The Terrible Loneliness of Genius

The Canon Club: Vincent van Gogh

Click here to listen to episode 7 of the Canon Club podcast, also available on Spotify, with Martin Gayford, author of The Yellow House.

From around the age of eight I have a warm memory of collecting one of those ‘second issue free with issue one’ magazine series that were big in the 1980s, this one called The Great Artists. I loved art but my favourites were the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, especially Vincent van Gogh.

I lost interest in drawing soon after and only retained a vague knowledge of art history, seeing visits to galleries as an active punishment. That I now regret my youthful philistine streak is one motivation for starting the Canon Club, and I now appreciate art much more; if in a new city I will even visit a gallery of my volition and without having to be bribed with a McDonald’s. One thing that hasn’t changed is my taste, and I still love the Post-Impressionists and Van Gogh in particular - maybe it’s like music, in that one’s preferences become crystalised at an early age.

There is also the allure of late 19^th century Paris, one of the all-time moments of history, along with 1920s New York, 18^th century London or 5^th century Athens. There is something about the life of a Parisian artist of this period which is deeply enticing – poverty, alcoholism, venereal disease, psychotic breakdowns, career failure and early death. So romantic!

Van Gogh is an especially attractive figure because he stands as the ultimate vindicated artist. In his native Holland he had been mocked as ‘the little painter’ and encountered little success in his short life, with only his long-suffering brother Theo believing in him throughout.

Impoverished and shunned by society, the great Dutch painter killed himself after a particularly intense period in Provence. Yet he wasn’t quite the failure we think, and Van Gogh may have been on the verge of a breakthrough when he decided he could stand it no more.

Martin Gayford’s highly readable The Yellow House recounts this immensely productive period from 1888 when Van Gogh moved to Arles and invited fellow artist Paul Gauguin to live with him. During his year and a half in the Provençal town Van Gogh produced 200 works of art, including masterpieces such as Still Life, Starry Night over the Rhone, and the Sunflowers series. But while it was indeed hugely fruitful, the house share was disastrous, and Van Gogh ended up having a mental breakdown.

Vincent had dreams of starting an artist colony in the south. While there were many such colonies in cheaper coastal areas of northern France, Vincent thought that sunlight would be of great benefit to his craft; he was passionately interested in Japanese art and believed that drawing under a brighter sky might give western artists ‘a more accurate idea of the way the Japanese feel and draw’. Provence enjoys far more sunlight than the rest of France, and the intensity of colours is apparent to visitors – the climate would suit Van Gogh’s style perfectly, even if it did little for his fragile mental state.

Arles is a pretty tourist spot today, dominated by its Roman ruins and benefitting from its association with the great Dutchman; a few years back we visited a Van Gogh exhibition in a nearby cave. At the time, however, it was run down, and Gauguin called it ‘the dirtiest town in the whole south’. Like the Netherlands, much of it was on reclaimed land; drainage canals had been dug in the 16^th century, before which it was surrounded by wetlands. The Roman name Arlate means ‘town in the marshes’. It was an unpromising place to start a new life, and Van Gogh’s was not going well at this point. As Gayford says, ‘he had sold virtually nothing in his career as a painter to date, just a handful of works sold or exchanged for a few francs with his friend, the dealer [Julien] Tanguy.’ He needed to work intensely just to avoid complete destitution.

‘I myself realise the necessity to produce even to the extent of being morally crushed and physically drained by it,’ the artist lamented: ‘I cannot help it that my pictures do not sell. The pains of producing pictures will have taken my whole life from me, and it will seem to me then that I have not lived.’

Cheery stuff, but he was never exactly a happy-go-lucky character. Vincent Willem van Gogh had been born on 30 March 1853 in Zundert, North Brabant. They were a Protestant family in a Catholic area, and his father Theodorus was a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, and followed the so-called Groningen School, which was comparable to Thomas Arnold’s ‘muscular Christianity’ in Britain. Vincent later wrote that his youth was ‘austere and cold, and sterile’.

Vincent was named after his grandfather, an art dealer who was a major figure in the international trade, and two of his uncles were also in the business. It was in his blood, yet while he studied art at school, he started producing it very late in life, compared to most geniuses.

