Van Gogh by Gregory White Smith

Author:Gregory White Smith [Smith, Gregory White]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0375507485
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Couple Dancing, DECEMBER 1885, CHALK ON PAPER, 3½ × 6⅜ IN. (Illustration credit 26.1)

VINCENT FILLED HIS first letters from Antwerp with desperate enthusiasm. “I feel a power within me to do something,” he wrote soon after his arrival. “I am very glad I came here.” Whether out of genuine optimism or as cover for his hasty, ignominious exit from Nuenen, he mounted yet another campaign for bourgeois respectability. Instead of sermons on Millet and treatises on color, he regaled his brother with strategies for showing and selling his work. After years of vehemently resisting, he offered to find a “job on the side”—making decorations for restaurants or painting signboards (“for instance, for a fishmonger, still life of fishes”). “One thing is certain,” he declared, “I want my things to be seen.”

Abandoning his rhetoric on the joys of the heath and solidarity with the peasants, he hailed the “bustle” of Antwerp’s chaotic commercial life, claiming “I needed it badly.” He bought new clothes and began to eat regularly, arguing the new mandate of success. “One must not look too hungry or shabby,” he wrote. “On the contrary, one must try to make things hum.” He rented a room in an impressive apartment block on the city’s burgeoning east side—a new but respectable neighborhood—and outfitted it with the trappings of an artist’s studio, including a stock of new canvases, better brushes, and more expensive pigments. To replace his beloved illustrations abandoned in Nuenen, he papered the walls with the cheap, colorful Japanese prints available in every dockside shop. “My little room has turned out better than I expected,” he crowed. “[This] is a splendid place for a painter.”

He charged fearlessly into Antwerp’s parochial art market, carrying under his arm the only three major paintings he had brought from Nuenen: an avenue of poplars, a moody view of a mill at twilight, and The Bible. Rather than bludgeoning dealers with endless arguments on behalf of these images, as he had Theo, he immediately set out to diversify his portfolio. In the first weeks after his arrival, he tried painting some of the tourist fare that he saw at many of the galleries he visited—picturesque street scenes and vistas of the old city from the opposite bank of the Schelde; romantic views of Antwerp’s medieval landmarks such as the cathedral, the Grote Markt, and the ninth-century castle Het Steen. Such images, he assured Theo, were “just the thing for foreigners who want to have a souvenir.”

Even as city life tempered some of the obsessions of the heath, it inflamed others. Like a sailor too long at sea, Vincent came to Antwerp with one overriding mandate: women.

Since leaving The Hague two years before, his quest for female companionship had never really abated. He continued to patronize prostitutes in Eindhoven throughout his time in Nuenen, and no doubt availed himself of their services on his trips to Utrecht, Antwerp, and Amsterdam. The liaison with Gordina de Groot had proved more tantalizing than satisfying. Although she probably succumbed to his pleading (and payment) to pose naked, it was never enough.

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