that Vincent vowed to emulate. He found in their “brusqueness of touch” and “spontaneity of impression” a new defense of both his rough art and its rough author. Others might call their summary image-making “foolishness,” he argued, but “it cannot be
imitated
by cowards and weaklings.” In a leap of imagination, he linked their rococo facility to the volcanic creativity of another hero, the great Delacroix. The ideal, said Vincent, was to paint
“comme le lion qui dévore le morceau”
(like a lion devouring its meat).

He especially admired their mastery of
enlever
(literally, “to lift up”), a maneuver of the brush—a flick of the wrist—that leaves sharp peaks of paint at the ends or edges of a stroke. At the Rijksmuseum, he had seen the distinctive reflection and felt the rippled contour of
enlever
strokes in the works of Golden Age painters like Hals. Now he began practicing the technique in his own studio, loading his brush with more and more paint, running it back and forth to coax the color into higher and higher ridges, trying to make it do what the thinned, muddy paint of
The Potato Eaters
would never do.

Eventually, he turned his new skills to an image—a different kind of still life. From his studio collection of stuffed animals, he took a bat, frozen in flight, and placed it in front of a light so that the thin membrane of its wings glowed like
a Chinese lantern. Using a broad brush loaded with bright orange and yellow, he distilled the subtle shadings of the illuminated wings into a fabric of distinct brushstrokes, woven spontaneously in a single pass. “At present it comes quite easily to me to paint a given subject unhesitatingly,” he wrote to his brother, “whatever its form or color may be.”

But bold color and dashing technique were not the only changes forced on Vincent by the events of 1885. In his defense of
The Potato Eaters
, he had advanced another radical claim for his art that fate now demanded he make good. By relentlessly equating his art and himself, he had seized the high ground of modernism staked out by Zola: the singularity and primacy of artistic temperament. But he had delivered mostly untutored echoes of nostalgic favorites like Israëls and Millet. For all his demands to “paint what I feel and feel what I paint,” he had steadfastly refused to put himself under the lens of his own art. When his peasant models fled, they took with them his only escape from the self-accounting that he always dreaded. He continued to resist the most obvious form of introspection—self-portraits—but the lack of models set him inexorably on that inward path.

His search for new subject matter had led him only briefly to traditional still life subjects (jugs, bowls, tankards) before he moved on to objects that held special meaning for him, like potatoes, apples, and birds’ nests. In landscapes, too, he quickly abandoned generic vistas and returned to the parsonage, his mother’s garden, the stand of pollard trees—all
places
with meaning. He had already risked this kind of intimate imagery once, under duress, in early June, when he painted the old churchyard where his father was buried. Immediately after the pastor’s death, Theo had suggested it as the perfect subject for a memento mori. Despite having drawn and painted the graveyard and its condemned tower many times already, Vincent at first resisted the suggestion, pursuing instead his single-minded vision of peasants around a table. Not until the last minute, with demolition imminent, did he finally set his easel in front of the stripped stone husk and allow himself to peer deeply at this scene of extraordinary personal significance.

When he did, he saw both his father’s funeral (“I wanted to express what a simple thing death and burial is”) and his own fall from grace. “Those ruins tell me how a faith and a religion moldered away,” he explained, “strongly founded though they were.” But his brush told a deeper story than his words. The old tower looms massively in the foreground, almost filling the canvas, its great masonry corner buttresses rooting it to the earth like a granite outcropping. This is no temporary structure. No demolition will erase it from the treeless field in which it sits, or release its grip on the graves at its feet. Despite the clichés of lowering skies and circling birds, Vincent had created not an epitaph, but a premonition: a portrait of a stone ghost that would always haunt his horizons.