Van Gogh (45 page)

Vincent’s strange ways and persona non grata status at Goupil quickly threatened to become “the subject of gossip in the studios,” which in turn fed
his paranoia. He blamed the coldness of people like the Dutch painter Roelofs on the false position into which his family, and Theo, had thrust him. He complained that people “accuse [me] of many bad intentions and villainies which have never entered [my] head,” and that bystanders who watched him work “think that I have gone mad and, of course, laugh at me.” In his defense, he could say only, “Few people know why an artist acts as he does.”

The failure of his family, especially his uncles, to come to his aid rankled more and more with each new indignity. Why wouldn’t his omnipotent uncle Cent at least “smooth the way” for him? Why wouldn’t his rich uncle Cor, who so often supported other draftsmen, help him? Shouldn’t they show their own family the same “good will”? He and Cor had argued three years before in Amsterdam when Vincent quit his studies, “but is that any reason to remain my enemy forever?” he demanded. He considered writing to them, but feared they would not read his letters. He considered going to see them, but feared they would not receive him cordially. When his father visited in March, Vincent begged him to intervene on his behalf: to make them “see me with new eyes.”

At some point, he worked up the courage to write Tersteeg. Vincent had been hoping for months that he could come to The Hague in the summer to repair relations with his old boss, renew his relationship with his successful artist cousin Anton Mauve, and “have some intercourse with painters.” But Tersteeg responded to Vincent’s overture with a fierce rejection that seemed to speak for the whole family. He accused Vincent of trying “to live off the bounty of his uncles,” and said he had “no right to do such a thing.” In response to Vincent’s request to come to The Hague, Tersteeg answered categorically: “No, certainly not, you have lost your rights.” As for his artistic ambitions, Tersteeg snidely suggested he would be better off “giving lessons in English and French.” “Of one thing he was sure,” Vincent reported bitterly: “I was no artist.”

Finally, Vincent decided to take his faltering campaign of rehabilitation to the place where all his campaigns led: home. His decision was helped, no doubt, by Rappard’s plan to go home for the summer. By now, Vincent did almost all his work in the studio on the rue Traversière, so when Rappard left Brussels, Vincent would have to go, too. Vincent had also come to see his young friend as a model of the gentleman-artist he wanted to be. If Rappard could spend the summer boating and sketching in the bosom of his family, why couldn’t Vincent? He briefly entertained a fantasy of going to some genteel summer resort (which he called “the country”) and setting up housekeeping with another painter. But there was no one but Rappard to join him, and the costs of going alone were prohibitive. “The cheapest way,” he concluded, “would perhaps be for me to spend this summer at Etten.”

In fact, his destination was never really in doubt. The hard and lonely winter in Brussels had brought new urgency to his old and still unfulfilled longing
for reconciliation. On the eve of his return, he wrote Theo: “It is necessary for good relations between myself and the family to be re-established.” He was determined to reverse the bitter judgment of the black country—what he called the “sufferings and shame” of the past. He imagined that once he had reclaimed his place in Etten, he could reach out to his uncles again, and that they, in turn, would reach out to him.

But going home was not easy. He had not been there since the previous winter, when his father tried to commit him to the asylum in Gheel. He had stayed in the Borinage the previous summer rather than come home because he believed his parents preferred him to keep out of the way. Even now, he asked Theo to intercede with their father and calm his parents’ fears of another cycle of shame. “I am willing to give in about dress,” he said, “or anything else to suit them.”

He originally intended to stay in Brussels until Rappard left in May, but the pull of home proved too strong to wait. As soon as he heard that Theo would go to Etten for Easter (April 17), he abruptly abandoned his room at the Aux Amis and took the train north. (He departed so precipitously that he had to return after the holiday to retrieve the rest of his belongings.) As always, Vincent layered his life onto the images that he saw—and, now, the images that he made. On the trip to Etten, one image in particular transfixed his imagination once again: the sower. As soon as he arrived, he sat down and made yet another copy of Millet’s icon of new life: his father’s icon of persistence in the face of failure. As if to demonstrate his new skills under his parents’ watchful eyes, he labored over the familiar figure, imitating the appearance of an etching with thousands of tiny pen strokes, endlessly hatching and cross-hatching, shading and shading again, in a manic proof of dedication.

