Chapter 1The Grave with His Name

Foreword

I have spent my working life writing about artists the market declined to see. Painters, performance artists, photographers — women, nearly all of them — whose work sat in storerooms and estate inventories while the auction houses built their cathedrals around other names. That was my beat and, if I am honest, my argument: that the price of a work of art is a verdict rendered by a machine, and that the machine has always been better at flattering its own history than at looking. So when I told people in Madrid that I was writing a book about Vincent van Gogh — the most expensive dead man in the history of that machine — the response was polite and unmistakable. He has been seen, they meant. He has been seen more than anyone. He is not your subject.

That was exactly why I wanted him.

Because my subject was never women as such. My subject was valuation — how the worth of a work gets decided, by whom, on what evidence, and how long the wrong verdict can stand. And there is no case in the whole history of Western art that indicts the machinery more completely than this one. A man sells one painting in his lifetime, for four hundred francs, to a painter named Anna Boch. A century later a canvas from the same hand sells for more than a hundred million dollars, and another — the most expensive of them all — disappears into private storage and has not been seen in public for thirty-six years. Four hundred francs and a hundred million dollars are both prices for the same body of work. They cannot both be correct. I have spent my career arguing that the market misprices; here was the extreme specimen, the undervaluation and the overvaluation stacked in a single life, and I wanted to take it apart.

The record I worked from is enormous and almost entirely public: the letters, published and republished for over a century; the family memoirs, written with hindsight and read here with suspicion; the press archives, the exhibition records, the auction results, the shelf of biographies that has accumulated since 1914. I expected to spend my years in that record writing about a man. I kept finding women. I found Sien Hoornik on a station platform with a baby in one arm and a five-year-old by the hand, the model for the finest drawing of his apprenticeship and a person the legend has never had five minutes for. I found Willemien, the sister he wrote to as an equal, who spent thirty-nine years in an asylum and is a footnote. And I found Jo van Gogh-Bonger, a twenty-eight-year-old widow taking in lodgers at Bussum, sitting up at night with a thousand sheets of paper, spending twenty-two years building the edition of the letters on which every book about this painter — including this one — stands. The women in this story do the labour of memory. The legend does not pay them for it.

The legend was the other thing I had to reckon with. I have written about artists whose legends were never constructed at all, whose lives dissolved for want of a single advocate. Vincent is the opposite case: a legend over-built, poured layer on layer — the memoir, the novel, the film, the song — until the person underneath is harder to see than the paint. I expected to find a madman-saint in a wheatfield. I found instead a stubborn, difficult, methodical worker; a man who copied a sentence of Michelet about abandoned women onto a drawing because he could not yet make the argument in words; a man whose exits were sudden and total and whose loyalties cost him everything they touched. The famous explanations — the dead brother's grave, the doomed temperament — kept turning out to be too neat. The record is quieter than the legend and much stranger.

Is he worth a book, after the hundreds already written? I concluded that he is, but not for the reasons the prices imply. He is worth a book because he is the control case. If you want to know what the machine of valuation actually measures, you need the artist it ignored completely and then consecrated absolutely, and you need to hold both verdicts up to the same canvases and ask what, at any point, either verdict had to do with the work. I came to this book from the other side of that question, a partisan of the unseen. I leave it convinced that the seen and the unseen are produced by the same machinery, and that this life is the clearest diagram of it we have.

— Sofía Estrada, Madrid

Chapter 1 · The Grave with His Name

There is a small graveyard behind the Dutch Reformed church in Groot-Zundert, and there is a stone there with the name Vincent van Gogh on it, and the date 30 March 1852. The Vincent van Gogh whose paintings are sold for hundreds of millions of dollars never lay underneath that stone. He was born one year later — exactly one year, day for day — and he was named for the boy who had not breathed.

Anna Cornelia Carbentus had given birth to a stillborn son in March 1852. She named him Vincent and buried him in his grandfather's parish churchyard. She fell pregnant again within months. She gave birth to a second son on the dead boy's first birthday. She named the new boy Vincent.

For most of his childhood that was the first dead person Vincent knew of, and he passed the stone every Sunday on the way into church for the morning service his father preached.

The stone has been used for a long time as the explanation. Lubin, in 1972, made it the central event of a psychological biography. Other writers have made it the trauma at the bottom of every later trauma — the substitute child, the named replacement, the boy who could only ever be a copy.

That is too neat. The boy himself wrote of the grave only once, in a letter of condolence to his Goupil manager Hermanus Tersteeg, whose young daughter had just died. He recalled standing early one morning in the churchyard at Zundert beside the small grave and its inscription — Suffer the little children to come unto Me — and observed that more than twenty-five years had passed since his father had buried his first little boy there. The letter is from August 1877, when Vincent was twenty-four. The tone is matter-of-fact. The grave does not seem to have weighed on him.

What weighed on him was different. It was the family.

