Van Gogh (50 page)

A
NTON
M
AUVE
, 1878 (
Illustration credit 16.1
)

By opening up the cherished serenity of his life to Vincent, Mauve was offering him not just a surrogate family, but an opportunity for advancement that other young artists in Holland could only dream about. For Mauve was more than just a cultivated teacher, he was one of the leading figures of the Hague School, a movement in Dutch art that had risen to the heights of critical and commercial success in the decade since Vincent first encountered it as an apprentice at Goupil. The painters of the Hague School not only claimed the mantle of the Golden Age, but also commanded a growing audience of collectors, especially in England and America, eager to pay dearly for the moody colors, deft brushwork, and picturesque subjects of the new Dutch art. By 1880, Hague School paintings dominated sales at the Goupil store on the Plaats, and its most popular artists—especially Anton Mauve—could not produce enough new work to keep up with the demand both at home and abroad.

Like the movement he championed, Mauve stood near the zenith of his success when Vincent arrived in The Hague in the last days of 1881. Critics applauded and collectors clamored for his appealing images of life among the dunes and meadows, whether in oil or in watercolor. His fellow artists had already begun to surround him with what was later called a “nimbus of devout veneration,” lauding him as a “poet-painter,” a “genius,” and a “magician.” In 1878, they honored him by electing him to the board of their most prestigious society, the Pulchri Studio.

Only a week after Vincent arrived, in a first hint of what the future might hold, Mauve nominated his young cousin to become an associate member of the Pulchri, an unprecedented honor for a late-arriving novice. “As soon as possible after that,” Vincent wrote Theo in a rush of ambition, “I shall become a full member.”

In his comfortable studio on Uileboomen, Mauve offered his young protégé an even more important head start on his new career. Vincent came almost every day to watch and learn—his first opportunity to study a mature painter at his easel. Working with lightning speed, Mauve exercised absolute control over the brush, rendering even the smallest details and most evanescent effects with precise, unhesitating strokes. Experience and endless sketching trips had finely tuned his innate facility until his eye and his hand seemed to work in perfect unison.

At the time Vincent arrived, Mauve had just begun work on a large painting of a fishing boat being hauled onto the beach at Scheveningen by a team of horses, a theme on which he had painted many variations. The scene’s foamy water and wet sand gave Vincent a chance to watch his teacher create the pearly atmosphere for which he was most famous. All the Hague School painters were praised (or criticized) for their distinctive muted palette. Instead of bright, contrasting colors, they used a limited range of subdued colors to create moody tone poems of suffused light. Ridiculed at first as “the gray school,” they believed that “tonal” painting better captured the “fragrant, warm gray” of their watery homeland.

No one rendered this silvery saltwater light better than Anton Mauve. In the painting that Vincent saw emerging in the studio, Mauve drenched the scene in it: from the mist-laden clouds hanging over the sea, to the puddles of water left by the receding tide, to the slippery sand, to the ink-black boat. “Theo, what a great thing tone and color are,” Vincent wrote, entranced. “Mauve has taught me to see so many things that I used not to see.”

Despite his commitments to work and family, Mauve made time for his “greenhorn” cousin. He pointed out Vincent’s mistakes, offered suggestions, and corrected details of proportion and perspective, sometimes directly on Vincent’s sheet. He dispensed his advice with a combination of authority and deference
that perfectly suited Vincent’s vulnerable state. “If he says to me, ‘This or that is no good,’ ” Vincent reported to Theo, “he immediately adds, ‘but just try it this way or that.’ ” A meticulous craftsman, Mauve extolled the virtues of good materials and good technique (“use the wrist, not the fingers”), and offered “lessons” in common problems, such as how to draw hands and faces—just the kind of practical advice that Vincent craved most: the inside information he felt deprived of by his late start.

