Читать книгу Vincent van Gogh - Victoria Charles - Страница 4

On March 30^th, 1852, a stillborn son was born at the vicarage of Zundert, but a year later, on the same date, Anna van Gogh gave birth to a healthy boy.[10] Pastor Theodorus van Gogh gave his second-born son the same name as the first: Vincent. When the second Vincent walked to his father’s church to attend services, he passed by the grave where ‘his’ name was written on a tombstone. In the last months of his life, van Gogh reminisced about the places of his childhood and often wistfully mentioned the graveyard of Zundert.

Very little is known about van Gogh as a child. A neighbour’s daughter described him as “kind-hearted, friendly, good, pitiful,”[11] while a former servant girl of the family reported that “Vincent had ‘oarige’ (funny, meaning unpleasantly eccentric) manners, and that he was often punished accordingly.”[12] Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who met her brother-in-law only a few times near the end of his life, also described him as a difficult, naughty, and obstinate child who had been spoiled by overindulgent parents.[13]

Similar inconsistencies appear in descriptions of van Gogh as an adult. Most of the descriptions were collected at the beginning of the twentieth century by van Gogh-Bonger, who took charge of van Gogh’s assets after Theo’s death in 1891. These accounts are somewhat dubious not only because of the distance of time, but also because the dead painter was by then already a figure of legend.

In general, van Gogh was kind and compassionate toward the poor or sick, and also to children. Another important trait that emerged early on, according to the artist’s sister Elisabeth Huberta, was his close relation to nature:

He knew the places where the rarest flowers bloomed […] as regards birds, he knew exactly where each nested or lived, and if he saw a pair of larks descend in the rye field, he knew how to approach their nest without snapping the surrounding blades or harming the birds in the least.[14]

Potato Planting, Nuenen, September 1884.

Oil on canvas, 70.5 x 170 cm.

Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal.

In his last years, van Gogh returned to the landscapes of his childhood through painting. “The whole south, everything became Holland for him,”[15] said Paul Gauguin of the paintings van Gogh made in Arles. In a letter to Emile Bernard, van Gogh compared the heath and flat landscape of the Camargue with Holland. While in the mental hospital of Saint-Rémy he wrote to Theo:

During my illness I saw again every room in the house at Zundert, every path, every plant in the garden, the views of the fields outside, the neighbours, the graveyard, the church, our kitchen garden at the back – down to a magpie’s nest in a tall acacia in the graveyard.[16]

The references to nests made by both Elisabeth Huberta and by van Gogh himself suggests the extent of the importance of this image for the painter. The nest is a symbol of safety, which may explain why he called houses “human nests.”[17]

Van Gogh had to leave his first nest – his parents’ home – at the age of eleven. It is not clear why the elder van Gogh decided to send his son to a boarding school in Zevenbergen, some thirty kilometres from Zundert. Perhaps there was no Protestant school nearby; the neighbourhood of Zundert was almost entirely Catholic. Or perhaps the parents’ nest had simply become too small with the arrival of four more children.

It was an autumn day when I stood on the steps before Mr. Provily’s school, watching the carriage in which Pa and Ma were driving home. One could see the little yellow carriage far down the road – wet with rain and with spare trees on either side – running through the meadows.[18]

A few weeks before his death, van Gogh painted his memory of this farewell: a two-wheel carriage rolling through fields on a narrow path.

At the age of thirteen, Vincent went to high school in Tilburg, where the landscape painter Constantijn C. Huysmans taught him drawing. Only one of van Gogh’s works from school has been preserved: Two Sketches of a Man Leaning on His Spade. In all, about a dozen of van Gogh’s childhood drawings and paintings have survived. On one occasion, according to van Gogh-Bonger, the eight-year-old “had modeled a little clay elephant that drew his parents’ attention, but he destroyed it at once when, according to his notion, such a fuss was made about it.”[19]

During his stay in Tilburg the first of two known photographs of young van Gogh was taken. It shows a soft, boyish face with very light eyes. The second portrait shows van Gogh as an earnest 19-year-old. By then, he had already been at work for three years in The Hague, at the gallery of Goupil & Co, where one of van Gogh’s uncles was a partner. Vincent reports that of the three-and-a-half years he spent in The Hague, “The first two were rather unpleasant, but the last one was much happier.”[20] Van Gogh’s master at Goupil’s was the 24-year-old Hermanus Gijsbertus Tersteeg, of whom the artist wrote:

I knew him during a very peculiar period of his life, when he had just ‘worked his way up,’ as the saying goes, and was newly married besides. He made a very strong impression on me then – he was a practical man, extremely clever and cheerful, energetic in both small and big undertakings; besides, there was real poetry, of the true unsentimental kind, in him. I felt such respect for him then that I always kept at a distance, and considered him a being of a higher order than myself.[21]

Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, Arles, 1888.

