Leaving Van Gogh

Four





AFTER THAT EVENING, the image of The Night Café rose before me each time Vincent entered my mind. I wished that I had been able to see the painting of almond branches in bloom that Theo had described. It would have given me something to set against the desolation of the red and green café. But what was more significant, I found that I was now thinking of Vincent van Gogh as an artist rather than as a patient. Before I saw his work, he was for me a troubled man whom I might be able to help as I had helped others. Now I was glad that I had not seen his work before I examined him. As a patient, I had found him intriguing; as an artist, he was formidable.

My mind was full of the beautiful and terrifying paintings stacked up in Tanguy’s attic when Vincent came to visit on the last Sunday in May. I was a little bit startled when Madame Chevalier, with an air of faint reluctance, showed him into the salon. He seemed so small compared to the image of him that his work had built up in my mind. The man who painted those canvases should, I thought, be a titanic physical presence, a man whose courage could be read in his features, not a slight figure in an ill-fitting coat.

We skirmished over coffee and rolls—I was always trying to feed him. But Vincent had come ready to paint, and he would not be distracted. He roamed about the gardens a bit, considering, hesitating, then finally set up his easel before the house, where the terraces step down to the street. I left him, not wanting to hover as he worked. Curiosity, however, drove me to my studio on the third floor several times in the course of that morning. From its window, I could watch his progress. I saw him set a small oblong canvas on the easel and start squeezing colors onto his palette, tossing the mangled tubes back into his box in no order at all. Less than an hour later, the canvas was half-covered. I could not see the details, but Vincent’s brush darted at the painting like a hummingbird.

The time for luncheon approached. I had suggested that Madame Chevalier make a soufflé because of Vincent’s ill-fitting teeth, but that also meant we could not be late to the table, lest the soufflé deflate. While our housekeeper was very fierce in protecting our interests, she had a soft spot for the vulnerable. I was playing on this when I told her about Vincent’s pain while eating and his great need to become stronger; his life in Auvers would be more comfortable if Madame Chevalier was one of his allies. Promptness at meals was essential to winning her over, but I was reluctant to interrupt Vincent. He was painting in a furor, and I feared that, if I disrupted it, the picture could not be finished. I expected him to be possessed, in a way. I could not imagine that the spirit that allowed him to slash paint onto the canvas at such a rate could coexist with the mundanities of a soufflé and the necessity to clean the paint off his hands. He was perfectly affable, however. He finished a twirling orange knot of blossom—I was proud of my dahlias, and delighted to see them painted—and willingly put his brush down.

The painting is before me now, as I write. Vincent gave it to me later that week, when it had dried somewhat. I think he meant the gift as an exchange of sorts, a kind of payment for my care of him, like my paintings from Renoir and Monet. I am still startled by the life and vigor bursting off the canvas. I am lucky enough to own some two dozen of his paintings, many of which are more important than this, which he thought of as merely a “sketch.” But I cannot see this one without being reminded of the first time I watched Vincent van Gogh paint.

I will confess to some initial confusion. I had thought I was abreast of the times, accustomed to the new techniques that involved painting spontaneously to capture fleeting visual conditions. By definition, this goal required swift execution. But Vincent van Gogh did not even appear to think about this composition, let alone plan it. It looked as if he merely tossed paint at the canvas. I could not help contrasting his slapdash approach with my own much more painstaking process: sketching, underpainting, blending pigments. I understood the principle of what he was doing; the eye would do the blending. And of course, as I now knew, he was immoderately gifted. That, no doubt, was why I had to work so much harder for results that pleased me much less.

Vincent became a familiar presence in our house over the next few weeks. On the days when I was in Auvers, he would ring the bell at the gate whenever he passed by. He came to the house one morning and made a beautiful painting of Marguerite watering the roses in the garden. Sometimes he came in just to drink something cool, or to drop off a book he had mentioned to me. We would sit in the shade behind the house and talk about what he had seen or painted that day. He never stayed very long, though; Vincent was industrious, and his next project always called out to him.

