Van Gogh (74 page)

Vincent no doubt taunted his parents, just as he taunted Theo, with descriptions of his daily visits to the homes of these disruptive agents: of their “miserable little rooms with the loam floors” and the strange, “disgusting” apparatus that filled their houses with noise day and night. “They are but poor creatures, those weavers.” If Dorus and Anna raised objections, he no doubt shouted them down, as he did Theo: “I consider myself absolutely free to consort with the so-called lower orders.” As if to underscore the argument, at mealtimes he brought his paintings into the parsonage dining room and propped them on the chair opposite, defiantly inviting the weavers to his parents’ table. “Vincent is
still working with weavers,” Dorus lamented after months of such incitements. “It’s a shame that he wouldn’t rather do landscapes.”

ON JANUARY
17, 1884, fate gave Vincent one last chance to break free from the lockstep of provocation and rejection. On a shopping trip to Helmond, his mother slipped and fell as she stepped off the train. The sixty-four-year-old Anna had fallen the previous winter, but escaped without serious injury. This time, she was not as lucky; she broke her hip. Accompanied by son Cor, she was rushed by carriage back to Nuenen, where the bone was set and encased in a huge plaster cast. Her bed was moved to Dorus’s downstairs study and she was given chloral hydrate to help her sleep.

Then the vigil began.

For the next two months, Vincent found a home in his mother’s helplessness. He threw himself into the healing work with abandon, just as he had for the injured coal miners of the Borinage and the sickly prostitute Sien. He fretted over every symptom and second-guessed every diagnosis. He worried endlessly over the dangers of long-term immobility. He put himself entirely at her disposal. “My mother will require a lot of nursing,” he explained solemnly to Rappard. “I have to stay at home most of the time these days.” He advised Theo of the necessary slowdown in his work. “I’ll be able to work only half time for a while,” he wrote, “on account of the unfortunate event, which has resulted in a lot of other things that
have
to be done.”

When her bed needed changing, he lent his back to a bierlike stretcher the doctor devised to move the patient without disturbing her stricken leg. Later, when the break began to heal, Vincent carried her in an improvised sedan chair into the living room and eventually into the parsonage garden. He took his turn with other family members reading to her, or otherwise distracting her from the pain. He searched the garden for winter blossoms—primroses, violets, snowdrops—and arranged them on trays that he brought to her bedside. Even when there was nothing to do for her, he lingered about the house waiting for any chance to “lend a helping hand.”

Gradually, the grip of the past seemed to loosen. The accident “pushed some questions entirely into the background,” Vincent reported, allowing him to “get on pretty well” with his parents. His eagerness to help drew rare praise from the Reverend van Gogh, who called Vincent “exemplary in his caring,” and even elicited some sympathy for his artistic efforts (“he works with tremendous ambition”)—if not for the art itself. “I so hope that his work will meet with some approval,” Dorus wrote Theo.

Vincent responded in kind. After more than a month of remorseless criticism,
he reembraced his father’s conventional values, amiably greeting well-wishers to the parsonage (“getting on better with people is of great importance to me,” he declared) and worrying over his sisters’ marital prospects. (“Without capital,” he warned, “the inclination to marry a penniless girl is not great.”) On Dorus’s birthday in early February, Vincent gave him a copy of
Uit de cel
(
From the Cell
) by Eliza Laurillard, a leading light of the same
dominocratie
he had so furiously denounced only weeks before. When two hundred florins in doctor bills arrived in the first weeks after the accident, Vincent handed his father all of his most recent payment from Theo (putting off his debts in The Hague still longer). So keen was his desire to help his parents through their financial difficulties that he pressed Theo once again to help him find paying work, “so that you could give Mother what you would otherwise give me.” Finally, in a bid that surely brought a smile to his mother’s face, he tried to broker a match between his sister Wil and the aristocrat Rappard.

In his art, too, Vincent turned from provocation to appeasement. Seized by the sudden and unexpected possibility of favor, his imagination returned to its earliest ambition: pleasing his parents. “I am glad to say Mother’s spirits are very even and bright,” he reported proudly to Theo. “She is amused by trifles. The other day I painted for her a little church with a hedge and trees.”

Vincent had already briefly explored this nostalgic imagery in a series of drawings he did immediately upon his arrival in Nuenen, in the first flush of homecoming. After a heavy snowfall, he took his sketchpad into the cold and recorded the Brabant winter of his childhood: the parsonage garden with its bare trees and snowy vistas; a couple walking the tree-lined route to church, leaving their twined footprints in the snow; a peasant woman forking manure against a vast, white horizon; children building a snowman; crooked crosses etched in a churchyard cemetery. He had come home with many of these images already in his imagination—prepared, as always, to see what he most needed to see. Done in delicate pen and pencil shadings, with the exquisite care that he always lavished on “portraits” of his family’s homes, these notebook-sized mementos earned the admiration even of his skeptical father, in the brief interval before the storm descended on the parsonage. “Don’t you think those pen drawings of Vincent’s are beautiful?” he wrote Theo. “It comes so easily to him.”

