Van Gogh’s Progress: Utopia, Modernity, and Late-Nineteenth-Century Art [A Centennial Book, Reprint 2020 ed.] 9780520338388

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VAN G O G H ' S

PROGRESS

C A L I F O R N I A S T U D I E S IN T H E H I S T O R Y O F A R T Walter Horn, Founding Editor James Marrow, General Editor i ii

The Birth of Landscape Painting in China, by Michael Sullivan Portraits by Degas, by Jean Sutherland Boggs

HI

Leonardo da Vinci on Painting: A Lost Book (Libro A), by Carlo Pedretti

iv

Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts, by Lilian M. C. Randall

v vi vii

The Dynastic Arts of the Kushans, by John M. Rosenfield A Century of Dutch Manuscript Illumination, by L. M.J. Délaissé George Caleb Bingham: The Evolution of an Artist, and A Catalogue Raisonné (two volumes), by E. Maurice Bloch

vin

Claude Lorrain: The Drawings—Catalog and Plates (two volumes), by Marcel Roethlisberger

ix x xi

Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance, by Juergen Schulz The Drawings of Edouard Manet, by Alain de Leiris Theories ofModern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, by Herschel B. Chipp, with contributions by Peter Selz and Joshua C. Taylor

xii

After the Hunt: William Harnett and Other American Still Life Painters, i8yo-igoo, by Alfred Frankenstein

XIII

Early Netherlandish Triptychs: A Study in Patronage, by Shirley Neilsen Blum

xiv

The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought, by Ruth Mellinkoff

xv

Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, by Kathleen Cohen

xvi xvii xviii

Franciabigio, by Susan Regan McKillop Egon Schiele's Portraits, by Alessandra Comini Manuscript Painting in Paris During the Reign of Saint Louis: A Study of Styles, by Robert Branner

xix

The Plan of St. Gall: A Study of the Architecture and Economy of, and Life in a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery (three volumes), by Walter Horn and Ernest Born

xx xxi xxii

French Gothic Architecture of the 12th and 13th Centuries, by Jean Bony The Art ofMatthew Paris in the Chronica Majora, by Suzanne Lewis The Literature of Classical Art: The Painting of the Ancients and A Lexicon of Artists and Their Works According to the Literary Sources, by Francisais Junius (two volumes), edited by Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, and Raina Fehl

XXIII

The Armor ofLight: Stained Glass in Western France, 1250-1325, by Meredith Parsons Lillich

xxiv

Nineteenth-Century Theories ofArt, byjoshua C. Taylor

xxv

Corinthian Vase-Painting of the Archaic Period (three volumes), by D. A. Amyx

xxvi

Picasso's Guernica: History, Transformations, Meanings, by Herschel B. Chipp

XXVII

xxviii

Lovis Corinth, by Horst Uhr The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes Chroniques de France, 1274-1422, by Anne Dawson Hedeman

xxix xxx

Bronzino's Chapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio, by Janet Cox-Rearick Masking the Blow: The Scene of Representation in Late Prehistoric Egyptian Art, by Whitney Davis

xxxi xxxii

The Forum of Trajan, by James Packer Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, by Ruth Mellinkoff

xxxin xxxiv

Giambologna: Narrator of the Catholic Reformation, by Mary Weitzel Gibbons The Two-Headed Deer: Illustrations of the Ramayana in Orissa, by Joanna Williams

xxxv xxxvi

Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, by Kristine Stil es and Peter Selz Van Gogh's Progress: Utopia, Modernity, and Late-Nineteenth-Century Art, by Carol Zemel

D I S C O V E R Y SERIES I

The Devil at Isenheim: Reflections of Popular Belief in Griinewald's Altarpiece, by Ruth Mellinkoff

II

The Forgotten Hermitage of Skellig Michael, by Walter Horn, Jenny White Marshall, and Grellan D. Rourke

ill

The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck's Double Portrait, by Edwin Hall

The preparation of this work was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency. Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association of America.

MM The publisher gratefully acknowledges the contribution provided by the Art Book Endowment Fund of the Associates of the University of California Press, which is supported by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation.

A CENTENNIAL

BOOK

One hundred books published between 1QQO and 1995 bear this special imprint of the University of California Press. We have chosen each Centennial Book as an example of the Press's finest publishing and bookmaking traditions as we celebrate the beginning of our second century.

UNIVERSITY

OF C A L I F O R N I A Founded in 1893

PRESS

VAN G O G H ' S PROGRESS

Utopia, Modernity, and Late-Nineteenth-Century Art

CAROL

ZEMEL

UNIVERSITY Berkeley

OF

CALIFORNIA

Los Angeles

PRESS London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1997 by Carol Zemel Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zemel, Carol M. Van Gogh's progress: Utopia, modernity, and late-nineteenth-century art / Carol Zemel. p. cm.—(California studies in the history of art; 36) "A Centennial book"—T.p. verso. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-08849-2 (alk. paper) l. Gogh, Vincent van, 1853-1890—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Gogh, Vincent van, 1853-1890—Philosophy. 3. Utopias. I. Title. II. Series. ND653.G7Z458

1997

759-9492—dc20

96-4850

Printed and bound in Hong Kong 987654321 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For Eunice Lipton and Ken Aptekar

CONTENTS

Note on Abbreviations List of Illustrations

xv

Acknowledgments

xxi

Introduction 1.

xii i

1

Sorrowing Women, Rescuing Men: Images of Women and Family

15

2. The "Spook" in the Machine: Pictures of Weavers in Brabant 3.

Modern Citizens: Configurations of Gender in Van Gogh's Portraiture

4.

87

Self-Portraits: The Construction of Professional Identity

5.

55

135

Brotherhoods: The Dealer, the Market, the Commune

171

6. "The Real Country": Utopian Decoration in Auvers

207

Notes

247

Bibliography

283

Index

301

XI

N O T E ON

ABBREVIATIONS

Van Gogh's letters are identified throughout this book according to the numbering system in The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh (Boston, 1981). The letters to Theo van Gogh and a small number of other texts are preceded by an L. Letters to Emile Bernard are preceded by B; letters to Anton van Rappard, by R; letters to Wilhelmina van Gogh, by W. Letters from Theo van Gogh to Vincent van Gogh are preceded by T. Van Gogh's paintings and drawings are identified with numbers preceded by the letter F or by the letters SD (Supplementary Drawings), following the system inJ.-B. de la Faille, The Works of Vincent van Gogh (New York, 1970). Unless noted otherwise, all works are oil on canvas.

ILLUSTRATIONS

P L A T E S

(following page 116)

1.

Vincent van Gogh, Weaver, Facing Front (F27), 1884

2.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of a Zouave (F423), 1888

3.

Vincent van Gogh, The Postman Roulin (F439), 1888-89

4.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of a Man (F533), 1888

5.

Vincent van Gogh, The Italian Woman (F381), 1887-88

6.

Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse: Madame Roulin (F508), 1889

7.

Vincent van Gogh, L 'Arlesienne: Madame Ginoux (F488), 1888

8.

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait as a Painter (F522), 1888

9.

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Gauguin (F476), 1888

10.

Vincent van Gogh, Irises (F608), 1889

11.

Vincent van Gogh, Le Pere Tanguy (F363), 1887

12.

Vincent van Gogh, Undergrowth with Two Figures (F773), 1890

13.

Vincent van Gogh, Wheatjield under Stormy Sky (F778), 1890

14.

Vincent van Gogh, Roots and Tree Trunks (F816), 1890

FIGURES 1.

Vincent van Gogh, L'Artésienne (F488), 1888

5

2.

Paul Gauguin, La Belle Angèle, 1889

5

3.

Vincent van Gogh, Sien in a White Bonnet (F931), pencil, black chalk, 1882

16

4.

Vincent van Gogh, The Seamstress (F1025), pencil, chalk, 1883

21

5.

Vincent van Gogh, Two Women Strolling (Fg88a), pencil, 1882

26

X V

6.

Berthe Morisot, The Mother and Sister of the Artist, 1869-70

26

7.

Vincent van Gogh, Sorrow (F929), pencil, 1882

27

8.

Vincent van Gogh, The Great Lady, illustration in L185,1882

27

9.

Vincent van Gogh, Sorrow (Fgaga), chalk, 1882

29

10. Jan Toorop, In de Nes, 1888

30

11.

Laborer's Cottage (Illustrated London News, 1872)

33

12.

T. Walter Wilson, Widowed and Fatherless (Graphic, 1878)

33

13.

Luke Fildes, Houseless and Hungry (Graphic, 1869)

34

14.

Louisa Starr, Hardly Earned (Illustrated London News, 1875)

34

15.

Vincent van Gogh, Woman Mourning (Facing Right) (F935), pencil, pen, sepia, 1882

36

Vincent van Gogh, Sien with Cigar, in White Clothes, Sitting on the Floor by the Stove (F898), pencil, chalk, pen, sepia, 1882

37

17.

Vincent van Gogh, In Church (Fg67), watercolor, pen, pencil, 1882

38

18.

Vincent van Gogh, Prayer Meeting (Two Kneeling Figures, One Standing) (F1058), pencil, chalk, 1883

.3,9

19.

Vincent van Gogh, Sien Walking (F1052), pencil, chalk, 1883

40

20.

Vincent van Gogh, Sien Sewing and Little Girl (F1072), pencil, ink,

16.

chalk, 1883 21. Johannes Blommers, Washday, watercolor 22.

Vincent van Gogh, Sien and Child Walking in Rain (F1048), pencil, 1883

23.

Vincent van Gogh, Head of a Girl Wearing a Shawl (Facing Left) (F1007),

41 42

chalk, pencil, 1883

42

24.

Vincent van Gogh, Girl Kneeling before Cradle (F1024), chalk, pencil, 1883

43

25.

Vincent van Gogh, Sien (Facing Left) with Child in Her Right Arm (F1061), pencil, watercolor, 1882-83

44

26.

Vincent van Gogh, Mother and Child (F1067), charcoal, pencil, 1883

45

27.

Vincent van Gogh, Public Soup Kitchen (Fi020a), chalk, 1883

46

28.

Vincent van Gogh, Woman Weeping, Sitting on an Upturned Basket (F1060), chalk on paper, 1883

47

29.