Once, I persuaded him to go fishing with me. It was a dull day, one of the few that summer, with low clouds that periodically released showers as if they could no longer be bothered to restrain them. For some reason I don’t remember, Paul was not with us. Perhaps it was so early in June that he was still at the lycée in Paris. Marguerite and Madame Chevalier had embarked on some ambitious and noisy housekeeping task. It was one of those days when I was out of sorts and nothing pleased me, so I barked my displeasure when the women came to the door of the salon with their aprons and feather dusters. Marguerite quailed, as she always did when I raised my voice, but Madame Chevalier, a creature of stronger fiber, thumped down her infernal tools, advanced on me, and suggested forcefully that I remove myself to the riverbank. “If it’s dirt and mess you want, you’ll find it aplenty there. We’ll be finished by sunset, but you’ll have to find yourself a meal elsewhere. I did tell you this, you know.”

I was grateful at that moment that I did not have a wife. There is occasionally something intolerable in women’s obsession with order. I put on my oldest jacket and tore off a good third of a baguette I found in the kitchen, seized my fishing rod, and headed to the river as Madame Chevalier had suggested. It even bothered me that I was obeying her—but fish do come to the surface on damp days like that.

I encountered Vincent near the train station, walking slowly with his shoulders hunched against the rain. He was carrying his painting kit, but a discouraged look on his face suggested that the weather had forced him to change his plans. He had hoped to paint the cottages in the rain, but the humidity interfered with the application of pigment to the canvas. “It so rarely rains in the South,” he told me. “I feel very foolish as well as disappointed.”

I, on the other hand, was delighted to see him. A solitary afternoon beneath the willows would not have been terrible, but Vincent’s company in a rowboat—that would be quite charming.

It was not easy to persuade him to join me. I had to walk back to Ravoux’s with him and beg the loan of a large umbrella so that Vincent could still sketch on the boat in the rain. He refused to have anything to do with a fishing rod. Then at the landing stage, where I rented a boat for a paltry sum—there was certainly no one else out that day—Vincent balked at stepping into the craft. One does not want to laugh in such a situation, for he was masking genuine fear, but his almost childish apprehension was comical. Once we were launched, he seemed consoled by my obvious competence at the oars—at least he could be sure I would not overturn the boat—and before long he was intrigued by the entirely new vantage point provided by the little craft. For my part, I was pleased for once to be the expert, showing him how to sit in the center of the boat, pointing out little landmarks like the river otters’ den. Paul had long since seen everything and sometimes attempted to snub me in similar circumstances, but Vincent was much more receptive. Bit by bit, his apprehension diminished. Then he confessed: “I cannot swim, you know.”

“The river is shallow. And I would have thought you Dutchmen were all at home on the water.”

He laughed. “You know, even fishermen often can’t swim. Imagine what a predicament! Spending your time on the open water, every day, in every weather, always aware that it can kill you.”

“The Oise cannot kill you,” I remember saying, not entirely truthfully. A hip bath can kill you, if you want it to. I shipped the oars and prepared to bait my hook. Vincent watched intently. Then I dropped the hook overboard and let it drift in the current.

“Is that all you do?” he asked.

I was surprised. “Yes.”

“I was expecting nets, I think,” Vincent said. Then he began to laugh. “But that would be ridiculous! I was thinking of ocean fishing, where men go out to sea and put their lives at risk!”

I had to laugh with him. “That being the case, you were very brave to get into this boat with me.”

“That was certainly my opinion!”

This short exchange put us on a new footing. We were companions rather than doctor and patient. Vincent refused to bait the hook, claiming that he could not bear to be cruel to the earthworm, but he took his turn with the rod and reeled in a fairly respectable perch, which he then sketched, lying on the flat seat between us. I wish I knew what had become of that drawing. I suppose those notebooks went back to Holland with Johanna.

