Van Gogh (97 page)

The spacious fourth-floor apartment at 54, rue Lepic fit these specifications like a tailored suit.

First, it was located in Montmartre, the community where Vincent had lived during his last stay in Paris. Rising from the boulevard de Clichy, Montmartre spread up and over the famous butte of the same name, a limestone promontory that thrust into the Seine valley from the east, forcing the river to take a great westward loop around it. From the crest of the butte, with its crenellation of windmills, one could see the Seine on three sides—slicing through the dense city to the south; washing the river playgrounds of Asnières and La Grande Jatte to the west; then disappearing into a wasteland of factories and
banlieues
to the north.

In the ten years since Vincent lived there, Montmartre had kept its reputation as an artistic refuge from the big city—a marginal place where people came to indulge in marginal activities, a “half-wild” quarry town where rich men secreted
their mistresses, and artists enjoyed a special liberty in their studios and in their habits. But now, like the rest of bohemia, Montmartre had acquired a new bourgeois cachet. Now, the margins had become the new fashion, as artists and intellectuals flocked to the knowing fringes. Zola and the Goncourts set novels here (and later chose to be buried here); Salon painters like Alfred Stevens brought their clients here (“society women [were] highly excited at the thought of going up to Montmartre,” according to one account); and popular
chansonniers
like Bruant sang the praises of the “martyr’s hill” to packed houses here.

The building that Vincent chose, on a bend in the rue Lepic, was perfectly poised at the intersection of old and new Montmartre, village and city, fringe and fashion. It sat just below the butte’s final steep rise—before the streets turned to stairs and the sidewalks ended in chalky paths. Beyond the bend, the bright new limestone buildings yielded to wind-beaten old shacks and ragged greenery, and the paths led sightseers to the few surviving windmills, now stripped of their sails and reduced to tourist attractions by the coming of steam.

Built in 1882, the nondescript five-story apartment house had been designed specifically to exploit the same demand for boundary-hopping that filled the seats of Le Chat Noir every night. It repackaged the old bohemian Montmartre for the new boulevard taste. Great oak outer doors led to a quiet passage and a view of the garden in back. Guests entered the vestibule through the elaborate iron-and-glass inner doors, where a concierge greeted them. The apartments—only two to a landing—boasted huge rooms (by Paris standards), herringbone parquet floors, black Belgian-marble mantles, and tin tubs. Modern conveniences included gas heat and light in every room and, most astonishing in a city where even good buildings offered only a single outdoor tap,
two
faucets—one in the kitchen and one in the bathroom. (Chamber pots remained a standard feature in all but the richest households.)

Theo and Vincent’s apartment had the special advantages of a high floor, far removed from the smells of the street, washed with sunlight and open to Montmartre’s famous breeze. Everywhere in Paris, height signaled status: the higher one’s floor, the higher one’s social standing. The builders of 54, rue Lepic shared their renters’ disregard for the lower classes, too. The “kitchen” consisted of a tiny room at the back with a single gas burner on a wooden table. But Vincent didn’t care: Theo had agreed to hire a full-time kitchen maid, enviously described by a friend as “a cook
in optima forma.”

In June, as soon as the rue Laval lease expired, Vincent moved the brothers into their fashionable new aerie. He took the smallest of the three bedrooms for his own, saving a larger one for his studio. Fulfilling fantasies of fraternal domesticity he had harbored since Drenthe, he doubtless took charge of the decorating—not just arranging the furniture and planning window treatments, but
also hanging Theo’s collection of paintings, prints from both their portfolios, and some of his own work.

As soon as the move was complete, as if to celebrate his new home and new life, Vincent took up Guy de Maupassant’s
Bel-Ami
, the story of another ambitious outsider who climbed to the heights of Paris society from a humble start in Montmartre. Like Octave Mouret, Georges Duroy charms and dares his way into the hearts of men and the beds of women (thus earning his nickname, Bel-Ami—a winning fellow). Vincent found comfort in Maupassant’s “light-hearted” vision of the uphill road ahead—and, no doubt, inspiration in Duroy’s ultimate, dizzying success. He pronounced
Bel-Ami
“a masterpiece” and recommended it as an antidote to all “civilized people [who] suffer melancholy and pessimism”—including himself:

A winning new life demanded a winning art. Gripped yet again by the vision of a successful joint enterprise with Theo, and desperate to justify his unbidden arrival, Vincent threw himself into the task of creating works that would sell. He started by illustrating menus for restaurants, fulfilling a pledge he had made in Antwerp. For one upscale establishment, he transcribed the entire bill of fare (
“Cervelle Beurre noir,” “veau marengo,” “gâteau de riz au Kirsch”
), and bordered it with a scene straight out of
Bel-Ami:
fashionable Parisians strolling through a park.