Oil on canvas, 40.6 x 32.4 cm.

Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena.

Peasant Women in a Field, Nieuw-Amsterdam, October 1883.

Oil on canvas, 27 x 35.5 cm.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Lane of Poplars at Sunset, Nuenen, October 1885.

Oil on canvas, 46 x 33 cm.

Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.

Head of a Man, Nuenen, March-April 1885.

Oil on canvas, 44 x 32 cm.

Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.

Later, when van Gogh had begun his career as a painter, he would continue struggling – always in vain – to win the respect of the highly regarded dealer.

During his apprenticeship, van Gogh came into contact with the paintings of the salons and of the School of Barbizon, whose most distinguished representative, Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), became one of the most influential figures for the painter. As Goupil & Co. also sold prints, the trainee saw reproductions of many masterpieces. Here, van Gogh built his new nest: the gallery, and later the museums, became his “land of pictures.”[22]

In August 1872, Theo came to see his elder brother in The Hague. During this meeting the two young men, then 19 and 15 years old, became closer in a way that changes relatives into friends. Thereafter, Vincent regarded Theo as his alter ego. Since the brothers lived most of the time in different cities – with the exception of the two years during which they shared a flat in Paris – they communicated through letters: they discussed art, argued about family problems, and gave one another advice about their illnesses and love affairs. Vincent wrote more than 600 letters to his brother for over eighteen years, who collected them faithfully. Most of these were published after van Gogh’s death. Roughly forty of Theo’s letters survived. The others were the casualties of Vincent’s frequent relocations, in which a large number of drawings and paintings were also lost.

“What pleasant days we spent together at The Hague; I think so often of that walk on the Rijswijk road, when we drank milk at the mill after the rain,”[23] van Gogh recalled wistfully in the summer of 1873. By then his training had come to an end, and the young man found himself working for Goupil’s in London:

The business here is only a stockroom, and our work is quite different from that in The Hague; but I shall probably get used to it. At six o’clock my work is already done for the day, so that I have a nice bit of time for myself, which I spend pleasantly – taking walks, reading and letter-writing.[24]

Van Gogh forgets to write about another activity in his spare time: drawing. Ten years later, just as he was about to become an artist, he remembered: “In London how often I stood drawing on the Thames Embankment, on my way home from Southampton Street in the evening, and it came to nothing.”[25]

His favorite reading in London was L’Amour by Jules Michelet: “To me the book has been both a revelation and a Gospel at the same time […] And that man and wife can be one, that is to say, one whole and not two halves, yes, I believe that too.”[26] When van Gogh wrote these sentences at the end of July 1874, he had every hope that his revelation would be fulfilled. But his love for Ursula Loyer, the daughter of his landlady, ended in disaster. Seven years later van Gogh summed up the events: “I gave up a girl and she married another, and I went away, far from her, but kept her in my thoughts always. Fatal.”[27] This representation of the facts is dubious, at best: Eugénie was already engaged when van Gogh met her, and it was not his decision to leave London; in May 1875, he was transferred to Paris – against his will.

Head of a Woman, The Hague, December 1882.

Lead pencil, ink and black pencil, 47.6 x 26.3 cm.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

By this time, van Gogh had already given up his gospel of earthly love and turned instead to the love of God. His religious enthusiasm was perhaps one reason why he had to leave Goupil’s in London. The business, moved into a bigger house, was no longer just a stockroom but a public gallery. And the solitary and eccentric van Gogh had difficulty pleasing the clientele. His family may also have wanted to bring an end to his ‘affair’ with Ursula. Van Gogh himself suspected his father and uncle of being behind the transfer. He retaliated with silence – a weapon that he came to rely on quite often in conflicts. Theo, who had taken Vincent’s place in Goupil’s office in The Hague, thus became the only member of the family with whom van Gogh maintained contact. The brothers continued to exchange their opinions about art.

