Van Gogh (43 page)

This flight from reckoning allowed him to be both mercilessly self-critical and endlessly hopeful: forever promising, and expecting, improvement; forever waiting for lightning to strike, or God’s voice to speak, or an angel to appear. “I am working away hard, though for the moment it is not yielding particularly gratifying results,” he wrote for the first of many times in a letter from the Borinage. “But I have every hope that these thorns will bear white blossoms in due course and that these apparently fruitless struggles are nothing but labor pains.” His sudden departure for Brussels—only days after assuring Theo, “the best thing is for me to stay here and work as hard as I can”—was the first of many preemptive flights to keep hope alive.

In his emotional life, too, Vincent would never leave the Borinage. When Theo sent him fifty francs in June, it not only revived their relationship, it began a financial dependence that would last the rest of Vincent’s life. Within a few months, he was advancing the first of the plaintive, coercive arguments for further subsidies that would become the corrosive hallmark of their correspondence. “Honestly, to be able to work properly I need at least a hundred francs a month,” he wrote in September, along with a warning: “Poverty stops the best minds in their tracks.” Money made vivid and undeniable the reversal of the brothers’ relative positions in the family—“if I have come down in the world,” Vincent conceded, “you have in a different way come up in it”—ushering in a new world of suspicion and reserve. Yet, at the same time, money brought a new edge of desperation to Vincent’s old craving for fraternal solidarity. The “magic force” of brotherhood would no longer be sufficient; Vincent now needed Theo’s absolute commitment to the joint enterprise of his art. His work, Vincent
claimed, was
their
progeny, fathered forever by Theo’s decisive encouragement in the summer of 1880.

But Vincent’s “depressing dependence” (his term) brought new waves of guilt and resentment. The guilt expressed itself in relentless protests of hard work, apologetic pleas for patience, and pathetic promises to pay his brother back. (“Someday or other I shall earn a few pennies with some drawings,” he wrote in his very first letter as an artist.) The resentment found its voice in manipulative schemes, escalating claims of entitlement, and fits of moral indignation when Theo, inevitably, failed to live up to Vincent’s vision of a joint enterprise. By the time Vincent left the Borinage, Theo had stepped fully into their father’s shoes in this vicious spiral of guilt and anger: a spiral in which resentment sometimes overruled gratitude, no support was ever sufficient, and gestures of generosity were often answered by spasms of defiance. In September, Theo invited Vincent to come to Paris. Vincent responded with a veiled request for money to visit Barbizon, and then, without advance notice, moved to Brussels instead.

Finally, through the sheer power of his imagination, Vincent emerged from the Borinage with his vision of
“it”
intact, undimmed by the years of setbacks and suffering. “My inner self,” he told Theo, “has not changed.… I think, believe, and love more seriously now what I thought, believed, and loved then.” Consolation remained the ultimate goal; truth the ultimate medium; and sorrow the ultimate, redemptive sentiment. His imagination was already busy transforming his years of exile and misery into the stuff of
it
—the “inner sorrow” that he found in the works of all the artists he admired. He vowed to seek in his own work “a nobler, worthier, and if you will allow me, more evangelical tone.” He spoke of the challenge ahead in biblical cadences (“Narrow is the way and strait the gate and there are only a few who find it”), and of his rebirth in the black country as a resurrection. “Even in that deep misery,” he wrote, “I felt my energy revive, and I said to myself: In spite of everything I shall rise again. I will take up my pencil.”

V
INCENT VAN
G
OGH, AGE 18
(
Illustration credit col2.1
)

I
T LOOMED OVER BRUSSELS LIKE A FANTASY OF EMPIRES LONG PAST
. Even in a century infatuated with itself, the Palais de Justice would stand as a high-water mark of grandiosity. “A little Michelangelo, a little Piranesi, and a little madness,” said the poet Verlaine of the Babel-like structure nearing completion when Vincent arrived in October 1880.

But, of course, it had to be huge (the biggest single-building construction project in the nineteenth century), because Brussels was a city with something to prove. Emboldened by the fiftieth anniversary of its independence and enriched by its African colonies, the young country of Belgium had set out to transform its ancient capital into a world-class city—to reverse centuries of domination by either French or Dutch and make Brussels a center of prestige and splendor to rival even Paris. What Baron Haussmann had done to the French capital, King Léopold II was doing to Brussels: leveling great swaths of medieval city to make room for grand new boulevards of bourgeois
appartements
and great new palaces of commerce, government, and art. Outside the old city, Léopold built a vast countryside park to match Paris’s Bois de Boulogne and a huge fairground where, in 1880, the country celebrated its anniversary with a jubilee that echoed Paris’s Exposition Universelle.

But Brussels had also benefited from its long eclipse in Paris’s shadow. Successive political convulsions had sent waves of artistic and intellectual refugees to this French-speaking safe haven. Karl Marx and other founders of socialism wrote and published here with impunity. The anarchist Paul Proudhon (“Property is theft!”) escaped imprisonment here. As Vincent must have known, Victor Hugo began his twenty-year exile here—the most productive years of his hugely productive life. Charles Baudelaire fled persecution for the “perversities” of Symbolism here. Verlaine brought his forbidden lover Arthur Rimbaud and
sketched the first drafts of
Romances sans paroles
(
Songs Without Words
) here. By the time Vincent arrived, Brussels had solidified its reputation as a place where people of uncommon mind, estranged from their homelands, could come to reset their destinies.

