Leaving Van Gogh

Three





I WALKED VINCENT down the steps to the gate and watched him trudge along the street, back toward the train station. He did, I had to admit, make a conspicuous figure. In Auvers we have always been accustomed to painters with their rucksacks and collapsible easels and stools, often settled where you least expect them, at a turn in the road or in the hollow of a meadow. I like to think that, in painting our landscape, they become part of it. But even from behind, Vincent’s shambling gait, his battered boots, and his coarse straw hat made him an unusual and unmistakable figure in Auvers.

I later learned that Vincent had chosen to lodge at the Auberge Ravoux, across from the mairie. It was the cheapest inn the town offered; Vincent was very careful with the money that Theo sent him. He had made the right choice, for Ravoux’s customers were working men, unlikely to be disturbed by a painter’s eccentricities.

The same was not true of Madame Chevalier, who was waiting for me at the front door when I had seen Vincent on his way. The force of her opinions did not match her small size.

“And who was that?” she demanded. Without waiting for an answer, she went on, “If he is to come back, you must tell him to come to the back door with his bundles. We can’t have word getting around the village that peddlers come to the front like guests.”

“But he is a guest,” I said mildly. “He is a painter, named Vincent van Gogh, and I hope we will see him often. I asked him to stay for luncheon today, but he could not.”

I said this only to tease her. Madame Chevalier was a wonderful cook, but she hated being surprised by guests.

“Vincent van what?” she retorted. “Van Goog? Dreadful name! I’ll never be able to say it. And if he’s going to paint here, you must tell him that I don’t want his oil paints all over the place. Outside, that’s where they stay, or in your studio, Doctor. Now come and sit down, Marguerite and Paul have been waiting for you. They want to know all about him.” I obeyed her, of course.

It had been some time since an artist had visited us. Pissarro’s move away from Pontoise in 1882 had limited my country contacts with artists. I saw them in Paris, at galleries and cafés, but I realized that Vincent’s presence in Auvers could be stimulating for all of us. I imagined lively conversations with him about art and literature. I might even paint with him, as I had with Cézanne and Pissarro. For many years now Auvers had been a kind of refuge for me. But the cultural life there was limited.

I began to wonder very much what Vincent van Gogh’s painting looked like. The man had struck me so positively, with his stoical approach to his illness and his quick enthusiasm for my treasured paintings. I hoped the artist would be one I could admire. I was eager to see Vincent’s work for another reason as well: though I had conducted a physical examination, I felt that my knowledge of the man and his mental state would be incomplete until I had seen how he viewed and depicted his world. I did not want to wait until his canvases arrived from the South, so I hoped that Theo could show me examples of Vincent’s paintings while I was working in Paris.



I made my way to the Boulevard Montmartre on the Friday evening after Vincent had first knocked at my door. “Dr. Gachet,” Theo said, coming forward with his hand out to greet me as I walked through the polished glass door of the gallery. Just as I had seen him in his brother’s rougher features, now I saw Vincent’s heavy brow and bold cheekbones superimposed on Theo’s more delicate face. “I am so happy to see you. I have heard from Vincent.” He clasped my hand warmly. “Doctor, I can hardly tell you …” He looked away for a moment, and I could see that he was struggling with emotion. “I am so relieved.”

Naturally he was relieved, poor man. He must have worried desperately about his brother. I had understood that before, but now that I had met Vincent, I could guess how his circumstances must weigh on Theo.

“He is terribly high-strung, of course,” I said, hoping to give Theo some time to recover himself. “But I thought he showed good sense in leaving Paris when he did. That is a wonderful sign, along with the fact that he was able to travel by himself from the South, without incident. I believe he is much better.”

Theo had turned back to me, after a swift glance at a man in a black coat examining a painting of a volcano in a heavy gilt frame. We had moved no farther than the entrance of the gallery, but now he drew me away from the door, to a long red leather bench in the middle of the back room. It was a pleasing space, with gleaming floors and luxuriant potted palms in the corners. He sat down, glancing again at the man, who appeared to be the only customer. “Please, sit down, Doctor. I am delighted to hear you say this. Can you tell me what you think was wrong with him?”