Vincent had begun with good prospects; he had gone into the family trade at 16 and by his early twenties was working for Goupil & Cie in London, earning good money and enjoying a relatively happy time. Here he developed an infatuation with his landlady’s daughter, Eugénie Loyer, but she shunned him after he confessed his feelings, a rejection which made him more isolated and also fuelled a religious mania. After being sacked from the art business, Vincent returned to England in 1876 to work as a supply teacher in Ramsgate and then Isleworth in Middlesex. This didn’t work out either, and he then became an assistant to a Methodist minister.

He returned home that Christmas and took a job in a bookshop, where he spent his time either translating bits of the Bible or doodling, living a very austere, monastic life. In 1879 he began preaching in the Belgian coal fields, in the incredibly grim Borinage region, and at one point had to help the wounded after a mining disaster. This was not a success either, and while some of the locals appreciated his help, many miners thought him a lunatic, and children threw things at him. It didn’t help that he couldn’t handle public speaking – something of a disadvantage for a preacher.

It was here in Belgium, in 1879, that he began to draw more, and soon after he decided to become an artist. One of his biggest influences was Jules Breton and so in 1880 Vincent decided to go on a pilgrimage to the artist’s house in Courrières, near Calais, without even checking if he was home. After several days, with only 10 francs in his pocket and sleeping on haystacks, the young man had to abandon the foolhardy mission.

By now his whole family was worried that he would become a layabout. They wanted him to become something like ‘a book-keeper or a carpenter’s apprentice’, while his sister Anna suggested baking. Vincent grew very rebellious towards his parents, who disapproved of his lifestyle and sent him to a shrink in the Hague. His father lamented: ‘What will become of him? Isn’t it insane to choose a life of poverty and let time pass by without looking for an occasion of earning one’s bread?’ While his parents were ashamed of their wayward son, brother Theo not only loyally stood by Vincent, but genuinely believed he was a great talent.

Vincent’s romantic life was as disastrous as his career. He developed another infatuation, but when he travelled to Amsterdam to meet the woman in question, she refused to see him. Upset by this rejection, he responded by putting his hand in a lamp flame, and wrote to his brother proclaiming, ‘Let me see her for as long as I can keep my hand in the flame.’

In June 1881 Van Gogh spent three weeks in hospital with gonorrhoea. By the following year he had set up home in the Hague with an alcoholic prostitute, Cristina ‘Sien’ Hoornik, and her young daughter. He was excited by the birth of her son Willem, probably the closest he came to the family relationship he so desired, and ‘saw the infinite in his eyes’. This relationship didn’t work out, unsurprisingly, and in 1884 he fell in love again, with Margot Begemann, a neighbour's daughter who was ten years his senior. This time the feeling was mutual, but both families objected and so she took an overdose of strychnine (she survived, thanks to his help).

He had begun to drink more and, living in Paris, felt he had become ‘almost an alcoholic’. He cut down at first but started again, and more intensely, writing that ‘if the storm within gets too loud, I take a glass too much to stun myself.’ In early February 1886, Vincent was hospitalised as a result of his drinking, and he may also have been suffering from syphilis. His long-suffering brother Theo, meanwhile, found living with Vincent to be ‘almost unbearable’.

So the artist moved to Arles in the hope of starting afresh but, as with many people with psychological problems, his troubles followed him.

The two artists living in the Yellow House really were the odd couple. Gauguin’s formula for a peaceful life - ‘Calm down, eat well, fuck well, work ditto and you will be happy’ – contrasted with Vincent, who thought sex drained the artistic spirit. He wrote to another artist, telling him: ‘Don’t fuck too much. Your panting will be all the more spermatic’. Artists who abstained were better in his opinion, since ‘If we want to be really potent males in our work, we must sometimes resign ourselves to not fuck much, and for the rest be monks or soldiers, according to the needs of our temperament.’

While Gauguin liked fencing and swordplay and used to go swimming in Brittany wearing trunks and a beret, ‘with his 40-year-old man’s belly’, Vincent didn’t enjoy sports or games, and found comfort only in walking, smoking a pipe – ‘he often recommended it as a source of comfort and a remedy against melancholy’ – and coffee.

