Van Gogh (159 page)

Theo welcomed him heartily, even tearfully, but the years of sacrifice and secret illness had taken a terrible toll that Vincent saw etched in his brother’s sunken face, pale complexion, and rattling cough. (Jo later admitted her shock at how much healthier Vincent looked when the two brothers stood side by side.) Despite their years apart, Theo spent most of Vincent’s brief visit working long hours at Goupil, where a Raffaëlli show filled his mezzanine gallery and a strategy to recapture Monet as a client preoccupied his mind.

Not enough time had passed, however, to erase the stains of the past. Still feeling unwelcome at his brother’s workplace, Vincent failed to attend the Raffaëlli show or even to see Gauguin’s latest paintings from Brittany. Indeed, everything about Theo’s new life in Paris seemed to scold or exclude him: from his brother’s poor health to the piles of unsold paintings hidden away under beds and in Tanguy’s bug-infested storeroom; from the bright bourgeois apartment on Cité Pigalle (“which is certainly better than the other one,” Vincent admitted) to the Dutch that Jo insisted on speaking. Even in the baby’s colicky wails, Vincent heard the judgment of his family and his past. “I can do nothing about my disease,” he wrote guiltily from his banishment in Auvers.

WHEN VINCENT AWOKE
from his three-day dream of Paris, everything had changed and nothing had changed. He could walk the streets of Auvers without an escort, but all the faces still belonged to strangers and all still eyed him with suspicion. He could buy whatever food he wanted and choose the hotel where he stayed, but Theo still had to pay the bills. “Send me some money toward the end of the week,” he wrote, already broke, the day after his arrival. “What I have will only last me till then.” In his haste, he had left Paris without arranging new “terms” with his brother, so his very first letter plunged him back into the torment of dependency. “Is it 150 francs a month,” he was forced to inquire, “paid in three installments, as before?”

In Auvers, Vincent could finally be treated by a doctor who understood artists. In his forty years of practice, Paul Gachet had tended to the afflictions, both physical and mental, of an avant-garde honor roll that included Manet, Renoir, and Cézanne, as well as Van Gogh colleagues like Pissarro and Guillaumin. But when Vincent went to see Gachet on the day of his arrival, he found the sixty-one-year-old doctor as detached and distracted as the ophthalmologist
Peyron. Surrounded by a house full of cats and dogs and a yard full of fowl, the dyed-blond Gachet greeted him with complaints about the medical profession, nostrums of encouragement (“he said that I must work boldly on”), and offers of a mysterious “booster” treatment if Vincent should fall prey to depression “or anything else became too great for me to bear.” To Theo, Vincent bleakly dismissed any hope that Gachet could provide meaningful medical oversight—the hope that had drawn him to Auvers in the first place. “We must not count on Dr. Gachet at all,” he wrote. “First of all, he is sicker than I am, I think … Now when one blind man leads another blind man, don’t they both fall into the ditch?”

In Auvers, for the first time in years, Vincent could meet people at will—circulate, start fresh, without the terrible rumors that followed him everywhere in Arles. Paris lay only twenty miles over the pastoral horizon, and the cottage-lined streets bustled with cosmopolites—retired, seasonal, even weekend refugees who shared none of the superstitions or prejudices that had dogged his past ventures into the countryside. (In the summer, Auvers’s population swelled from two to three thousand.) But Vincent brought his exile with him. Despite the beautiful scenery (“There is a great deal of color here,” he wrote of the picturesque riverbank town), he laid plans to lock himself in his hotel room and redraw the Bargue
Exercices
yet again.

With unlimited access to pen and paper, he could write to anyone he wanted. But his mind wandered and his hand faltered. He started letters multiple times and left completed drafts unsent. With his work, too, freedom thwarted resolution. He talked hazily about painting some more “translations” of his old drawings and perhaps “working a little at the figure.” “Some pictures present themselves vaguely to my mind,” he reported listlessly, “which it will take time to get clear, but that will come bit by bit.”