“Do you ever paint still lifes?” I asked Vincent, as he admired his catch. I had seen flower paintings at Tanguy’s in Paris, but I wondered about other subjects. “When Cézanne was here, he painted apples over and over again.”

“Because he could find nothing better to paint?” Vincent asked.

“No, we put bouquets together and painted those, and he went out into the village as well. He was experimenting with rendering volume, I believe.”

“That seems to be all he ever does. I understand that this is his primary concern, and I can imagine that he must find it interesting, but the results are quite dull. The colors are always the same, have you noticed?”

“Not always. You’ve seen my flower pieces—he uses clearer tones there.”

“True, but the landscapes are most monotonous. Always the same dreary green.” He pointed at his fish. “Now, you see, if I had my paints, I could make something beautiful with that gleaming skin, something Cézanne would never think of. I would have liked to do that. A kind of silvery olive, shaded with pink. Can I take him with me?”

“Of course,” I said, “but you’d better give him to Ravoux to cook for your dinner. The skin will dull very quickly, and then he will start to smell.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Vincent said with a frown and returned to his sketch. “I painted some sardines once, but even though I work quickly, I could not tolerate their smell for very long. It was a while before I could eat sardines again after that.”

He ended up not painting that fish but eating it, which made me even happier. He came back to the house with me, and Madame Chevalier sautéed his catch and mine with almonds and fresh parsley. I saw him eyeing the skeleton on his plate when he had finished, as if he would have liked to draw it, but he let Madame Chevalier remove the plate without any protest.

If Vincent came to the house on the way to Ravoux’s at the end of the day, he liked to show me what he had painted. Soon we were accustomed to his speed, to the élan with which he covered even large canvases with paint. Once Paul finished his school term, and returned home for the summer, he would often clean up after our new friend; you could always tell where in Auvers Vincent had been working, and often what colors he had used. Paul sometimes came home from his wanderings around the village with one of Vincent’s paint tubes or abandoned brushes, tossed aside when the bristles failed. As I knew, Theo kept him supplied with materials; the shipments from Paris must have been prodigious.

It was the first sign Paul showed of having any artistic inclination, despite my numerous previous attempts to share my interests with him. I told myself that this was because Vincent was a younger man, closer to Paul in age than I was. Certainly Vincent made no attempt to win Paul over, though my son followed him around like a puppy. Paul sometimes tried to strike up a conversation, but Vincent rarely responded beyond mere courtesy. This did not seem to discourage Paul, though. He was always persistent when he wanted something. To this day I wonder what he hoped for from Vincent. Some kind of approval or acknowledgment, I suppose.

The paintings accumulated quickly. I was slightly concerned about Vincent’s almost feverish pace, lest he wear himself out. Yet he seemed to be delighted rather than anxious. This ardor was one of his most compelling traits. Each time I returned from my customary four-day stint in Paris, he was eager to show me what he had done in my absence. It was as if he were discovering the world I lived in with eyes that unveiled a new splendor. It appeared that he could not be deterred by discomfort or fatigue or discouragement. When a painting did not please him, he thought of another way to approach the subject. He was always thinking about the next thing he wanted to paint. His speed reflected a kind of hunger to make the beauty all around him his own. I found this both fascinating and inspiring.

Vincent was using a kind of shed at Ravoux’s as storage, and by early June, it was beginning to fill with images of Auvers, then with shipments of paintings Vincent had made in the South, then with more Auvers paintings. He loved the crooked little thatched cottages and the fields patchworked with their different shades of green. I never tired of examining the way he applied the paint—in waves or dashes or thick, swirling rosettes. Sometimes he would cover a background with a kind of woven effect, painstakingly applied.

He did not mind at all when I watched him, I discovered. In fact, he said he concentrated better with someone to talk to.

