Van Gogh (56 page)

In Vincent’s reality, images evoked emotions. Born into a family and an era awash in sentimentality, Vincent looked to images not just to be instructed and inspired, but, most of all, to be moved. Art should be “personal and intimate,” he said, and concern itself with “what touches us as human beings.” He shared the Victorian love not only for scenes of melodramatic emotion—deathbed vigils, tearful farewells, joyful reunions—but also for the sweet ubiquitous vignettes of little girls with baskets, grandparents with children, flirting young lovers, families at prayer, flowers and kittens—nosegays of imagery so popular that they spawned an entire new industry: greeting cards. He hailed “sentiment” as the sine qua non of all great art, and set for his own art the highest goal: “to make drawings that
touch
some people.”

In Vincent’s reality, even landscapes had to speak to the heart. “The secret of beautiful landscape,” he wrote, “lies mainly in truth and sincere sentiment.” He praised the Barbizon painters for their “heartbreaking” intimacy with nature. But nature had always been a wellspring of both imagery and emotion for Vincent: from the consolations of creekbank and heath, to the conceits of Karr and Michelet. The landscape images that he began collecting from an early age reflected both the Romantics’ awe before sublime Nature and the Victorian code of Nature’s sentiments. Every season, every time of day, every meteorological condition was thought to have its own specific emotional effect. Pictures were called simply “Autumn Effect,” “Evening Effect,” “Sunrise Effect,” or “Snow Effect.” Each provided an emotional cue, like the caption on a print, as certain and comforting as a children’s story: sunrise for hope, sunset for serenity, autumn for melancholy, twilight for longing.

In Vincent’s reality, both the search for significance and the search for sentiment demanded simplicity. In his own work, he pledged to seek images “that almost everybody will understand”—to simplify each image “to the essentials, with a deliberate disregard of those details that do not belong.” Despite his subtle and far-ranging intellect, he preferred images that did not puzzle or prevaricate. Far too earnest for irony, he drew from the densest Carlyle and deepest Eliot only the most forthright lessons. In huge novels, he sometimes saw only a single character, often a minor one, reflecting back his view of himself and the world. His childhood love of fables and parables, especially Andersen’s, and his taste for vivid imagery and simple narratives never left him. He treated the grown-up fables of Dickens as true accounts, only occasionally allowing himself to look into the Englishman’s dark heart. Just as he read Dickens as if it were Zola, he
read Zola as if it were Dickens, drawing these very different authors into his reductive imaginary world.

The search for simple truths dominated Vincent’s visual world. He loved cartoons—everything from the political send-ups of the British magazine
Punch
to the caricatures of the two great French illustrators of the century, Paul Gavarni and Honoré Daumier, whose droll, sometimes hilarious drawings of bourgeois vanity and official buffoonery carried a weight of humanity as heavy as Millet’s toiling peasants. “There is pith and a sober depth in [them],” he wrote. Like Daumier and Millet, Vincent shared the Victorian fascination with “types.” The notion that human behavior could be explained through physical appearances was only one of the many comforting pseudosciences spun off by the century’s social, economic, and spiritual upheavals. It permeated popular culture: from the sideshow quackery of phrenology to the high art of Balzac’s
La comédie humaine
. The work of Vincent’s beloved Dickens represented a virtual bible for believers in types, with its unbreakable correlations between outward and inward behavior, between surface and essence.

Raised in a culture of unmistakable distinctions—Catholic-Protestant, rich-poor, city-country, served-serving—Vincent became an ardent disciple of typology long before he took up drawing the figure. If bugs and birds’ nests could be catalogued and labeled, why not people? “I am in the habit of observing very accurately the physical exteriors of people in order to get at their real mental make-up,” he wrote. From his mother, no doubt, he learned early how to read character as well as class in the clothes people wore. He also inherited her abiding faith in stereotypes. For Vincent, Jews sold books or lent money and “Negroes” (any nonwhites) worked hard. Americans (“Yankees”) were coarse and dull; Scandinavians, orderly; Middle Easterners (all “Egyptians”), enigmatic; southerners, temperamental; northerners, phlegmatic.