“Do you need to attend to the gentleman over there? I realize this may not be a convenient time for a visit.”

Theo shook his head. “He visits us frequently,” he said in a low voice. “He is very partial to our traditional landscapes, and I believe he is in no hurry to get home. In any event, I will be closing the gallery shortly. If you would like to wait, perhaps we could take a glass of something together. I have a new Pissarro upstairs. Would you like to see it? Are you acquainted with his most recent work?” The smooth gallery employee had quickly replaced the distraught brother, but I felt that his politeness was automatic. I could sense that he was still preoccupied with Vincent.

“I would be happy to see what my old friend has been painting some other time. I cannot say I like these pointillist canvases of the last few years, and I keep hoping he will abandon that style. But for now, I would like more than anything to see your brother’s work. Have you anything here?”

He smiled wearily. “Unfortunately, I do not. Vincent’s paintings are magnificent, but … startling. Very strong. He has been invited to show with a group in Brussels, but I can’t think of a gallery in France that would hang his work now. Of course, I believe all of this will change. You read Aurier’s piece?”

“Albert Aurier?” I shook my head. “No. He wrote about Vincent?”

“Yes, in the Mercure de France. In January. It was a long article about various artists whose work does not seem related to any of the contemporary movements. He called it ‘The Isolated Ones.’ He said wonderful things about Vincent’s painting. Unfortunately, Vincent is also isolated personally.”

The jingle of the doorbell announced that the devotee of traditional landscapes had departed, and Theo stood up. “I don’t believe I’ll be forfeiting any sales if I close now. I could take you to see some of Vincent’s paintings, if you like. You will forgive me for not taking you to my home—we have many of them there—but we have a new baby, and to be honest, Vincent left the place as if a whirlwind had gone through it.” Now the anxiety of the new father peered through the polish of the art dealer; Theo had so many sources of worry for a young man.

“Of course,” I told him, putting as much sympathy into my voice as I could. “I have two children myself. They’re older now, but when Marguerite was small we lived in Paris like you. I know how difficult it is.” Actually, I did not. I could not really know how life was for Theo van Gogh, who had to take care of a wife, a new baby, and a brother who was prone to nervous difficulties.

He moved around the gallery, extinguishing the lights, then closed and locked the steel shutters. He led me out the back door, through a courtyard. “We bring the canvases through here,” he said. “Most of the big Salon-style productions go to the main branch of the gallery, on rue Chaptal, of course. Few of my clients have room for that kind of enormous painting. I think, and so does Vincent, that art buyers are looking for something completely different now, anyway.”

“You mean easel pictures?” I asked, as we emerged onto the street and he locked the outer door.

“Oh, of course. But more than that. Vincent believes that colors, certain combinations of colors, can prompt or express emotion. You will see,” he added, heading up the street. “I am taking you to Père Tanguy, the paint seller. Vincent left some canvases with him. We’ll go up by Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. Do you mind walking? It is a lovely evening.”

“Not at all,” I answered. “I will be delighted to go to Tanguy’s. I have met him several times, but I’ve never visited his shop. Tell me, did your brother have any formal training?”

“He spent some weeks at the academy in Antwerp but could not submit to the discipline. Here in Paris he took lessons at Cormon’s studio, but in truth he is more or less self-taught. You will see, his paintings have none of the technical expertise taught at the École des Beaux-Arts. With Vincent, it is more a matter of …” He hesitated for a moment. “I can only say that he sees the world as no one else does. Naturally this makes his paintings difficult to sell. But … Well, you will see.”

Tanguy’s tiny store was wedged into a small building on the rue Clauzel, off the rue des Martyrs. If Boussod and Valadon represented the official face of Parisian art, with its chandeliers and crimson carpets, chez Tanguy was its other face, all charcoal dust and pungent fluids and shiny lead tubes. I had been in shops like this before. There were always poorly groomed men standing around arguing about the shape of a brush or the flexibility of a palette knife, the grain of a canvas or the luster of a glaze. Even at this late hour, the shop was open, though there was only one customer, choosing between a pair of palettes that the bearded, burly Tanguy held out for him. I glanced around, pleased by the familiar clutter of stacks of paper, jugs of brushes, and the wall of tiny drawers to store the pigments for oil paint.

