Van Gogh (150 page)

ABANDONED BY FAMILY
, afraid of the asylum staff, and threatened by every other human contact, Vincent escaped into his work. As always, he was convinced that only furious labor could restore his equilibrium and keep the demons of illness at bay. “Work distracts me infinitely better than anything else,” he wrote. “[It] strengthens the will and consequently leaves these mental weaknesses less hold.” As soon as the door to his studio was unlocked, he threw himself into it “with all my energy possible.” Within the first week, he had begun a dozen canvases. He started with all the images that had burned themselves into
his imagination during his long solitude: the Pietà, the angel, the face in the mirror, and, especially, the view from his barred bedroom window.

Working as long as the wardens would let him—“morning, noon and night,” he told Theo—he revisited canvases begun before the attacks, and retouched others he had considered finished. Proclaiming a new dawn and a ripe harvest, he started another version of
The Reaper
, depicting the little figure working tirelessly outside his window at sunrise. He used an identically huge canvas and completed it within days. Throughout his long ordeal, the painting of his Arles bedroom had sat in his studio. Right before the attacks, Theo had returned it for some repairs, but Vincent had left it rolled up, fearing it might further roil his troubled brain. Now he fearlessly unfurled it and began another version, on another big canvas.

He finished that one in the first week, too, and immediately laid plans to repaint a raft of favorite images from the Yellow House: the vineyards, the Crau, and “above all, that Night Café.” Ordering vast new supplies of materials, he imagined painting reduced copies of all his “best canvases” to send to family members, and then starting a new series of “autumn effects”—all by the end of the month. It was the beginning of a stupendous outpouring of work—almost a painting every other day for the next eight months—racing to keep his hands busy and his mind distracted. “I am working like one truly possessed,” he wrote, “more than ever I am in the grip of a pent-up fury of work, and I’m sure it will help to cure me.”

As always, he longed most to do portraits. But his confinement to the asylum meant he could only recruit models from among his fellow patients (“an impossibility,” he conceded) or from the staff. He apparently did succeed in persuading one befuddled, blank-eyed inmate to pose in his hospital robe for a quickly slashed portrait. But the only true sitters he could find were the two wardens who were paid to watch him while he painted. One was Jean-François Poulet, the young attendant who had often accompanied him on excursions outside the asylum. The other was Charles Trabuc, the elderly chief warden who lived with his wife in a house on the grounds.

Universalizing his tiny world of human companionship, Vincent painted both men as types: Poulet as the smiling local peasant boy in straw hat and colorful shirt, set forever in the outdoors he called home; Trabuc (known as “the Major”) as a stiff, unsmiling grandee of authority. Dressed in his official black-and-white striped jacket, colorless and humorless, Trabuc becomes in Vincent’s austere portrait a symbol of the rigidity and morbidity of the asylum, the church, the region, and life. “He has a military air and small, lively, black eyes,” Vincent wrote, “a veritable bird of prey … very much a Southern type.”

The limited palette, careful rendering, and heads-of-the-people ambition of the Trabuc portrait announced yet another front in Vincent’s campaign of
work: the past. He had emerged from the summer, as he always did from attacks, “overwhelmed with memories as by an avalanche.” Haunted equally by these hallucinatory visions and by the reality of his disintegrating family, Vincent fell into a reverie of regression. He reported feeling “homesick” and “swamped by over-melancholic nostalgia.” To placate these ghosts, he immersed himself again in his scrapbook of the past: his portfolio of prints. The Delacroix Pietà and Rembrandt angel had cracked open a door, an escape hatch, into a previous obsession as consoling to him in his isolation at Saint Paul as it was in The Hague. In the first week of September, he sketched out a grand plan to transform his collection of beloved images into a studio full of color paintings. If he could not find models among the strangers that wandered about him all day, he would find them in the intimates of his
musée imaginaire
.

