Van Gogh (92 page)

True to his word, Vincent arrived in Antwerp and immediately sought out Rubens’s women. He described in rapturous detail two bare-breasted blondes in the foreground of the artist’s vast
Christ with St. Theresa in Purgatory
. He called them “very beautiful, finer than the rest … Rubens at his best.” He returned to the museum many times to examine these and other Rubens women “repeatedly and at my ease.” He studied especially the Flemish master’s rendering of female flesh, which he praised as
“so alive,”
and conveyed to Theo the lessons learned in lascivious terms far removed from the pious metaphors of Millet.

He visited the Cathedral and stood before Rubens’s great triptych centerpieces,
The Elevation of the Cross
and
The Deposition from the Cross
. With their astounding scale, daring compositions, and operatic lighting, the two images filled the vast cathedral with a drama in paint that had mesmerized visitors for two hundred years. But Vincent was disappointed, especially by the
Elevation
. “[It] has a peculiarity that struck me at once,” he complained. “There is no female figure in it.” He professed to “love” the
Deposition
, on the other hand, for the “blonde hair, fair faces and necks” of the two Marys at the foot of the cross, receiving the limp body of Christ. Nothing else about the picture moved him—not the slender grace of the pale, pliant figure gliding lifelessly on its winding sheet; not the tender brush of its foot against the Magdalen’s bare shoulder; and especially not the vivid depiction of inconsolable grief. “Nothing touches me
less
than Rubens expressing human sorrow,” Vincent snapped. “Even his most beautiful weeping Magdalenes or Mater Dolorosas always simply remind me of the tears of a beautiful prostitute who has caught a venereal disease or some such small misery of human life.”

When Vincent himself took up a brush, the same obsessions guided his hand. The same powerful fusion of artistic and sexual imperatives preempted all the hard-won freedoms of Nuenen—enlisting some and discarding others. His brief, promising ventures into landscape and still life ended almost as soon as he arrived. Except for the early attempts at tourist fare, all his thoughts and
efforts turned to portraits. In the rare breaks from model hunting, he found time to paint only two urban landscapes—both views of snowy rooftops out the rear window of his apartment building, images that harked all the way back to the Schenkweg. As in The Hague, he was seized by a frantic conviction that his art could not progress at all without models (“Above all, above all, I still haven’t enough models”), compounded by a convenient certainty that portraits held the key to commercial success.

But the new mission made a new demand on Vincent’s art: accuracy. The women he wooed wanted portraits that pleased and flattered—idealized but identifiable records of their unique allure—not expressions of the artist’s unique temperament. Vincent had long despaired over his inability to create such “likenesses” (as he called them dismissively), and had always taken care to exempt his portrayals from the particularity required of portraiture. They were “types” or “heads of the people,” he insisted, not portraits: an old fisherman, not the orphan man Zuyderland wearing a sou’wester; “a poor woman with a swollen belly,” not the pregnant Sien Hoornik; “peasant heads,” not the De Groot family.

Even as he planned his campaign of portrait painting in Antwerp, he dreaded the expectations of his sitters: “I know it is difficult to satisfy people as to the ‘likeness,’ ” he wrote on the eve of his arrival, “and I dare not say beforehand that I feel sure of myself on that point.” Every time a woman sat for him, he struggled with the mandate of reality. He worked and reworked profiles, noses, eyes, and hairlines, searching for the elusive correctness. The need to please overwhelmed the brave rhetoric of
“premier coup”
and “in one rush” that he had brought back from the Rijksmuseum in October. Only on the margins of an image—in the billowing folds of a blouse or the crenellations of a bonnet or a sweep of hair—could the broad, impetuous brush of Nuenen reassert itself.

Vincent’s libidinous new mission may have stymied his brush, but it emboldened his palette. The models he wanted most would never have tolerated the
“de terre”
tones endured by Gordina de Groot. Only once, when an old man wandered into his studio soon after his arrival, did Vincent fall back on the familiar bistre and bitumen of his Nuenen heads. The very first time a woman sat for him, in mid-December, he courted her with bright colors and floods of light. He described the results to Theo: “I have brought lighter tones into the flesh, white tinted with carmine, vermilion, yellow … Lilac tones in the dress.” He placed her not in a Stygian darkness but against “a light background of gray-yellow.”