These were the simple images that peopled Vincent’s world: “unpolished” laborers with faces “broad and rough”; fine-featured young ladies and solemn preachers; bent old men and sturdy peasants. Onto this childhood template, the new gospels of physiognomy and phrenology, the
“tournure”
of Daumier and Gavarni, the icons of Millet and the English illustrators, only added layers of refinement and confirmation.

This was the “reality” that Vincent increasingly imposed on the world around him. “I see a world,” he said, “which is quite different from what most painters see.” It was a reality that demanded “significance.” When he saw a group of poor people gathered expectantly outside a lottery office, he dubbed the scene “The Poor and Money.” That way, he explained, “it assumed a greater and deeper significance for me than it had at first sight.” On his walks, he recognized only effects. (“All nature is an indescribably beautiful ‘Black and White’ exhibition during those snow effects.”) It was a reality tender with emotion. News of a
friend’s death could pass with barely a mention, but seeing his portrait opened up floodgates of grief.

It was a reality of uncompromising simplicity. Even his greatest passions had to conform to simple formulae, like the captions on his prints, whether “sorrowful yet always rejoicing” or
“aimer encore.”
Through this lens, everyday irritations appeared as
“petites misères de la vie humaine”
(little miseries of human life), and the deepest mysteries as
“quelque chose là-haut”
(something on high). For the rest of his life, no crisis or enthusiasm could avoid the relentless reduction of a motto. From
foi de charbonnier
to
rayon blanc
, he forced the world into categories, as if pinning bugs in a box or arranging prints in a portfolio. He eschewed ambiguity and saw cartoons of metaphor where others saw only harsh reality.

When he looked at people, he saw only types. From the handsome, aristocratic Van Rappard to the lowly streetwalker Sien, they were never more real than characters in a book or figures on a page—drawn indelibly by fate in the broad outlines of their type. (“I
see
things as pen drawings,” he said.) Except for Sien, not one of the models who drifted through his studio in two years on the Schenkweg ever merited a personal word or any observation beyond a physical description. He drew orphans repeatedly, but never commented on their circumstance or condition. Of a disabled model he wrote only, “One little fellow, with a long thin neck, in a wheel chair, was splendid.”

He treated people according to type, expected them to act according to type, and judged them according to type. Rich men like his uncle Cent
should
think only of money, he said. “One could not expect anything else.” But clergymen, like his father, “ought to be humble and contented with simple things.” The poor should help each other; women and children (but not men) should “learn thrift.” Bourgeois women should be cultured, but not intellectual; lower-class women, neither. Workers should never go on strike, but only “work on to the utmost.” Why? Because, like characters in a novel, he said, “it was impossible [for them] to act differently.”

Most of all, artists should act like artists. Again and again in Vincent’s defiant standoff with the world, he invoked the destiny of “type” to define and justify himself. If he did not seek out good company, it was because, “as a painter, one must
leave aside
other social ambitions.” If he suffered from “temporary fits of weakness, nervousness, and melancholy,” it was the result of “something peculiar in the constitution of every painter.” If he led a troubled, unconventional life, it was because “it fits in with my profession … I am a poor painter.” Even his “ugly face and shabby coat” he claimed as badges of his type. And if he refused to change his mind about loving Kee Vos or drawing figures or using models or marrying Sien, it was because he was who he was, and an artist could not be any other way. “I do not intend to think and live less passionately than I do,” he declared. “I am myself.”

In this world of pen drawings, Sien Hoornik had her place, too. For Vincent, as for his era, no typology was stricter than the typology of women (a strait-jacket laid out benevolently in Michelet’s treatise on womanhood,
La femme
). In their purest form, they were delicate, inchoate creatures, inherently weak and frail-willed, designed by God for love. Without love, a woman became an icon of pity—“she loses her spirits and the charm is gone,” Vincent said. Images of sad, helpless, unloved women preoccupied the Victorian mind in a kind of pornography of pathos: wives of departing soldiers, homeless maidens, husbandless mothers, grieving widows. The sight of lonely, unloved women, whether in a print or in a church pew, touched Vincent deeply. “Even as a boy,” he told Theo, “I would often look up with infinite sympathy, indeed with respect, at a woman’s face past its prime, inscribed as it were with the words: here life and reality have left their mark.” Mothers were the other icon of womanhood that could move Vincent to tears. His collections had always included this staple of nineteenth-century sentimentalism, and he spun vivid images of motherhood from the threads of his own experience long before he put pencil to paper.