Gaugin loved food, and said that ‘No mean woman can cook well. It calls for a generous spirit, a light hand, and a large heart’; Vincent thought of it as merely fuel, and during his youthful religious period, long since abandoned, he would eat only the simplest meals of dry bread and cheese.

He had regular stomach troubles, not unknown in people suffering from depression, made worse by his regular bouts of semi-starvation. Indeed, he noted a correlation between his artistic output and the state of his digestion.

This clash of personalities in some ways reflected the contrast between Protestant and Catholic Europe, the former uncomfortable with pleasure but also prone to excess, and channelling their anxiety into often crushing overwork.

After his early zeal, Vincent grew repulsed by religion and even religious art; he looked at images of the damned in eternal torment and wrote ‘It is so cruel, so monstrous’. Instead, like many of his era, he directed his sense of awe to nature. He read Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that new beliefs should not use outworn iconography of Madonnas and martyrdom but must be derived from the natural world. This was the new religion of modern men, Gayford writes, and indeed many Dutch theologians came to see in the structure of nature the signs of God. Vincent, who read intensely, was probably influenced by the Rev Bernard ter Haar, who wrote that ‘The view of the starry sky, reminds the Christian of the dwellings of the house of the father.’

Vincent was a tragic figure and one might have wanted to save him, but he also very difficult. He constantly argued, and even in life classes clashed angrily with the teachers; he bickered with friends, easily worked up, and Gaugin would reply ‘Corporal, you’re right’ when Vincent started shouting at him, a line from a song and a witty way to end a conversation. Art dealer Andries Bonger, the brother of Theo’s wife, said of Vincent: ‘He is always quarrelling with everybody. Consequently Theo has a lot of trouble getting along with him’.

Vincent unsettled people so much that he had difficulty finding models, but there was also a rural superstition that having a likeness taken was unlucky and would invite the evil eye. Gayford notes that residents of rural Somerset thought that being ‘a-lookt’ by an artist could result in illness and death.

He especially repulsed women. One local girl, 13-year-old Jeanne Calment, remembered being introduced to ‘an uncharming Dutch painter’ and Gayford wrote that ‘She thought him very ugly, ungracious, impolite, crazy and bad-smelling – which was characteristic of the impression poor Vincent made on people, especially the opposite sex.’ One local woman, Madame Roulin, looked straight at Gauguin but wouldn’t make eye contact with Van Gogh.

The locals, who just called him Vincent because the French had trouble pronouncing his surname, were rather perplexed by this strange incomer, one considering him ‘a rather weedy little man, with punched features’. He couldn’t understand the language, which was closer to Catalan than French, although he said that ‘the dialect of these parts is extraordinarily musical in the mouth of an Arlésienne’.

Vincent was even persecuted by the local boys and many years later one of them, now a respectable librarian, expressed remorse. Monsieur Julian recalled that they would shout abuse at him as he walked past, ‘alone and silent, in his long smock and wearing one of those cheap straw hats you could buy everywhere’. Vincent was ‘continually stopping and peering at things’ and that provoked ridicule, too.

In one incredibly sad passage, Julian later recalled: ‘I remember and I am bitterly ashamed of it now – how I threw cabbage stalks at him! What do you expect? We were young, he was odd, going out to paint in the country, his pipe between his teeth, his big body a bit hunched, a mad look in his eye. He always looked as if he were running away, without daring to look at anyone.’

As the librarian later recalled, he now saw that he was ‘really a gentle person, a creature who would probably have liked us to like him, and we left him in terrifying isolation, the terrible loneliness of genius’.

For Van Gogh, work was a way of channeling mental anguish, ‘perhaps a remedy in fighting the disease which still continues to disquiet me’, although he was never satisfied. He was so self-critical that he even regretted The Starry Night, writing that ‘once again I allowed myself to be led astray into reaching for stars that are too big – another failure – and I have had my fill of that.’ (Yep, sorry Vincent, it’s rubbish.)