In Auvers, he could finally see the night sky without looking through a barred window. But the stars still spoke of loneliness and distant loved ones. Sitting alone in his empty hotel room (his trunk had been delayed), bereft of companionship, or even attention, Vincent’s thoughts returned inexorably to the family he had left behind in Paris. “Often, very often I think of my little nephew,” he wrote only a few days after arriving.

With this plaintive, confessional plea, Vincent began the last great campaign of his life. The days in Paris had been brief, but even the fleeting sight of his brother’s wife and child had triggered a longing that overtopped all those
that preceded it. In the cell-like solitude of his Auvers hotel room, he dreamed a scheme—a final “castle in the air”—commensurate with that longing. He would bring Theo’s family to Auvers and make it
his
family.

The idea had formed by the time he left Paris; perhaps even before then. It was the same vision of reunion that he had shouted from the wilderness of Drenthe when he demanded that Theo—and his mistress—“join me” in a cottage on the heath to form a “family of painters.” It was the same vision that comforted him in 1887 when Theo first proposed to Jo Bonger and Vincent imagined the three of them sharing a “country house” filled with one brother’s children and the other’s paintings. With the same vision, he had beckoned Theo, in words and images, to make the Yellow House his home in the South so they could jointly foster the next generation of Impressionists.

But this time the family was real, not imaginary. Vincent had held the child in his arms only days before. It bore his name.

His first lonely days in Auvers turned that vision from a wistful dream into a driving obsession. When he first committed it to paper, in a letter addressed to Jo as well as Theo on May 24, it came out not as a plea but as an accusation. “At present it seems to me that while the child is no more than six months old yet, your milk is already drying up,” he scolded his sister-in-law. “Already—like Theo—you are too tired.… Worries are looming too large, and are too numerous, and you are sowing among thorns.” He chastised the young parents for shirking their duty to their child by staying in the city where all three were forever “on edge and worn out.” If they continued on that reckless path, Vincent warned, “I foresee that the child will suffer later on for being brought up in the city.” In short, they risked condemning their son to a life of “suffering” and “ruin”—a life, that is, like his uncle’s.

Vincent never sent that letter. No doubt deeming it too harsh and too honest, he set it aside and drafted a different, less dire invitation: “Often, very often, I think of your little one and then I start wishing he was big enough to come to the country. For it is the best system to bring them up here.” But the fire of obsession burned no less brightly in the weeks of persuasion that followed. “Auvers is very beautiful,” he wrote, “really profoundly beautiful … decidedly very beautiful.” He called it “the real country, characteristic and picturesque … far enough from Paris to be
real
country … an almost lush country [with] much well-being in the air.” He compared it to Puvis’s mural of a quiet, ancient, unstained Eden—only lovingly tended like a Dutch garden, not Zola’s untamed
Paradou
—“no factories, but lovely greenery in abundance and well kept.”

For Jo, he promised escape from the choking air and noise of the city, less pressure on her overworked husband, more “solid nourishment,” and better health for all—especially the baby. “I honestly believe that Jo would have twice as much milk here,” he wrote. Again and again, he appealed to the mother’s
duty to her young child. “I often think of you, Jo, and the little one, and I notice that the children here in the healthy open air look well.” He sympathized over the “terrible difficulty” of raising children in the city: of “keeping them safe and sound in Paris on a fourth floor.” He had heard the child’s relentless wails and seen the mother’s exasperation at what she called his “hot-headedness”: his “screaming as if someone is killing him.” All he needed, Vincent insisted, was country air, better milk, the soothing distractions of animals and flowers, and “even more, the little bustle of other children that a village has.”

For Theo, Auvers needed no introduction. The medieval town along the Oise River, a tributary of the Seine, had entered the French imagination as early as the 1850s, when Charles Daubigny anchored his studio barge at the water’s edge and began to record its archetypal charms. Fixed in the rich alluvial margin between the river and the surrounding plateau, and dependent for centuries on the fish-rich waters of the Oise, the town had grown along the riverbank like a vine, not outward onto the surrounding plateau.