He began where his artistic journey had begun: with Millet. A decade earlier, when he escaped from the Borinage with nothing more than an ambition to be an illustrator, he had started by copying Millet’s famous series depicting laborers in the fields,
Les travaux des champs
. In his little room in Cuesmes, perched on his rickety camp stool with his sketchpad on his knees, he had made copy after copy, laboring intently over the scenes of woodcutters and sheep shearers, threshers and sheaf binders. Now, once again, he reached out to Millet’s rustic icons from the depths of the black country.

Using the skills of squaring and enlarging that he had honed on his Japanese
prints in Paris, he drew a grid on the tiny black-and-white images and transferred them one by one to canvas. He lavished each with contrasting colors—mostly yellows and blues in broken tones—and flights of impasto. He varied the sizes from very small (15½ inches by 9½ inches) to very big (three feet by two feet—as big as
The Bedroom
), and never felt bound by Millet’s uniform proportions. He took pains to fill in backgrounds and flesh out faces.

A
DRIEN
L
AVIELLE AFTER
J
EAN-FRANÇOIS
M
ILLET
,
The Siesta
, 1873,
ENGRAVING, 5⅝ × 8¾ IN
. (
Illustration credit 40.1
)

Within two weeks, he had finished seven of Millet’s ten figures and started an eighth. By the end of a month, he had exhausted
Les travaux
and moved on to engravings of other artists’ works—although he begged Theo to send him more Millet: in particular,
Les quatre heures de la journée
(
The Four Hours of the Day
). His plans stretched months into the future—to more Delacroix and more Rembrandt, and then to Doré and Daumier—until he had amassed a collection “large and complete enough to give the whole to a school,” he said. And then he would attack the world beyond prints: drawings. Millet had done drawings that never made it onto canvas, after all, and painting them “might make Millet’s work more accessible to the great general public,” he imagined. “Perhaps I would be more useful doing that than doing my own painting.”

Vincent gave various accounts of this bizarre, bottomless, backward-looking project. At first, he attributed it to the lucky “accident” of spoiling some prints and needing replacements as decorations. (“I don’t especially like to see my own pictures in my bedroom,” he explained.) As the task grew, he cited bad weather and lack of models as reasons for continuing it. Elsewhere, he defended it as essential to his recovery. The discipline of copying ensured a “clear mind” and “sure fingers,” he told Theo. One day he described it as a drudging necessity—like his drawing in the Borinage—the only way to make up for lost time and past failures (“those ten years of unfortunate studies that didn’t come off”). But another day, he claimed for his new direction a loftier artistic purpose. Rising to the rhetorical heights and evangelical fervor of The Hague, he argued that figures, far from being relics of a past art, pointed the way to Impressionism’s future. By applying the new gospel of contrasting color to these venerated icons of the primitive, he could do for figure painting what Monet had done for landscape.

To justify this great turn backward in his imagination, this desperate “clinging to the affections of the past,” Vincent insisted that he wasn’t just copying these images, he was
“translating them into another tongue”
—much the way Jo translated books from English to Dutch. Instead of simply re-creating the palette of the original, he “improvised” the color in an effort to find “the vague consonance of colors that are at least right in feeling.” Thus, the new work became “my
own
interpretation,” he emphasized. “Isn’t it like that in music?” he asked, piling up ever more elaborate and poetic reasons for his recherché imagery. “When a person plays Beethoven, he adds his own personal interpretation.” Is that not what Jo did when she played the piano for Theo? Painting was the same
for him, he argued. “My brush goes between my fingers as a bow would on the violin, and absolutely for my own pleasure.”