VINCENT BARELY PAUSED
to savor his return home, saying only, “I am very glad things have been arranged so that I shall be able to work here quietly for a while.” Instead, he plunged with renewed energy into the project that had made his return possible. Every day that it didn’t rain—not many in Etten’s wet spring—he struck out across the woods and heaths in search of a place to set his folding chair. He wore a uniform befitting a young artist summering in the country: a blousy shirt shorn of its stiff collar, and a stylish felt hat. On cold days, he wore a coat.

He carried his chair, a portfolio of paper, and a plank of wood. He worked so intensely—holding the big carpenter’s pencil in his fist like a knife—that he needed the heavy plank to prevent tearing the paper. He planted himself in front of trees and shrubs, outside farmers’ cottages and barns, overlooking mills and meadows, along roadsides and churchyards. He sketched animals as they fed, and implements—plows, harrows, wheelbarrows—where they lay. In the village
of Etten (twice the size of Zundert, but poorer), he invaded the shops of tradesmen to practice his perspective drawing. In bad weather, and sometimes even in good, he stayed inside and worked furiously at his “exercises”: copying more Millets and racing yet again through Bargue “with a tremendous zeal,” according to one visitor that summer. “I hope to make as many studies as I can,” he pledged to Theo. Years later, the Etten parsonage maid recalled that Vincent sometimes spent the whole night drawing, “and when his mother came down in the morning she would sometimes find him still at work.”

Sower
(
after Millet
), A
PRIL 1881
,
INK ON PAPER
, 18⅞ × 14¼
IN
. (
Illustration credit 14.2
)

But to achieve his ambition of self-sufficiency, Vincent argued, he needed more than anything else to draw from models. “Anyone who has learned to master a figure,” he wrote, “can earn quite a bit.” If he mastered figure drawing, he could make the kinds of images that often appeared in illustrated magazines—especially images of picturesque country life. Championed by artists like Millet and Breton, these images had become a staple of popular culture—favorites of a rootless bourgeoisie seeking comforting myths to replace the consolation of religion. Vincent’s studies of landscapes and interiors, farmyards and tools, copies of Millet and the
Exercices
, all served this larger ambition. “I must draw diggers, sowers, men and women at the plow, without cease,” he explained to Theo: “scrutinize and draw everything that is part of country life.”

In single-minded pursuit of this goal, Vincent roamed across the countryside
around Etten in search of models. At first, as in the Borinage, he drew laborers in the fields where they worked. He barged fearlessly into farmhouses to draw women at their chores. But neither quick nor dexterous enough to capture their activities as they happened, he needed them to pose. Sometimes he persuaded them to do so on the spot—in the field or yard or farmhouse—freezing in place with shovel poised or plow stayed. If he could, he took them back to the parsonage where he set up a studio in an abandoned outbuilding. Here, in the ample light of a big, arched window, he posed them standing, stooping, bending, kneeling. He usually drew them from the side to avoid the challenges of foreshortening. He gave them props: a rake, a broom, a shovel, a shepherd’s crook, a sower’s bag. He might start by asking them to re-create the positions in which he had sketched them earlier in the field, allowing him to clarify lines and correct proportions. But he often went on to pose the same model in multiple roles. He used the same big sheets of paper that the Bargue exercises required and consumed them at the same furious rate.

He recruited models with a combination of money and intimidating enthusiasm. “He forced people to pose for him,” one villager remembered; “they were afraid of him.” Locals began to avoid the “peculiar” parson’s son when they saw him coming down the road, “always looking straight ahead,” intent on his new mission. “It was unpleasant to be with him,” one of them recalled. In the studio, he drove his models as tirelessly as he drove himself. He drew the same poses over and over and scolded his amateur sitters for their restlessness. He “would work on a drawing for hours,” according to the account of one of his models, “until he had caught the expression he was aiming at.” On his side, Vincent complained “what a tough job it is to make people understand how to pose.” He called his models “desperately obstinate” and mocked their bumpkin insistence on posing in their stiff Sunday clothes “in which neither knees, elbows, shoulder blades, nor any other part of the body have left their characteristic dents or bumps.”