Responding to his pupil’s most pressing concern—how to make salable works—Mauve continued to urge him toward watercolor. Impatient and forceful, Vincent had always struggled with this fragile medium (he called it “diabolical”), using it mostly just to highlight and fill in drawings. But Mauve, a master watercolorist, showed him how to
draw
using only the luminous daubs and washes of color. “Mauve has shown me a new way to make something,” Vincent exulted. “I am getting to like it more and more … it is different and has more power and freshness.”

Hungry for approval after years of reproaches, Vincent grasped at the attentions of his celebrated cousin. “Mauve’s sympathy,” he said, “was like water to a parched plant to me.” In a fever of gratitude, he lavished praise on his new mentor. “I love Mauve,” he wrote. “I love his work—and I count myself fortunate to be learning from him.” He bought him gifts, mimicked his speech, cherished his compliments, yielded to his criticisms, and faithfully relayed to Theo every word of his wisdom. “Mauve says that I shall spoil at least ten drawings before I know how to handle the brush well,” he wrote, “so [I] am not disheartened even by my mistakes.”

Vincent was so enamored of his new mentor that he abjured all other company. “I do not wish to associate much with other painters,” he said, “[because] each day I find Mauve cleverer and more trustworthy, and what more can I want?” He begged Theo for more money so that his penury would not embarrass him in front of his genteel cousin, and vowed to “dress a little better” now that he was a regular visitor to the studio on Uileboomen. “I know now the direction in which I have to go,” he wrote solemnly, “and need not hide myself.” Because of Mauve, he said, “the light is beginning to dawn [and] the sun is rising.”

But it couldn’t last. No one could satisfy the demands of Vincent’s admiration for long, especially not the prickly, introverted Mauve. And Vincent’s wild flights of enthusiasm were always doomed to crash in disillusionment. The relationship had already begun to fray when Mauve came to visit Vincent on January 26 in his second-floor flat on the outskirts of town. While he was there, one of Vincent’s “models” showed up: an old woman he had recruited on the street—the only place he could find people willing to pose for the little money he could pay.

Vincent tried to cover the awkward encounter by posing the hapless woman
and showing Mauve his sketching skills. But the effort collapsed in embarrassment, sparking an argument between student and teacher. Vincent tried to dismiss the discord as the inevitable friction of artistic temperaments—“we are equally nervous,” he explained to Theo—but the episode upset him so much that he took to his bed with “fever and nerves.”

Over the next few weeks, in a series of furious letters, Vincent inflated the dispute into a preemptive casus belli. Mauve, apparently, had been dismayed by the scene in Vincent’s studio, seeing it as the worst kind of amateur posturing. If Vincent truly wanted to learn to draw the figure, Mauve insisted, he should start by drawing from plaster casts—the traditional method—rather than waste his time (and his brother’s money) on playacting with street people. “He spoke to me … in a way such as the worst teacher at the academy would not have spoken,” Vincent fumed.

The battle lines were drawn. Rather than wait for the inevitable rejection, Vincent sprang to the attack. He accused Mauve of being “narrow-minded,” “unfriendly,” “moody and rather unkind.” He cast the dispute as a veiled assault on his whole artistic project, claiming that Mauve secretly disliked his work and harbored a wish “that I should give it up.” He escalated the argument into a contest not just between live models and plaster casts, but between drawing and watercolor; then, between realism and academism. Calling watercolor “exasperating” and “hopeless,” he virtually gave up trying to master the medium—a ringing repudiation of his teacher.

On the other hand, he defiantly continued working with his model, arguing that he was “getting more used to [her], and for that very reason I must continue with her.” As if determined to push the dispute into a confrontation, he persisted in demanding his cousin’s attention. He seemed shocked when Mauve withdrew further (“Mauve has done very little for me lately,” he complained) and genuinely wounded when the older man lashed out at him in exasperation: “I am not always in a mood to show you things, [and] you will damn well have to wait for the right moment.”