I thought that was why he wanted to paint my portrait—that he might as well make use of my constant presence. He was surprisingly modest in his request, asking if I might be able to spare him the time for a sitting. Of course I was flattered and intrigued. I had by then seen his exquisite self-portrait, the one with the swirling blue background that I am fortunate enough to own now. There was a rigor to it that I admired immensely. It was not a portrait in the old-fashioned sense, a painting that demonstrated a sitter’s position in life and permitted him to think well of himself. Van Gogh’s self-portrait with the blue flames is an examination. In fact, I thought, that afternoon, as Vincent arranged his easel, that it was now his turn to examine me. I had peered at his body and attempted to diagnose the state of his mind, and he would now do likewise to me.

When my old friend Amand Gautier painted me as a young man, we discussed the format, the pose, even which one of my two coats I should wear. He sketched a few different poses, drew my figure three or four times to work out his lighting scheme. That portrait was finished in three weeks, and we thought his swiftness astounding. (I might add that it was a great success in the Salon of 1861, and that I gained a degree of renown from the painting and the lithograph reproduction of it.) Now here I was, sitting at the red table in the garden behind the house, without any obvious preparation. But of course Vincent van Gogh never did anything conventionally. I would have liked to change into something more elegant, but Vincent would not permit this.

“No, Doctor, just as you are,” he said. “We’ll do very well with your old jacket.” I made to take off my hat, but he would not permit that, either, though it was only a stained sailor’s cap with a narrow leather brim. Vincent stood a few feet away, squeezing blue and red and yellow paint onto his palette.

“And how would you like me to pose?” I asked, feeling somewhat at a loss. “Perhaps I could be writing something?”

“No, no,” he answered, scrutinizing the bristles on a brush and discarding it. “Just lean your head on your hand and look at me.” I obeyed. I already knew better than to suggest an alternative.

He stepped back and gazed at me. “We need another note,” he muttered, almost to himself. “Yellow.” He glanced around, as if the desired color would appear before him.

“Have you any yellow blooms, Doctor?” he asked. “I don’t know your northern plants very well. I want something strong, like the yolk of an egg.”

“There are the orange dahlias you painted the other day,” I suggested.

“No, I must have yellow, the primary color. You see the red of the table and the blue of your coat require it, a strong, true yellow like the cover of a novel. Actually, a book would do nicely.”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “Shall I get one?”

“Yes,” he said. “But I will paint your figure first. I like this pose. It shows that you have been long acquainted with grief.”

So he was indeed examining me, and he had managed to discern a truth about me that I did not often acknowledge. Blanche had been gone for many years already; perhaps I should have been able to put the pain and guilt of her death behind me. Yet I often felt that I carried it with me like a heavy stone, a burden I could never put down. Many a man has been widowed young, but there is a special anguish in being a doctor who cannot cure his wife. Vincent watched me as if waiting for a response. “I lost my wife to illness fifteen years ago,” I confessed. “It is a long time, yet the sadness persists.” I looked around the garden and gestured to the trees and shrubs. “It was at this time of year. Sometimes the way the sunlight falls, or a certain scent on the breeze, brings back a rush of memories.”

“And you did not marry again,” Vincent observed. He had begun to paint, but I hardly noticed his hand moving swiftly from palette to canvas and back.

“No, I did not,” I confirmed. “I never met another woman …”

“Another woman like Madame Gachet?” Vincent prompted.

“No,” I agreed. I fell silent again. It was the truth. Yet there was a freedom, too, in being unmarried, which brought me occasional solace. Sometimes bachelors like Vincent imagine marriage as a blissful union, but there is a constraint. A married man must live up to his wife. Or perhaps I felt this only because of how Blanche had died. The last days of a consumptive’s life are wretched and painful, yet Blanche showed only courage and kindness as she left us. For me she had forgiveness and more. There is a terrible rebuke in pity from a woman you have failed. I felt that, in contrast to her steadfastness, I had discovered only cowardice in myself. That discovery has haunted me ever since. In any event, I did not expect Vincent to understand.