Vincent wrote often of his visits to the Louvre, and in particular, of his passion for the paintings of Ruysdael and Rembrandt. Above all else, van Gogh was an enthusiast, not a dealer, and he had little patience for the paintings he was supposed to sell at Goupil’s. His parents were informed of his failure in the business. When Vincent came home for Christmas in 1875 – clearly without having obtained permission to leave the gallery during the busiest time of the year – his father suggested that he resign. But by then it was already too late, and the gallery manager dismissed van Gogh immediately after his return to Paris.

Van Gogh decided not to return to Holland, but to go to England. He found work as an assistant teacher in Ramsgate and later as an assistant preacher in Isleworth. In October 1876 he gave his first sermon, whose central thesis was: “We are pilgrims on the earth and strangers – we come from afar and we are going far.”[28] When he returned to Holland to join his family for Christmas, his parents had already decided to change the direction of his journey through life, by steering him into the bookstore of Pieter Kornelius Braat in Dordrecht. Vincent accepted and took a position in the accounting department of the shop. But his Bible studies continued to be his main interest. On his first Sunday in Dordrecht, van Gogh went to church twice to listen to a sermon about this verse from the first epistle to the Corinthians: “Now we look through a mirror into a dark reason, now I only know in part, but then I shall know even as also I am known myself.”[29] In his letters to Theo, van Gogh referred to this sentence obliquely: “When we meet again, we shall be as good friends as ever; sometimes I feel so delighted that we are again living on the same soil and speaking the same language.”[30] Before leaving Dordrecht in April 1877 – since he spent most of his nights engrossed in the Bible, he was too sleepy during the day to be of much use in the bookshop – he heard the same sermon again. In a letter to Theo, he wrote: “After church I walked along the path behind the station where we walked together; my thoughts were full of you, and I wished we might be together.”[31]

Van Gogh’s understanding of the biblical verse reveals his yearning to be known. This desire persisted through most of his life, manifesting itself in his friendship with Theo, in his love for Ursula Loyer or his cousin Kee, and in his attitudes about religion or art. The common thread in each of these is an intense longing to discover himself in a dialogue with others. The mercantile affairs of an art dealer or an accountant offered no such satisfaction. During his stay in Dordrecht, van Gogh finally arrived at a plan for his future: he set out to become a minister.

The Potato Eaters, Nuenen, 1885.

Oil on canvas, 82 x 114 cm.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen, Nuenen, October 1884.

Oil on canvas, 41.5 x 32 cm.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

P. C. Görlitz, van Gogh’s roommate in this time, wrote of him:

He was totally different from the usual type of man. His face was ugly, his mouth more or less awry, his face was densely covered with freckles, and he had hair of a reddish hue. As I said, his face was ugly, but as soon as he spoke about religion or art, and then became excited, which was sure to happen very soon, his eyes would sparkle, and his features would make a deep impression on me; it wasn’t his own face any longer: it had become beautiful […] When he came back from his office at nine o’clock in the evening, he would immediately light a little wooden pipe; he would take down a big Bible, and sit down to read assiduously, to copy texts and to learn them by heart; he would also write all kinds of religious compositions […] When Sunday came, van Gogh would go to church three times, either to the Roman Catholic church, or to the Protestant or Old Episcopal church, which was commonly called the Jansenist church. When once we made the remark, “But, my dear van Gogh, how is it possible that you can go to three churches of such divergent creeds?” he said, “Well, in every church I see God, and it’s all the same to me whether a Protestant pastor or a Roman Catholic priest preaches; it is not really a matter of dogma, but of the spirit of the Gospel, and I find this spirit in all churches.[32]

After his failure as a businessman, van Gogh hoped that his father would appreciate his decision to follow in his footsteps. But vicar van Gogh viewed his eldest son’s enthusiasm for religion critically: Vincent’s belief in the “spirit of the Gospel” deviated from the teachings of the Church. Nevertheless, he asked his brothers Cornelius and Jan, who lived in Amsterdam, to help the young man. Both uncles agreed to support their nephew: one promised to give him money, the other board and lodging.