But then I caught sight of the portrait. Instinctively I knew that Vincent had painted it. I had spent only an hour in his company, but the picture obviously came from that vigorous, discerning sensibility. The subject, Tanguy himself, in a blue jacket and wide-brimmed hat, sat in the center of the canvas, looking out, not directly at the viewer but somewhat down. He seemed to focus on the body of the viewer—possibly on the heart? Behind him was a patchwork of Japanese prints painted in brilliant colors; a glowing blue, saffron, emerald green. Directly to the right of Tanguy’s hat floated the pink cloud of a blossoming cherry tree set in a landscape of beauty and peace, with a stream leading the viewer’s eye through green fields to a series of low hills beneath a sky stippled with white clouds.

I had never seen brushwork like this. I owned at that point a Monet, several Pissarros, many Cézannes. I was and still am fascinated by the technique, inaugurated by the Impressionists, of breaking up the application of color. Those painters drew attention to their method of placing paint on the canvas while still constructing a complete image. But Van Gogh, if it were possible, took this tendency further. His paint lived. It seemed to flicker or dance on the canvas—yet the image held together. I have seen canvases rendered in this manner that do not, somehow, engage your eye. You are so distracted by the brushwork that you cannot see the picture. This portrait, though, seized my gaze and my emotions. Moments earlier Theo had told me that Vincent believed he could elicit certain feelings through his juxtapositions of color. I was struck to the core by the beauty, the peacefulness, and the intricacy of what he had created.

Above all I was astonished at his mastery. Composing a canvas is harder than it looks. Painters like Amand Gautier, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, go through an extensive series of preparations. They draw components of their painting in charcoal. They try out different angles, different combinations of elements. They make oil sketches, to see how their colors work together. Then they build the painting slowly, first drawing on the canvas, then filling in areas of dark and light, gradually thinning their pigments and using smaller brushes until they have created their picture. It seemed as though Vincent had omitted those steps, somehow creating an immensely complicated image in a single burst of energy, using large quantities of bright, unmixed colors. He had depicted Tanguy—a former radical, a man of the people—in his blue workman’s jacket and brown trousers. But the jacket was grooved with vertical strokes of paint, lighter and darker blue, yellow for highlights, curving with the collar, rumpled at the elbow, heavy and thick. His beard and eyebrows—white and brown mixed—were laid in with a finer brush and bristled off the canvas. Vincent had painted the background prints with thinner pigments, emulating the flat quality of Japanese woodcuts. Somehow a harmony of colors and shapes reigned among them. Yet if one brushstroke had been in the wrong place—one flicker of blue highlight on the brown trousers, one fleck of greenish shadow on the backs of the hands—the painting would have dissolved into a wreck. I was awestruck. How could this be the work of the high-strung man with the damaged ear whom I had examined days earlier? I felt there should have been some physical sign that he was a genius.

I looked down and found my hands locked together like those of Tanguy in the painting.

“Everyone does that,” Theo said, nodding at my hands. “You don’t even know you’re doing it.” He looked back up at the portrait and shrugged. “So you see, my brother is brilliant. There is no one like him.”

He did not say it with excitement or pride. There was no sense of anticipation, no vision of a future in which Vincent’s paintings would be prized and Vincent himself—Well, what would one hope for Vincent? Even based only on my short acquaintance, I could not imagine a glowing future for him. He was not a man made for success, I thought. He could never tolerate having a busy studio, multiple commissions, an assistant to run errands, and a dealer to broker sales. He was like a monk. He belonged in a different setting, somehow withdrawn from the world.

Tanguy closed the drawer of the massive cash register, and the sole customer edged past us with both of the palettes beneath his arm. “Monsieur van Gogh,” Tanguy greeted Theo. “And I believe it is Dr. Gachet?” We shook hands, and he gestured up at his portrait. “A thing of beauty. Monsieur van Gogh, your brother is a giant. They will see.”

“It is the doctor who would like to see now,” Theo said. “Vincent is staying in Auvers, where the doctor lives.”