E. G. Dalziel, Sunday Afternoon, 1 P.M.: Waitingfor the Public House to Open (Graphic, 1874)

49

Vincent van Gogh, Woman on Her Deathbed (F841), chalk, pencil, watercolor, 1883

51

Vincent van Gogh, Interior of a Weaver's Workshop with Baby Chair (F1118), pencil, ink, 1884

56

30. 31.

X V I

40

ILLUSTRATIONS

32.

Adriaen van Ostade, Siesta of the Weaver, 1650

57

33.

Vincent van Gogh. Loom with Weaver (F30), 1884

J8

34.

Vincent van Gogh, Weaver: The Whole Loom, Facing Left, with Oil Lamp (F1123), pen, 1884

59

35.

Léon Lhermitte, Woodworker at His Lathe, 1868

64

36.

Max Liebermann, Weaver Workshop, 1882

65

37.

F. Skill, Distress at Coventry (Illustrated London News, 1881)

66

38.

Paul Renouard, Un Canut à son métier (L'Illustration, 1884)

39.

W. Bazett Murray, Jute Industry: Mat Weaving in England (Illustrated

67

London News, 1881)

68

40.

Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters (F82), 1885

71

41.

Weaver Cottage, Nuenen, photograph

42.

Vincent van Gogh, Four Figures in Attic ( Weaving Shed) (F1111), ink, 1884

72 74

43.

Vincent van Gogh, Weaver with Loom and Spinning Wheel (F29), 1884

75

44.

Vincent van Gogh, Weaver: The Whole Loom, Facing Left (F1114), pencil, watercolor, 1884

76

45.

Vincent van Gogh, Weaver and Loom (F35), 1884

77

46.

Ryckebusch, Un Tisserand (L'Illustration, 1881)

77

47.

Vincent van Gogh, Interior with Weaver (F37), 1884

81

48.

Anton van Rappard, Weaver, ink, 1883-84

82

49.

Vincent van Gogh, Weaver: Half Length, Facing Right (F1122), ink, 1884

83

50.

Vincent van Gogh, Weaver, Facing Front (F27), 1884

84

51.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of a Zouave (F423), 1888

52.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait ofMilliet, Second Lieutenant of the Zouaves

95

(F 47 3),i888

95

53.

Eugène Bellangé, iSeatoi Zouave, 1888

96

54.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of a Zouave (F424), 1888

97

55.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of a Zouave (F1472), watercolor, 1888

99

56.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Patience Escalier (F444), 1888

101

57.

Vincent van Gogh, Postman Joseph Roulin (F432), 1888

103

58.

Vincent van Gogh, The Postman Roulin (F439), 1888-89

105

59.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of a Man (F533), 1888

106

60.

Nineteenth-century cravats

107

61.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait ofArmand Roulin (F492), 1888

108

62.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait ofArmand Roulin (F493), 1888

109

I L L U S T R A T I O N S

X V I I

63.

Paul Cézanne, Boy with a Skull, 1896-98

111

64.

Vincent van Gogh, Woman Sitting in the Café du Tambourin (F370), 1887

113

65.

Vincent van Gogh, The Italian Woman (F381), 1887-88

114

66.

Vincent van Gogh, La Mousmé (F431), 1888

116

67.

Vincent Van Gogh, Madame Roulin and Her Baby (F490), 1888

117

68.

Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse: Madame Roulin (F508), 1889

118

69.

Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse, illustration in L592,1889

120

70.

Vincent van Gogh, Parisian Novels (F358), 1887

122

71.

Paul Gauguin, The Night Café, 1888

123

72.

Paul Gauguin, Portrait ofMadeleine Bernard, 1888

124

73.

Wilhelmina van Gogh, photograph

126

74.

Vincent van Gogh, The Novel Reader (F497), 1888

128

75.

Vincent van Gogh, Memory of the Garden at Etten (F496), 1888

12g

76.

Vincent van Gogh, LArlésienne (F542), 1889

131

77.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Dr. Gachet (F573), 1890

133

78.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self Portrait at Easel

138

79.

Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait (F2o8a), 1886

13g

80.

Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait as Wounded Man, 1844-54

140

81.

Vincent van Gogh, Two Self-Portraits; Fragments of a Third (Fi378r), pencil, ink, 1887

XVIII

143

82. John Russell, Portrait of Vincent van Gogh, 1886

144

83.

Vincent van Gogh and Emile Bernard at Asnières, photograph, 1886

145

84.

Vincent van Gogh, Self Portrait (F178V), 1886

146

85.

Vincent van Gogh, Self Portrait (F545), oil on artist's board mounted on cradled panel, ca. 1886/87

147

86.

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait in Grey Felt Hat (F344), 1887

148

87.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait ofAlexander Reid (F343), 1887

148

88.

Vincent van Gogh, Self Portrait in Straw Hat (F469), 1887

150

89.

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait as a Painter (F522), 1888

152

90.

Paul Cézanne, Self-Portrait with Palette, 1885-86

153

91.

Cormon's studio, photograph

153

92.

Detail of letter W4,1888

155

93.

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Gauguin (F476), 1888

155

94.

Charles Laval, Self-Portrait, 1888

160

ILLUSTRATIONS

95-

Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait with Bernard {Les Misérables), 1888

162

96.

Emile Bernard, Self-Portrait with Gauguin, 1888

163

97-

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (F529), 1889

164

98.

Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait, 1889

164

99-

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait (F626), 1889

167

100. Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait (F627), i88g

168

Vincent van Gogh, Irises (F608), 1889

172

101.

102. Advertisement (unassigried), New York Times, 29 July 1990 103.

173

Honoré Daumier, Artists Bringing Work to the Salon, lithograph, 1846

104. Adolphe Willette, Le Courrierfrançais,

3 January 1886

175 176

105. Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Durand-Ruel, 1910

178

106. Théo van Gogh, photograph

181

107. Advertisement for Café du Tambourin, Gazette du Bagne, 1885

186

108. Vincent van Gogh, Bowl of Pansies (F244), 1886

187

109. Vincent van Gogh, View of Montmartre (F316), 1887

m

110.

Café Volpini, catalog cover, 1889

m

111.

Vincent van Gogh, The Yellow House (F464), 1888

196

112.

Vincent van Gogh, Bedroom at Arles (F482), 1888

197

"3-

Paul Gauguin, L'Arlésienne: Madame Ginoux, chalk, 1888

199

114. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Père Tanguy (F263), 1887

203

115.

Emile Bernard, Portrait of Père Tanguy, 1887

2 03

116.

Vincent van Gogh, Le Père Tanguy (F363), 1887

204

117.

Vincent van Gogh, Thatched Cottages against a Hillside (F793), 1890

210

118. Vincent van Gogh, Rain atAuvers (F811), 1890

210

119. Vincent van Gogh, Undergrowth with Two Figures (F773), 1890

211

120.

Vincent van Gogh, Sheaves of Wheat (F771), 1890

211

121.

Vincent van Gogh, Daubigny's Garden (F777), 1890

212

122.

Vincent van Gogh, Château in the Evening (F770), 1890

212

123-

Vincent van Gogh, Crows over the Wheatfield (F779), 1890

213

124. Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield under Stormy Sky (F778), 1890

214

125-

Vincent van Gogh, Roots and Tree Trunks (F816), 1890

215

126.

Charles Daubigny, Ile-de-Vaux on the Oise near Auvers, 1876

216

127. Vincent van Gogh, Bank of the Oise atAuvers (F798), 1890

218

128. Auvers-sur-Oise, postcard

219

I L L U S T R A T I O N S

XIX

12g.

Ravoux family, Auvers, photograph

130.

Vincent van Gogh, The Man with a Pipe (Dr. Gachet) (F1664),

220

etching, 1890

221

131.

Vincent van Gogh's place card at Dr. Gachet's, 1890

222

132.

Camille Pissarro, Factory near Pontoise, 1873

223

133. Jacob van Ruisdael, View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds, oil

XX

on canvas, ca. 1665

224

134.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Inter Artes etJVaturam, 1890

226

135.

Vincent van Gogh, illustration in letter W22,1890

227

136.

Vincent van Gogh, Women Crossing the Fields (F819), oil on paper mounted on canvas, 1890

228

137.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait ofMarguerite Gachet (F772), 1890

230

138.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Mademoiselle Dihau at the Piano, 1890

231

139.

Paul Gachet, Madame Gachet at the Piano, 1873

232

140.

Vincent van Gogh, The Plain ofAuvers (F775), 1890

233

141.

Vincent van Gogh, illustration in letter L645,1890

233

142.

Paul Gauguin and Meyer de Haan, murals, inn at Le Pouldu, photograph, 1889

238

143.

Vincent van Gogh, installation plan for Les XX in letter L614,1889

241

144.

Camille Pissarro, Spring and Summer, overdoor panels, 1872

242

145.

Claude Monet, Grainstack (Snow Effect), 1891

244

146.