In May 1877, van Gogh began to prepare himself for university. Since he had left school at the age of fifteen, he had to study mathematics and ancient languages before entering the academy. His language teacher, Mendes da Costa, described his student:

I succeeded in winning his confidence and friendship very soon, which was so essential in this case: and as his studies were prompted by the best of intentions, we made comparatively good progress at the beginning […]; but after a short time the Greek verbs became too much for him. However I might set about it, whatever trick I might invent to enliven the lessons, it was no use. – ‘Mendes’, he would say […] ‘do you seriously believe that such horrors are indispensable to a man who wants to do what I want to do: give peace to poor creatures and reconcile them to their existence on earth?’[33]

Van Gogh stayed less than one year in Amsterdam before abandoning his studies. He did not lack talent: van Gogh spoke a couple of languages; read German books; and wrote his letters in English and French. But he was impatient: he didn’t want to meditate on the Gospel; he wanted to live it.

Still Life with a Basket of Apples, Nuenen, September 1885.

Oil on canvas, 33 x 43.5 cm.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Avenue of Poplars in Autumn, Nuenen, October 1884.

Oil on canvas on wood, 98.5 x 66 cm.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

He travelled to Brussels to begin training at a mission school. Three months later, he left the school and applied for a job as a preacher in the Borinage, a Belgian mining area. In January 1879, he found a temporary post that might have been renewed, had an inspector of the Comité d’Évangélisation not discovered that the new preacher took the Bible more literally than the authorities of the church.

Vicar Bonte, who also worked in the neighbourhood, reported:

He felt obliged to imitate the early Christians, to sacrifice all he could live without, and he wanted to be even more destitute than the majority of the miners to whom he preached the Gospel. I must add that also his Dutch cleanliness was singularly abandoned; soap was banished as a wicked luxury; and when our evangelist was not wholly covered with a layer of coal dust, his face was usually dirtier than that of the miners. […] He no longer felt any inducement to care for his own well-being – his heart had been aroused by the sight of others’ want. He preferred to go to the unfortunate, the wounded, the sick, and always stayed with them a long time; he was willing to make any sacrifice to relieve their sufferings.[34]

After he ‘failed’ as a preacher, van Gogh broke with the church, which was, in his opinion, dominated by Christian conventions instead of a Christ-like love for mankind. This rupture also sent ripples through his relationship with his father, who threatened to have his son committed to the mental hospital in Gheel.[35]

After his father’s death in 1885, van Gogh expressed his resentment against father and church in two still lifes: one shows his father’s pipe and tobacco pouch lying next to a vase with a bouquet of flowers, known in Holland as Silver of Judas. The second composition depicts a large, open Bible next to a small, well-thumbed copy of Zola’s Joie de Vivre – ‘The Joy of Life’. Vicar van Gogh disapproved of his son’s preference for contemporary French literature, which was, in his opinion, depraved. The Bible in the painting is opened to the Book of Isaiah, chapter 53: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”

The correspondence between autumn 1879 and spring 1880 is full of gaps. Van Gogh remained in the Borinage, where he spent most of his time drawing. He had already started to make sketches in Brussels and during his time as a preacher: “Often I draw far into the night, to keep some souvenir and to strengthen the thoughts raised involuntarily by the aspect of things here.”[36]

For his parents’ sake, van Gogh tried to cloak his artistic aspirations in the more sensible garb of a bourgeois professional, like a printer or technical draughtsman. He told his mother that he wanted to draw costumes and machines. In his letters to Theo, he was more candid:

On the other hand, you would also be mistaken if you thought that I would do well to follow your advice literally to become an engraver of bill headings and visiting cards, […] But, you say, I do not expect you take that advice literally; I was just afraid you were too fond of spending your days in idleness, and I thought you had to put an end to it. May I observe that this is a rather strange sort of ‘idleness’. It is somewhat difficult for me to defend myself, but I should be very sorry if, sooner or later, you could not see it differently.[37]

The Weaver, Nuenen, February 1884.

Oil on canvas, 36.6 x 45 cm.

Private collection.

The Cottage, Nuenen, 1885.

Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 79 cm.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Woman (“Sien”) Seated near the Stove, The Hague, March-April 1882.

Pencil, pen and brush in black ink (faded to brown in parts) and white opaque watercolour on laid paper (two sheets), 50 x 61 cm.

Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.

Sorrow, The Hague, November 1882.

Lithograph, 38.9 x 29.2 cm.

Private collection.