The chance to win his mother’s approval revived those first hopeful images. After the defiance and subversion of the weavers, Vincent returned to the comforting imagery of his father’s little church and the nearby parsonage. Rather than wandering down unknown paths, he took his sketchpad no farther than his mother’s garden behind the parsonage, where he lovingly recorded its ghostly winter pall and its promise of spring: saplings and rose bushes wrapped in straw against the frost; skeletal fruit trees gesticulating crazily; an old bell tower, long since stripped of its church, standing alone on the horizon, the ultimate
reminder of rebirth. He took these sketches into his little laundry-studio and transferred them to big sheets of smooth paper, tirelessly hatching every change in texture, every twisted branch, every picket of hedge, every leaf or tuft or blade that braved the winter’s wrath. He broke out his paint box and displayed his new skill to his parents for the first time by painting his father’s church with the congregation assembled outside, as if for a group portrait. When he was done, he gave the painting to his mother, enacting a childhood ritual of offer and acceptance from which he had long felt barred.

Freed from the need to prove or persuade, wanting only to please, Vincent began a series of images that would become the first indisputable masterpieces of his slow-igniting, fast-burning career. Retreating from the unfamiliar challenges of oil painting, he chose instead the instruments that felt most comfortable in his hand: pencil and pen. Black-and-white drawing had sustained him since the dark days in the Borinage, and through all the crises since. It was the only medium that had ever earned him compliments from his family. It was also the medium on which he had built his friendship with Anthon van Rappard. Now, with the possibility of reconciliation at home revived, Vincent launched yet another campaign of solidarity with this parental favorite, of which matchmaking was only a part.

For subjects, he chose places as familiar and comforting to his parents as the rooms of the parsonage: a pond on the margins of the parsonage garden, swollen with winter runoff and fringed in wild grasses; a sandy road just outside the garden gate; and a stand of bare birches at the edge of town, only a short distance away. If his mother could not walk the garden paths she loved, Vincent would bring them to her in images.

He captured the stillness and anticipation on the banks of the pond in the first days of spring. Pouring a lifetime of intense, meticulous observation into a single image, he filled the sixteen-by-twenty-one-inch sheet with an exquisitely detailed record of the devastation wrought by winter: the tortured stumps and twisted branches of unpruned bushes, the spindly bareness of unplanned trees competing upward to form a single lacy canopy that he traced in finer and finer lines to the top of the sheet. He filled the foreground with the lambent pond, its still waters mirroring its unkempt margins and the stand of trees in glowing grays. He caught even the reflection of the sky in endless modulations of fine hatching that left no part of the wove paper untouched by his pen. With his perspective frame, he laid in an empty road lined by a grizzled hedge. It enters from the left and vanishes on the horizon beyond the trees, its arrow straightness a rebuke to the amoebic pond. In the distance, dead center, ever present, is the faint gray ghost of a church tower.

Against this frozen tableau of winter, Vincent set the tiny drama of a bird hovering over the motionless water in search of a meal. In a few careful dabs
of white paint against the pond’s dark reflections, he evoked a childhood of bird-watching with his father, the shared gospel of Michelet’s
L’oiseau
, and the solitary rewards of waiting patiently by a creekbank for the thrilling surprises of nature. He decided to name the drawing after the bird:
The Kingfisher
.

The Kingfisher
, M
ARCH
1883,
PENCIL ON PAPER, 15⅜ × 20⅞ IN
. (
Illustration credit 21.4
)

In another drawing, Vincent focused all his extraordinary powers of observation on a small stand of pollard birches. About a dozen of the stout, stunted trees stood in motley formation on the banks of a drainage ditch separating the town from the flat pastureland beyond. Anna van Gogh knew the sight well. Vincent set his perspective frame so close that the two trees in front almost filled his big sheet, both top to bottom and side to side. Behind each one, he drew a row of trees shooting to the distant horizon, converging almost at the center of the image—a dramatic perspective that thrust the front trees forward. Vincent had often drawn pollard trees before: their distinctive gnarled trunks and crown of new growth attracted him just as they had attracted generations of Dutch artists. Along many of the roads, canals, and fields he walked, trees of all kinds—willows, oaks, birches—were subjected to the annual pruning, called pollarding, that left them looking abused and forsaken, especially in winter—roadside grotesques, half tended, half natural.

On these dozen birches, veterans bearing the scars of many spring mayhems, Vincent focused his unblinking eye. One should draw a pollard tree “as if
it were a living being,” he had once told Rappard; “focus all one’s attention on that particular tree and not rest until there is some life in it.” But until now, Vincent had never followed this advice. In previous efforts, his pen had wandered to the mise-en-scène of landscape or farmhouse, cloudy sky or vanishing road. Or to figures. In drawing after drawing, he used pollard trees to frame a solitary figure tramping a lonely road, their tortured forms reduced to symbolic echoes as he labored fruitlessly over the figures that he loved and the feelings he longed to share.

In the brief clearing of his mother’s favor, however, Vincent could just
look
. His eye found and probed every knotty wound, every stump of severed limb, every pitiful deformation. It captured the shiny white crinkles of bark as well as each tree’s slightly different, asymmetrical lean. And from the black knots that marked the most recent cuts, it caught the upward exultation of new growth—the slender, sun-seeking branches that sprang heavenward from the battered ruin beneath. In row after row of receding trees, he repeated the triumphant gesture, filling the top of the sheet with layer upon layer of vertical lines, and then echoed it everywhere across the bottom in a thousand vertical pen strokes of grass and reeds and distant stalks.