Claude Monet, Grainstack (Sunset), 1890-91

245

I L L U S T R A T I O N S

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I n the mid-1980s, having published a study of Van Gogh criticism and the formation of his legendary status, I began again to write about the artist, this time a cultural biography. I soon found myself stymied by the biographical monograph and the art historical protocols of artistic genius, career development, struggle and mastery; these were the terms and representations I had previously sought to unpack. A conversation with Jake Jacobus at Dartmouth College in 1986 helped me see beyond the conventions of biography, to conceptualize a study of interrelated Van Gogh projects and themes, and once again to use the artist as a lens onto the wider culture. In the process, I tried to raise new questions and issues in Van Gogh scholarship. T h e urgencies of my own generation's approach to culture—our commitment to a social history of art and, as feminists, to issues of gender in visual forms—are evident in the chapter topics. Nevertheless, it took years to produce what often seemed to me and everyone around me like an endless book. I am indebted to many people for help, support, and encouragement along the way. In the Netherlands, my work was enormously facilitated by the staff of the Vincent van Gogh Museum, who, each time I turned up, made that research center a friendly institutional home. I am grateful to the curators Louis van Tilborgh and Sjaar van Heughten, to the librarians Anita Vriend and Monique Hageman, and especially to the documentalist Fieke Pabst, whose archival skills and good cheer made scaling the mountain of documents less daunting. Professor Evert van Uitert of the University of Amsterdam generously encouraged my project with invitations to deliver papers and to publish text. Gerard Rooijakkers and Cor van der Heijden shared their extensive research on material culture in Brabant with me and guided me through the Eindhoven archives. Many good friends made Amsterdam a gezellig environment. Lili Jampoller shared her home and library with me and listened tirelessly to my Van Gogh speculations; Debora Meijers and

X X I

Hans van der Kamp always bolstered my spirits and dispelled anxieties; Harm van Duin and Jay Henry Kester, JaapJong, Minke Krings, Erik Couvée and Janine Otten gave me shelter, entertained me, and performed emergency research tasks. In France, the warm friendship and good company of Hélène Hourmat and Maria Ivens made my forays into Paris art and culture a great adventure; without them, I could hardly have managed the maze of French archival and research proprieties relatively unscathed. At home in Buffalo, Elizabeth Felmet, secretary of the Department of Art History, and Leslie Walker, slide librarian, unstintingly and cheerfully helped pull together the maddening details of clerical and photographic work. Grants from the Research Foundation of the State University of New York in 1981 and the American Philosophical Society in 1987 facilitated summer research in Holland and France. In 1991-92 a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities gave me an essential year in Paris and enabled me to bring my project to completion. Grants from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association and the National Endowment for the Humanities subsidized publication. At SUNY-Buffalo, I am grateful for the support of Dean Kerry Grant and the Arts and Letters Dean's Research Fund for easing the considerable cost of photographs. No scholar could ask for a more supportive editor than Deborah Kirshman at the University of California Press. Her enthusiasm for the manuscript and her efforts on its behalf encouraged me through the detailed stages ofpublication and enabled me to see that there was a bigger picture after all. I am especially grateful to Stephanie Fay for her meticulous copy-editing of my text, and for her patience as I pushed press schedules to their limit. Over the years, friends and colleagues read portions of this study. For their critical insights and support, I thank Linda Nochlin, Debora Silverman, Kathleen Corrigan, Kristin Richardson, Paul Tucker, Maureen Ryan. In Buffalo, I am fortunate to be part of a remarkable feminist writing group; Elizabeth Cromley, Hester Eisenstein, Claire Kahane, Elizabeth Kennedy, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Isabel Marcus, and Suzanne Pucci were exceptional readers, scrupulous critics, and editors of numerous drafts; our meetings prodded me forward when my courage and energies flagged. Eunice Lip ton and Ken Aptekar shared my pleasure in Van Gogh's pictures. They also read my text, listened to my arguments, offered suggestions, and made a virtue of impatience, as they nudged, pushed, nagged, cajoled, and cheered me on. In loving friendship, I owe my greatest thanks to them.

XXII

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

INTRODUCTION

I am trying to finish canvases which will undoubtedly secure me the little corner that I have claimed. Ah, the future of it all. . . but since old Pangloss assures us that everything is always for the best in the best of worlds—can we doubt it? L574, January

1889

I n a letter from Aries a few weeks after his breakdown, Vincent van Gogh invoked the wise doctor of Voltaire's Candide to declare his ambitions and affirm his future. It was not the only time that Van Gogh would summon a Panglossian optimism, and his tone, as usual, maintains some Voltairean irony.1 After all, Pangloss's cheerful outlook was comic as well as sage, and the claim that "tout va pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes" sardonically acknowledged an imperfect world. For the artist, more optimist than cynic, "good father Pangloss" offered some comfort in the face of difficulty and disappointment—a cockeyed optimism, perhaps. It seems no accident that Van Gogh invoked Utopian satire at times of stress. His comments on those occasions, as in the letter quoted in the epigraph to this introduction, are resigned yet undaunted, accepting yet ambitious, critical yet idealistic, drawn from particular to more general issues. In their acknowledgment of setbacks and their reach for an idealized future, they are symptomatic, I believe, of an unshakable belief in progress and a Utopian approach to both personal problems and professional concerns. Van Gogh worked hard to construct an œuvre with which he would be identified— what his letter calls "the little corner that I have claimed." 2 Notwithstanding his modest tone, there are various ambitious projects in Van Gogh's œuvre meant to launch idealistic cultural programs for specific audiences. Pictures of weavers he painted in 1884 were intended to celebrate rural artisans for an urban public; portraits of people in Aries painted in 1888 were salable in Paris as social types, but they were also designed as inspirational decorations for the Yellow House, Van Gogh's proposed communal studio and refuge. Van Gogh infused even his collection of self-portraits and his schemes for making and marketing pictures through cooperative "brotherhoods," or for exhibiting in unusual venues, with idealistic meaning and purpose.

This book is about several such projects that Van Gogh undertook and the Utopian values that gave them form. My title, Van Gogh's Progress, derives from a double borrowing. It calls to mind, perhaps most obviously, John Bunyan's allegorical tale, Pilgrim's Progress, one of Van Gogh's favorite texts when he was young,3 and in doing so, it suggests the unremitting idealism that infused his practice. But it also derives from an eloquent passage by Walter Benjamin. Describing an image by Paul Klee of the angel of history, Benjamin notes that the angel faces the past and the record of human tragedy. But "a storm . . . blowing from paradise" catches his wings and hurtles the angel forward "into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. That storm," Benjamin writes, "is what we call progress." 4 Without sacralizing Van Gogh's image further, one might imagine the artist in this angelic stance: facing the past with nostalgic longing, sighting disaffection and cultural "debris," and, with great storms of energy, developing projects in the name of progress and a perfected modernity. I mean the metaphor to redraw somewhat an image of what scholars such as Griselda Pollock have characterized as Van Gogh's conservatism—the elaboration of bourgeois cultural constructs and values, like his figures of artisanal labor or his notion of the countryside. Without relinquishing the insights and importance of class in any account of the artist's oudook and images, the Benjaminian metaphor moves the assessment from any specific ideology or politics—any specific row he should have hoed or path he might have progressively followed—to what Benjamin called an "ethics of progress," as a conceptual framework in which Van Gogh worked. Within that progressivist framework, then, I use a notion of Utopia to characterize further Van Gogh's enterprise—his picture making and the conduct of his professional career. Indeed, like the double stance of Benjamin's angel, Van Gogh's Utopian "vision"—to the extent that we may find a singular vision—is both nostalgic and progressive. In pictures and projects, his outlook was antiurban, anticapitalist, communitarian; he envisioned a multiclassed rural society of good people—artists among them—living productively with simple needs. In biographical terms, one might describe his Utopia as the fantasy of a middle-class Protestant Dutchman, raised in the country and more at ease in environments like Brabant and Provence, where "nature" and "peasants" seemed the palpable realities, than in urban centers and their cultural marketplaces. But such a totalizing overview, however true as a general account of the artist's Utopian oudook, flattens the diversity of Van Gogh's projects and reduces their

2

INTRODUCTION

complexity as idealistic and ambitious schemes. I propose another way to consider the issue. What interests me in Van Gogh's pictures, in his letters, plans, and career moves, is neither the evidence of artistic development nor a singular vision but the signs of a Utopian impulse that is critical of many aspects of modernity and programmatically committed to improvement, progress, and change. Again and again, with great enthusiasm and energy, Van Gogh developed strategies to reach broader audiences, to promote popular art forms, to represent alternatives to urban civilization, and to foster creative communities. He persisted in these projects even though his work provoked arguments, his exhibitions were little noticed, and factional disputes often eroded his plans for cooperative enterprise. One might heroize his resolve as a "pilgrim's progress." But disappointments go hand in hand with a desire for progress and Utopian enterprise. Utopia is, after all, "no-place"; promise and impossibility are part of its name. It is too easy to pronounce these projects failures and consign them to Van Gogh's naive idealism or to pick away at the incompleteness of his Utopian ideal. More interesting than the measurable success or failure of his Utopian projects is their exploration of crucial issues in nineteenth-century culture. Pictures of weavers, for example, frame the crisis of artisanal production and industrialization with an unstable nostalgia for ruralist ideals. Van Gogh's plans for group exhibitions in Montmartre and for an artists' commune in Aries place idealistic notions of career management in the context of a burgeoning capitalist art market. And decorative landscapes painted in Auvers, another example, present a panorama of ideal settings for a diverse republican citizenry. In their engagement with pressing cultural issues, these are complex undertakings, not simple formulations of Utopian fantasy, and their Utopian features, rather than welding a perfected whole, instead chart dimensions of instability and urgency in nineteenth-century cultural life. For the historian Van Gogh's projects are not only components of a remarkable œuvre but also an illuminating lens through which to pinpoint the malaise of a moment and to locate its most vigorous hopes and energies. That Van Gogh was not alone in this Utopian impulse makes the issue and his approach all the more meaningful. The work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes offered the most obvious and perhaps the most conventional example of Utopian designs. Set in Edenic landscapes peopled with classically gowned figures or statuesque nudes, Puvis's pictures invoked a mythic Golden Age to inspire a noble future. Van Gogh admired their "strange and providential meeting of very far-off antiquities and crude modernity"; they suggested, he thought, a "continuation of all

I N T R O D U C T I O N

3

kinds of things, a benevolent renaissance ordained by fate" (L6i4a). There was also no shortage of Utopian schemes among the painters of his own generation. T h e Neo-Impressionist landscapes of Paul Signac and Maximilien Luce, Camille Pissarro's peasant imagery, Paul Gauguin's and Emile Bernard's medievalized representations of Brittany, Gauguin's painted prelapsarian fantasy of Polynesia, even Claude Monet's serial paintings of the 1890s and Paul Cézanne's magisterial images of Mont-Sainte-Victoire: all these may be seen as corrective visions. They are pictures that renounce urban fray and decadence, that replace, or in some cases infuse, the spectacle and flux that Baudelaire and the Impressionists considered the essence of modernity with a perfected vision of order and stability.5 If transience had fascinated one generation, these painters were determined to locate and picture what endured. To that end, many of these pictures—those by Gauguin and Bernard, especially, and certainly those of Puvis—present Utopia as an atemporal costumed land. Van Gogh's approach, however, was grounded in a recognizable modernity. No matter how much his pictures were affected by the cultures of Japan and seventeenthcentury Holland, and despite some nostalgia for a "good old days," they clearly refer to nineteenth-century conditions and circumstances. T h e 1888 portrait L'Artésienne (F488; Fig. 1 and Plate 7), for example, represents Marie Ginoux as an icon of regional—in this case, Provençal—femininity. Unlike Gauguin's picture of a Breton woman, Angèle Satre, flanked by primitive pottery and framed in a medievalized roundel as La Belle Angèle (Fig. 2), Van Gogh's portrait format maintains a sense of his subject's activity and, with her novels (in another version, her gloves and parasol), affirms her modernity. Gauguin's archaizing allusions—to medievalized Brittany or primitivized Tahiti—are typical of his Utopian constructs. They characteristically enclose the Utopian fantasy in some distant time or place. Van Gogh's approach is less distancing. His images, whether of weavers in Brabant, citizens in Provence, or landscapes in Auvers, insist on contemporary references to refashion the modern world. Keeping in mind this commitment to modernity, how then to approach and assess Van Gogh's Utopian projects? In his monumental study of the subject Frank Manuel has suggested interpreting Utopias as psycho-social constructs, whose symbolic meaning, much like the suggestive allusions of dreams or unconscious fantasies, may assuage the conflicts of their maker and society and so serve as "a sensitive indicator of where the sharpest anguish of an age lies." 6 Seen in these terms, the picture of rural plenty in Van Gogh's Auvers landscapes may invert and

4

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Fig. l.

