Lust for Life

In the little spare room he put up his canvas of his friends the De Groots, the Potato Eaters; it was the first oil in which he had expressed himself fully. All about it he pinned dozens of studies of the weavers of Nuenen, the peasants in mourning, the graveyard behind his father’s church, the slim, tapering steeple.

In his own bedroom he hung the oil paintings from the Paris period, the ones he had put on Theo’s walls in the Rue Lepic the night he left for Aries. In the living room he crowded every last blazing Arlesian canvas he could fit on the walls. In Theo’s bedroom he put up the pictures he had created while in the asylum at St. Remy.

His job finished, he cleared the floor, put on his hat and coat, walked down the four flights of stairs, and wheeled his namesake in the sunshine of the Cité Pigalle, while Johanna held his arm and chatted with him in Dutch.

Theo swung in from the Rue Pigalle at a little after twelve, waved to them happily, broke into a run, and scooped the baby out of the perambulator with a loving gesture. They left the carriage with the concierge and walked up stairs, chatting animatedly. When they came to the front door, Vincent stopped them.

“I’m going to take you to a Van Gogh exhibition, Theo and Jo,” he said. “So steel yourself for the ordeal.”

“An exhibit, Vincent?” asked Theo. “Where?”

“Just shut your eyes,” said Vincent.

He threw the door open and the three Van Goghs stepped into the foyer. Theo and Johanna gazed about, stunned.

“When I was living in Etten,” said Vincent, “father once remarked that good could never grow out of bad. I replied that not only it could, but that in art it must. If you will follow me, my dear brother and sister, I will show you the story of a man who began crudely, like an awkward child, and after ten years of constant labour, arrived at . . . but you shall decide that for yourselves.”

He led them, in the proper chronological sequence, from room to room. They stood like three visitors in an art gallery, looking at this work which was a man’s life. They felt the slow, painful growth of the artist, the fumbling toward maturity of expression, the upheaval that had taken place in Paris, the passionate outburst of his powerful voice in Arles, which caught up all the strands of his years of labour . . . and then . . . the smash . . . the St. Remy canvases . . . the crucial striving to keep up to the blaze of creation, and the falling slowly away . . . falling . . . falling . . . falling . . .

They looked at the exhibit through the eyes of casual strangers. Before them they saw, in a brief half hour, the recapitulation of one man’s stay on earth.

Johanna served a typical Brabant lunch. Vincent was happy just to taste Dutch food once again. After she had cleared away, the two men lit their pipes and chatted.

“You must be very careful to do everything Doctor Gachet tells you, Vincent.”

“Yes, Theo, I will.”

“Because, you see, he’s a specialist in nervous diseases. If you carry out his instructions, you are sure to recover.”

“I promise.”

“Gachet paints, too. He exhibits each year with the Independents under the name of P. Van Ryssel.”

“Is his work good, Theo?”

“No, I shouldn’t say so. But he’s one of those men who have a genius for recognizing genius. He came to Paris at the age of twenty to study medicine, and became friends with Courbet, Murger, Champfleury, and Proudhon. He used to frequent the café La Nouvelle Athens, and soon was intimate with Manet, Renoir, Degas, Durante, and Claude Monet. Daubigny and Daumier painted in his house years before there even was such a thing as Impressionism.”

“You don’t say!”

“Nearly everything he has was painted either in his garden or his living room. Pissarro, Guillaumin, Sisley, Delacroix, they’ve all gone out to work with Gachet in Auvers. You’ll find canvases of Cezanne, Lautrec, and Seurat on the walls, too. I tell you, Vincent, there hasn’t been an important painter since the middle of the century who wasn’t Doctor Gachet’s friend.”

“Whoa! Wait a minute, Theo, you’re frightening me. I don’t belong in such illustrious company. Has he seen any of my work yet?”

“You idiot, why do you suppose he’s so eager to have you come to Auvers?”

“Blessed if I know.”

“He thought your Arlesian night scenes in the last Independents the best canvases in the whole show. I swear to you, when I showed him the sunflower panels you painted for Gauguin and the yellow house, the tears came to his eyes. He turned to me and said, ‘Monsieur Van Gogh, your brother is a great artist. There has never been anything like the yellow of these sunflowers before in the history of art. These canvases alone, Monsieur, will make your brother immortal.’”

Vincent scratched his head and grinned.

“Well,” he said, “if Doctor Gachet feels that way about my sunflowers, he and I shall get along together.”

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