To make his colors even brighter and more pleasing, he sought out better paints, convinced that color “is what gives [a portrait] life.” He discovered cobalt blue (“a divine color”), carmine red (“warm and lively like wine”), cadmium yellow (“brilliant”), and emerald green. Instead of mixing them endlessly into grays, he deployed them boldly: a jade green dress with a scarlet bow. He applied the lessons of Blanc and Chevreul to the new mission of flattery: heightening
a rouged cheek with a bright green background, or the yellow thrust of a neck with a lavender blouse. In place of fine gradations of tone, he called for “less far-fetched, less difficult color. More simplicity.” He cited as his new goals both the luminous flesh of Rubens’s women and the saturated colors of stained-glass windows. Among the modern works he saw, he singled out the bright, brusque canvases of Henri de Braekeleer, an Antwerp artist who painted women (including prostitutes) in vivid dashes of light-drenched color.

No matter how enthusiastically he embraced the new hues, new paints, new palette, and new heroes of Antwerp, however, he never lost sight of his ultimate goal. “We must carry things to such a height,” he wrote, rallying Theo to the new mission, “that the girls will begin to like having their portraits painted—I am sure that there are some who want them.”

BUT FEW DID
. Despite his Herculean efforts, the models did not come. In the first month, Vincent reported only a trickle of visitors to his studio: the old man, an old lady, one young woman, and “half a promise” from another. By late December, he was desperate. Using some extra money Theo had sent, he paid a chorus girl from the Café-concert Scala, a Folies Bergères–like revue, to come to his studio and pose. For several weeks, he had watched her perform in the Scala’s tacky Moorish splendor and, he suspected, pleasure select patrons afterward. When she arrived at his studio with her luxuriant black hair, pouty cheeks, and bee-sting lips, Vincent found her “beautiful” and “witty,” but also impatient. Restless from too many late nights, she could not sit still. She refused an offer of champagne (“it doesn’t cheer me up,” she said, “it makes me sad”) and breezily declined his invitation to take her clothes off.

Unnerved by the rebuffs, Vincent worked feverishly to produce “something voluptuous” to appease his
ennuyée
sitter: a stark, Rubenesque contrast of “jet-black” hair against a white jacket with a “flame-colored bow,” surrounded by a halolike “golden glimmer” of radiant yellow “much lighter than white.” She left his studio that night with the painting and a flirtatious promise to pose for him again (in her dressing room next time).
“Sacrebleu,”
he exclaimed to Theo as soon as she left. “I feel the infinite beauty of the study of women … in the very marrow of my bones.” But there is no evidence that they ever saw each other again.

By the start of the new year, all of Vincent’s bold new plans had come to similar dead ends. Nothing sold: not the big paintings he had brought from Nuenen like
The Bible
, not his beloved portraits, not even the little city views he had done for that reason only. After a month of trekking through the “chilly and gloomy” streets carrying his wares of castles and cathedrals, he had not found a single dealer who would even show his work, much less buy it. His vows to
paint signboards or design menus or find students evaporated in the heat of his passion for prostitutes and portraits. Coveting the success of portrait photographers, he imagined he could ensure more accurate likenesses in his own work by applying paint directly to photographs (“one could get a much better coloring that way”), or simply by repackaging his portraits and selling them as “fantasy heads.” When schemes like these failed, as they invariably did, he blamed tight-fisted buyers, out-of-touch dealers, a moribund market, or the decline of modern art in general. “If they showed more and better things,” he complained, “more would sell.… The prices, the public, everything needs renovation.”

Next, his body betrayed him. After years of bragging about his hardy “peasant” constitution, Vincent began to complain about feeling faint, “overstrained,” and “far from well.” The proud rigors of his Millet diet in Nuenen came to seem more like deprivations in Antwerp’s bitter, wet winter; but his stomach rebelled against richer fare. He smoked a pipe to calm his digestion, but his gums grew sore and his teeth loosened. He developed a hacking cough. For the first time, he reported losing weight. At some point, he must have suffered rashes, cankers, or lesions—as if all his vague afflictions were manifesting themselves on his flesh. In a port city filled with sailors and whores, Vincent sought treatment for the scourge of sailors and whores everywhere: syphilis.