“This is the first time I have seen his work,” I added. “The portrait is magnificent. I would be very proud to be painted by him.”

“I am proud,” Tanguy responded. “Monsieur van Gogh feels as no one else does. He puts his heart on the canvas every time he lifts a brush. And if you sit for him, you will find that he puts your heart on the canvas as well.”

A harsh female voice called from the doorway at the back of the shop. “Julien! If you want to eat your supper, you must come now!” He rolled his eyes at us in the age-old gesture of the husband harassed by a shrewish wife, and held back the dark green curtains behind the counter.

“The stairs are there.” He pointed. He lifted two small lanterns from hooks on the wall. “You can light them?” he asked Theo, who nodded. “I’d best join my wife,” he added in a low voice and slipped through the doorway into the room beyond, where the aroma of long-stewed onions vanquished the chemical tang of the shop.

We stood awkwardly at the bottom of the stairs while Theo found a match safe in his pocket. “If you could open the doors,” he murmured to me, once we had light. “Now that I think of it, I should not have brought you here. What can we possibly see in this dim light?”

“Oh, but this is an adventure,” I said, my eagerness apparent in my voice. “We could be characters in a Dumas novel, hunting for hidden treasure.”

Theo smiled gratefully and led the way up the stairs, his lantern swinging gently, making the pool of light before him rock in response. Two flights up, he opened a door into an attic, even more pungent than the shop downstairs. As Theo looked for a place to hang the lantern, I tried to identify the different odors—turpentine was very strong, but so was the unmistakable scent of dead rodent.

“Here,” Theo’s voice said, as he reached a shelf where he deposited his lantern, which provided only a moderate glow. Even doubled by the light from my lantern, the area of visibility was narrow, dim, and wavering.

“This really is like a Dumas novel,” I remarked. “Or Aladdin’s cave. I feel there should be massive jars.”

“We never heard those tales growing up in Holland. Not in a preacher’s house.” Theo was busying himself with a pile of stretched canvases. “I doubt Vincent knows them to this day, though he is very well read. Oh, here we are. Most of these he painted in Paris a few years ago. Some were sent from the South. This, for instance.”

He pulled forward a picture of a coach resting against a brilliant yellow wall. Even in the shadowy room, the canvas crackled with heat. Green and red and black sizzled against each other, respectively the body, trim, and wheels of the carriage. I could almost hear the thrumming cicadas and the crunch of the dusty roadway beneath my feet.

“I begin to see what Tanguy meant about ‘feeling,’ ” I said.

Theo nodded. “This he painted here while he was living with me in Paris. An entirely different mood.”

“Ah, how lovely!” I exclaimed. It was a still life, a copper vase of fritillaries—their bell-shaped, golden blossoms and needles of leaves glimmered on the surface of the canvas. “What a color sense he has. Could the background have been anything besides that blue?”

“In a better light you’ll be able to see all the colors that make up the blue; it’s mixed with lavender, green, pink.… One doesn’t want to say it’s like a Monet—Vincent’s work is not like anyone else’s—but there was a moment when he was fascinated by Impressionist techniques.” As he continued to sort through the disorderly rows of canvases, I saw colors flicker past: ultramarine, scarlet, a surprisingly soft green, and that searing yellow. “Ah. This is what I was looking for.” He held up a horizontal rectangular canvas. At first I could only make out the simplest forms: round tables with crude chairs, clumsy ceiling lamps, a billiards table, awkward, blocky figures. Theo lifted the canvas to take it closer to the lantern on the wall. The colors became more distinct, but I almost wished they had not—the walls of the room were a throbbing red, trimmed with a green so vivid the eye bounced off it. The perspective was distorted so that the floorboards rushed upward while the chairs tilted, ready to eject anyone unfortunate enough to sit on them.

I could not look away from it, but I hated what it made me feel—despair, dislocation, and agitation. Melancholy seemed peaceful compared to this jangling, buzzing, lopsided room peopled with the vacant and desolate. As a window into Vincent’s mental state, it was startling. Could this be the same artist who had painted the fritillaries, or the lovely portrait of Tanguy? “I see,” I told Theo. “This is very disturbing.”

