The Letters of Vincent van Gogh Read online

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  That Van Gogh idolized such popular contemporary artists as Schef-fer, Decamps and Delaroche in his youth need not surprise us, nor the fact that they eventually made way for new heroes. What is remarkable, however, is the loyalty he continued to feel for his old idols. No matter how radically his tastes changed, he remained constant to artists once admitted to his heart. A relative unknown such as the Anglo-American historical and genre painter George Henry Boughton, first extolled in letters in the 1870s for the noble sentiment of his art, is still being mentioned with much appreciation during the Nuenen period - albeit for technical reasons. Conversely, Van Gogh’s later allegiance to the Impressionists did not blind him to their shortcomings, and he never considered their discoveries concerning the laws of colour the only way forward. Though he counted himself one of their number — it was not until much later that his art came to be labelled ‘Post-Impressionist’ -he found them wanting in the long run. The letters show how he fell back on his earliest loves time and again. These included not only such widely admired masters as Millet and Delacroix, but also Meis-sonier, a painter of fine historical detail whom his avant-garde colleagues despised, and the fashionable Tissot.

  Theo realized early in 1888 that Vincent did not embrace the new and the modish alone, recognizing that he saw as his special mission the upholding of the achievements of an earlier generation of artists - ‘the regeneration of the old ideas that have been corrupted and diminished by wear and tear’.

  In the past, ignorance of this conservative side of his nature has often given rise to a false interpretation of the work Van Gogh did after he left Aries. Because of their loss of colour, the pictures he made in Saint-Rimy and Auvers-sur-Oise have been considered an artistic relapse largely associated with his mental illness. That, following his ‘dark’ Brabant period, Van Gogh should have discovered the vivid, richly contrasting colours of France - ‘the high yellow note’ - matched the prevailing view of the evolution of art in the late nineteenth century. In contrast to the oversimplified picture of an artist who abandoned the earth-bound art of the Barbizon and Hague Schools under the impact of Impressionism and the scorching southern sun and who, following mental decline at the end of his life, was unable to maintain the ‘high yellow note’, the letters convey a far more consistent story. They show us how Van Gogh, after the liberation of colour in his Aries period, finally tried once more to channel his art along the lines of his original ideal, still his aim, of becoming a northern painter of peasant life. It is increasingly being appreciated that the paintings he did during the last year of his life demonstrated much breaking of new ground.

  We see a similar development in his literary taste. In notes and letters, the young, ‘unknown’ Van Gogh reveals his delight in the fairy-tales of Hans Christian Andersen and copies out whole pages of poems by Jan van Beers, Joseph Autran, Pierre Jean de Bèranger, Franç;ois Coppè, Riickert, Uhland, Heine and Goethe. And just as his taste in painting evolves from Scheffer and Delaroche to the Impressionists and Seurat, so the above-named romantic poets are ousted from their places of honour by Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and the de Goncourt brothers. But even here Van Gogh remains loyal to a number of youthful passions, rereading Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Now and then the memory of a favourite poem loved in his youth seems to find an echo in one of his later paintings. Thus the lyrical references in the early letters to Dickens’s descriptions of ivy receive belated homage in the splendid series of’sousbois’ (undergrowth) painted in Paris and Saint-Rèmy.

  Some of his favourite books are incorporated into his paintings with their titles clearly displayed, as, for instance, Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the portrait of Madame Ginoux and the de Goncourts’ Manette Salomon in the portrait of Dr Gachet. Other literary preferences go without mention in his work. Thus his paintings do not testify to his interest in the French Revolution or in Tolstoy’s revolutionary ideas, evinced in the letters and reflected in the cuttings he collected from illustrated magazines. The letters do record how engrossed he was in Victor Hugo’s Les Misèrables and Quatre Vingt Treize, as well as in what Michelet, Dickens and Carlyle had to say about the French Revolution. Van Gogh saw his own period, too, as an age on the brink of major upheavals, and this was something upon which he frequently ruminated. We can picture him in heated discussions on the subject in Parisian artists’ cafes or with his friend Roulin in Aries.

