Van Gogh (82 page)

Whether those same memories haunted Vincent’s thoughts as he watched the persistent sower finally laid to rest, he never revealed. But he no doubt heard the accusation in every pious tribute, every expression of shock, and every awkward silence. Only his plainspoken sister Anna dared to say to his face what the others were whispering: that Vincent had killed his father.

V
INCENT WAS TOO BUSY TO MOURN. THEO’S OFFER TO SUBMIT A PAINTING
to the Salon had thrown down a gauntlet that propelled him into a panic of work in the weeks preceding his father’s death. The prospect of a public reckoning so terrified him that he tried at first to escape it, protesting that he had nothing suitable to show. “Had I known about it six weeks ago,” he demurred, “I should have tried to send you something.”

After years of fiery demands for more exposure, he retreated into lawyerly distinctions between “pictures” fit for showing and “studies” meant only for the studio. He included all of his recent painted works (about which he had so often boasted) in the latter category, saying “only one out of ten or twenty is worth seeing.” And even those “may be worth
nothing now.”
When Theo visited the Kerkstraat studio at the time of their father’s funeral, Vincent gave him two of his “heads of the people” portraits and meekly suggested that he show them
privately
to Salon-goers. “It might be useful,” he apologized, “even though they’re only studies.”

He also showed his brother the first sketches of a new work—something “larger and more elaborate … a more important composition.” This was Vincent’s
other
response to Theo’s unexpected challenge, and to his father’s sudden death—not guilt, but defiance. “After more than a year of devoting myself almost exclusively to painting,” he declared, “it’s safe to say that [this will be] something quite different.” For the next month, in a fury of work, Vincent silenced the whispers and filled the emptiness with his newest fantasy of vindication. “People will speak of unfinished, or ugly,” he wrote, defending himself as well as his art, “but my idea is to
show them by all means.”

—

THE IDEA FIRST
touched paper sometime in March, before his father’s death, with a loose, blowsy sketch of peasants seated around a table. At the time, Vincent was spending many evenings at Gordina de Groot’s tumbledown cottage on the road to Gerwen, and he later claimed as his inspiration the sight of Gordina and her family at the dinner table. But the image that took shape in April, in a torrent of drawings and painted studies, tapped much deeper and more tangled roots.

From the start of his artistic enterprise, Vincent had longed to portray people in groups. Whether miners trekking to their labors, lottery ticket buyers, peat cutters, sand diggers, potato grubbers, or funeral mourners, he had always seen his relentless figure studies as only a means to an end: preparation for something more elaborate that would both consummate and redeem his years of drudgery. Even as his studio and sketchbooks filled up with hundreds of images of lonely figures and empty landscapes, depictions of people
connecting—
through labor, through leisure, through love—continued to haunt Vincent’s art and preoccupy his ambitions. Indeed, he had come to Nuenen from the lonely heaths of Drenthe with a dream of painting his own family, just as he had drawn his ersatz family in the Schenkweg soup kitchen.

J
OZEF
I
SRAËLS
,
Peasant Family at Table
, 1882,
OIL ON CANVAS, 28 × 41⅜ IN.
(
Illustration credit 24.1
)

No doubt, Vincent saw the tableau of the De Groots at their table through a kaleidoscope of other images. From the monumental laborers of Millet to the idealized rustics of Breton to the bathetic simplefolk of Israëls, he had memorized
the era’s narcissistic fascination with its own humble past. He had also absorbed scores of images of families at table, sharing both food and prayer. Since the seventeenth century, when English and Dutch Pietists put mealtime “grace” at the center of domestic religious life, artists from Jan Steen to Hubert Herkomer had celebrated this daily ritual in paintings and prints. Vincent ardently admired Charles de Groux’s
Le bénédicité
(
The Benediction
), a solemn,
Last
Supper–like panorama of a peasant family giving thanks; and he hung Gustave Brion’s version of the same scene in his room in Amsterdam. Masters of nostalgia like Israëls had revived the subject, with and without prayer, for the new, backward-looking bourgeois class.

In The Hague, in 1882, Vincent had seen one of the many variations on Israëls’s hugely successful
The Frugal Meal
, and proclaimed Israëls “the equal of Millet.” Younger artists, inspired by Israëls, had taken up the subject, too, until heartwarming dinner table scenes had become ubiquitous. To find examples, Vincent had to look no farther than his portfolios of magazine illustrations, or the studio of his friend Anthon van Rappard, whose paintings of institutional “families” gathered around tables had impressed him on his visits to Utrecht.

In the storm of argument to come, Vincent would claim all these, and more, as godfathers to his new work. But for a man who could still recite his father’s dinnertime blessing, no mere image could match the resonance of the empty chair at the head of the parsonage table. When Vincent looked at the strange, extended De Groot family gathered in the yellow lamplight, he could not help but see the oil lamp that lighted every dinner of his childhood, and the table at which he was no longer welcome.

