Van Gogh (87 page)

Vincent waited for Rappard’s reply. And waited. Finally, Vincent himself broke the silence. “I am willing to look upon the whole business as a misunderstanding,” he wrote, “provided that you realize yourself that you were mistaken.” If Rappard did not retract everything within a week, Vincent added, “I shall personally not be at all sorry to be done with you.” It was the same ultimatum he had issued so often to Theo. But his friend chose the option Theo never could. He found in Vincent’s unreasoning defense of
The Potato Eaters
the final excuse he needed to walk away from his odd, oppressive correspondent.

At some point that summer, Vincent took a penciled self-portrait that Rappard had given him and tore it in half. “You are ahead of me in many things,” he wrote; “still I think you went too far.”

That left only Theo.

LIKE RAPPARD
, Theo bristled under Vincent’s manic onslaught. He had tried every way possible to coax his uncoaxable brother from his fixation on dark colors and dreary subjects. Vincent had recoiled from even the most diplomatic and indirect hints with storms of defense as well as fresh attacks on Goupil, on dealers, on the Salon, on the Impressionists, and on Theo himself. To avoid raising his brother’s ire, Theo had recruited acquaintances like Portier and Serret to beard the unwelcome truth. But Vincent had responded by drawing them, too, into his mania of persuasion, deluging them with the same pleading, bullying letters that filled Theo’s mailbox that summer.

Far from being grateful for Theo’s exertions, Vincent had rallied his brother to more and greater efforts on behalf of his neglected art. After years of dismissing exhibitions, and one-man shows in particular, he pushed Theo to mount a solo show for him. He demanded that Theo show his work to other dealers: not
nonentities like Portier, but prominent dealers like Henry Wallis and Elbert Jan van Wisselingh, his old Goupil colleague. He had begged Theo to approach Paul Durand-Ruel, one of Paris’s most celebrated dealers and an early champion of the very Impressionists that Vincent so often derided. “Let him think it ugly,” Vincent snapped, ignoring the delicacy of his brother’s position. “I don’t mind.” In his fever, he had even suggested that Theo enlist the help of his eternal antagonist, Tersteeg (“he is a man who dares, once he is convinced”)—a notion of breathtaking folly.

Ever suspicious of Theo’s resolve, Vincent hinted threateningly that if Theo failed in his duties, he might come to Paris himself and take the promotion of
The Potato Eaters
into his own hands—a prospect that surely alarmed his discreet, circumspect brother.

And at the end of every month, as regular as rent, the same cry erupted: “I am
absolutely
without money,” “I am absolutely cleaned out,” “I am literally without a penny.” At a time when Theo’s own finances were strained by the expenses of his father’s burial and the burdens of an entire family, Vincent’s allowance continued to disappear faster than Theo could send it. “I cannot and may not do otherwise than spend relatively much on models,” Vincent responded defiantly to his brother’s repeated pleas for forbearance. “Far from cutting down on the expenses for models, I think spending a little more is called for, very much called for.” The terrifying risks of Vincent’s profligacy were made clear to Theo in August when his uncle Jan, the distinguished admiral, died penniless and disgraced at the age of sixty-seven after his feckless, epileptic son squandered the family fortune and ran off to America.

In fact, the situation in Nuenen was far worse than Theo knew. Vincent had lavished money as heedlessly as words in advocating for
The Potato Eaters
. Rent money, paint money, food money—almost all had gone to his ragged fantasy of a peasant family. Since settling his debts in April with an extra payment from Theo, Vincent had resumed buying everything he could on credit. By the end of July, the dogs were at the door again, especially the paint sellers in The Hague, whose bills he had put off repeatedly. At least one of them had threatened to seize the contents of Vincent’s studio and sell the lot as junk. It was all he could do to fend them off with protests and lies until the end of the month when Theo would visit Nuenen again and Vincent could plead his case face-to-face.

But Theo had already set his mind against his brother. He signaled his new resolve in advance by refusing to send Vincent an extra few guilders to prepay the freight on a third crate of paintings. He failed to take any of Vincent’s work with him on his stop in Antwerp, as Vincent had urged him to do. And finally, most piercingly, he brought with him to Nuenen a new friend, a colleague at Goupil and fellow Dutchman, Andries Bonger. With his gentle manner, self-effacing intelligence, and guileless affection, “Dries” represented a repudiation, in every
way, of the overweaning brother Theo had grown up with. Vincent, who had always resented his brother’s friends, sent pouting, scornful notes to the parsonage from which he was banished. “I am rather busy, as they are reaping the corn in the fields,” he wrote, putting off their reunion a little longer. “You must not be offended when I go on with my work.”

But nothing could temper or delay the inevitable explosion when they finally confronted each other. It was sparked when Vincent warned Theo about the family embarrassment that would result if his paint bills were not paid. Unable to contain the resentments that had built up through all the months of dunning arguments on behalf of
The Potato Eaters
, Theo not only rejected outright Vincent’s request for extra funds, he told him he could no longer count on the same level of support. Indeed, he warned that his subsidies might end altogether. “Bear in mind,” he said gravely, “that under the pressure of certain circumstances I may feel obliged to cut the towrope.” Vincent raged in defense, rearguing a whole summer’s worth of letters. He scoffed at his brother’s financial woes and ridiculed his bourgeois pretensions, saying, “In my opinion you don’t in the least belong among the rising men.” He took the opportunity to launch yet another doomsaying assault on Goupil and the “tulip mania” of art dealing.