Yet the art world was starting to notice. In January 1890, critic Albert Aurier hailed his ‘brilliant and dazzling symphonies of colour and lines’, and ‘the legend was born of Vincent van Gogh, the mad, inspired artist’. Vincent was flattered but also appalled, and - remarkably - wrote to the critic thanking him but stating there were much better artists out there, like Gauguin: ‘For the role attached to me or that will be attached to me, will remain, I assure you, of very secondary importance’.

His genius for colours was perhaps related to his synesthesia, so that he might associate musical chords with Prussian blue or cadmium yellow, referring to himself as ‘musician in colours’ in a letter to his brother in which he reflected that ‘I would still rather be a shoemaker’.

Van Gogh’s exact mental condition has been much debated; perhaps he suffered from bipolar disorder, or epilepsy with bouts of depression, or even porphyria. Gayford notes that bipolar produces highs that sufferers are reluctant to give up, and composer Hugo Wolf described how ‘blood becomes changed into streams of fire’ and ‘sane life feels flat to them’. What is certain is that it was made worse by the combination of overwork and alcohol.

In the second week of October, 1888, he painted five large pieces and was then completely exhausted, had a ‘queer turn’ and had a sort of collapse. In December came the breakdown and action for which Van Gogh is always remembered. On the 23^rd he came back to the Yellow House and heard voices, cut off his left ear (or part of it) and presented it to a woman working as a cleaner in the brothel, a 17-year-old called Gaby, went home and passed out. (Van Gogh avidly read gruesome crime stories, and Gayford suggests he may have been influenced by recent reports of the Whitechapel murders, the fourth victim having had an ear removed.)

The artist recovered enough to return home on January 7, and spent the next month in and out of hospital. However, in March the police closed his house after a petition by 30 locals who described him as ‘the redheaded madman’, including the Ginoux family, whom he thought of as friends - a bitter blow.

He entered the asylum again in May 1889, but continued working, often in periods of furious productivity. In early 1890 came a severe relapse, and Vincent spent the next few months in a state of insanity or withdrawal. Curiously, Gayford writes, ‘Vincent regarded the most prolonged of these attacks as a punishment for his success.’

Vincent could take it no more, and the artist shot himself on June 27, 1890, in a wheat field. He was just 37, and according to his brother, his last words to him were: ‘The sadness will last forever.’

Although Theo was the stable one in the family, this was all relative with the Van Goghs, as he also suffered from ‘melancholy’, as well as syphilis. In September 1890, Theo was admitted to hospital with syphilis-induced insanity, and he died in January 1891, aged 33. Their brother Cornelius also killed himself at 32, and sister Wil ended up in a mental hospital - safe to say they weren’t the happiest of families.

Gauguin moved to Tahiti but became sick and covered with sores, most likely also from syphilis. After he died, aged just 54, ‘phials of morphine and broken bottles of absinthe were excavated from the well behind his house.’

Many of those featured in this story survived for much longer. Gabrielle Berlatier, the unwitting (and unwilling) recipient of Vincent’s ear, died in 1952, aged 80, and her family are still in the area. A baby he drew, Marcelle Roulin, lived until 1980, aged 92, but they were all outshone by young Jeanne Calment, who went onto become the oldest person in the world when she passed away in 1997 (although there is some scepticism about this feat).

Long before this, Provence had become a magnet for artists, and Vincent was correct in his belief that painters would now be attracted by the sun: ‘The Fauves, the Cubists, Matisse, Picasso: all of them would follow Vincent to the South,’ Gayford writes.

Van Gogh was on the cusp of a breakthrough, and had he lived a few more years might have grown rich, but then he was his own worst advocate, and in death he had one of the best – Theo’s widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. Her syphilitic husband having left her with little except 200 of his mad brother’s art, she embarked on obsessively promoting his work, editing and translating the hundreds of letters the brothers had exchanged.

While she was initially dismissed by much of the art establishment, it was thanks to Johanna that Van Gogh’s legacy grew, especially in Germany, which had begun to replace Paris as the artistic capital of Europe. Today, Van Gogh is regarded as among the greatest artists in history, and his paintings have sold for a combined total of a billion dollars. The terrible loneliness of genius exacted a heavy price on poor Vincent, but his legacy to the Western Canon has been priceless.