For a while, it looked like the world might yield to this hurricane of effort. In striking contrast to his previous stay there, the Etten parsonage began to seem like home; its occupants, like family. The house was big and square. Behind its impressive façade, the rooms were spare but lofty and comfortable, with an abundance of windows that welcomed every summer breeze. In back, a cozy garden filled with rosebushes nestled between the house and a vine-covered wall. Against the wall stood a wooden arbor. By the middle of summer, it was canopied in blooming greenery. Here, the family often sat in the shade and took sandwiches in the evening. On rainy days, they gathered at a round table in the living room under the light of a hanging oil lamp.

Over the summer, Cor came home from school in Breda, sister Lies visited from Soesterberg, and sister Wil, now nineteen and returned from England, sat
for one of Vincent’s first portraits. “She poses very well,” he reported. To replace the companionship of the missing Theo, Vincent found two young men, Jan and Willem Kam, sons of the pastor in neighboring Leur. Both amateur artists, the Kam brothers followed Vincent on his sketching expeditions and watched him at work in his studio. “He wanted his drawings to be precise—and profitable,” Willem recalled years later. “He talked about Maris and Mauve,” Jan remembered, “but most of all about Millet.”

Reassured by the brothers’ good company, and by Vincent’s repeated pledges to “make a living,” even Dorus and Anna began to relax from their long despair. Not a word of criticism or concern made its way to Theo that summer. They willingly offered the parsonage outbuilding, a former Sunday school, for Vincent’s strange ritual with the local peasantry, taking on faith (and his forceful protests) that it constituted an essential step in the long ascent out of the black country—the safe return of their eldest son to the “normal life” for which they had never stopped praying.

All those prayers seemed answered when Anthon van Rappard arrived in June. For both Vincent and his parents, the visit of the young gentleman with the noble name crowned the fantasy of a new life. On the day of his arrival, the Van Goghs took their distinguished guest on a long walk to display him to the neighbors. He accompanied them to church on Sunday and sat at the front of the big medieval sanctuary in the side pew reserved for the preacher’s family, where the whole congregation could see him. He received the ultimate imprimatur of family approval when Vincent took him to Prinsenhage to meet the ailing Cent (who was too sick to receive them).

Vincent exulted in his parents’ approbation as much as his new friend’s attentions. “Van Gogh was in very high spirits then,” Jan Kam recalled of Rappard’s visit, “more cheerful than I would ever see him again.” With camp stool and sketchpad in hand, Vincent led his new “fellow traveler” (the same term he applied to Theo) on a tour of all his favorite spots in the countryside around Etten: the deep, mysterious woods of Liesbosch to the east; the “notorious” village of Heike to the south (home to “gypsy-like” refugees and other “riff-raff” where Vincent often recruited models); and the strange swampland, called the Passievaart, to the west.

At various points along the way, in a celebration of artistic fraternity that Vincent would try for the rest of his life to reenact (most memorably in the Yellow House in Arles), the two men set their rickety stools side by side and shared the act of making art.

Once the drawing began, their roles reversed: Rappard led and Vincent followed. The more warmly his parents embraced the handsome young gentleman-artist, the more eagerly Vincent embraced his friend’s genteel art. While still in Brussels, he had admired Rappard’s pencil-and-pen drawings of
trees, vistas, and scenic vignettes, calling them “very witty and charming.” He had adopted Rappard’s favored métier, reed pen and ink, and his characteristic short, quick pen strokes to render the infinite variety of nature’s textures. Indeed, Vincent had come to the Etten heaths partly in imitation of his young companion, who, like many beginning artists, had made sketching trips into the countryside every summer since adolescence.