Rather than shy from Vincent’s attacks, as he had all summer, Theo rose for the first time to meet them, blow for blow. As if responding to years of unanswered arguments—against painting, against color, against light, against convention, against Goupil, against their father—he lashed out at the “selfishness” of Vincent’s relentless offensives against the world. He was fed up with his brother’s righteous reproaches and cruel “truths.” He accused Vincent of trying to discourage him, of wanting to see him fail, of being more his “enemy” than his friend. Resurrecting the incendiary charge from the previous year, he challenged Vincent’s good faith, and told him bluntly that he did not trust him in the battles that lay ahead. “I see quite clearly that I cannot count on you,” he said. No matter what he did for Vincent in the future, no matter how much money he sent, no matter how hard he worked to sell his paintings, Theo concluded, Vincent would reward him only with “stinking ingratitude.”

Vincent wrote afterward that the conversation “made me utterly disconsolate.”

Theo left Nuenen early so he could stop in Amsterdam to meet Andries Bonger’s family members. Among them was Dries’s twenty-two-year-old sister, Johanna.

BLINDING HONESTY
and the threat of abandonment drove Vincent only deeper into delusion. As if the argument with Theo had never happened, he
casually laid plans to take even more models (“always the best policy”) and sent his brother an elaborate budget that called for an
increase
in his regular allowance from one hundred back to one hundred and fifty francs a month. “Let’s keep that little painting business of mine in good shape,” he wrote cheerfully. As if Anthon van Rappard were still a friend, he resumed their correspondence: first with a joking letter that dismissed their dispute as a silly theological spat; then with the opposite: a long, barbed, petulant brief for a return to the status quo ante (“I deem it desirable for us to remain friends”) that stood steadfastly by
The Potato Eaters
(“I render what I see”). His entreaties pried one last letter out of Rappard before the friendship lapsed into total and permanent silence.

As if the summer had never happened, Vincent imagined a welcoming audience for his paintings somewhere. He saw a “reaction setting in” among both artists and public against the tyranny of fashion. More and more, they would demand “modern” pictures, by which he meant paintings that “show the peasant figure in action…
That
is the very essence of modern art.” He predicted a “peasant uprising” against Salon juries, and claimed a mandate from Millet to follow on the successes of the summer. “I cannot stop working at the height I have risen to now,” he announced. “I must push on.” He rallied Theo to work with more animation on behalf of his art, urging “now is just the moment to try to do something with my work.” He planned showings in Antwerp and Holland as well as Paris. “One must not call it a hopeless struggle,” he exhorted. “Others have won, and we shall win too.”

He summoned his brother to this fantasy of past and future with an image as charming as a child’s parable. Comparing his career as a painter to a lifeboat being towed behind the “big ship” of Theo’s career as a dealer, Vincent envisioned a day when their roles—rescuer and rescued—would be reversed:

In September 1885, Vincent van Gogh had his first public show—in the shop window of his most relentless creditor, a paint store in The Hague called Leurs. Vincent claimed his shameful place in Leurs’s window as a career coup and imagined it as a victory for all his months of argument. “I am too firmly convinced of being on the right road,” he declared one week after Theo’s visit. “I want to paint what I feel and feel what I paint.”

I
N HIS MONTHS OF TENDENTIOUS ARGUMENTS ON BEHALF OF
THE POTATO
Eaters
, Vincent had talked himself into a new art. Extremities of temperament and rhetoric had flung him far from the course on which he had originally set out five years earlier in the Borinage, when art seemed the only point of reentry into the bourgeois world that had expelled him. Instead, his fevered defenses had landed him on a distant, unknown shore: a place without “true” color or line; a place where hues clashed and objects took shape unhindered by nature’s narrow-mindedness.

The art that Vincent described did not exist yet: not in his books or portfolios of prints, not on the walls of any galleries or museums, and certainly not on Vincent’s easel. Nothing could have been further from it than the turgid, tenebrous image that set the storm in motion, or the scores of paintings and drawings with which he had tried to justify it. Hardened in opposition to his brother’s advisements to bright colors and mired in yet another fantasy of family, Vincent clung to the aggrieved palette and rejected subjects of
The Potato Eaters
long after his Odyssean vision had left them behind.

In the fall of 1885, two events, impossibly different—a trip to a museum and a sex scandal—combined to finally break the grip of the past. Together—one pulling, the other pushing—they drove Vincent out of Brabant, freeing him to explore, for the rest of his brief life, the strange new art he had already defiantly imagined.

VISITORS TO
A
MSTERDAM’S
Rijksmuseum on October 7, 1885, expected to encounter slow-moving crowds. The grand new building on the Stadhouderskade had opened less than three months before with a spectacular ceremony
featuring chorus, orchestra, and fireworks. For years before that, the whole country had buzzed with controversy as Pierre Cuypers’s fantastical masterpiece slowly rose at the edge of the old city. Many Protestants (including the king, who boycotted the opening ceremony) saw in its cathedral windows and Gothic echoes yet another Roman conspiracy (led by the Catholic Cuypers)—an affront in iron filigree and variegated brick to the pious dignity of the Dutch Republic. Others, like Dries Bonger, thought it merely vulgar. “It is such a pity that this great building turned out to be such a disappointment,” he wrote after seeing it with Theo in August. “There it stands for all eternity, to the annoyance of future generations.”