Theodorus van Gogh, his father, was a Dutch Reformed minister who never advanced. He had trained in theology at Utrecht, took the small parish at Groot-Zundert in 1849, and married Anna Cornelia in May 1851. He stayed at Zundert for twenty-two years. The moves that followed were sideways, not upward — to Helvoirt in 1871, to Etten in 1875, eventually to Nuenen in 1882. The salary stayed small. The houses stayed modest. The congregations stayed rural.

Anna Cornelia was the daughter of a court bookbinder in The Hague, and her sister had married a successful art dealer; her family connections were better than her husband's parish. She had wanted more, and she had not received it. She kept account-books with neat columns. She practised needlework with strict precision. She wrote her sons letters that always inquired after their punctuality and their digestion before they inquired after their thoughts.

The marriage produced six children who survived childhood. Vincent (born 30 March 1853) was the oldest. Then Anna (1855), then Theodorus the younger — Theo, the brother who would matter — on 1 May 1857, then Elisabeth in 1859, then Willemien in 1862, then Cornelis in 1867. Three girls and three boys around the dead first Vincent, in the parsonage at Zundert.

The parsonage stood on the Markt. It had a flagstone hall, a tile-stove kitchen, a steep staircase, and a small upstairs nursery where the children slept four or five to a room. The garden ran behind. The pinewoods began at the edge of the village. Through the woods one came to the Belgian border in less than an hour's walk.

Vincent walked the woods alone. From an early age he was the strange one. He kept a beetle collection in glass boxes with German labels he had taught himself. He arranged them by colour rather than by family. He wandered without telling anyone where he had gone. When his sisters tried to follow he frightened them away with a sudden sharpness none of them ever forgot. The family's later recollections agree that he was the brother who frightened the others. Not violently — in his moods.

The Brabant landscape settled into him. The flat fields between hedgerows; the windbreak poplars; the heath at the edge of the village where peat-cutters worked through summer. He would later — in Drenthe, in Nuenen, in Saint-Rémy — paint that childhood landscape from memory, projected through whatever country he was living in. The wheat under turbulent sky in the Auvers canvases of 1890 has the lay of the Brabant fields. The cypresses he painted at the asylum at Saint-Rémy in 1889 are Provençal cypresses but the fields they stand in remember Zundert.

He learned to read late, his sister Lies wrote later. The remark may be unreliable; Lies wrote her family memoir in 1910 with the painter already a celebrity, and her recollections are coloured by hindsight. What is clearer is what he read. The Pilgrim's Progress. Andersen's Fairy Tales. The Bible — the family Bible his mother read aloud in the parlour after dinner. The illustrated histories on the parsonage shelves. He memorized passages of Dickens — David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol, Hard Times — that he would still be quoting from memory thirty years later in letters from Provence.

The reading had a pattern that his adult correspondence would make legible. He gravitated, from early adolescence, toward texts about labour and suffering and the relationship between the two: toward Bunyan's tinker in jail composing allegories, toward Dickens's industrial poor, toward the illustrated Old Testament stories of the family Bible. He was not reading for pleasure in the way the Zundert schoolmaster's son was supposed to read. He was reading for instruction in how a person endured. It was the same reading programme he would maintain for the rest of his life in every city he lived in and every language he needed, from the English Bible he carried into the Borinage in 1879 to the Dickens he was still quoting from memory in his last years.

His first formal schooling was at the Zundert village school. He was withdrawn from it at the age of eleven because, his parents said, the village boys were a bad influence. The judgment is suspect. Theodorus had not himself attended a village school; he was anxious about the family's social standing. The deeper truth, as it appears in fragments through the later letters, is that Vincent was already a boy who did not get on with other boys. The village school had taught him that.

In October 1864 he was sent thirty kilometres away to a boarding school at Zevenbergen run by Jan Provily. He was eleven. He had never been away from his mother. The school was an ordinary Protestant primary school for boys from his own social class. The fees strained the Zundert parsonage income; a village pastor's stipend was modest, and there were six surviving children to feed and clothe on it.

He hated it.

The one account of that day that survives is Vincent's own. Years later he described standing on the steps of Provily's school, watching the little carriage that had brought him drive away down the wet road toward Zundert, his mother and father inside it, until it was out of sight. And looking back from Nuenen in December 1883 he set down the verdict on the whole of it: "My youth was gloomy and cold and sterile."

He boarded at Zevenbergen for two years. In 1866, when he was thirteen, he was moved to a new state secondary school at Tilburg, the Rijks-HBS Willem II. The drawing teacher there was Constant Cornelis Huijsmans, who had been a Paris-trained painter before becoming a provincial schoolmaster. Huijsmans taught against the academic technique of his time: against the careful charcoal drawing from plaster casts, the Vasarian regime of finished surface and correct line. He taught his pupils to draw the impression of a thing — its mass, its weight on the paper, its emotional address — before drawing its outline. Vincent took two years of Huijsmans's lessons, between his thirteenth and his fifteenth birthdays, and they imprinted on him for life. The argument with academic drawing that he would have with Charles Verlat at the Antwerp Academy in 1886, and with the Cormon studio in Paris in 1886–87, was already there in seed in Tilburg. The eleven hundred or so drawings that survive him are first cousins to Huijsmans's exercises.

