The owner of the lumber yard sent him as models all the men who came for work and could not get it. As his pocketbook emptied his portfolio filled. He drew the baby in the cradle by the stove many, many times. When the fall rains came he worked outdoors on oil torchon and captured the effects he wanted. He quickly learned that a colourist is one who, seeing a colour in nature, knows at once how to analyse it and say. “That grey-green is yellow with black, and hardly any blue.”
Whether he was drawing the figure or landscape, he wished to express not sentimental melancholy but serious sorrow. He wanted to reach out so far that people would say of his work, “He feels deeply, he feels tenderly.”
He knew that in the eyes of the world he was a good-for-nothing, an eccentric and disagreeable man, someone who had no position in life. He wanted to show in his work just what there was in the heart of such an eccentric man, of such a nobody. In the poorest huts, in the dirtiest corners, he saw drawings and pictures. The more he painted, the more other activities lost their interest. The more he got rid of them the quicker his eye grasped the picturesque qualities of life. Art demanded persistent work, work in spite of everything, and a continuous observation.
The only difficulty was that oil pigments were so frightfully expensive, and he laid his colour on so thick. When he squeezed it out of the tube on to the canvas in rich deep masses, it was like pouring francs into the Zuider Zee. He painted so fast that his canvas bill was enormous; he did at one sitting an oil that would have taken Mauve two months. Well, he could not paint thin, and he could not work slowly; his money evaporated and his studio became filled with pictures. As soon as his allowance arrived from Theo—who had arranged to send fifty francs on the first, tenth, and twentieth—he would rush down to the dealer and buy large tubes of ochre, cobalt, and Prussian blue, and smaller tubes of Naples yellow, terra sienna, ultramarine, and gamboge. Then he would work happily until the paints and the francs were exhausted, usually five or six days after the allowance arrived from Paris, and his troubles set in again.
He was amazed to find that so many things had to be bought for the baby; that Christine had to have constant medicines, new garments, special foods; that Herman had to buy books and supplies for the school he was sent to; and that the household was a bottomless pit into which he was forever pouring lamps, pots, blankets, coal and wood, curtains, rugs, candles, sheets, silverware, plates, furniture, and an endless stream of food. It was hard to know just how to apportion the fifty francs between his painting and the three people who were dependent upon him.
“You look like a labourer rushing off to the wine shop the minute he gets paid,” remarked Christine one time when Vincent snatched the fifty francs out of Theo’s envelope and began gathering up empty tubes.
He built a new perspective instrument with two long legs that would stand up in the sand of the dunes, and had the blacksmith make iron corners for the frame. Scheveningen, with the sea, the sand dunes, the fisherfolk, the barks and horses and nets, lured him most. He trudged across the dunes every day, loaded down with his heavy easel and perspective instrument, to catch the changing nature of the sea and sky. As fall deepened and other artists began to hug their studio fires, he went out to paint in the wind, the rain, the mist and the storm. In the roughest of weather his wet paint often became covered with blowing sand and salt water. The rain drenched him, the mist and wind chilled him, the sand got into his eyes and nose . . . and he loved every last minute of it. Nothing but death could stop him now.
One night he showed Christine a new canvas. “But Vincent,” she exclaimed, “how do you make it look so real?”
Vincent forgot he was speaking to an illiterate woman of the people. He might have been talking to Weissenbruch or Mauve.
“I don’t know myself,” he said. “I sit down with a white board before the spot that strikes me, and I say, ‘That white board must become something!’ I work for a long time, I come back home dissatisfied, I put it away in the closet. When I have rested a little I go to look at it with a kind of fear. I am still dissatisfied because I have too clearly in my mind the splendid original to be content with what I have made of it. But after all, I find in my work an echo of what struck me. I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me, and that I have put it down in shorthand. In my shorthand there may be words that cannot be deciphered, there may be mistakes or gaps, but there is something in it of what the woods or beach or figure has told me. Do you understand?”
“No.”
13
CHRISTINE UNDERSTOOD VERY little of what he was doing. She thought his hunger to paint things a sort of costly obsession. She knew it was the rock upon which his life was built, however, and made no attempt to oppose him; the purpose, the slow progress and painful expression of his work were completely lost upon her. She was a good companion for ordinary domestic purposes, but only a very small part of Vincent’s life was domestic. When he wished to express himself in words, he was forced to write to Theo; he poured out a long passionate letter almost every night, telling of all the things he had seen, painted, and thought during the day. When he wished to enjoy the expression of others, he turned to novels: French, English, German and Dutch. Christine shared only a fraction of his life. But he was satisfied; he did not regret his decision to take Christine to wife, nor did he attempt to force upon her the intellectual pursuits for which she was manifestly unqualified.
All this was very well during the long months of the summer, autumn, and fall, when he left the house as early as five and six o’clock in the morning, to be gone until the light of day failed completely and he had to trudge home across the dunes in the cool dusk. But when a terrific snow-storm served to celebrate the first anniversary of their meeting in the wine shop opposite the Ryn station, and Vincent had to work at home from morning until night, it became more difficult to maintain a satisfactory relationship.
He went back to drawing, and saved money on paints, but the models ate him out of house and home. People who would gladly work for next to nothing at the worst kind of menial labour would demand a large sum just to come and sit for him. He asked permission to sketch at the insane asylum, but the authorities declared they had no precedent for it, and besides they were laying new floors so he could not work there except on visiting days.
His only hope lay in Christine. As soon as she was well and strong he expected her to pose for him, work as hard as she had before the baby came. Christine had different ideas. At first she would say, “I’m not strong enough. Wait a bit. You ain’t in any hurry.” When she was completely well again, she thought herself too busy.
“It’s not the same now as it was, Vincent,” she would say. “I got to nurse the baby. And I got to keep a whole house clean. There’s four people to cook for.”
Vincent arose at five in the morning to do the housework so that she would be free to pose during the day. “But I ain’t a model no more,” she protested. “I’m your wife.”
“Sien, you must pose for me! I can’t afford to hire models every day. That’s one of the reasons you’re here.”
Christine flared up into one of the unrestrained fits of temper that had been so common when she first met Vincent. “That’s all you took me in for! So you could save money out of me! I’m just a goddam servant to you! If I don’t pose you’ll throw me out again!”