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.
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