  A life in letters

  Van Gogh’s ‘life in letters’ satisfies a number of literary criteria which render its reading particularly gratifying. Oscar Wilde remarked that life imitates art far more than art imitates life, but in Van Gogh’s case all the ingredients of life seem to have gone into literary expression. The very fact that he himself used the lives of artists as a model for his own is significant. The linear development of his own life story through the halts, if not the stations of the cross, on his pilgrimage - Brabant, London, Paris, London, The Hague, Drenthe, Nuenen, Antwerp, Paris, Aries, Saint-Rèmy, Auvers - seems made for literature. The dramatic denouement in Aries and the associated mental crisis, so close on the heels of the peak of his artistic achievement, are as potent in their impact as the last act of a tragedy by Shakespeare (whose historical plays Van Gogh read in Saint-Rèmy). Even the reason for his return to the north, and with it the closing of a geographical circle at the end of his life, could not be improved upon by a writer of fiction.

  That Van Gogh’s life did not simply and relentlessly speed towards madness and the abyss but that, precisely towards the end of his life, the circle closed with his wish to return to the great loves of his youth, to Millet and Delacroix, and that even in Saint-Rèmy he still tried to produce a new version of his first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters, all ensured that his life had an ‘artistically’ perfect rounding off.

  The handling of the recurring motifs in his life — for instance, the succession of ùnhappy love affairs, the role of his various friendships with fellow artists (and also their development), the transformation of his love of God, through his humanitarian phase in the Borinage, into his love of art — as well as the many emotional crises, which, with hindsight, the reader is bound to consider as portents of the ultimate tragedy, Van Gogh would have been unable to improve upon as a writer. The letters are full of such leitmotivs. In his Brabant period, Van Gogh himself compared his paintings to the weaving of cloth. The number of recurring themes and the striking consistency of his range of ideas as reflected in the letters find their artistic counterpart in his striving after coherent decorations for the Yellow House and - in a broader sense — the construction of his ‘oeuvre’. In that respect he proved to be, and much more so than he realized, a true contemporary of Richard Wagner, whose attempt to produce a Gesamtkuntstwerk — a synthesis of all the arts - he so admired. Thus, referring to Wagner, he exclaimed, ‘How we need the same thing in painting!’

  The discovery of these repeated leitmotivs in his letters lends an extra dimension to the interpretation of comparable situations during various periods of his life. A case in point was his attitude to friendship. From Harry Gladwell, the young man with whom he would read the Bible in the evening after work during his first stay in Paris, to his fellow artists Van Rappard, Bernard and Gauguin, and the postman Roulin, Van Gogh cultivated intense friendships. They give the lie to the oversimplified view that he was an antisocial human being. True, at times his behaviour disturbed nearly everyone who came into contact with him, and differences in artistic opinion could at times lead to bitter disputes with other painters, but Dr Mendes da Costa, his Latin teacher in Amsterdam, later charitably described Van Gogh’s ‘inappropriate behaviour’ as ‘charming oddity’.

  The ambivalent attitude to sexuality that prevailed in the nineteenth century is clearly reflected in Van Gogh’s frustrated love life. Nearly all his amorous overtures were spurned, and even when he believed that he might lay claim to a very modest portion of happiness, as with Sien Hoornik or Margot Begemann, the social gulf between them seemed so great that the relation
ships were doomed to failure. Brothels and the use of tobacco and alcohol, dubbed ‘anti-aphrodisiacs’ by Van Gogh, remained his only stimulants, sublimation by art his only solace.

  Although the letters merely skim the surface of this subject, they can nevertheless prove most revealing. Vincent’s delight when Theo makes him privy to the perils of his own love life is a poignant sign of the brothers’ great intimacy, and it was with bitter resignation that Vincent renounced his right to earthly love in some of his later letters.

  Much as Van Gogh’s mature art was dominated by a radical use of complementary colours, so many of the recurring themes in the letters constitute a system of strict polarities. In his relationship with his brother there was the continual tension between artist and art dealer. In his dealings with his father he contrasted the hypocritical practices of the cloth with the true humanity he saw embodied in Christ. Van Gogh’s sense of isolation found its counterpart in his dream of establishing a painters’ fraternity based on what he thought was the Japanese model. In the visual arts themselves he saw a constant conflict between drawing and painting, between his talent for making quick sketches and his ideal of the finished tableau, between the pull of the landscape and that of the figure. His great aim of becoming a painter of peasant life was regularly at odds with his penchant for city life, and Van Gogh the realist was forever struggling with the temptations of symbolism, ‘style’ and abstraction.

