Van Gogh (91 page)

L
ESS THAN A DAY AFTER LEAVING THE HEATHS OF NUENEN, VINCENT
sat at the window of a sailors’ bar in Antwerp and watched the city explode with life. Not since his exile to London ten years earlier had he suffered such a shock of dislocation. In every direction, as far as he could see, carts and wagons choked the narrow streets, inching toward the docks where they massed in a calamity of commerce. “More tangled and fantastic than a thorn hedge,” he described the scene to Theo, “so chaotic that one finds no rest for the eye and grows giddy.” Herds of cattle snorted impatiently, steamship whistles screamed, sailors with “ruddy faces and broad shoulders, lusty and tipsy” staggered from bar to brothel. Loads of strange wares moved in and out of the maelstrom, wrestled on their way by “docker types as ugly as sin.” Vincent was especially struck by the mounds of hides and buffalo horns from America.

Here and there, arguments broke into scuffles, creating little whirlpools of commotion in the turbulent flow of commerce. Soon after his arrival, Vincent was caught in one of these eruptions. “A sailor is being thrown out of a brothel by the girls in broad daylight,” he recorded from his window seat, “pursued by a furious fellow and a string of prostitutes, of whom he seems to be terrified.” In the distance, the great black ships bobbed and creaked in their slips like restless beasts. The forest of their masts winked in the winter sun, almost obscuring the far shore of the Schelde. “It’s all an impenetrable confusion,” Vincent wrote.

Although only twenty-five miles from the Zundert parsonage, Antwerp might as well have been an island in the middle of the ocean. Perched on the edge of the vast Rhine delta, the city had been one of Europe’s busiest ports for half a millennium—a place as distant from the rural countryside beyond its fortified walls as the exotic destinations of its ships or the homelands of its sailors.
Another visitor in 1885 catalogued the city’s polyglot of strangers: “the silent, serious Norwegian; the square Dutchman; the red-haired Scotch; the quick Portuguese; the boisterous, talkative Frenchman; the slender, irritable Spaniard; the Ethiopian with his blue-black skin.” From every corner of the world, they brought their wares and their indulgences. A babel of shops lined the medieval streets leading to the docks, catering to every worldly whim. Brothels advertised prostitutes from every nation. Bars served everything from Lambiek, a local beer, to sake. A saloon filled with rowdy Flemish sailors eating mussels stood next to a quiet English pub, which stood next to a vast
café-concert:
a French concoction of music hall, dance hall, bar, and brothel.

Like centuries of vagabonds and exiles passing through Antwerp before him, Vincent drank the beer and plied the whores, torn between visions of new beginnings and dreams of homecoming. He introduced himself to barmaids as a “bargee”—an inland sailor. Once inside, he sat, like other lone sailors, at the end of the bar, or on the edge of the brothel sofa, or beside the dance floor as couples whirled nearby. He smuggled in a pocket-sized sketchpad and captured glimpses where he could—lightning drawings hidden in his lap, made to the accompaniment of a husky dance hall organ. He drew spectators shouting and singing from the balcony, and maidservants dancing together in giddy pairs. Vincent never reported dancing himself; only watching. After attending “a popular sailors’ ball at the docks,” he wrote Theo: “It does one good to see folks actually enjoy themselves.”

—

Couple Dancing
, D
ECEMBER
1885,
CHALK ON PAPER, 3½ × 6⅜ IN.
(
Illustration credit 26.1
)

VINCENT FILLED HIS
first letters from Antwerp with desperate enthusiasm. “I feel a power within me to do something,” he wrote soon after his arrival. “I am very glad I came here.” Whether out of genuine optimism or as cover for his hasty, ignominious exit from Nuenen, he mounted yet another campaign for bourgeois respectability. Instead of sermons on Millet and treatises on color, he regaled his brother with strategies for showing and selling his work. After years of vehemently resisting, he offered to find a “job on the side”—making decorations for restaurants or painting signboards (“for instance, for a fishmonger, still life of fishes”). “One thing is certain,” he declared, “I want my things to be seen.”

