Van Gogh (52 page)

This time, however, Uncle Cor did not let Vincent’s tantrum deter him from his benevolent purpose. Browsing through his nephew’s thick portfolios of drawings, he stopped at one of the street scenes Vincent had sketched with Breitner. “Could you make some more of these?” he asked. Thrilled by his first commission—“a ray of hope,” he called it—Vincent set aside his uncompromising arguments with Tersteeg about artistic integrity and eagerly agreed to make twelve views of the city for two and a half guilders each. Although clearly stung that Cor had passed over his hundreds of figure drawings without a single comment, Vincent spared him the furious counterattacks that he had mounted against both Mauve and Tersteeg in defense of drawing from the model.

That is, until after he left. When payment did not arrive promptly once he sent the drawings, Vincent immediately suspected an insult. Even after receiving a second order for six more drawings in April, he continued to question his patron’s motives. In May, paralyzed by suspicion, he threatened to stop work on the new commission altogether. “I don’t deserve having to consider it charity,” he protested. Theo finally cajoled him into finishing the drawings, but when Cor paid him less than he expected,
and
sent the payment “without one written word,” Vincent exploded in indignation.

In his uncle’s silence, he thought he heard a contemptuous question: “Do you really think that such drawings have the slightest commercial value?” To this imagined scolding, he formulated a brave retort:

Anticipating that such an argument would be considered “ungrateful, rude and impertinent,” Vincent imagined his uncle’s response: “Your uncle in Amsterdam, who means so well by you, and is so kind to you, and gives you such help reproaches you for your pretentiousness and obstinacy … You treated him so ungratefully that it is your own fault.” To this imagined upbraiding, Vincent formulated a proud and defiant reply: “I am willing to reconcile myself to losing your patronage.”

It was the kind of argument Vincent would have again and again for the rest of his life—made only more vivid, not less, by the fact that it took place entirely in his own head.

EVEN AS VINCENT
fought his mentors, patrons, and fellow artists, he waged an ongoing battle with his art. His draftsman’s fist “does not quite obey my will,” he complained. The problems he had experienced since declaring himself an artist continued to frustrate and oppose him. In his figure drawings, bodies stretched and bent in impossible ways; faces disappeared in a blur of uncertainty. In his watercolors, daubs missed and colors muddied. In perspective drawings, lines skewed out of true, shadows fell at contradictory angles, and figures floated out of relation to ground or proportion.

Vincent responded to these repeated setbacks with a combination of brave optimism for Theo’s benefit and quiet anguish that he revealed only later. “The way they turned out made me desperate,” he said the following year about these early drawings. “I made an absolute mess of it.” As if disputing the evidence of his own eyes, he redoubled his efforts, just as he had done when his studies in Amsterdam faltered. He rallied himself with the language of combat, vowing to overpower the images and triumph in the “hand-to-hand struggle” with nature.

Rather than slow down and take more care with each drawing, he defiantly pushed himself to go faster, arguing that speed and quantity would produce successful images as surely as precision or facility. “Things like this are difficult and do not always work straight away,” he explained. “When they do work, it’s sometimes the end result of a whole series of failures.” He calculated that if only one out of twenty drawings was successful, he could produce at least one good drawing every week—one “more characteristic, more deeply felt,” a drawing of which he could say, “This will last.”

When such a drawing emerged from the blizzard of failures, he made copy after copy, sometimes ten in a row, as if unsure of when, or if, another would follow. (“Later one hardly knows how one tossed it off.”) Vincent admitted that
he worked this way partly because he could work no other way: “There is something in my make-up that does not want to be too careful,” he said. But it was clearly a method perfectly suited to his manic, missionary imagination—a relentless argument with the images in his head—and Vincent sealed it with the most encouraging example of persistence in the face of failure that he knew: “the more one sows,” he wrote, “the more one may hope to reap.”