Theo craned around to see the image more clearly. “He calls it The Night Café. He intentionally put all those colors together, to make it harsh. I think he said ‘like a devil’s furnace.’ I hate to think that this was what his life was like in Arles, where he painted it. Do you see that figure standing in the center?”

“Yes, the waiter? With his hands hanging down?”

“Yes. He looks so helpless to me. As if he were trapped in this infernal place. Look at how much paint he used for the lamps.” I reached out and touched one of them gently, a small ridged dome on the canvas. I remembered how the skin of Vincent’s hands was seamed with paint. It was as though he sculpted with his pigments.

Theo lowered the painting, as if to set it down at the front of a row of canvases, facing the room. But he changed his mind and slipped it in behind, no doubt to conceal the alarming image. “The worst of his illness dates from Arles,” he said, dusting off his hands. “The doctor in the asylum told us that when he was very ill he did not know who he was. At times he could describe his feelings, but in just a few hours, he would turn morose. He suspected everyone around him of seeking to do him harm.”

“That is very common with melancholiacs,” I said, watching Theo as he idly flipped through more pictures. “They feel they must be perpetually on guard. It is very difficult to win their trust.” He pulled one out and put it at the front of the stack. A golden pottery vase of sunflowers stood against a cream background. Even in the dim light, the blossoms appeared to be so thick they were almost three-dimensional. Aside from the green stems and a narrow blue line dividing the lemon surface on which the vase stood from the pale background, the entire painting was yellow: primrose and mustard and egg yolk, ocher and daffodil and straw. It should never have worked. Yet it was a tour de force. Stepping closer, I could see the signature, “Vincent,” in blue on the side of the vase. He must have been proud of it.

“Vincent painted a series of these sunflowers to decorate his little house in Arles for Gauguin,” Theo said, straightening up. “His expectations were so high that his disappointment must have been dreadfully painful. Do you think he suffers from melancholy? Is that what ails him?” He stood, I couldn’t help noticing, as stiffly as the waiter in The Night Café, hands empty at his sides.

“Not at the moment,” I told him. “Patients afflicted by melancholy are always on the verge of fading away. You feel they would like to vanish if they could. But Vincent has such force. You can feel his eyes always moving, seeking motifs and rejecting them. He seems to think of nothing but painting.”

“That is almost true,” Theo agreed and turned to lift his lantern from the shelf. “To the extent that he thinks of anything else, it is almost always related to painting. Even when he reads, he thinks about how the writer’s thoughts could be expressed in color. When he meets someone new, he wonders whether their face would be interesting to paint. He sees the whole world as if there were a palette always in his hand. Shall we go? I must get back to my wife and baby. We called my son Vincent, you know,” he added, looking back from the door. “After my brother, of course, although Vincent thought we should have called the child after our father.”

“Yet he must be pleased,” I said, following Theo’s lantern down the narrow staircase.

“Yes, of course.” Theo’s voice came from below. “In his own way. He painted the most beautiful canvas when he heard that our son had been born. He was in the asylum then. The painting is a branch of blossoming almond against a blue sky, the most limpid, serene blue. A picture of immense tenderness.” By now we were back in Tanguy’s shop. Theo carefully snuffed the lanterns and hung them back on the hook.

“Thank you so much, Monsieur Tanguy,” he called through the door to the back room. “Please do not disturb your dinner. Good evening, Madame Tanguy. I left the lanterns on the stair. We will see ourselves out.”

I was almost startled to find myself on a busy Parisian street on a warm May evening, with light and noise coming from the little square at the end of the block. I turned to Theo and held out my hand. “I am most grateful, Monsieur van Gogh, that you took the time to show me these paintings. Of course I will see more of Monsieur Vincent’s work in Auvers—I believe it is vital for his health that he continue to work—but I am glad you could show me some of his paintings from recent years.” I took a deep breath, trying to control the emotion that I knew was in my voice. “Please believe that I will do everything I can to preserve the welfare of a man with such a gift.”

I knew I might seem overwrought, but I was not embarrassed. Let Theo think what he pleased. If he was taken aback, he had enough command of his features to hide it. “One could ask for no more,” he answered.