Vincent van Gogh,

L'Arlesienne (F488), 1888. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A BELLE ANGELE1 Fig. 2.

Paul Gauguin, La Belle Angèk,

1889. Paris, Musée d'Orsay.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

5

deny urban tensions and discontents, and pictures such as Daubigny's Garden and the Plain ofAuvers (see Figs. 121,140) may be seen as specifying a Utopian promise of shelter, abundance, and natural harmony. But Utopia means more than the obverse of some unhappy state. T h e complexities of Van Gogh's projects—their internal shifts and turns and the dynamics of their development—may be better explained through Utopian formulations by Louis Marin and Michel Foucault. In Utopics: Spatial Play, Marin presents the enterprise of imagining Utopias as a linguistic or signifying practice he calls "utopics." "Utopia" is a configuration in that practice; it is the end product of a process that engages and plays with contradictory materials or situations.7 Thus, rather than assessing a complete (and never achieved) Utopian structure, or marshaling a critique of its lapses and impossibilities, Marin's more elastic conception looks to the dynamics of a utopic impulse. And, as is appropriate for a figure of symbolic geography, Marin's utopics are a discursive "space," in which contradictions and complexities are not resolved or synthesized but remain in vital tension, available to cultural imagination, strategically at work—or as Marin puts it—in play. "Utopic discourse," he writes,

occupies the empty—historically empty—place of the historical resolution of a contradiction. It is the "zero degree" of the dialectical synthesis of contraries. It edges its way in between the contraries and thus is the discursive expression of the neutral (defined as "neither one nor the other of the contraries").8

By "historically empty," Marin means without prior history, not yet existing, thus indicating the creative dimension, the something new that the utopic discourse proposes, no matter how vested it is in specific circumstances or historical costume. At the same time, for Marin, the "neutrality" or "zero degree" of utopic discourse signifies neither stasis nor synthesis; it is considerably more vital and charged with possibility, for, he writes, it marks out "the path and movement of contradiction before it is caught, immobilized . . . in a figure."9 Marin's approach has suggestive implications for art-historical analysis. Social and historical data may illuminate the emphases and exaggerations in a Utopian figure: the conditions of textile production in Brabant cast into relief the nostalgia of Van Gogh's pictures of hand-loom weavers in the region. But through Marin's model, the "utopic space" between data and representation may be plumbed as well, and the idealistic interplay of history, discourse, and experience

6

I N T R O D U C T I O N

examined in all its unevenness. Applied to Van Gogh's practice, the notion of utopics allows us to relinquish the quest for a comprehensive Utopian vision and to focus instead on the processes and complex materials his projects engage. More than this, it alerts us to the ways in which each of Van Gogh's projects maps out a site of cultural vulnerability and significance. "At a precise moment in history," Marin writes, "utopic practice sketches out and schematizes, unconsciously, by the spatial play of its internal differences (incongruities), the empty places (topics) of the concepts social theory will eventually occupy." 10 Thus one might say that Van Gogh's portraits of men and women in Aries in my own study not only present a Utopian array of stereotypes but also suggest—indeed, almost forecast— scarcely articulated and rarely represented tensions in modern gender roles. Michel Foucault's concept of "heterotopia" is also useful for understanding the complexities of the Utopian enterprise. 11 Foucault, like Marin, was less interested in Utopia's final form, more concerned with a diversity or multiplicity of Utopian positions. His heterotopia is not a simple or unified geography but instead a place that is simultaneously mythic and real—the cemetery is one example he offers—whose meanings are derived through juxtaposition to other sites. In such Utopian "counter-sites," Foucault claims, real spaces in the culture are "simultaneously represented, contested and inverted." 12 Furthermore, the heterotopia is "capable ofjuxtaposing in a single real space several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible." 13 Among Foucault's examples are modern libraries and museums that arrange and order several times, forms, tastes, and so forth, in one space, or vacation villages that capture time and space in one perfected enclosure. What is useful for my analysis is, once again, to relinquish a totalizing, comprehensive structure; to emphasize layered representational constructs; and to see Van Gogh's projects as heterotopic schemes intricately bound up in wider cultural pressures and urgencies. Thus the Aries portraits function both as individual portraits and as a heterotopic pantheon of model citizens; Van Gogh's production and marketing strategies chart another sort of heterotopic geography, as café, studio, salon, and salesroom become distinctive spaces in an expanding art trade; and the Auvers landscapes might be considered heterotopic space related to and shaped by republican forces, rather than simply urban substitute. This would be country life, not as the Brittany Gauguin and Bernard fantasized, the modern city's medievalized binary opposite, 14 but as an alternative environment that harmonized and naturalized a modern mix of residential, work, and leisure spaces. Thus Marin's and Foucault's formulations are useful in my

INTRODUCTION

7

analysis both because their rethinking of Utopian models thwarts the inclination to force Van Gogh's projects into conventional molds and because they call attention to the processes of imagining Utopias, and so complicate the result. Two scholars, Tsukasa Kodera and Griselda Pollock, have addressed Utopian elements in Van Gogh's work. In his study of thematic structures in the artist's work, Kodera focuses on Van Gogh's Japanism—the artist's Utopian interpretation and use of Japanese society and culture. Kodera argues that portraits Van Gogh painted in Aries—especially those with obvious Japanist referents in their titles or imagery, like La Mousmé (F431; see Fig. 66), the Self-Portrait as a Bonze (F476; also known as Self-Portrait Dedicated to Gauguin; see Fig. 93 and Plate 9), and the 1887 portraits of Père Tanguy (F363 [see Fig. 116 and Plate 11], F364)— are shaped by that understanding and so function as "an expression of his Utopian ideals." 15 Japan signaled "a luminous land" to Van Gogh, analogous to the landscape of Provence, and Japanese society embodied a Gemeinschaftsideal. Such ideals, Kodera writes, inspired images like the Self-Portrait as a Bonze (Japanese monk) offered in symbolic exchange to Gauguin as a token of membership in a modern artistic community. T h e Utopian then is one thematic structure of Van Gogh's œuvre, which is bound, in Kodera's analysis, to self-expression and religious idealism. Pollock's groundbreaking study addresses the Utopian issue as a more systemic dimension of the artist's practice. 16 Emphatically avoiding any tendency to heroize Van Gogh's person or his art, Pollock proposes historicized notions of seventeenth-century "Golden Age" Holland and Barbizon naturalism as cultural legacies for Van Gogh, along with the ideologies of French republicanism, and the artist's bourgeois values as discursive frames through which to measure his production of what he called la peinture consolante—painting that would console the troubled spirit of modern times. Pollock demonstrates that portraits by Hals and Rembrandt, for example, inspired the republican types pictured in Aries and that landscapes like The Starry Night (F612) symbolically reformulate the artist's reverence for Barbizon naturalism as modern religious art. 17 For Pollock, Van Gogh's work is born of a recuperative bourgeois nostalgia: as such, it is an effort to combat the disappointments of modernity with an uplifting but fundamentally conservative alternative. My own approach to the Utopian shares many of these convictions but is less concerned with locating thematic structures of self-expression or with defining a systematic politics for Van Gogh's modernism. Rather, looking outward from his projects, I use the Utopian impulse to explore the links between nineteenth8

I N T R O D U C T I O N

century cultural and social issues. Following the general chronology of the artist's career from T h e Hague in 1882 to Auvers in 1890,1 have selected six projects that exemplify a Utopian impulse, that is to say, a distinct issue or problem—artisanal and agricultural production, cultural economics and marketing, gender and professional identities—and Van Gogh's strategies of resolution of these problems in Utopian terms. I have not looked for previously undiscussed masterpieces, and some conventional highspots of Van Gogh's career history—the Aries and Saint-Rémy landscapes, for example—are not included here. Selections were prompted by what seemed to me interesting groups of pictures (self-portraits, odd-sized decorative landscapes), by my concern with the professionalization of the modern artist and the modern art market (a concern heightened by the record prices of Van Gogh's work at recent auctions), and by my interest in the pictorial shaping of social and gender histories. Taken together, these six projects do not produce "utopia" as a comprehensive plan for perfection or paradise. Rather they are like shifting fragments in a kaleidoscope: each turn presents another interesting design or schema, and their particularities are as important as the Utopian impulse they share. T h e study opens with Van Gogh in 1882 trying to establish himself as a professional in T h e Hague; it culminates with work produced for avant-garde settings and bourgeois patrons just prior to his death in 1890 in Auvers. The arrangement is chronological—a convenient way to stage the persistent Utopian impulse—but the chapters do not narrate a development, with Van Gogh growing ever more skillful, or even more Utopian, over the years. Each chapter involves a familiar cast of characters comprising the artist and his colleagues, but each also highlights another figure—prostitute, artisan, sister, art dealer, physician and country gendeman—to expand the social arena and to voice the experience of Van Gogh's subjects and public. I begin with a chapter on images of women and working-class family life in T h e Hague. Van Gogh's efforts to establish himself as an artist in the Dutch capital coincide with his "rescue" of a poor prostitute and their ensuing partnership. A Utopian project concerning women, sexuality, and family life is thus embedded in Van Gogh's plans to picture the modernizing city and its working people. With an emphasis on Clasina Hoornik's role as Van Gogh's model and domestic partner, the chapter considers her story, his pictures, and their alliance and explores how class and gender ideals, and differences, shape their relationship and Van Gogh's pictures. Van Gogh's idealistic commitment to art about and for "the people" intensiI N T R O D U C T I O N