Vincent also enlisted his art in his ongoing battles with the world. The increasingly bitter antagonisms with Mauve and Tersteeg drove him even more deeply into his obsession with figure drawing, despite his persistent inability to render the human form convincingly. “The figure takes more time and is more complicated,” he claimed, “but I think in the long run it is more worthwhile.” He made forays into other kinds of imagery—streetscapes with Breitner, cityscapes for Cor—but always returned to figures, disputing the judgment not only of Mauve and Tersteeg, but also of his own unruly hand. All artistic endeavors began and ended with figure drawing, he argued—even landscape. “[One must] draw a pollard willow as if it were a living being,” he wrote, “then the surroundings follow almost by themselves.” He bolstered this militant devotion to the figure by reading Alfred Sensier’s biography of Millet (“What a giant!”), and defended it with a campaign of words and images rallied by Millet’s battle cry:
“L’art c’est un combat.”

To counter Mauve’s and Tersteeg’s arguments for watercolor—and against his beloved pen drawings—Vincent set out to prove that his black-and-white images could achieve the same moody tonality as the daubs of watery color that the world was pushing him to make. He worked over drawings again and again, relentlessly shading, rubbing, and erasing, using big carpenter’s pencils, ink from a reed pen, ink on a brush, charcoal, chalk, and crayon, trying to achieve the subtle modulations of gray that would match the “drowsy dusk” tone of Mauve’s watercolors. “This little drawing has caused me more trouble than has been expended on many a watercolor,” he claimed of one such effort. Of another he said, “I have brushed it in with lead pencil … as I would if I were painting.”

But it was a process that brought him into fresh conflict with both his images and his materials. Pencil marks could be erased or even scraped off (as long as he didn’t tear the paper, which he often did); some charcoal could be brushed off with a handkerchief or feather. But the images grew darker and darker as he reworked them in pursuit of a “warmer and deeper” atmosphere, and he had to fight to prevent them from turning “heavy, thick, black and dull.” Many of the drawings he made for his uncle show the strains of this struggle: skies lower menacingly, dark rivers pass through darker fields, shadows veil buildings even in broad daylight. When Mauve saw drawings like these, he recognized their defiant ambition to create the mood of color without the means. “When you draw,” he told Vincent, “you are a painter.”

In April, Vincent sent Theo a figure drawing that announced a new offensive in his battle of images against a disapproving world. It was a naked woman, seen from the side, her legs drawn up to her breasts and her head buried in her crossed arms.

Vincent had begun drawing from the nude.

BY APRIL 1882
, only three months after his arrival, Vincent’s relentless combativeness had left him virtually friendless in a city his family had called home for three centuries. As an associate member of the Pulchri Studio, he had the right to draw from models two nights a week at the society’s imposing home on Prinsengracht, but he never wrote a word or left a drawing to suggest that he took advantage of the privilege. After only two recorded attempts, he gave up on social visits there as well. “I cannot stand the close air of a crowded hall,” he explained. “I do not like to be in company.”

Nevertheless, in late March, Vincent tried to mount a showing of his favorite black-and-white prints in the Pulchri’s popular exhibition series. Although supported by Bernard Blommers, a successful Hague School painter, the proposal met with opposition, even ridicule, from most Pulchri members. They dismissed Vincent’s cherished images as mere “illustrations”: too superficial, too sentimental, and too commercial for serious artistic consideration. Vincent, who saw even minor disagreements as personal attacks, took their rejection as a declaration of war. He dismissed their opinions as “humbug” and told them acidly to “hold their tongues until they learned to draw better themselves.”

After that, he withdrew completely, choking on bitter denunciations of his fellow artists’ “pedantic self-conceit,” and fantasies of ultimate vindication. “In a year—or I don’t know how long—I shall be able to draw,” he vowed, “then they will hear me thunder, ‘Go to hell’;…‘Go away, you’re standing in my light.’…To hell with anyone who wants to hinder me.”

The more attacks he fended off, the more attacks he suspected. Gripped by paranoia, he accused people of laughing at him behind his back, of plotting to “obstruct” him, of “trying to devour” him. Despite his early unearned access to luminaries like Mauve and Tersteeg, he expressed shock at the “jealousy” and “intrigues” he imagined directed against him. He tried to explain the opposition as artistic and inevitable: “The better my drawings become, the more difficulty and opposition I shall meet.” But he heard Mauve’s cruel taunts of the previous winter echoed everywhere. “If remarks are made about my habits—meaning dress, face, manner of speech, what answer shall I make?” he asked Theo. “Am I really so
ill-mannered
, insolent and indelicate? Could I be such a monster of insolence and impoliteness? [Do I] deserve to be cut off from society?”