Fearing, no doubt, that Theo would see the disease as the wages of his obsession with prostitutes and question his entire portrait project, Vincent hid both the symptoms and the treatments from his brother. He wrote nothing about his visits to Dr. Amadeus Cavenaille on the rue de Holland only a few blocks from his studio; nothing about his treatments at the big Stuyvenberg hospital nearby; nothing about his shame or dread in the face of an uncertain prognosis. But in an era that reflexively linked syphilis and gonorrhea (which Vincent had already contracted in The Hague), and that condemned both equally as “monstrosities” of nature, the diagnosis was inevitable and the treatment certain: mercury.

Whether administered in the famous blue pills, as a foul-smelling ointment, or in “fumigations” of toxic vapor (Vincent jotted one name for such treatments,
“bain de siège”
[seated bath], in his sketchbook, along with appointment times), mercury could only ameliorate the disease but not cure it. Meanwhile, it inflicted on its victims a Job-like litany of suffering to rival the disease itself: from hair loss and sexual asthenia to insanity and death. Even in moderate doses, it could cause stomach cramps, diarrhea, anemia, depression, organ failure, and impairment of sight or hearing. Mercury’s signature side effect was salivation—not just unsightly drooling, but buckets of sputum (“liquefied wastes from the sickness”), all of it carrying the unseen spirochete, bathing throat and mouth and gums in new infections until the entire orifice erupted in one huge, fetid ulcer.

Although he never admitted to the disease or the treatment, Vincent
couldn’t keep from his brother the ruin that followed in their wake. His already ailing stomach revolted. His energy drained. For the first time in his life, he complained of “feeling physically weak.” Running constantly with a strange “grayish phlegm,” his mouth and throat filled with sores so that he couldn’t chew or swallow food. Within a few months, his loose teeth began to rot and break off. Before leaving Antwerp in February, he paid a precious fifty francs to have a dentist remove up to a third of his teeth—a horrific ordeal at a time when extractions were done with ratchet wrenches and liquor was often the only anesthetic.

Christmas 1885 brought a different kind of torment. The ghost of Pastor van Gogh haunted the holiday that he had dominated for so long. Vincent complained that “certain recollections [of the way] Father spoke and behaved toward me” hounded him—just as memories hounded Redlaw in his favorite Dickens Christmas story,
The Haunted Man
. To escape the voices from the past, he took long walks through the snowy streets to the city’s edge. But he found no consolation in the countryside, either; only “immense melancholy.” He turned inevitably to taverns and brothels for some facsimile of seasonal cheer. Despite Theo’s pleadings, he adamantly refused to write to his mother or sisters, even on Saint Nicholas Day—a blasphemy against faith and family aimed straight at the heart of his dead father. He considered himself doomed to “a perpetual state of exile”—condemned forever to “a family stranger than strangers.”

The despondency spread to every corner of his life. As Christmas processions made their way through the streets outside his window and skaters filled the flooded Grote Markt, Vincent sat in his empty studio and cursed the world. He cursed the dealers, like Portier, who had failed him; he cursed the models who harried and hurried him; he cursed the prostitutes who refused his money, and the creditors who demanded it. He cursed all those who scorned his claim to being a
“real
painter.” And, of course, he cursed Theo. In an acid holiday “greeting,” he chastised his brother for his “frigid and unkind slighting and keeping me at a distance,” and lashed out at him for having so often “taken the wrong side”—their father’s side—against him. “Again and again,” he complained to Theo just as he had to Dorus, “you lapse into the old evil with regard to me.” Looking back over the year just ending, he admitted bitterly: “I am not the least bit, literally not the least bit, better off than I was years ago.”

The bleaker his reality, the more tightly Vincent clung to the fantasy of artistic and sexual fulfillment through portraits. At the very end of December, when he persuaded the girl from the Scala to pose for him, his obsession revived like a phoenix. Against all the weight of failures, that single “success” with a chorus girl rejuvenated his mission. Calling it his “greatest craving” and an “absolute necessity,” he vowed to continue his quest among the prostitutes of Antwerp for a genuine “whore’s expression.” He summoned Theo to yet another ante of patience and sacrifice (“I must be able to spread my wings a little”) and redoubled
his promises of financial breakthrough and artistic triumph. “One should aim at something lofty, genuine, and distinguished,” he challenged his brother, “shouldn’t one?”