A pregnant prostitute combined the helplessness of all women, the pathos of unloved women, and the dewy sentiments of Mother Love. In Vincent’s typology, only a few “temptresses” actually chose prostitution. The vast majority of fallen women were merely victims of unloving men and their own weak natures. All women were easily deceived and readily deserted, he believed, but poor women especially, if not taken care of by a man, were always “in great, immediate danger of being drowned in the pool of prostitution” and lost forever. An older prostitute mother, like Sien, touched all these talismans of pity.
“My poor, weak, ill-used little wife,”
Vincent called her, “an unhappy, forsaken, lonely creature.” Not to help this thrice-damned creature would be “monstrous,” he protested. “She has,” he said, “something of the sublime for me.”

In drawing after drawing, he situated Sien in this intimate typology. He drew her as the “bare, forked animal” of
Sorrow;
as a young widow, dressed in black and lost in melancholy; as a matron sewing serenely for her family. He posed her as a mother, using both her sister and her daughter as children. Suggesting her features with only the most cursory strokes, he depicted her contented in the safe embrace of domesticity: sweeping the floor, saying grace, carrying a kettle, going to church. Rough as they are, these pencil and charcoal drawings, taken together, represent Vincent’s first effort at portraiture—the first of many efforts over the coming years that would, like these, reveal far more about the artist and his inner world than about the sitter or the real world.

HOLD UP IN HIS
Schenkweg studio, surrounded by prostitutes posing as maternal icons, orphans as shoeblacks, vagrants as Millet farmers, and pensioners
as fishermen, Vincent could keep the real world at bay. The studio itself became by turns an almshouse, a peasant’s hovel, a fisherman’s hut, a village inn, a soup kitchen. Vincent adjusted the light flooding in his window by adding shutters and muslin shades—not just to re-create the mysterious contrasts of a
Graphic
illustration, or the warm, tempered light of a Rembrandt print, but also to shut out the world.

Windows had always played a special role in Vincent’s life. As both an observer and an outsider, he had staked his place early at the parsonage window overlooking the Zundert Markt. Twenty-nine years later, he was still there. Whenever he arrived in a new home, he lovingly recorded the view from his window and sometimes drew it, as in Brixton and Ramsgate. His descriptions of the scenes outside his windows, often filled with longing and nostalgia, are indistinguishable from his descriptions of the prints on his wall.

From these frequent, detailed accounts, it is clear that Vincent spent long hours, day and night, gazing from his window, observing unobserved the distant ebb and flow of other lives: from the dockworkers in Amsterdam to the diggers in the railroad coalyards outside his Hague studio. In any interior, whether depicted or real, he was preoccupied by the window arrangement, and the view through windows would return again and again to obsess his own imagery. From the time he began to create studios for himself in 1881, he complained relentlessly about the inadequacy of the windows and lavished far more of his precious funds on window treatments than his artistic requirements could justify.

Among the very first images Vincent drew after arriving in The Hague was the view from his window: a cluttered patchwork of backyards, each fenced off from the others, but all visible from Vincent’s second-floor vantage. In May, when his uncle Cor commissioned a second set of city scenes, he returned to his window and drew the scene in loving, longing detail: the laundry yard of his own building in the foreground and a busy carpenter’s yard beyond—all rendered with a combination of intense looking and voyeuristic detachment that rehearsed a lifetime of seeing unseen. “One can look around it and through it,” Vincent wrote proudly of this drawing, “in every nook and cranny.” The laundresses and carpenters pass through the scene’s meticulous clutter like ghosts, unaware of being watched, leaving barely a trace of life.

Vincent clearly found something deeply satisfying about this eavesdropping perspective. When he went to the almshouse in search of models, he secreted himself in front of a window looking out and made sketches of the activities he spied on the grounds. In the hustle and bustle of the Geest, he yearned to withdraw to a safe distance and observe unobserved. “I wish one could have free access to the houses,” he wrote, “and sit down by the windows without ceremony.” In summer, when he moved to a new apartment in the building next door, he immediately went to its higher window and drew the same scene again.
“You must picture me sitting in my attic window as early as four o’clock in the morning,” he reported to Theo, “studying the meadows and the carpenter’s yard with my perspective frame.”