In May, Mauve reappeared in Vincent’s life just long enough to confirm all
the paranoid voices in his head. Even after his banishment expired in April, Mauve had successfully avoided any further contact with his former student. “One day he is ill, then he needs rest, then he is too busy,” Vincent complained. He had written Mauve a pitiful letter, but Mauve ignored it. They spoke only once, briefly, in the street. Angered by this continued coldness, Vincent had written him yet another letter, bitter this time, reopening their final argument (about drawing from plaster casts) in a desperate bid to end their relationship on his terms, not Mauve’s. “It is too difficult for you to guide me,” he wrote, “and it is too difficult for me to be guided by you if you require ‘strict obedience’ to all you say—I cannot give that. So that’s the end of the guiding and being guided.” When Mauve still did not reply, Vincent felt “choked” by his indifference. He complained that the shock of Mauve’s desertion made it impossible for him to work. “I cannot look at a brush,” he said, “it makes me nervous.”

But a few weeks later, when he encountered Mauve by accident in Scheveningen, he found his draftsman’s fist again. He demanded that Mauve come see his work and “talk things over.” Mauve refused. “I will certainly not come to see you,” he said flatly, “that’s all over.” When Vincent reminded him that Uncle Cor had seen his work and even given him a commission, Mauve scoffed: “That doesn’t mean anything; [it] will be the first and last, and then nobody will take an interest in you.” When Vincent stood his ground, insisting, “I am an artist,” Mauve repeated his accusation of amateurism and added venomously, “You have a vicious character.”

Vincent later compared the encounter to being tortured.

In Mauve’s betrayal, as in every calamity that spring, Vincent thought he saw the gloved hand of H. G. Tersteeg. Ever since their falling-out in February, Vincent had suspected the
gérant
of plotting against him. He lived in constant fear that Tersteeg’s implacable skepticism would infect distant family members, especially Uncle Cent, and no doubt attributed the hostility of the Pulchri members to Tersteeg’s ubiquitous influence. When Mauve’s attitude toward him “changed suddenly,” Vincent immediately accused Tersteeg of poisoning his mentor’s ear. In a reverie of paranoia, he imagined Tersteeg whispering to Mauve: “Be careful, you can’t trust him with money. Let him go, don’t help him any longer; as a dealer I see no good coming of it.” Driven by such visions, Vincent imagined Tersteeg as the architect of a relentless conspiracy—a “poisonous wind”—intended to drive him out of The Hague. He accused him of slander and betrayal, and damned him as “an enemy who begrudges me the very light of my eyes.”

By April, Vincent imagined that the conspiratorial
gérant
had set his sights on Theo. “[Tersteeg] told me he would see to it that you stopped sending me money,” he wrote, frantic with worry. “[He said], ‘Mauve and I will see to it that there is an end to this.’ ”

—

SO FAR, THEO HAD BEEN
spared the blunt force of the draftsman’s fist. Compared to the rhetorical fireworks and bitter recriminations directed at Mauve and Tersteeg, Vincent’s letters to his brother, although tense at times and furious with others, had never veered into open hostility. After Theo’s scolding letter in January, and Vincent’s defiant reply, their exchanges settled into a wary intimacy—a volatile mix of pleading and threatening on Vincent’s side; encouraging and warning on Theo’s. Beneath the surface, however, a battle raged.

They fought over money. For Vincent, no subject was more sensitive or incendiary. Since the Christmas expulsion from Etten, his war with the world had made money the defining issue between the brothers. Vincent had spurned his parents’ (astonishing) offer to lend him money after his flight to The Hague (“I hate to have to account to Father for every cent I spend,” he said brusquely), and Uncle Cent had long since recused himself from his nephew’s sad tale. That left only Theo. But his support was by no means assured. In December, he had refused to send Vincent the money he needed to extend his earlier stay in The Hague, after fleeing the Strickers’ house.