Reviving his ambitions from The Hague, he peddled illustrations to the myriad magazines and illustrated papers that filled the newsstands of Paris, many of them published by cafés and cabarets like Le Chat Noir. He carefully calculated the subject matter, size, setting, and mood of each drawing, gauging it to a specific potential client. For Le Mirliton, Aristide Bruant’s popular club not far from the rue Laval, he chose as his subject a denizen of the very demimonde that Bruant celebrated in his songs and in his magazine: a grotesquely obese woman walking her little dog. He set her on the sidewalk just outside Le Mirliton, with landmarks carefully drawn in, and, for good measure, inscribed the drawing with a verse from one of Bruant’s own songs. For Le Chat Noir itself, he created a tiny illustration the size of a calling card—perfect for menus, napkins, stationery, or their famous magazine—showing a dangling skeleton and a crouching black cat locked in a macabre stare.

The move to a studio of his own in June opened up another money-making
possibility: tourist pictures. Every day a steady stream of sightseers made their way up the rue Lepic, the primary route to the summit of Butte Montmartre, to see the famous view of Paris from its crest. Only a block uphill from the brothers’ apartment, the Moulin de la Galette—a bustling entertainment complex of restaurant, dance hall, and park—attracted crowds day and night with food, drink, and the
cahut
, a lewd variant of the cancan. The complex incorporated two of the three remaining windmills on the mount, the Radet and the Blute-Fin. The latter’s precarious belvedere offered the most spectacular view of all: a panoramic metropolitan vista unlike anything anybody had seen in an era when flight was still an exotic rarity.

Self-Portrait
, 1887,
OIL ON CANVAS, 16⅛ × 13⅛ IN.;
(
Illustration credit 27.1
)

Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat
, 1886–87,
OIL ON CARDBOARD, 16⅛
× 1
2⅝ IN.; AND

Self-Portrait with Straw Hat
, 1887,
OIL ON PANEL, 14 × 10⅝ IN
.

The view was Montmartre’s signature landmark, as closely linked to it in the public imagination as Antwerp was to its cathedral, and Vincent attacked it with the same mercenary fervor. Many streets in his neighborhood afforded spectacular views from their higher reaches, as did the windows of the rue Lepic apartment. From the windy lookout of Blute-Fin to the noisy construction site of Sacré Coeur, he carried his easel up and down the mount in search of fresh angles on the vast vista.

At some point, Vincent turned around and fixed his perspective frame on the butte itself. He saw in its sentinel windmills and seedy clutter more to interest his searching eye than in the smoky, unchanging panoramas. Even more important, he saw the potential for sales. Tourists snapped up prints of Montmartre’s unique country-in-city landscape—not just the windmills, but the old quarry, the twisted streets, and the shantytown on the ridge. Dedicated magazines ran page after page of such illustrations. Vincent repeatedly drew and painted the picturesque mills (both from a distance and close-up); the street outside the Moulin de la Galette (with its signage carefully lettered in); and the crazed patchwork of huts and gardens at the crest of the butte. He painted them in the muted tones of Mauve and the Hague School—the most salable images he knew. He even tried them in watercolor—an ever-frustrating but affordable medium. “One must sell cheap to rise,” he said, “or even at cost. Paris is Paris.”

Sometime that spring, Vincent celebrated his new incarnation in a new way: he looked in the mirror. Instead of a convict with broken teeth and sunken cheeks, he saw an artist Bel-Ami—a young man still, but not unseasoned (his hairline receding), dressed not in the loose blue smock of Millet but in a sturdy wool jacket, high-buttoned vest, and silk cravat. Here was a man who cared for himself properly: beard barbered, hair curled, teeth tended; a man who carried himself with dignity: chin up, chest thrust out. Without the telltale brushes and palette, he could have been a businessman, a Paris art dealer perhaps, distractedly smoking his Prince of Wales pipe, looking back with a skeptical gaze.

Only then, and for the first time, Vincent painted what he saw in the mirror.

He liked what he saw so much, in fact, that he painted at least four more versions of the image in the mirror over the next few months, each one bigger, better attired, and more prosperous-looking than the last.

But the centerpiece of Vincent’s bourgeois rebirth in Paris wasn’t his salable art, his new clothes, his new teeth, or even the bright new apartment on the rue Lepic. It was his enrollment in the atelier of Fernand Piestre, the artist known as Cormon.

THE SALON SYSTEM
may have lost its hegemony by 1886, but not its popularity. A vast industry, with Goupil still in the lead, churned out thousands upon thousands
of genre scenes, rural idylls, oriental fantasies, and historical vignettes for a larger and richer audience of collectors than ever before. The demand for these polished, pleasing images had overwhelmed the old state-sponsored Académie system for training artists, with its competitive elitism and aristocratic bias. Meanwhile, the same prosperity that drove the booming art market had also produced a surplus of young men (and a very few women) with the money, education, and leisure to pursue their artistic ambitions.

To address both these unmet demands, an alternate form of art schooling had sprung up in major cities across the Continent, but especially in Paris, the birthplace of the Salon. Called
ateliers
(for the skylighted attics where artists often worked), or simply studios, these private schools varied in size, in prestige, in rigor, and, of course, in fees. But they were all children of the École des Beaux-Arts—employing the same time-honored teaching methods and pledged to the same goal of proficiency as their more exalted parent. Almost all their founders and instructors had graduated from the École. Many were former Salon stars who parlayed their prize medals, sometimes even just a single
succès d’estime
, into the franchise of an atelier. Cormon was one of these.