9

fied in 1884-85 with his plan to celebrate country people and the habits of country life. Chapter 2 concentrates on the pictures of hand-loom weavers in the Dutch village of Nuenen and contextualizes these images by examining the situation of local textile workers, the ruralist discourses of la vie rustique, and the artist's desire to find Parisian markets for his own "artisanal" work. T h e images of Van Gogh's weaver neighbors are set at this intersection of social experience, cultural discourse, and artistic ambition as the chapter explores Van Gogh's ruralism and his pictures' Utopian strategies. Because of his distance, or estrangement, from a supportive professional milieu, the projects Van Gogh undertook in Holland were largely self-directed exercises— drawing the figure, devising multifigure compositions, mastering graphic media and color—as well as Utopian approaches to difficult or insuperable social realities: modern sexuality, the situation ofpoor women, the exploitation ofartisanal labor. In their attempt to assemble a cultural ideal from the conditions of rural labor or impoverished domesticity, his Utopian projects found no solutions—indeed, how could they?—even as they unveil their own contradictions and gaps. In France, however, where Van Gogh immersed himself in the heart and hubbub of the avant-garde, his projects are no less social in their meanings and program, but they are more closely bound to the shared problematics of the profession: modern portraiture, the construction of professional identity and career, the status and meanings of landscape, the development of a symbolic, decorative style. Chapter 3 takes up the issue of portraiture in forty-nine images of men, women, and children painted in Aries. These are well-known pictures, discussed by Van Gogh scholars at some length. 18 My analysis focuses on regional types and gendered identities. Van Gogh's commitment to the modern portrait was bolstered by his determination to picture male and female countertypes to the worldly figures of urban society. Sexuality and gender identities, I argue, are crucial issues in his modern portrait gallery. As nineteenth-century cities grew, women's sexuality— commodified, commercialized, constrained, and regulated—had become a defining topos of modern culture, central to the Baudelairean experience of "the heroism of modern life." 19 But by the end of the century, the pressure brought by bourgeois women for personal and political rights seemed to contest traditional gender roles. The task of picturing modern men and women in this heated atmosphere was especially challenging. How, for example, to represent modern figures like the worldly woman without falling back on titillating stereotypes? And how to represent the concerns and anxieties that inevitably beset modern men?

I N T R O D U C T I O N

In this chapter, I read Van Gogh's letters to his sister Wilhelmina and to Emile Bernard not only as comments on modern art and portraiture, but also as forms of gendered address. Bolstered by his oudook in these texts, the chapter explores the femininities and masculinities encoded in the Aries portraits and their Utopian representation of a modern citizenry. Two chapters address the strategies and conduct of the artist's professional life. Chapter 4 concerns Van Gogh's self-portraits, pictures that are usually interpreted as self-expressive autobiography or stylistic experiment. T h e project of self-portraiture, however, poses special challenges, not least ofwhich is the psychological strain of painting the self as "other." But self-portraits also stage a Utopian figure of the artist; they are an occasion for the formulation of professional ambitions and ideals. T h e chapter considers Van Gogh's thirty-eight selfportraits as Utopian constructions of a professional self that probe the possibilities of artistic identity. Chapter 5 turns from the artist's professional persona to strategies for professional recognition and success. Discussion here concerns the Van Gogh brothers' promotional and marketing efforts: Vincent's career tactics, Theo's activities as art dealer, and Vincent's characterization of their relationship as a Utopian community and brotherhood. T h e chapter thus discounts the legend of the artist's isolation, his ineffective stumbling, and nai'veté—all hagiographic tropes that shield the image of selfless genius from the taints of ego, ambition, and money— and highlights Van Gogh's attempts to install his work in an expanding capitalist art market. T h e structures and personnel of that marketplace—the dealers and auction sales, the salons and galleries, the cooperative ventures and factional disputes—provide the context for Van Gogh's Utopian model of communal art production, exhibition, and sales. In the final chapter, I consider a series of landscapes painted in Auvers as a Utopian diorama of what Van Gogh called "the real country." With their distinctive narrow format, these thirteen canvases represent a range of natural spaces— forest, garden, hillside, field, and plain—that stage a rural world of work and leisure. Recent studies of nineteenth-century France by Nicholas Green and Griselda Pollock have explored bourgeois cultural experience and pictorial definitions of the countryside. 20 In line with that discussion I suggest that Auvers's Utopian ruralism, as Van Gogh pictured it, is ideally suited to the new middle classes of Third Republic France—les nouvelles couches sociales—figured in this chapter by the physician-artist and country gentleman Paul Gachet. T h e concept

I N T R O D U C T I O N

ofa decorative ensemble is also central to the argument, for formal echoes and pairings in the series tie its thematics to the harmony, order, and Utopian meanings expected of decorative painting schemes. With these pictures as examples of Van Gogh's turn to decoration, the chapter links his efforts to projects by Gauguin, Monet, and Puvis de Chavannes. And in this Utopian frame, Van Gogh's "last paintings" do not appear as forecasts of his personal tragedy or as culminating statements of a stormy career but as quite the opposite, an optimistic project fully in step with avant-garde and republican programs to imagine and construct a Utopian countryside. This, then, is a study of projects, not the story of a career. Nevertheless, the person of the artist looms large in my text, and his status merits some comment. It is by now a commonplace to insist that the unitary figure of the artist is a cultural fiction, a product of art history's emphases on biography and genius.21 It is not a fiction I want to resurrect or amplify. In these chapters, I make use of biographical data and, through Van Gogh's letters, of the artist's voice—though these materials should be seen as texts for analysis, not unmediated truths. Loneliness, poverty, mental illness, struggle—standard topoi of the Van Gogh legend—are inscribed in what J. R. R. Christie and Fred Orton have called the "text of his life";22 they appear peripherally here, not as elements that flesh out personality, but as events with some bearing on professional intentions, choices, and plans. This study is thus neither a conventional monograph celebrating Van Gogh's mastery nor a conventional cultural history. I have tried to produce an integrative account of culture and modern experience and to locate Van Gogh's activities and his strategies as an artist in that matrix of images and influences. The Utopian impulse—the Utopian desire and urge to progress—that I signal in his production allows us to reconsider the agency and purposiveness of Van Gogh's professional image and activities. Read through that impulse, these projects stand as sites of cultural crisis for Van Gogh and his generation, and as Utopian sites of possibility and change.

INTRODUCTION

1 SORROWING IMAGES

WOMEN,

OF W O M E N

RESCUING

AND

FAMILY

MEN:

I want to go through the joys and sorrows of domestic life," Van Gogh wrote Theo in May 1882, "in order to paint it from my own experience" (L192). He seems to have done just that, for among the images of city people and neighborhoods in The Hague that claimed Van Gogh's attention from January 1882 to September 1883 are approximately sixty-nine drawings and watercolors representing women and domestic life. These pictures were probably not meant as an independent series. In fact, they vary considerably in size and finish, from tiny charcoal drawings to rather elaborate watercolors. There is good reason to consider them as a group, however, for they construct an image of women and family from a distinct and intimate vantage point. Clasina Hoornik (Fig. 3), a thirty-two-year-old seamstress and prostitute known as Sien, who was Van Gogh's model and domestic partner in those months, posed for the pictures, as did female members of her family— her mother, sister, and daughter. The images take up the expected topoi of femininity: the nude, motherhood, domestic work. These themes are hardly Van Gogh's invention; they proliferate across a wide range of nineteenth-century cultural discourses, from literature and pictures to the natural and social sciences and the language of social reform. Nevertheless, Van Gogh's drawings are more than formulaic renderings. They represent an effort to fit the data of daily experience into Utopian social and pictorial categories—and it is often an uneasy fit. Within such a broad framework, I want to consider not only how Van Gogh's pictures set out a Utopian program for women and domesticity but also how that process inflects familiar gendered codes. There is also a biographical dimension to consider here, for the images that use Sien Hoornik as model are bound up with her life, and with the liaison between her and Van Gogh. This is not to suggest that they illustrate a particular woman's character, or give a documentary account of Van Gogh and Sien's life together. Even at their most personal, these images are constructs; they operate

Fig. 3.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , Sien in a

White Bonnet (F931), pencil, black chalk, 188a. Collection V i n c e n t van G o g h Foundation/Van G o g h M u s e u m , Amsterdam.

within, and to some extent against, an existing formal language and cultural terrain. But neither is Sien a cipher here, a blank figure entirely constructed by Van Gogh. Sien Hoornik's life, as Van Gogh understood it—her poverty, her prostitution, her labor, her status as unwed mother—is the immediate fuel for the pictures. Van Gogh called the relationship a partnership: "My drawings are done 'by my model and me'" (L192), he wrote, and while his comment may be disingenuous—he was also defending their liaison—we may think of the pictures as a dual venture or co-production, imagined and developed, to some extent, by both of them. Van Gogh clearly had the power to picture her, but Sien too shaped these images. Both symbol and subject in these pictures, the figure of Sien Hoornik is everywhere—and hard to pin down.