Looking at one of his canvases, you can imagine how he moved constantly while he painted. The pigment seems to have been applied with his whole body. As I sat still on that early summer afternoon, he danced around me, stepping back and forth to the canvas, bending his knees, shifting his weight. And talking all the while. I value intensely some of the things he told me that afternoon. He was fascinated by portraits, and loathed photographs; he despised their slavish recording of physical features.

“I believe that, with color, I can capture a more enduring truth,” he said. “Something more in the nature of a dream, that has a truth of its own that may be different from what we experience every day. For example, I will paint your face in brick red.” (Naturally I found this notion somewhat alarming.) “Next to the blue background, it will appear much paler. Your face will look rosy, healthy—but I will be able to show also how the distress of time has played on your features.” He hoped, he told me, that his portraits might still be valued a hundred years hence, allowing the people of that distant era to better understand the conditions of life as we ended the nineteenth century. He seemed not to think it at all unlikely that people would still know his paintings in 1990. It was a strange kind of confidence for a man whose work had been seen primarily in cafés, a paint shop, and his brother’s apartment, and bought by precisely one collector.

When he was satisfied with a rough outline of my figure, he allowed me to stand up and move about. “Would you find me that novel, Doctor?” he asked. “Two volumes would be best. I don’t mind what they are, but they must be yellow.”

I returned to the garden with a pair of volumes that he placed carefully in front of me. “Have you read any of the Goncourts’ novels, Doctor?” he asked.

“No,” I answered. “I have heard of them, naturally.”

“I will give these books two of their titles. One of them, Germinie Lacerteux, concerns a remarkable case of mental degeneration. I understand it was the authors’ maid who inspired it. When she became ill and died, they discovered that she had led a secret existence of complete debauchery. She drank and went with men—she had even had a child, I believe. Yet they never guessed it.”

“What a tale!” I answered. “Of course I have seen women subject to these compulsions, but they normally become apparent. It seems those brothers must not have been terribly observant.”

“Perhaps not.” Vincent knelt on the ground, his head hidden by the canvas. The palette rested on one of his bent legs, and a brush laden with cadmium yellow darted between canvas and palette. “Yet because it is about the woman’s disastrous mental state, it will allude to your work with ailments of the mind. And the other title is Manette Salomon. You don’t know it either?” He peered out from the side of the canvas as he asked this.

“No,” I said.

“A marvelous book. Not unlike Zola’s L’Oeuvre. Which you certainly know,” he went on and withdrew behind the canvas again.

“That one, yes,” I answered. “I was especially interested in it because of my connection with Cézanne.” Zola’s novel had created quite a furor in the circles I frequented. It was an unsparing portrait of an unsuccessful artist who was so obviously based on Cézanne that after it was published the artist and author had parted ways, despite a lifelong friendship.

“Well, Manette Salomon is quite similar, only there are also echoes of Manet’s career. In any event, it concerns the harsh life of the artist who tries to create something new. And it will refer to your interest in art and artists.”

Vincent got to his feet and stepped back. “Yes, that is what I wanted. The yellow heightens the blue and the red. It locks the whole composition into place. Yet we are still missing a note. You wouldn’t have any lavender, or mauve? Surely somewhere in your garden?” He came around to my side of the canvas to look over the flower beds. There was a spot of vermilion on his sleeve.

I pointed to the bells of the foxglove just a few meters away. “Would that do?” I asked. “Shall I cut it for you?”

“No, Doctor, I can get it. Do you mind if I break off a stalk?” He didn’t wait for permission. “What a pretty blossom. What is it called?”

“Foxglove,” I told him. “Also known as digitalis. We doctors use the extract of the leaves to control some heart disorders.”

“Oh, wonderful,” he answered. “For we could also say, Doctor, that you take care of your patients’ hearts, couldn’t we?” It was the kind of allusion that made him happy.