The real reason was clear enough; and Vincent eventually admitted it. “Because I am ill at present, I am trying to do something to console myself,” he wrote. “I find that it teaches me things, and above all it sometimes gives me consolation.” A decade earlier in the Borinage—the last time Theo sent him
Les travaux
—Vincent had climbed out of the darkness with a vision of fraternal solidarity in the “land of pictures.” Now, only a fantasy of fraternal reunion could save him. The endless reworkings of Millet were just the most visible part of that fantasy. In search of comfort, his reveries took him back to Henri Conscience, the Belgian writer beloved of both brothers, whose evocations of life on the heaths “bucked me up,” he said. He laid plans to move to a farm for a year and “live with the ordinary folk.” As in Nuenen, he would take up the “virile and complete” life that could only be lived in the country.

Theo welcomed the return of Vincent’s peasant delusions as a sign of recovery, and encouraged them by referencing the noble miners and puddlers of another Belgian, Constantin Meunier, along with images of farmers’ daughters “as fresh as young cows” and paintings done with the “wholesomeness of brown bread.” From these strands, Vincent wove a thrilling and consoling vision. Henceforth, he would live his life in mirror parallel with his brother: the rustic trueheart to Theo’s urban sophisticate (the “wooden clogs” to Theo’s “patent-leather boots”); the artist to his merchant; the monk to his married man; the creator to his procreator. On the mystic heaths of memory, laboring every day on images that “smelled of the earth” like Millet’s peasants, he would take up the country life that he knew Theo, in his heart, longed for over the din and distraction of Paris. He would live for
both
of them, he imagined, experiencing the “simpler and truer nature” that they would always share—in art as well as in thought—in a place where Jo could never intrude. “Oh, my dear brother,” he wrote, “a thing like that is not felt, nor even found, by any chance comer.”

A DECADE EARLIER
, Vincent had imagined his way out of the black country with a Barbizon-like fantasy and the promise of the Rijswijk road (“two brothers … feeling, thinking and believing the same”). At the asylum of Saint Paul, his new vision of a brotherhood of the imagination—a union more perfect than any marriage—lifted him out of the darkness. By mid-September, he reported “feeling completely normal” and “eating like a horse.” In the studio, he devoured canvas, too, as image after image appeared at the asylum door, stacked to dry. He begged Theo for copious quantities of new materials and sent off bundles of paintings to signal his resurgent strength. Step by step, he ventured from the safety of the studio and returned to the outdoors, painting as he went: first to
the asylum garden; then to the enclosed field outside his window; and finally, as October began, to the world beyond the wall. “I have feasted upon the air in the hills and the orchards,” he announced triumphantly.

He arrived just in time for fall. “We are having some superb autumn days,” he wrote, “and I am taking advantage of them.” Like a sailor on shore leave after a long voyage, he spent his brush profligately on the season’s voluptuous color. He painted a pair of poplars by the road as two jets of flame shooting into a violet sky. He painted a simple mulberry tree—not much bigger than a shrub—as an orange-and-red Medusa with leafy ringlets filling an entire canvas. He tested his hand on all the styles of the past, from the thin paint and loose fabric of Paris to the sculptural impasto of Monticelli; from swarms of Impressionist brushstrokes to plates of Japanese color. He laid on paint with the lightest possible touch—mere glances of hue—to show the falling of leaves; then loaded his brush with spades of pigment to paint the serpentine web of bare tree limbs left behind. His palette, too, flexed all the ardors of the past: from the broken tones and quiet harmonies of Nuenen, to the pastel mirages of the Grande Jatte, to the pungent yellows and fathomless blues of Arles.

He tested his mind as well as his hand. On one of his first excursions outside the asylum walls, he ventured into an olive grove, a subject fraught with the perils of Gethsemane. He not only painted the rows of twisted trees and silvery leaves, he found someone to sit for a portrait. The hospital’s chief warden, Trabuc, lived beside the grove, and his wife, Jeanne, agreed to Vincent’s importunings. Not since Madame Roulin, the inspiration for
La berceuse
, had a woman modeled for him. With a confidence that seemed unthinkable only weeks before, he painted a careful likeness of her “tired, withered, sunburned face,” using a panel, not a canvas, just as Monticelli had often done.