16

SORROWING

WOMEN,

RESCUING

MEN

How, for example, to distinguish pictures of Sien as model from pictures of Sien "herself"? In the Public Soup Kitchen (see Fig. 27), she poses as a workingclass woman in a genre scene, a representative of her gender and class. In Sorrow (see Fig. 7), she embodies a fallen woman, symbol of her own sexual and moral status. Other drawings, like Woman Mourning (see Fig. 15) or the somber Mother and Child (see Fig. 26), elude precise classification and seem to combine the immediacy of portraiture, the formality of an icon, and the social distance of genre. Van Gogh situated his model in several picture categories—as fallen woman, poor seamstress, mother, housewife, and intimate—and in situations that, as much as anything else, embodied his own ideas about women and his notion of their world. But with images drawn from Sien's history and their own shared experience, Sien is always also her "self," just as her "self" is always also Van Gogh's construction or pose. In these images then, the strict distinction between person and model does not serve us well, for it simplifies the project and dichotomizes biographical and cultural dimensions as "reality" and "art." What is interesting about these works is that both spheres—the personal-biographical and the pictorial-cultural— are useful constructions for the artist that braid and intertwine. Van Gogh is hardly remembered for close personal relationships. He seemed to manage intimacy best at a distance, through letters; at least, he rarely pictured the people he was close to. There are no images of friends like Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard, or Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. T h e four pictures of family members— his father, his mother, his sister Wilhelmina—are worked from photographs or memory.1 Most astonishing, there are none of Theo. But when he worked across some distance of class, Van Gogh repeatedly produced icon-like images of family. In Aries, he painted the postal official Joseph Roulin six times as a patriarchal authority, Madame Roulin seven times as a potent symbol of wife and mother, and individual portraits of the Roulin children, including the baby Marcelle. A comment to Theo—"as a married couple our parents were exemplary, like Roulin and his wife" (L573)—suggests this displacement of the familial ideal. But Van Gogh's best-known pictures of family center on peasants. T h e somber Potato Eaters (F82; see Fig. 40) of 1885 shows three generations huddled together at their meal. More cheerful paintings like The Evening Watch (F647)

or

First Steps

(F668), copies of works by Millet painted while Van Gogh was hospitalized in Saint-Remy, recapitulate the idea of a rural paradise and happy family: peasant mother, father, and baby become a Holy Family suffused with light.

S O R R O W I N G

WOMEN,

R E S C U I N G

MEN

Women in Van Gogh's pictures also appear most often across the distance of class. Significantly, Van Gogh did not represent the bourgeois women he was drawn to—Margot Begemann in Nuenen or his cousin Kee Vos—though with Kee's visit to Nuenen in 1881 and Margot next door, they surely could have posed for him. There is a hint of repressed or angry sexuality in his claim that he preferred to draw women in peasant denim rather than his sisters in bourgeois dresses (L395).2 In that working-class world Van Gogh could represent a fairly explicit eroticism. A thick runningjuice of pigment gives the loosened hair and undress of an anonymous Antwerp woman painted in 1885 (F206) a marked sensual presence. A more moralized sexuality appears in 1882, however, when Van Gogh aligned Utopian professional goals with an equally Utopian personal project: the rescue of a "fallen woman" and the search for a market for his art. Van Gogh came to T h e Hague, the nineteenth-century center of Holland's art world, eager to launch his career.3 T h e departure from Etten in December 1881 had been inauspicious: his father had thrown him out of the house, partly because Van Gogh stubbornly refused to accept Kee Vos's rejection of his love. T h e Hague meant a new setting, new opportunities, a new start; with the encouragement and support of the Hague School painter Anton Mauve, who even lent him money for furniture, Van Gogh was optimistic. His uncle C. M. van Gogh, an art dealer in Amsterdam, commissioned a series of city views, and H. G. Tersteeg, the manager of Goupils et Cie, hinted at further sales.4 But working in color to produce picturesque effects was beyond Van Gogh's skills; he concentrated on learning the figure, though professional models were a luxury he could scarcely afford. Van Gogh looked among the city's poor for people to pose—among day laborers, neighborhood children, fishermen from Scheveningen, elderly "orphan" men and women from the Roman Catholic almshouse. At one point, he even imagined his studio as a models' "refuge," with food, shelter, and a minimal wage in exchange for some work (L278). Working women, too, constituted city types for Van Gogh, and by February 1882 Sien Hoornik was posing for him regularly. Her story—unlike Van Gogh's—is scanty. Archival data and Van Gogh's letters fill out the record somewhat, though both are fragmentary sources. Clasina Maria Hoornik was born in 1850, the eldest of ten children in a Catholic family. Her father, Pieter Hoornik, was a porter in the poor district near the center of T h e Hague known as the Geest. 5 After his death in 1875 the chair-making business of Pieter Anthonie, the oldest son, supplemented what Sien and her mother could earn as seamstresses and charwomen, but in general the Hoorniks were poor

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and often depended on public assistance or church charity. T h e parish soup kitchen was one source of food, and for a time Sien and three of her brothers lived in the Catholic orphanage, for there was no adequate way to provide for them at home. 6 At thirty-two, Sien was unmarried, and she had given birth to three children; only Maria Wilhelmina, then five years old, lived beyond infancy.7 A fourth child, Willem, was delivered in July 1882 in Leiden Hospital, where Sien was probably treated for venereal disease (Van Gogh was hospitalized with gonorrhea in June) and her pregnancy monitored. Her poor health was exacerbated by quinsy (inflammation of the throat and tonsils), an earlier miscarriage, an operation the previous winter, and what Van Gogh described as "many years of unrest and worry" (L210). We can only speculate about her reasons for not aborting her pregnancies. In one sense, after the first pregnancy, she was already "fallen," and there was no longer a reputation to protect. But there were also real medical dangers. Abortions were not uncommon, but the practice was illegal and often performed by unskilled practitioners with no recourse to medical aid. T h e issue was volatile and urgent enough to provoke legislation in 1886 whereby both the practitioner and the pregnant woman were culpable. 8 With her surviving child, Maria Wilhelmina, Sien lived for the most part with her mother and sisters, working desultorily. In 1874 the city archive listed her as a seamstress (naaister), but in 1877 and again in 1879 she was described as unemployed. 9 Earning a pittance, she relied on prostitution to survive. Even with these data, Sien's history is schematic and archetypal. There is much we do not know about this woman and her activities. How casual was her labor, how regular her prostitution? Seamstress, or naaister, is, after all, a very general category, and poor women, barely skilled, were commonly designated this way— as were prostitutes. 10 Nor do we know what Sien, as a seamstress, actually did: did she sew and mend for people in the Geest? did she work for wealthy families as a dressmaker? was she employed by a shop? did she work at home for clothing fabricators? Van Gogh's pictures offer little clue. Whatever the site of her labor, Sien, as part of a large, irregular workforce, could hardly earn enough in 1882 to support herself and two children. 11 Prostitution in this economy was one alternative to tedious piecework and poverty. Posing for Van Gogh was another. A few weeks after Van Gogh met Sien, his relations with Mauve and Tersteeg broke down. 12 Van Gogh's appearance, demeanor, and association with Sien were considered inappropriate. This seems a somewhat priggish position considering, as Van Gogh would comment to his friend the artist Anton van Rappard

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(R20), that painter-model liaisons were a fixture of nineteenth-century bohemian life. But it was a crushing rejection by the art establishment, and worth noting not only for its ad hominem denunciation of Van Gogh's speech, face, and character—"You have a vicious character," Mauve is reported to have said (L192)— but also for the class rage that his behavior and art provoked. As much as Mauve, the painter of peasants and volk-ish genre scenes, and Tersteeg, the proper art dealer, wanted to cut him off from further encouragement or support, Van Gogh insisted on his right to live as a worker among the people he depicted, his "subjects," while marketing those subjects in his own bourgeois world. " D o I lower myself by living with the people I draw?" Van Gogh asked rhetorically. "I think my profession requires it, and only those who don't understand anything of painting or drawing could object to it" (L190). T h e disagreement, like Van Gogh's project, mingled a classed language of culture and domesticity. In Mauve's and Tersteeg's gentlemanly society Van Gogh's pictures, like his model and partner, were "unsalable" and "without charm" (L193); they were not acceptably picturesque. Defending them (and Sien), Van Gogh compared their unrefined graphic qualities to the harsh, lye-based soap working people used. Van Gogh was as committed to this kind of "yellow-soap" production as he was to his model. In the fall of 1883 he idealistically proposed editions of cheap lithographic prints showing "types ofworkmen from the people for the people . . . in a popular edition . . . the whole a matter of duty and public service" (L251). And he fantasized working for illustrated magazines. 13 He especially admired British journals like the Graphic, where artists such as Luke Fildes, Hubert Herkomer, and Frank Holl stirred the social sympathies of middle-class readers and presumably brought images to working people with limited access to art. "I think it very noble," he wrote Theo, "that no winter passed without the Graphic doing something to arouse sympathy for the poor." 1 4 As he became estranged from his influential connections in the Hague, Van Gogh began to work with this "alternative" market in mind. He experimented with graphic and print media— black mountain chalk, lithographic crayon, and inks, chiefly—hoping to improve his drawing without relinquishing its "yellow-soap" qualities. 15 Although in the end he did not send his work to the English magazines but to Theo in Paris, where it remained unsold and for the most part unseen, 16 the many signed drawings of Sien and her family should still be seen within that populist graphic frame. Given this market for his work, it is not surprising that Van Gogh represented Sien in poses hardly less conventional than the archive categories. She is a "poor

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Fig. 4.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , The

Seamstress

(F1025), pencil, chalk, 1883. Rotterdam, B o y m a n s - v a n Beuningen M u s e u m .

seamstress" in his emblematic drawing of a woman intently stitching some white cloth (Fig. 4). T h e subject was a cliché for women's activities: middle-class women are often depicted with their embroidery or fancy needlework, while poor and peasant women are shown stitching simpler goods. But rather than show the pleasures of a woman's domestic activity, the image emphasizes an unremitting workweariness. T h e figure is a stark and haggard silhouette; light glares onto the creased contours of her bent head, hands, and cloth. T h e face is hollow cheeked, the neck all ropey sinew, and at the center, where the hands are emphatically outlined, each bone, knuckle, and nail is a carefully drawn sign of labor and wear. T h e figure bears Sien's craggy profile, but it is less a study of a person than a métier portrait, commonly used to define and "celebrate" working people in a social scheme. Seamstresses in the public workforce often appear as figures of sentiment and sexuality in nineteenth-century literature—one need only think of such types in Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt" or Charles Dickens's Tale of Two Cities. But pictorial tradition commonly placed sewing women in a domestic setting, and rarely among picturesque métier types. 17 Van Gogh's image thus effectively