  After a youth full of false starts and disappointments, his decision to become an artist was unconditional. He accepted the social implications even when madness was the price that had to be paid. He preferred to go hungry in The Hague to producing ‘saleable water-colours’ before he was ready to do so. In Aries, he fell briefly under the spell of Gauguin’s tempting abstractions, but abruptly forswore them because they offended his deepest convictions as a realist. Although he was prepared to try everything honestly, his inability to compromise invariably triumphed in the end. This inflexibility alienated him from his fellow men. His letters to Isaacson and Aurier prove that -following in Millet’s footsteps — he did not even like to be praised when he felt unworthy or when such praise mistook the essence of his work.

  Shortly after Vincent’s departure for Aries, Theo wrote to their sister, Wil, that their brother’s art was far from self-centred: ‘Through him I came into contact with many painters who held him in high regard […]. Moreover, his heart is so big that he is constantly trying to do things for others. Tant pis for all those who cannot or will not understand him.’ It was Vincent’s hope, in a Utopian brotherhood of artists, to purge hostile society — and the practices of the art trade! — of every vestige of improbity.

  Without wishing to detract in any way from the tragic isolation in which Van Gogh’s self-taught skill matured and briefly came to rich fruition, it is not going too far to claim that his letters bear at least equal witness to his affinity with the world he had created around him. For every belief he lost, for every clash with society, he found his own compensation. While his visits to museums were necessarily few and far between, he created his own Louvre on his walls with photographs, woodcuts and Japanese prints. When the people of Nuenen refused to pose for him, he discovered the beauty of birds-’ nests. When canvas and paint ran out in Aries he used his reed pen to effect a revolution in Western draughtsmanship. Van Gogh may rarely have sold a picture, but all the greater was the number of friends who valued his work and exchanged canvases with him. At the moment of his greatest existential anguish, Delacroix and Millet watched over him, and Theo was almost constantly there. The times when he was racked with doubt about Theo’s solidarity were probably the most tragic of his intense life.

  Ronald de Leeuw

  Amsterdam

  Biographical Outline

  1853 Vincent Willem van Gogh born at Groot-Zundert on 30 March, the eldest son of the Reverend Theodoras van Gogh and Anna Cornelia Carbentus (1819–1907)

  1857 Birth of his favourite brother, Theodoras (Theo), on 1 May

  1861–8 Sketchy school education: one year at Zundert village school (1861); two years at boarding school in Zevenbergen (1864- 6), and one and a half years at Rijks Hogere Burgerschool Willem II in Tilburg (September 1866-March 1868)

  1869 On 30 July, he joins the international art dealers, Goupil & Cie, in The Hague as their youngest employee, under H. G. Tersteeg

  1872 In August, he starts regular correspondence from The Hague with his brother Theo, who is four years his junior

  1873 Theo joins the Brussels branch of Goupil & Cie on 1 January; Vincent is transferred to Goupil’s London branch in June; Theo starts to work for Goupil in The Hague in November

  1874 From October to December, Vincent is temporarily transferred to Goupil’s main branch in Paris, then returns to London

  1875 Second transfer to Goupil’s main branch in Paris on 15 May

  1876 Dismissed from Goupil & Cie at the end of March; he becomes a teacher in Ramsgate on 16 April and an assistant preacher in Isleworth in the middle of July

  1877 From January to late April he works for Blussè & Van Braam, a bookshop in Dordrecht, then moves to Amsterdam in May to prepare for the entrance examination to the theological faculty

  1878 In July he formally abandons his studies in Theology and, after a short training period in Laeken near Brussels during the autumn, moves to the Borinage in December to work as an evangelist among the miners

  1879 In July Van Gogh decides to become an artist

  1880 Moves to Brussels, where he meets the painter Anthon van Rappard through Theo, who has meanwhile been transferred to Goupil’s main branch in Paris

  1881 Moves into his parents’ house in April and practises drawing from live models; in August, he falls violently in love with his cousin Kee Vos-Stricker but is rejected; at the end of November, he starts several weeks’ work in The Hague with Anton Mauve, his cousin by marriage and a member of the Hague School; after a violent quarrel with his parents at Christmas time, he moves to The Hague