Abandoning his rhetoric on the joys of the heath and solidarity with the peasants, he hailed the “bustle” of Antwerp’s chaotic commercial life, claiming “I needed it badly.” He bought new clothes and began to eat regularly, arguing the new mandate of success. “One must not look too hungry or shabby,” he wrote. “On the contrary, one must try to make things hum.” He rented a room in an impressive apartment block on the city’s burgeoning east side—a new but respectable neighborhood—and outfitted it with the trappings of an artist’s studio, including a stock of new canvases, better brushes, and more expensive pigments. To replace his beloved illustrations abandoned in Nuenen, he papered the walls with the cheap, colorful Japanese prints available in every dockside shop. “My little room has turned out better than I expected,” he crowed. “[This] is a splendid place for a painter.”

He charged fearlessly into Antwerp’s parochial art market, carrying under his arm the only three major paintings he had brought from Nuenen: an avenue of poplars, a moody view of a mill at twilight, and
The Bible
. Rather than bludgeoning dealers with endless arguments on behalf of these images, as he had Theo, he immediately set out to diversify his portfolio. In the first weeks after his arrival, he tried painting some of the tourist fare that he saw at many of the galleries he visited—picturesque street scenes and vistas of the old city from the opposite bank of the Schelde; romantic views of Antwerp’s medieval landmarks such as the cathedral, the Grote Markt, and the ninth-century castle Het Steen. Such images, he assured Theo, were “just the thing for foreigners who want to have a souvenir.”

Even as city life tempered some of the obsessions of the heath, it inflamed others. Like a sailor too long at sea, Vincent came to Antwerp with one overriding mandate: women.

Since leaving The Hague two years before, his quest for female companionship had never really abated. He continued to patronize prostitutes in Eindhoven throughout his time in Nuenen, and no doubt availed himself of their services on his trips to Utrecht, Antwerp, and Amsterdam. The liaison with Gordina de Groot had proved more tantalizing than satisfying. Although she probably succumbed
to his pleading (and payment) to pose naked, it was never enough. In his letters to Theo, he continued to fantasize about a more systematic and intensive study of the female nude.

Stymied by the prudery of the Brabant peasants and their meddlesome priest, he increasingly saw Antwerp, with its large population of prostitutes, as the answer to all his longings, both artistic and sexual. He argued an urgent need to “get good models,
as many as I like
and
good
ones,” and imagined apprenticing to an artist “who takes models for the nude.” “I need it for many reasons,” he explained cryptically. Based on his reading of a passage in Sensier’s biography, he convinced himself that he could recruit prostitutes to model for him by offering to paint their portraits—as Millet had done in another port town, Le Havre. By insistently conflating modeling and prostitution, and eliding the difference between modeling for portraits and modeling nude, Vincent managed to transform Sensier’s salacious hints into a virtual guarantee of both sexual and artistic fulfillment among Antwerp’s legion of whores.

By the time he arrived, these strands of obsession and desire had combined into a mania that propelled him through the tangled streets day and night. Every place people gathered—public dances, cafés, music halls—he scanned the crowds for women, alternately admiring their “splendid heads” and assessing their availability. “What they say about Antwerp is true,” he reported; “the women are all handsome.” He sent Theo elaborate catalogues of the women he observed: some “splendidly healthy-looking,” others with “dull, grey little eyes.” He preferred “common girls” for their “power and vitality” and for their “ugly and irregular faces … lively and piquant à la Frans Hals.” He admired Scandinavian girls for their blond hair, which he preferred, but German girls left him “quite cold,” he said, because “they are all manufactured from a single model.” He compared English girls (“very fair, very delicate”) to Chinese girls (“quiet as a mouse, stealthy, small, naturally bedbug-like”). Their variety and plentitude almost overwhelmed him. “There’s no denying that they can be damned beautiful … If only I had my choice of models!”