Only a few roads wide, but miles long, mixing clusters of thatched houses and farm enclosures with vineyards and market gardens all along its winding length, Auvers became a model for the postcard-perfect rural utopias depicted again and again in the mania of nostalgia that accompanied the depredations of industry. Once the railroad came, the same mania brought flocks of Parisians, all looking for vestiges of the lost past. Artists like Corot, Cézanne, and Pissarro followed Daubigny in capturing these pretty, rustic scenes for broader consumption, and dealers like Theo van Gogh sold thousands of their images of picturesque cottages, country lanes, and village folk, all advertising the reparative power of country life.

But Vincent had a more specific promise for Theo. He had left his first encounter with Dr. Gachet discouraged, even scornful. But his new vision of family changed all that. The eccentric doctor now had a critical role to play in bringing Theo to Auvers. What better enticement to his sick brother than a reputable, sympathetic, attentive (and rich) physician? Vincent immediately shelved the letter he had written dismissing Gachet (“the blind leading the blind”) and substituted a glowing account of their budding friendship. “[He] has shown me much sympathy,” Vincent wrote. “I may come to his house as often as I want.” Indeed, he had found in the dotty doctor yet another lost brother. “Father Gachet is very, yes very like you and me,” he wrote, slipping into the fraternal “we” of earlier days. “I feel that he understands us perfectly, and that he will work with you and me to the best of his power, without any reserve, for the love of art for art’s sake.”

To prove this alluring vision to his brother, Vincent took his easel to Gachet’s big hillside house, set it in the garden amid the chickens, turkeys, and ducks, and began a portrait of the strange man who had become both his bulwark against
the storms and his best chance for a family of his own. He painted him in a thoughtful pose: seated at a table with his head turned to one side and propped comfortably on his hand, as if listening to his neighbor at a dinner party. His attentive posture, open face, and big blue eyes, fretted with concern, invite confidences of both body and soul.

D
R
. P
AUL
G
ACHET
(
Illustration credit 42.1
)

On the table in front of him, Vincent placed a glass with sprigs of foxglove, as both an emblem of Gachet’s particular devotion to homeopathic remedies and a deeper promise of nature’s curative powers. Next to the glass, Vincent painted two books, their titles carefully inscribed as a message for Theo:
Germinie Lacerteux
and
Manette Salomon
—both by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the great model for all artistic brotherhoods: one, a cautionary tale of illness and death in the city; the other, a story of salvation through art. Together, they reassured Theo that this eccentric country doctor, with his funny white cap and too-heavy-for-summer coat, fully embraced the modern world of the mind, even as he worked to cure its inevitable ills.

The portrait of Dr. Gachet marked the opening round in a fusillade of painted arguments for Auvers. In Drenthe, Vincent had sent magazine illustrations inviting Theo to share the “stern poetry” of the heath. In Arles, he had
summoned his
copains
to the primitive nobility of the Midi with monuments of color and light. Now, from a makeshift studio in a back room of his hotel, he dunned his brother (and Jo) with dozens of advertisements for the healthy, happy, family-friendly life that could only be found in the rural utopia of Auvers.

In a frenzy of work that began every morning at five and often left canvases, like letters, unfinished or loosely drafted, he painted the little village all up and down its length, devoting canvas after canvas to the quaint thatch-roofed cottages that were disappearing almost everywhere else on the Continent but still spoke eloquently of a simpler, steadier time. He painted Auvers’s unique marriage of country and village. Because of its long reach, the town had no real center; houses alternated with vineyards and gardens all along its two main arteries. Nature broke in everywhere. Every house that he painted sat in its own park, enveloped in greenery—a promise that comfort and repair never lay more than steps away from any door.