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mingles pictorial genres. Drawing on Sien's experience and eliminating any clear domestic space, Van Gogh made her an emblem of hard work and endurance within the iconography of the working poor. Initially, however, in both his letters and pictures, she is a fallen woman and prostitute. T h e categories were almost interchangeable, but the distinction is worth making because Van Gogh relied on one designation or the other to defend or malign Sien's character. Fallen women began as innocents. T h e y were often, though not always, middle-class, and their sexual "fall" was explained by a scenario of love and seduction, followed by abandonment and ruin. 18 Prostitution, on the other hand, meant the exchange of sex for money, and it was not so readily subsumed by bourgeois ideologies of love and romance. T h e nineteenth century puzzled over its origins and control, and while some believed it signaled unbridled sexuality—male or female—progressive opinion like Van Gogh's located the phenomenon firmly in poverty and class. 19 In Holland, reformist clergymen like H. Pierson and the anarchist-socialist Ferdinand Domela-Nieuwenhuis reasserted the link between poverty, prostitution, and class at an International Conference on Prostitution held in 1883 in T h e Hague. T h e Social-Democratic weekly Recht voor Allen reported their views: " T h e main cause of prostitution, despite all the claims and stories, is poverty and nothing but poverty. Many people don't want to hear that, but the truth must be spoken." 20 Necessity then—not female lust, greed, or desire—produced prostitution. Henry Mayhew's account in London Labour and the London Poor (1862) is another classic description: "Large numbers of [prostitutes] are driven upon the streets by a stern necessity, compelled to live by sin as a trade, while everything contributes to prevent their escape from the mode of life into which they have been involuntarily forced." 21 Van Gogh concurred. He cited an image by Frank Holl called "Her Poverty But Not Her Will Consents" to make the point to Van Rappard (R21). And to Theo he wrote: "It is my opinion that no matter how good and noble a woman may be by nature, if she has no means and is not protected by her own family, in the present society she is in great, immediate danger of being drowned in the pool of prostitution" (L279). 22 Van Gogh sought out a prostitute when, feeling rejected and needy, he visited The Hague in the fall of 1881, and his description of the encounter romantically enshrines the woman in opposition to Kee Vos, the cousin who had spurned him. Like Kee (and like Sien Hoornik), this woman had a child. But unlike the bourgeois cousin, this woman was poor, warm, hardworking, welcoming, and—

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unjustly—a social outcast.23 His account of meeting Sien has another tone, with the emphasis on her victim status and misery. "Last winter," he wrote,

I met a pregnant woman, deserted by the 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 have worked with her all winter. I could not pay her the full wages of a model, but that did not prevent my paying her rent, and, thank G o d , so far I have been able to protect her and her child from hunger and cold by sharing my own bread with her. When I met this woman, she attracted my attention because she looked ill. I made her take baths and as much nourishing food as I could afford, and she has become much stronger. I went with her to Leyden, to the maternity hospital where she will be confined. . . . It seems to me that every man worth a straw would have done the same in such a case. [Li 9 2]

Though the chronology fits and the idea has a certain sentimental appeal, there is no firm evidence that Van Gogh was the father of Sien Hoornik's baby. If Sien was the prostitute he had visited the previous fall, the discovery of her pregnancy might explain his readiness to shelter and rescue her. Van Gogh once referred to Willem as "our baby" (L273), and he drew the infant several times. His plans for marriage, however, focus on Sien's rescue, and his letters make no reference to legal recognition or his paternity. In fact, we know little about Sien's sexual "fall." Van Gogh's account of her youthful liaison with a man who "was very kind to her" but refused to marry her "for the sake . . . of his rank and his family" (L192) is the standard scenario. In this version of her story, Sien is the archetypal fallen woman—seduced, abandoned, and forced to prostitute herself. T h e sordid terms ofher story invited charity, forgiveness, and rescue, a favorite Victorian fantasy. Or so Van Gogh defended his actions to family and friends—"you who prize good manners and culture, and rightly so if only it be the true kind," he wrote to Theo (and, indirectly, to his father, Mauve, and Tersteeg). "Which is the more delicate, refined, manly—to desert a woman or to stand by a forsaken woman?" Other explanations in Van Gogh's letters—similarly defensive—suggest his psychological neediness, just as his declared bond with social outcasts points to a psychological recuperation of his own social awkwardness. 24 Van Gogh linked the strength of his and Sien's connection—his power to heal Sien's "wounds"—

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to similarities of character. He compared her "ugly" speech and "fits of anger" to the "mask of reserve, almost of roughness" that he himself protectively wore. It was not exactly romantic love, feelings he reserved for the bourgeois Kee, but Sien's plea that they stay together—she told Van Gogh that she was "so attached to you that I could not be alone again" (L194)—seemed to neutralize Kee's rebuff and affirm the possibility that he was lovable. Of course, the liaison offered more than moral and emotional rescue. Sien and her children were sheltered and fed, but Van Gogh got a cheap, available model. After working for Van Gogh for several months, she joined his household in the Schenkweg, a workers' district of new housing at the outskirts of the city. Although Van Gogh was proud of the civilizing change he brought about, his plan nevertheless resonated with the authority of class and masculine rectitude. " T h e woman is now attached to me like a tame dove," his letter of May continues. "For my part, I can only marry once, and how can I do better than marry her? It is the only way to help her; otherwise misery would force her back into her old ways, which end in a precipice. She has no money, but she helps me earn money in my profession" (L192).25 With Sien at the center of his work and his household, Van Gogh imagined a Utopian domesticity as a form of mutual rescue. Not only would Sien and her children be offered the sanctuary of a complete family—husband, wife, and children happily housed together—but they would also form a working unit or partnership. Indeed, threaded through this tale of misery is another discourse that relates Sien's presence to Van Gogh's professional life. His letters tell what he valued in her. "I have a new model now," he wrote Theo in March, two months before revealing her personal history. Or rather, it is more than one model, for I have already had three persons from the same family: a woman of about forty-five . . . then her daughter of about thirty, and a young child often or twelve. T h e y are poor people, and I must say they are more than willing. I get them to pose, but not without difficulty, and only on condition that I promise them regular work. . . . T h e younger woman [Sien] is not handsome, as she is marked by smallpox, but the figure is very graceful and has some charm for me. Also, they have the right clothes. Black merino and a nice style of bonnets and a beautiful shawl, etc. . . . I promised them a guilder a day as soon as I sold something. A n d also that I shall make it up to them later for paying too little now. But I must try to get someone to buy my drawings. [L178]

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According to Van Gogh, models asked one guilder an hour—far more than he could afford. 26 A guilder a day, even as promised earnings, was comparable to the wages of seamstresses in the best shops, who earned approximately six guilders a week. 27 But Van Gogh's goodwill as an employer should not blur the distinction between his models' poverty and his own. T h e Hoorniks certainly knew the difference. Van Gogh received 50 guilders per month (12.50 per week) from Theo at a time when a working man earned approximately 10 guilders a week. Mothers on public assistance received a meager 1.50 guilders a week at most, plus bread. 28 Van Gogh's offer was generous, but it was also based on considerable optimism about future sales. As poor people "more than willing" to work, the Hoorniks were wary of being exploited and wanted the assurance of a regular wage. To the ambitious artist, their situation was grim, but it was also picturesque. With the "right clothes," they were effectively costumed types; Sien, though blemished, had "charm." Van Gogh was pleased with his model. "I have only to say 'Be there at such and such a time,'" he wrote Van Rappard, "and she is there." Along with her compliance, Van Gogh valued her lack of conventional beauty and made good use of the marks of her past. "I never had such a good assistant as this ugly (???) [sic], faded woman," he wrote his friend: In my eyes she is beautiful, and 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. W h e n the earth is not plowed, you can get no harvest from it. She has been plowed— and so I find more in her than in a crowd of unplowed ones. [R8]

T h e metaphor may be awkward, but in fact, Van Gogh reaped an abundant harvest that year. Sien Hoornik was a ready-made subject. Rescuing her for the present, he made good use of the moral lapses of her past. And avoiding the traffic in women, he drew her into another economy: the traffic in pictures and middleclass domesticity. Her body was his starting point. A pencil drawing (Fig. 5) shows Sien as a morose figure, hand across her pregnant belly, walking with her mother to fetch soup. T h e image seems a simple realist record of women and street life in the Geest. But the public presentation of her pregnancy sets it apart. Pictorial references to pregnancy in previous centuries locate the woman firmly in a domestic space or economy—Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini and His Wife (1434), Vermeer's Woman in

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Fig. 5.

Left: V i n c e n t van G o g h , Two Women

Strolling

(Fg88a), pencil, 1882. Netherlands, private collection. Fig. 6.

Above: Berthe Morisot, The Mother

and

Sister of the Artist, 1869-70. Chester Dale Collection, © Board o f Trustees, National Gallery o f Art, Washington.

Blue Reading a Letter (1664); in the nineteenth century pregnant women almost never appeared in pictures. Middle-class women, when pregnant, simply retired from public view. Berthe Morisot's painting of her pregnant sister at home (Fig. 6) offers a glimpse of this domestic terrain, with the swollen belly nonetheless muffled by voluminous clothing and picture design. In fact, an elaborate iconography of the bourgeois couple's "sweet secret" developed that often represented the delivery of babies by storks.29 Sien's working-class status may have allowed Van Gogh the liberty to picture her condition. Even so, it is a reminder of how the appearance and representation of women's bodies was coded through decorum and class. The symbolic Sorrow (Fig. 7) barely masks the six- or seven-month pregnancy. This was one of the first works for which Sien posed, and Van Gogh was especially proud of the drawing as a sign of his developing skills. "Some way or other I must

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Fig. 7.

Aboiie, Uft: V i n c e n t van G o g h , Sorrow (F929), pencil, 1882. T h e H a g u e , F. Bremmer.

Fig. 8.