Van Gogh compared his unproductive period with a bird’s change of feathers:

As the moulting time […] is for birds, so adversity or misfortune is the difficult time for us human beings. One can stay in it – in that time of moulting – one can also emerge renewed; but anyhow it must not be done in public and it is not at all amusing, therefore the only thing to do is to hide oneself. Well, so be it.[38]

The ‘renewed’ van Gogh made two important decisions: first, he resolved to determine the course of his life entirely on his own and not to seek his family’s advice; second, he set out to put his passions to good use:

When I was in other surroundings, in the surroundings of pictures and works of art, you know how violent a passion I had for them, reaching the highest pitch of enthusiasm. And I am not sorry about it, for even now, far from that land, I am often homesick for the land of pictures.[39]

Peasant Woman in a White Bonnet, Nuenen, December 1884-January 1885.

Lead pencil and charcoal, 33.6 x 20.9 cm.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Homesick for the world of art, van Gogh moved to Brussels in October 1880. He began to study with reproductions and models: “There are laws of proportions, of light and shadow, of perspective, which one must know in order to be able to draw well; without that knowledge, it always remains a fruitless struggle, and one never creates anything.”[40] Though his father disapproved of his decision, he supported his son financially. Theo, who by that time had begun working in Goupil’s branch in Paris, also sent him money.

In the spring of 1881, to reduce his expenses, van Gogh moved to the vicarage in Etten, where his father had been working for some time. The young painter did not suffer from material wants, but his family neither understood nor supported his ideas:

Father and Mother are very good to me in that they do everything to feed me well, etc. Of course I appreciate it very much, but it cannot be denied that food and drink and sleep are not enough for a man, that he longs for something nobler and higher – aye, he positively cannot do without it.[41]

Girl in a Wood, The Hague, August 1882.

Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 39 x 59 cm.

Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.

Beach at Scheveningen, The Hague, August 1882.

Oil on canvas, 34.5 x 51 cm.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Woman with a Broom, Nuenen, March-April 1885.

Oil on canvas, 41 x 27 cm.

Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.

At this time, “something nobler and higher” meant, first of all, not the artistic work, but his love for his cousin Kee. Although she had resisted his advances, he continued trying to win her heart. His family was ashamed by his persistence, and openly criticized his passion. After a particularly heated argument during the Christmas holidays in 1881, the pastor ordered his wayward son to leave.

Two years later Vincent returned to the family nest for the last time. With this final break, he abandoned the family name, and began signing his canvases simply ‘Vincent.’ The event that precipitated the rupture was van Gogh’s decision to take up residence in The Hague with the prostitute Christina Hoornik, also called Sien. In May 1882 he wrote to Theo:

Last winter I met a pregnant woman, deserted by a man whose child she carried. A pregnant woman who had to walk the streets in winter, had to earn her bread, you understand how. I took this woman for a model, and I have worked with her all the winter. I could not pay her the full wages of a model, but that did not prevent my paying her rent, and thank God, so far I have been able to protect her and her child from hunger and cold by sharing my own bread with her.[42]

The compassion he felt for the pregnant woman was coupled with his longing to have a nest: “I have a feeling of being at home when I am with her, as though she gives me my own hearth, a feeling that our lives are interwoven.”[43]

The family reacted with reproaches, exhortations, and threats. Once again, the familiar pattern recurs: van Gogh’s parents could not understand the behaviour of their son, but they cared about his well-being. In the winter of 1883 they sent him a package of clothes which included a woman’s coat. For some time van Gogh had been dependent on people who did not accept him, a paradox which prompted him to think at length about the relationship between art and money. He wrote to Theo: “I will succeed in earning money to keep myself, not in luxury, but as one who eats his bread in the sweat of his brow.”[44] In the years to come, van Gogh would defend the artist as a productive, and therefore respectable, member of society. He began sending Theo some of his pictures in exchange for the money he sent; in this way Theo became his employer rather than his patron.

In The Hague, van Gogh focused on figurative drawing. Sien was his most important model: “I find in her exactly what I want: her life has been rough, and sorrow and adversity have put their marks upon her – now I can do something with her.”[45] Van Gogh’s conception of women was quite far removed from the classical ideal of beauty. On one occasion, he expressed his opinion in these terms:

The Farm, The Hague, September 1883.

Oil on canvas on wood, 28.5 x 39.5 cm.

Private collection.

The Old Cemetery Tower in Nuenen in the Snow Storm, Nuenen, January 1885.

Oil on canvas, 30 x 41.5 cm.