To this city of new ambitions and second chances, Vincent brought his own desperate bid for a new life. The troubles of the past disappeared from his correspondence. Only the name of the café-inn where he lodged, Aux Amis de Charleroi, hinted of his black time in the black country. (Charleroi was the capital of the coal mining region.) In his little room above the café at 72, boulevard du Midi, overlooking the train station, the fever of work resumed. “I am pushing ahead with a will,” he assured Theo after his arrival. “We must make the same efforts as lost, desperate beings.”

Living on the free bread and coffee available around the clock in the café downstairs, he threw himself into the last part of the Bargue course, which showed him how to make copies after the great line portraits of Raphael and Holbein. But at the same time, he returned to the more elementary charcoal exercises and raced through them yet again. He made still more copies of his favorite Millet prints, experimenting with a pen, which he found frustrating. (“It is not as easy as it seems,” he complained.) He labored over a big anatomy book, copying its large-scale illustrations of grimacing skulls and muscled limbs until he had traversed “the whole of the human body,” front, back, and side. Then he sought out veterinary sources for illustrations of horses, cows, and sheep, to master animal anatomy as well. He even ventured into the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology, convinced that an artist had to know “how character is expressed in the features and in the shape of the skull.”

Vincent dutifully reported these Herculean efforts to his parents and to Theo, working as hard to reverse the family judgment against him as to master the mysteries of the figure. “[If] I make progress and my drawing becomes stronger,” he wrote his parents, “then everything will come right sooner or later.” He sent them drawings (“so [they] might see I am working”) accompanied by plaintive protests of his diligence and sincerity. Scarcely a letter went by without a reminder of the difficulty of the task before him or a promise of ultimate success. “On the whole I can say I have made progress,” he wrote on New Year’s Day 1881. “[Now] I ought to be able to get along more quickly.”

He bought new shoes and new clothes. “[They] are well cut and look better on me than any others that I can remember,” he reported proudly. He even enclosed a swatch of suit fabric for his parents’ approval, noting with a newfound sense of style, “this material is often worn, in studios especially.” “I also replenished my underwear with three pairs of drawers,” he added reassuringly, and went to the public bathhouse “two or three times a week.”

Responding to another of his parents’ complaints, Vincent resumed the
quest for “good company.” Almost as soon as he arrived in Brussels, he reported meeting “several young men who were also beginning to study drawing.” He dunned Theo for introductions in a city where his brother had worked for almost a year. One of his first stops after arriving was the Goupil gallery at 58, rue Montagne de la Cour, in the shadow of Léopold’s grand new showplace, the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts. He hoped that Theo’s old boss,
gérant
Schmidt, could help him “make the acquaintance of some of the young artists here,” he said. When Theo wrote back with introductions, Vincent promptly pursued them. He presented himself to Willem Roelofs, the dean of expatriate Dutch painters in Brussels, and probably met Victor Horta, a young Belgian architect who had just returned from Paris to enroll in the Brussels Academy. Theo may also have provided an introduction to another expatriate Dutch painter, Adriaan Jan Madiol. Vincent eagerly advertised these social forays to his parents and pledged to renew relations with family favorites like Tersteeg and Schmidt and, by extension, Uncle Cent.

Of all Vincent’s new acquaintances, none pleased his parents more, or played a larger role in his life, than Anthon Gerard Alexander Ridder van Rappard. (In writing and in speech, Vincent always referred to him simply as Rappard.) Like almost everyone Vincent met in Brussels, Rappard knew Theo first. They had met not long before in Paris, during Rappard’s apprenticeship in the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme, a leading Salon artist as well as Adolphe Goupil’s son-in-law. Like so many of Theo’s friends, Rappard personified Anna Carbentus’s ideal of “civilized company.” The youngest son of a prosperous Utrecht lawyer from a noble family, he had attended the proper bourgeois schools; socialized in the proper circles; and summered in proper style, whether sailing on the lake at Loosdrecht or going to fashionable spas like Baden-Baden.

When Vincent arrived one morning in late October 1880 at Rappard’s well-appointed studio on the rue Traversière on Brussels’s north side, he found a handsome, affluent, self-possessed young man of twenty-two, one year younger than Theo. Even beyond the obvious differences of wealth, looks, and social standing, the two artists could not have been more different. Rappard was phlegmatic, good-hearted, and amiable, qualities honed from a lifetime of being well liked. An inveterate joiner of clubs, he moved with the ease of long experience in social gatherings, prized by his many friends for a level head and a steady heart. Vincent was confrontational, prickly, and self-righteous; never fully at ease in company; prone to outbursts of vehemence that could derail any conversation. After years of living inside his own head, he had lost almost all sense of social grace and approached every interaction as a choice between assaulting or being assaulted.