When Vincent still pressed his case, Mauve turned on him. In a poisonous pique, he “spitefully” mimicked his student’s “nervous and flurried” speech, and mocked his earnest, grimacing expression. “He is very clever at those things,” Vincent later recalled painfully. “It was a striking caricature of me, but drawn with hatred.” Vincent tried to defend himself: “If you had spent rainy nights in the streets of London or cold nights in the Borinage,” he told Mauve, “you would also have such ugly lines in your face and perhaps a husky voice, too.”

But his real response came later when he returned to his room and hurled the plaster casts he had into the coalbin, smashing them to pieces. “I will draw from those casts only when they become whole and white again,” he vowed in a fury of hurt, “when there are no more hands and feet of living beings to draw
from.” Then, in a final provocation, he returned to Mauve and flaunted his defiant act. “Don’t mention plaster to me again,” he raged. “I can’t stand it.” Mauve immediately banished Vincent from his studio and vowed “not to have anything to do with him” for the rest of the winter.

It had lasted barely a month.

WITH H. G. TERSTEEG
, the break came even more quickly. The precocious Goupil
gérant
, now thirty-six, stood at the epicenter of the Hague art world, his star rising ever higher with the success of the Hague School painters whom he had long supported. No one, not even Mauve, could have done more to further Vincent’s career.

At first, Tersteeg welcomed his former apprentice to The Hague, apparently setting aside their rancorous exchange the previous spring when he accused Vincent of sponging off his uncles and advised him to be a teacher, not an artist. Vincent joined in the show of reconciliation, saying “all had been forgiven and forgotten,” and suggesting “let bygones be bygones.” But of course nothing had changed. Just as he could leave no slight unchallenged, Vincent could leave no courtesy untested. Less than two weeks after his arrival, he went to Tersteeg and borrowed twenty-five guilders, not a trivial amount. Tersteeg retaliated by waiting three weeks to make his first visit to Vincent’s apartment.

When he finally did visit, the dispute erupted into the open. Shrewd and imperious, and unrestrained by family ties, Tersteeg did not mince words. He called Vincent’s pen drawings—his pride—“charmless” and “unsalable,” and reproached him for persisting in the clumsy, amateur sketches that filled his studio. He disparaged Vincent’s prized models with a haughty “There are no models in The Hague.” If Vincent really wanted to make a living as an artist, said Tersteeg, he had to abandon figure drawing and apply himself to watercolor—landscapes, preferably. He also had to give up the large Bargue-sized images he favored and make smaller works. He scoffed at Vincent’s defense that his drawings had “character,” and when Vincent brought out his fat portfolios to prove how hard he worked, the
gérant
dismissed their contents as “a waste of time.” Figure drawing, he told Vincent, “is a kind of narcotic which you take in order not to feel the pain caused by being unable to make watercolors.”

Even by the standards of their difficult past, it was a shattering indictment. Tersteeg had always had a perverse instinct for Vincent’s weaknesses; and Vincent, always a special sensitivity to his former boss’s rebukes. Deeply wounded, Vincent unleashed a storm of protest. The violence of it would tear him away from beliefs he had professed only weeks before and cast him on a new and perilous course. Calling Tersteeg “thoughtless” and “superficial,” he vehemently defended his drawings, insisting “[they] have a great deal of good in them.” He
argued that figure drawing from the model was both more difficult than watercolor, and more “serious”—that is, more capable of expressing deeper truths.

Soon the arguments escalated into a sweeping rejection of the goal that had guided him since he emerged from the Borinage: to support himself by selling his work. “I shall not run after the art lovers or dealers,” he vowed; “let them come to me.” Rather than “flatter the public,” he wanted only “to be true to myself”—even if that meant expressing “rough things in a rough manner.” Where only a month before he had confessed himself an eager novice, hungry for instruction, now he cast himself as a persecuted artist defending his integrity. “Since when can they force or try to force an artist to change either his technique or his point of view?” he demanded indignantly. “I think it very impertinent to attempt such a thing.” “I will not let myself be forced to produce work that does not show my own character.”