Collection of Stavros S. Niarchos, London.

The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in the Snow, Nuenen, 1885.

Oil on canvas, 53 x 78 cm.

The Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

Uncle Cor asked me today if I didn’t like Phryne by Gérôme. I told him that I would rather see a homely woman by Israëls or Millet, or an old woman by Edouard Frère: for what’s the use of a beautiful body such as Phryne’s? Animals have it too, perhaps even more than men; but the soul, as it lives in the people painted by Israëls or Millet or Frère, that is what animals never have. Is not life given to us to become richer in spirit, even though the outward appearance may suffer?[46]

For some time van Gogh served as an apprentice to the painter Anton Mauve. There, he started to paint with oil colours. His major motifs involved people: “I am decidedly not a landscape painter; when I make landscapes, there will always be something of the figure in them.”[47] The comparison between the drawings Sorrow, a crouched nude, and Les Racines, the roots of a tree, tells us something of what he has in mind:

I tried to put the same sentiment into the landscape as into the figure: the convulsive, passionate clinging to the earth, and yet being half torn up by a storm. I wanted to express something of the struggle for life in that pale, slender woman’s figure, as well as in the black, gnarled and knotty roots.[48]

Woman Seated, The Hague, early May 1882.

Pencil, pen and brush in ink (diluted), wash, traces of squaring, on laid paper (two sheets), 58 x 43 cm.

Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.

Woman Shelling Peas, Nuenen, summer 1885.

Charcoal, 42 x 26 cm.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Peasant Burning Weeds, Drente, October 1883.

Oil on wood, 30.5 x 39.5 cm.

Private collection.

When Mauve discovered that van Gogh was living together with Sien, he cancelled the contact. Tersteeg, van Gogh’s former master, sought to pressure him by asking Theo to stop the financial support. The painter was largely isolated in The Hague, and his relations with Sien became increasingly strained as money grew tight. During a visit, Theo convinced Vincent to abandon the relationship.

At the end of 1883, van Gogh joined his parents, who had moved to Etten, near Eindhoven. The return of the prodigal son was not a success:

I am sick at heart about the fact that, coming back after two years’ absence, the welcome home was kind and cordial in every respect, but basically there has been no change whatever, not the slightest, in what I must call the most extreme blindness and ignorance as to the insight into our mutual position.[49]

Because his family was unable to understand him – to know him – van Gogh severed the connection.

They have the same dread of taking me in the house as they would about taking a big rough dog. He would run into the room with wet paws – and he is so rough. He will be in everybody’s way. And he barks so loud. In short, he is a foul beast. […] And I, admitting that I am a kind of dog, leave them alone.[50]

Van Gogh has often been criticized because of his appearance and his manners. He confesses that, in some periods of his life, he had neglected his clothes in order to ensure his solitude. He left the vicarage and rented rooms in the home of a Catholic sexton. When he visited his father’s house for a meal, he sat away from the family table: “I consciously choose the dog’s path through life; I will remain the dog, I shall be poor, I shall be a painter, I want to remain human – going into nature.”[51]

In the summer of 1884, van Gogh met Margot Begemann, a neighbour’s daughter. The 43-year-old woman fell in love with the 31-year-old, who, as he stressed to Theo, had feelings of friendship for her and respected her “on a certain point that would have dishonoured her socially.”[52] He noticed “certain symptoms” in her behaviour, and so wrote to his brother that:

I was afraid that she would get brain fever, and that I was sorry to state that, in my eyes, the Begemann family acted extremely imprudently in speaking to her the way they did. This had no effect, at least no other than that they told me to wait two years, which I decidedly refused to do, saying that if there was a question of marriage, it had to be soon or not at all.[53]

At the beginning of September, Margot attempted suicide. Van Gogh rescued her by making her vomit the poison she had taken. He reported this incident “which hardly anybody here knows, or suspects, or may ever know,”[54] to Theo. Defamation and the family’s pressure were, in van Gogh’s view, the reasons behind the suicide attempt: “But for heaven’s sake, what is the meaning of that standing and of that religion which the respectable people maintain? – oh, they are perfectly absurd, making society a kind of lunatic asylum, a perfectly topsy-turvy world – oh, that mysticism.”[55] Four years later, van Gogh was to suffer his own crisis, a despair which would drive him to attempt suicide. Unlike Margot, however, he would not be rescued.