In March 1868 he abruptly left Tilburg. He was halfway through the school year. He returned to the parsonage on a railway carriage with no warning and no explanation that has survived in the documents. He was fifteen. He never went back to school.

What had happened? The records are silent. The most reasonable inference is the one Anna's family papers suggest: he had broken down. The combination of the boarding-school regime, the loneliness, his mother's tight letters — these had become something he could not continue to carry. The pattern would recur in his adult life. The total break from a difficult situation, the train home, the silent return. He would do it again with Goupil in 1875, with the Borinage in 1880, with The Hague in 1883, with Antwerp in 1886. Vincent's exits were always sudden, always total, always silent. They began in March 1868 in a railway carriage from Tilburg.

The siblings left behind at Nuenen and Etten in those years were not uniformly indifferent to what Vincent had become. Of the five who survived him, the closest was Willemien — "Wil," born 16 March 1862, nine years younger. She and Vincent maintained a correspondence through the late 1880s that is among the most revealing outside of the Theo letters: Vincent in Arles and Auvers sent Wil frank assessments of his work and his health, addressing her as an equal. Wil had artistic inclinations herself, having taken up drawing in the early 1880s. She never married. In 1902, twelve years after Vincent's death, she was committed to the Veldwijk psychiatric asylum at Ermelo, where she remained until her death in 1941 — thirty-nine years of confinement. The hereditary tendency toward psychosis that would defeat both Vincent and Wil and also, eventually, Theo was in the Carbentus bloodline as well as the Van Gogh one; the maternal inheritance was as pertinent to the clinical picture as anything in the paternal line.

He spent the rest of 1868 and the first half of 1869 at the parsonage. He read. He drew. He walked the heath. He helped his mother with the small garden. He was sixteen, jobless, formally educated to age fifteen, and a worry.

Theodorus had no money to send him to university. There was the senior Vincent — Cent, his uncle, the brother of his father — who had become wealthy as one of the principal partners in the Goupil & Cie chain of art dealerships, with branches in The Hague, Brussels, Paris, and London. Uncle Cent had no children. He had also no patience for unproductive nephews. He approached Theodorus and Anna Cornelia in spring 1869 and offered Vincent a clerk's position at Goupil's Hague branch.

It was a respectable career. The Goupil dealership sold reproductions and engravings — many of them commissioned by Goupil itself from contemporary academic painters — to the bourgeois drawing-rooms of northern Europe. A clerk progressed up the firm's hierarchy, learned the trade, transferred between branches, eventually became a junior partner. Cent had risen this way. So would Theo, after Vincent. The work was not creative. It was business. Theodorus and Anna Cornelia accepted on Vincent's behalf.

On 30 July 1869, four months after his sixteenth birthday, Vincent began his salaried life as a junior clerk at the Goupil & Cie branch in The Hague. He would work for the firm for six years and eight months.

It is the period of his life least like the legend. He was a competent dealer. He was prompt. He read English well enough to translate documents. By his early twenties he was earning more than his father. His letters to Theo from these Goupil years (Theo joined the firm at The Hague in 1873, four years after Vincent) read as the normal letters of an unremarkable young man embarked on a normal career. He wrote about the weather, the customers, the lithographs that had come in from Paris, the exhibitions he went to see. He went to the theatre. He visited the Mauritshuis. He copied paintings on his afternoons off — Vermeer, Hals, Rembrandt — into small albums he kept and showed to no one.

He was not yet a painter. He was not even particularly considering becoming one. He was a clerk. He was the eldest son of a country pastor making good in a respectable family business. What he would later call the great fire in the soul had not yet shown itself, even to him.

The Hague branch of Goupil & Cie in 1869 occupied the ground floor of a three-storey building on the Plaats, the small square near the Binnenhof. The manager was Hermanus Tersteeg, a meticulous young Dutchman who turned twenty-four that year, and who had risen through the firm on commercial intelligence and a gift for client management. Tersteeg was everything Vincent was not: socially adept, organized, commercially shrewd, unwilling to confuse his personal aesthetic preferences with his professional responsibilities. He and Vincent would remain in a complicated relationship for twenty years — Tersteeg supporting, advising, finally withdrawing; Vincent resisting, defending, eventually dismissing. In 1869 Tersteeg was the first professional authority in Vincent's life outside his family, and Vincent, at sixteen, was too eager and too earnest to be anything other than a reliable clerk. He was prompt. He kept the print inventory with precision. He answered correspondence in Dutch and in English (which he had been learning since Tilburg) with a clarity Tersteeg came to rely on. Within a few years he had risen from copying-clerk to advising customers directly on purchases. He was nineteen and apparently suited to the work. It was the only period of his working life — six years, from sixteen to twenty-three — in which his employers were satisfied with him.

The boy with the stillborn brother's name, the boy who frightened his sisters, the boy who walked off the train from Tilburg and never went back to school — he had become an ordinary young man in a starched collar going to work in The Hague every morning at half past eight. He was approaching the only stretch of his life in which he might have been called normal. The fire would come from somewhere else.

It came, as nearly all of his fires came, from a refusal.