When the dances ended, that frustration led him inevitably to the city’s ubiquitous brothels. To Theo, he admitted “roaming through quite a number of streets and alleyways” in order to “make acquaintances among the prostitutes.” Even during the day, he frequented the quays, where streetwalkers catered around the clock to sailors’ timeless urges. He sought out a local procuress—“a washerwoman who knows a lot of women”—and rendezvoused with a shadowy man who offered him “a couple of very beautiful hussies” to paint. “I suppose they are kept women,” he speculated. He stationed himself outside whorehouses “in broad daylight” to watch the traffic and assay the women on offer. He called these vigils “model-hunting” but confessed to Theo that he wanted not just to paint the girls he saw, but to “have them.”

Whenever an opening presented itself, he approached and made his strange proposal. Unable to pay the wages of sex for hours of modeling, he undoubtedly plied them with the same arguments he rehearsed to Theo: that portraits were not only fashionable (“in keeping with the times”), but also useful. They could be hung in cafés and restaurants to attract clients, given as keepsakes, or even sold at a profit. Noting that the local photography studios did a brisk business in portraits, Vincent pressed the advantages of painting over photography. “Painted portraits have a life of their own,” he argued, “coming straight from the painter’s soul, which the [camera] cannot express.” He offered not only to pay his sitters a modeling fee but also to give them their portraits in exchange for posing—a lopsided proposition that scarcely veiled the sexual advance at its core. Even when he succeeded—when a woman came to his studio—he faced the further hurdle of persuading her to take off her clothes. Still, he persisted, convinced that, “if only I could come by a good model for a song, I’d be afraid of nothing.”

Vincent’s obsessive eye singled out women even in the pictures he saw. In a city filled with masterworks in every genre and every style for five hundred years, he saw only portraits—specifically, women’s portraits—everywhere. From Henri Leys’s panorama of Antwerp’s medieval street life, to museums filled with the jewels of Flemish art, he remarked only on depictions of women: a blond Mary Magdalene by Quentin Matsys, a winsome Saint Barbara by Van Eyck. He especially liked Rembrandt’s portrait of a prostitute. “[That] whore’s head by Rembrandt struck me so forcefully,” he wrote, “because he had caught that mysterious smile in such an infinitely beautiful way.”

Scenes of peasants or workers or figural vignettes no longer registered in his letters to Theo. Of all the “modern” art he saw, he talked only about the painters of women—Alfred Stevens, James Tissot, Octave Tassaert, Charles Chaplin. He praised their “delicate intuition of the female form,” and compared them to the great eighteenth-century French sensualists Greuze and Prud’hon. Portraits by the giants of academism Ingres and David elicited not the damning polemics of the previous summer, but envious appreciation of the beautiful sitters they could command. “Oh, if only one could get the models one wants!!!” he wailed. In a country forested in sculpture, from the baroque fantasies of the Quellinus family to the noble laborers of Meunier, Vincent found only one work—Jef Lambeaux’s
The Kiss
—worthy of comment. (
“Superb,”
he pronounced it.) Lambeaux’s figure of a naked young girl coyly fending off the advances of a suitor only confirmed his envious suspicion that sculptors enjoyed easier access to nude models than painters did.

Vincent’s new obsession led him inexorably to perhaps the greatest painter of women in all of Western art, Peter Paul Rubens. As Antwerp’s most famous artist, Rubens would have been unavoidable under any circumstances. His heroic,
oratorical canvases of curvaceous women and straining men peopled the city’s artistic landscape. From the voluptuous horrors of martyrdom to the bacchanalian pleasures of the flesh, Rubens had marked the walls of his adopted hometown indelibly with his vision. Even before setting out from Nuenen, Vincent had cast his trip to Antwerp as a journey into Rubens’s exuberant imaginative world—as far from the dark, claustrophobic world of
The Potato Eaters
as it was possible to go. On the eve of his departure, he wrote Theo: “As for Rubens, I am looking forward to him very much.” Not for his religious paintings, which Vincent dismissed as “theatrical, often even badly theatrical in the worst sense of the word”; nor for the seriousness of his subjects; nor for the persuasiveness of his brush. “What he can paint is
women
,” Vincent emphasized. “There especially he gives one most to think about and there he is at his deepest.”