  1882 In January he rents a studio in the Schenkweg, The Hague; initially both Tersteeg - his former branch manager at Goupil’s - and Mauve prove very helpful, Mauve even giving him drawing lessons, but both men turn against him when he takes his model, Sien Hoornik, a pregnant, unmarried mother, and her small daughter into his house and even considers marrying her (Theo, however, continues to give him financial support); in March, he receives his first commission, for twelve views of The Hague, from his uncle Cornelis (‘C. M.’); following a stay in the City Hospital in June, he produces his first watercolours in July and his first painted studies in August; studies lithography in November, in the hope of finding work as an illustrator

  1883 Living with Sien Hoornik becomes increasingly difficult and when it also dawns on him that city life is beyond his financial means, he breaks with her; on 11 September he leaves for Drenthe, where he takes lodgings successively in Hoogeveen and Nieuw Amsterdam; although the Drenthe landscape proves a revelation to him, his working conditions are miserable: the weather is bad, he has no studio, and there is a shortage of painting and drawing materials; moreover, Theo’s money is late reaching him and he is troubled by loneliness; after three months, he decides to go to his parents in Nuenen and arrives there on 5 December 1884 At first his relationship with his parents is tense, but matters improve when he takes care of his sick mother in January; he decides to become a painter of peasant life and produces numerous painted and colour-washed studies of weavers in January-February; in May, he rents a study from Schafrat, the verger of the Catholic church; in the summer, Margot Bege-mann forms an attachment with him, but marriage is not forthcoming; in the autumn, he teaches still-life painting to several amateurs and works in the genre himself

  1885 In the winter, he starts painting a series of fifty peasants’ heads and develops his conception for The Potato Eaters; his father dies suddenly on 26 March; he completes the definitive version of The Potato Eaters at the end of April and moves into his studio in May
; in the summer he draws peasants working on the land; in September the Catholic priest instructs his parishioners not to pose for Vincent any longer; he moves to Antwerp on 24 November and hopes to earn a living there with townscapes and portraits; the busy seaport makes an overwhelming impression on him, especially the art galleries, where Rubens’s use of colour and brush technique have a particular attraction for him

  1886 He enrols in the Antwerp Academy on 18 January and attends lessons in figure painting and in drawing from plaster casts; he meets the English painter Horace Mann Livens; he leaves for Paris on about 1 March and moves in with Theo; he works in Fernand Cormon’s studio, where he makes friends with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Èmile Bernard, John Peter Russell and Archibald Standish Hartrick; he discovers the true meaning of Impressionism; in the summer, he paints a series of still lifes with flowers as colour studies; he meets Louis Anquetin and Charles Angrand; he becomes an admirer of the work of Adolphe Monticelli

  1887 In March-April he organizes an exhibition of Japanese prints in the Cafè Le Tambourin; in April-May he paints many pictures along the Seine at Asniéres, accompanied by Paul Signac; in November he organizes an exhibition of the ‘impressionistes [sic] du Petit Boulevard’ in the Restaurant du Chalet, where his own work appears side by side with that of An-quetin, Bernard, Arnold Koning and Toulouse-Lautrec; he meets Gauguin, Guillaumin, Pissarro and Seurat during the exhibition; he exhibits a painting in the Theatre Libre d’Antoine (December 1887-January 1888)

  1888 On 19 February, exhausted by the pressures of life in Paris and driven by a great longing for rest and a warm climate, he leaves for Aries in the south of France and takes a room at the Restaurant Carrel; in April he paints orchards in bloom; on 1 May he rents four rooms in the Yellow House but does not have enough money to make them habitable; he leaves the Restaurant Carrel for a room in the Caf6 de la Gare; at the beginning of June, he briefly visits Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer on the Mediterranean coast; he paints harvest scenes and portraits during the summer; he plans to turn the Yellow House into a studio of the south, and invites Gauguin to live and work in it; in expectation of Gauguin’s arrival he moves into the Yellow House on 16 September; Gauguin finally arrives in Aries on 23 October; in the middle of November he turns down an invitation to exhibit in the offices of the Revue Independante; in late November and early December he paints the portraits of the entire family of Joseph Roulin, the postman; during December, conflicting views on art make working with Gauguin increasingly difficult, following a violent argument with Gauguin, he cuts offpart of his ear on 23 December and Gauguin leaves precipitately for Paris; he is admitted to the hospital in Aries and treated by Dr Felix Rey