In the first week after the funeral, Vincent worked furiously to bring forth the image in his head. He made drawing after drawing of figures around a table, experimenting with their placement, their posture, the way they perched on their chairs. He returned again and again to the house on the Gerwen road to check his vision against Gordina’s ever-willing and seemingly oblivious clan. He sketched the cottage’s gloomy interior, with its beamed ceiling, its broken glass transom, and its yawning, soot-stained hearth. He peered into the darkness to make detailed studies of everything from the clock on the wall to the kettle on the fire to the knobs on the chairs.

Back in the studio, the denizens of this world took form. Vincent may have started with life sketches of the De Groots and their housemates, the Van Rooijses, but his eager ambition soon transformed them into something new and strange. For all his practice, Vincent had never mastered the casual precision required to render the human face, especially on a small scale. His hand fell naturally into the exaggerations and shortcuts of caricature. In an era addicted to stereotypes, he found encouragement for his weakness everywhere. His hero Millet had portrayed peasants as simple beasts. Like Millet, Vincent had learned
from the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology that a peasant’s features should echo those of his bestial cousins: the low forehead and broad shoulders of an ox, the sharp beak and small eyes of a rooster, the thick lips and saucer eyes of a cow. “You know what a peasant is,” he later wrote, “how strongly he reminds one of a wild beast, when you have found one of the true race.”

Head of a Woman
, 1884–85,
CHALK ON PAPER, 15¾ × 13 IN.
(
Illustration credit 24.2
)

Like Millet, Vincent wanted his depictions to celebrate not just the peasants’ oneness with nature (their “harmony” with the countryside) but also their stolid resignation in the face of crushing labor—the same noble resignation he had admired in the old cab horses of London, Paris, and Brussels, hauling dung or ashes through the streets “patiently and meekly … await[ing their] last hour.” Throughout the winter, in his endless portrait heads, Vincent had worked to endow his models’ faces and hands with the immortality of toil. Now he brought all those lessons to bear on a final flurry of preparatory studies, both drawn and painted, for the figures around the table.

To give these humble beasts the solemnity and significance they deserved, he set them in their natural habitat: darkness. He had long been fascinated with the gloomy cottages—“caves,” he called them—in which families like the De
Groots lived. But not even his darkest palette could penetrate the almost total obscurity of these thatch-roofed hovels. In the past, he had solved the problem by placing his figures against the bright light of a window, or by carving them out of the darkness in a woodcutter’s economy of highlights. Even before he became an artist, his imagination had been seized by the drama of objects emerging from shadows, or silhouetted against coronas of backlight. To him, “effects” like these revealed an immortal dimension, and as early as Etten he had begun experimenting with them. “I want something broad and audacious, with silhouette and relief in it,” he said of his group drawings in The Hague. In his images of weavers, he enlisted both shadow and silhouette to confer sublimity on his simple subjects, as well as to conceal his awkward drawing.

For his new tableau of peasants around a table, he sketched the scene both ways: at a midday meal in front of a window, and at supper in the chiaroscuro of lamplight. He quickly decided on the latter, darker vision: he would portray his diners in the blackness of their night meal, revealed only by the yellow light of the oil lamp over the table. He had already practiced this Stygian palette in several paintings in March, creating elaborate mixes of hues to achieve a narrow range of brown-green, green-blue, and blue-black—what he called “the color of dark soft soap.”

Almost no pigment traveled from tube to canvas untouched, uncut, unbroken by his relentless pursuit of these minute variations in tone. Pleats in a skirt or objects on a wall were differentiated with only the slightest lightening or darkening. Highlights on the table or the hands engaged a host of hues—Prussian blue, Naples yellow, organic red, brown ocher, chrome orange—to achieve an unnamably neutral gray. Vincent had recently steeped himself in color theory, reading books by Eugène Fromentin and Charles Blanc (he copied out long passages from the latter). Following Millet’s example, he had even started taking piano lessons, convinced that musical tones could teach him more about color tones. But he subordinated all these “scientific” lessons to his poetic vision of the cavelike cottage (“a glimpse into a very gray interior”) and months of championing “a low scale of colors.”

Only days after completing the portrait-sized study, he attacked a larger canvas (two and a half by three feet) with his broad, dark brush. In the week after Easter, working “continually from morning till night,” he struggled to find a new and better expression of the scene he imagined. Frustrated, as always, with the mysteries of the human body and the complications of modeling in such a limited range of colors, he fought a “tremendous battle” with his materials, he reported, working and reworking the figures until the paint became too dry to manipulate, but too wet to paint over. Although he trudged many nights to the De Groot house to refresh his imagination in the lamplight, he relied increasingly on his portrait studies of the winter for the faces and hands around
the table. To emphasize the claustrophobia of the little cottage, he lowered the beamed ceiling, crammed more of the room into the picture frame, and crowded it with more and more domestic details: a mirror, a clog filled with utensils, a devotional print of the Crucifixion.