It is easy to forget, in light of what happened to him, that Vincent had a playful side, but the evidence of his humor is right there in my portrait. We had been discussing my career and some of the more striking incidents that had earned me nomination to the Order of the Legion of Honor. For instance, when I was still a medical student, I traveled to the Jura to help care for the patients in a cholera epidemic. Upon my return, one of the doctors sent my nomination to the minister of health, but nothing came of it. Other episodes resulted in subsequent nominations: my activity during a train wreck on the Chemin de Fer du Nord, for example, or my medical services during the siege of Paris. When I related these to Vincent—I had been nominated, without success, six times by 1890—he laughed and took up a narrow brush, dashing it through a streak of scarlet on his palette, and slashed a thread through my lapel on the canvas—the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor. “Never mind, Doctor,” he said, “you’ll get your ribbon yet. Perhaps for your services to the arts!” he crowed, taking the joke a step further. “Doctor to all the renegade painters in Paris, the refusés and intransigeants and Impressionists and every kind of rebel. The Ministry of Arts will reward you for keeping us all alive and making masterpieces!” He paused in the midst of laughing and frowned, scrutinizing the canvas. “In any event, that streak of red intensifies the blue of your coat. I like the effect.” Still, he did not include the “ribbon” in the duplicate portrait he made for me at my request. I suppose I am glad, since I still have not received the award. It might have been difficult to explain to viewers that this was a little painterly joke.

When Vincent allowed me to stand up and stretch, I could see that it was indeed my face appearing on the canvas. I looked despondent. My eyes gazed out beyond the viewer to something—or nothing. You could say I was lost in an unhappy reverie. The skin of my cheek was pushed up and wrinkled by the fist it rested on. There, identifiably, were my red hair, my mustache, the tiny bit of beard I wore in those days. The features were mine.

Yet in a way it was also not me. There I was, a haunted man, with the gay yellow books and the bells of the foxglove pressed up to the front of the picture. The angle of the flowers echoed the way my body leaned to the side of the canvas, so that the yellow books somehow held us steady. But for all the physical resemblance, what makes this portrait a marvel is not the way it captures anything specific to me. It is more than that: Vincent used my features to create a portrait of world-weariness. He later told me that he had described it to Gauguin in a letter as having “the despairing expression of our times.”

I have thought of every conversation I had with Vincent so often that I could repeat them all exactly. Vincent asked questions. He solicited opinions. However, looking back, I wonder if these conversations were ever true exchanges or just Vincent’s attempts to seek confirmation for what he already believed. And I have wondered, in the years since then, whether Vincent perceived the people he knew as individuals. He had a great love for humankind—he spoke often about the suffering in the world, and I do believe that he felt it deeply. What he did not seem to feel was the suffering of the particular human beings around him. Or, for that matter, their anxiety, their impatience, their satisfaction, their longing. Certainly this inability affected his relations with Theo. It also explained the unfortunate episodes of his attachments to women, as Theo had described them to me. It was a mark of the extent of his mental alienation, but, alas, I did not recognize it until much later.

When I arrived at this conclusion, I felt somewhat disillusioned, I must confess. I had become accustomed to thinking of him as a man of wisdom. I preferred not to see his limitation: he had compassion for mankind but not for individual men. I felt that, in sitting for a portrait, I had trusted him to plumb my soul, much the way he had trusted me when he first arrived in Auvers. And indeed, he had done that in a way, by seeing the grief that I carried around as an invisible burden. He saw it, and he used it in my portrait as an emblem. He did not, I realized, understand it. He knew what my grief looked like, but not what it was to suffer it.

But there was no reason why he should, I had to remind myself. I was the doctor, he the patient, and one does not anticipate that the patient shall turn and diagnose the one who is supposed to cure him. Further, I had been painted before and was painted again afterward without expecting such profound revelations. It was just that Vincent was so extraordinary that one tended to expect marvels from him. Disappointment was inevitable.