Above, right: V i n c e n t van G o g h , The Great Lady, illustration in L 1 8 5 , 1 8 8 2 . Collection V i n c e n t van G o g h

Foundation/Van G o g h M u s e u m , Amsterdam.

make some studies of the nude," he wrote T h e o , " . . . to learn to feel and see the body through the clothes and to understand the action" (L182). But acquiring that skill was a professional issue, for it meant having access not only to models, but to models willing to pose nude. "The fear that they have to 'strip to the skin' for you," Van Gogh reported, "is generally the first scruple you have to get rid of when asking someone to pose" (L182). Of the dozen or so studies of the nude Van Gogh hoped to make, only Sorrow survives. He compared it to another drawing,Roots (Fg33r): "I wanted to express something of the struggle for life in that pale, slender woman's body, as well as in the black, gnarled and knotty roots" (L195). Thus rather than stressing sensual features, Van Gogh embedded the body in a moralized discourse of struggle and survival. As such, it may be seen not only with the landscape, but beside a small study titled in English The Great Lady (Fig. 8), inspired by a Victorian poem of

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social protest, "The Lady's Dream," by Thomas Hood.30 Hood's text, as Van Gogh remembered it, told of a "pale, consumptive, emaciated" seamstress laboring in close quarters on a wealthy woman's gown. The lady sees the seamstress in a dream, and the vision disturbs her conscience and her sleep.31 The drawing shows a half-length nude woman sitting upright in a dark, impenetrable space, the suddenness of her action conveyed by the stark black and white design. But the image also has an allegorical meaning: it centers on heavy breasts that spill over the crossed arms, proffering one frontal nipple to the spectator in symbolic charity. Sorrow is similar to this study in its graphic style and symbolic emphases. With no softening play of light or atmosphere, Van Gogh's line tracks a course along bony arms and legs, over pendulous breasts and swollen belly, creased and wrinkled chest, and a back strewn with lank tendrils of hair. In contrast to The Great Lady's upright, open form, the sorrowing woman contracts her body in the weeping posture commonly associated with a sexual fall.32 And where The Great Lady rises to charity in the darkness, this woman crouches and grieves in an empty white space. In each picture, the blunt simplicity of line de-eroticizes the body because it lacks the visual seduction or titillation offered by a schooled graphic style. The emphasis on the breasts and belly of the profiled nude in Sorrow also calls attention to the pitfalls of woman's sexuality, with the viewer, like the artist, as bystander and potential rescuer. Symbolic details in a more elaborate version of Sorrow reinforce this message (Fig. g). 33 Pressed beneath a high horizon, the woman here huddles in a natural setting that suggests both fertility and pain. Lilies of the valley, symbols of purity and innocence now lost, repeat the curl of her pose; bare twigs oudined against the stony seat echo her straggling hair; a branch at the left, dotted with spring blossoms, is harsh and thorny nonetheless. Pregnant and sorrowing, she is a modern Eve, these details tell us, nature's hostage, condemned to suffer alone. A quotation from Jules Michelet (1798-1874) captions this version of the image. "Comment se fait-il," it asks, without translation, "qu'il ait sur la terre une femme seule, délaissée?"34 The rhetorical question asserts the picture's social meaning, for it implies a woman-as-victim—not sinner—and so sets the nude within a framework of ethical responsibility, rather than temptation and desire. By alluding to her sexuality yet suppressing her sensual appeal, the image absolves the woman of her fall and blames the society that abandons her.

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Fig. 9.

Vincent van Gogh, Sorrow

(Fgiga), chalk, 1882. London, Walsall Museum and Art Gallery.

With Sorrow, Van Gogh initiated a pictorial as well as a personal rescue of Sien, representing her as a repentant fallen woman, not as a prostitute. T h e distinction— and with it, the possibility of rescue—is more pointed ifwe consider a nearly contemporary image of prostitution, Jan Toorop's painting of 1889, In de Nes (Fig. 10), which pictures an Amsterdam street (the Nes) well known for its sexual commerce. Toorop linked prostitution to decadence in this moralizing scene, and he presented it as the working woman's dilemma or choice. A uniformed housemaid (whose work is considered proper for poor women) is the central figure. She clutches the hand of a wailing child and remonstrates with another woman, probably the mother, who leans, languorous and unheeding, against the post; in the background half-clad women prepare for the night's revelry. With its NeoImpressionist stippling, the picture is appropriately dusky for a low-life specta-

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Fig. 10.

Jan T o o r o p ,

IndeNes,

1888. T h e

Hague, Haags Gemeentemuseum.

cle, but Toorop's message is clear: prostitution is a woman's choice of irresponsible pleasure, severed from both the respectable working world and the responsibilities of family. Whereas Toorop painted an anecdotal allegory that delivers its message through a naturalistic setting or frame, Sorrow universalizes a particular woman's circumstances. Anonymous, nude, and in a symbolic setting, a poor woman becomes Woman, and the image passes beyond class behavior and boundaries to gendered social responsibilities. An exhausted and unbeautiful figure is sympathetically designated remorseful victim rather than frivolous trollop. It was one way for Van Gogh to draw Sien's moral laxity into a framework of love and to begin her return to respectability. Using the configurations of The Great Lady and Sorrow to evoke social conscience rather than sexual guilt, Van Gogh presented charity and repentance as a rescuing strategy. In this respect, the quotation from Michelet is a telling choice. 35 Van Gogh especially admired the French historian's best-selling studies L'Amour and La Femme, published in 1859 and i860. He had turned to these texts the previous year when, rejected by Kee Vos, he struggled to rationalize his own emotional and sexual needs. "I could not do without Michelet for anything in the world," he wrote Theo.

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It is true the Bible is eternal and everlasting, but Michelet gives such very practical and clear hints, so directly applicable to this hurried and feverish modern life in which you and I find ourselves, that he helps us to progress rapidly; we cannot do without him. . . . Michelet even expresses completely and aloud things w h i c h the Gospel whispers only the germ of. [L161]

What the Gospel whispered—sexuality—Michelet openly voiced. Van Gogh himself was fairly reticent on the subject, and the spectacle of sexuality associated with the modern city and modern culture would remain an unsettled and unsettling issue for him. His pictures and letters seem eager to displace the eroticism of his liaison with Sien into social and moral issues. But the admiring references to Michelet suggest a compelling conflation of desire, individual freedom, and morality. In a comment that seems to forecast his own impassioned way of painting, Van Gogh told Theo in 1883 how he was moved by Michelet's frankness and immediacy: "He smears what he feels like onto paper without caring in the least how he does it" (L266). Michelet not only acknowledged the force of sexuality in modern society but in La Femme also addressed the moral dangers that threatened the single working girl unable to live on a factory or piecework wage. 36 It was possible, Michelet believed—and this surely appealed to Van Gogh—to reverse the consequences of a sexual fall. "We too easily imagine that a person is irremediably ruined," Michelet wrote. But, he continued: the soul of a woman, much more mobile, more fluid-like, than that of a man, is never profoundly corrupted. W h e n once she has seriously resolved to return to virtue, w h e n once she has fairly begun to live by struggles, sacrifices, and reflection, she is already regenerate. . . . if once she loves—all is well. T h e best man in the world may find happiness in her, and be honored by her still.37

If repentance was the recipe for rescue, it was best realized, not surprisingly, within the family—that refuge from the fallen woman's solitary misery. Linda Nochlin describes a virtually twinned configuration for this nineteenth-century type: "Behind every crouched figure of a fallen woman, there stands the eminently upright one, of the angel of the house." 38 Michelet naturalized the issue and proclaimed its moral urgency. "Woman dies," he wrote, "if she has no hearth and no protection." " A household she ought to have, she ought to be married." And in a chapter titled "No Life for Woman without Man," he wrote: "Nature has bound

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up life within a triple and absolute tie: man, woman and child. Separately they are sure to perish, and are only saved together." 39 UAmour made a similar argument: sections like "Creation of the Beloved" and chapters titled " T h e Revelation of Woman," "Am I Fit to Create a Woman?" (certifying the rescuer's authority), and "Love in a Cottage," along with detailed instructions on what that modest nest should be, dramatize the appeal of Michelet's rhetoric and ideas to a middle-class audience. 40 This Christian doctrine of redemptive love was certain to appeal to Van Gogh's evangelical temperament. Domesticity was constituted as a perfected relationship oflove and a model for social order and harmony. Only within the family, protected by her husband, could a woman perform her essential task: to nourish, comfort, and construct a spiritual, loving, and productive environment. T h e lesson was simple and clear. " T h e world cannot come to an end while one man still loves," Michelet preached. "Love somebody for the salvation of the globe." 41 His counsel offered a timely Utopian framework for Van Gogh's own actions and needs. It is a mark of his interest in international markets and culture that Van Gogh invoked a French cultural authority for his image and opinions. He would find a no less urgent valorization of family—and reminder of female vulnerability—in a widespread repertoire of pictures, including those in the English magazines to which he hoped to sell his work. Pictures like F. X. Winterhalter's Queen Victoria and Her Family (1846) represent royalty through a loving domestic paradigm. Like Van Gogh, readers of the 1872 Illustrated London News could admire a neat and cozy laborer's cottage (Fig. 11) in which a father dandles an infant on his knee while the women perform domestic chores. And in genre images of peasants or fisherfolk by the Dutch painters David Bles, Johannes Blommers, and Josef Israels, familial love and domestic ritual seem as "natural" as the land and seas that supported them. T h e success of the family unit was paramount in this discourse, and no matter how problematic or varied, family life was measured through this normative ideal. T h e absence of husbands and fathers, for example—common enough at all levels of society, though more often associated with the poor—was represented as an insuperable loss that left women helpless and families lamed. Indeed, in this discourse, where women's work was confined to domestic labor, the absence of husband or masculine protector, some unseen but omniscient male figure, was a terrifying signal of "poverty" and doom. T. Walter Wilson's picture Widowed and

32

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Fig. n .

Laborer's Cottage

{Illustrated, London Mews, 1872). Collection Vincent van Gogh Foundation/ Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 12.

T. Walter Wilson,

Widowed and Fatherless (Graphic, 1878). Collection Vincent van Gogh Foundation/Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

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33

Fig. 13.

Luke Fildes, Houseless

and Hungry {Graphic, 1869). Collection Vincent van Gogh Foundation/Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 14.

Louisa Starr, Hardly

Earned {Illustrated London News, 1875). Collection Vincent van Gogh Foundation/Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

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Fatherless, reproduced in an 1878 Graphic (Fig. 12), represented the condition with a scene of rupturing grief in which even the cast-off, "parentless" doll is prey for the family dog. If women without men were vulnerable, they were often, in the magazines, winsome and pretty—the better to stir rescue fantasies and desire. We shudder at the sight of the young mother clutching her baby in Luke Fildes's Houseless and Hungry (Fig. 13)—an extremely popular print from an 1869 Graphic—as she is drawn into the frieze of families whose homelessness forecasts her fate. T h e attractive working girl in Louisa Starr's Hardly Earned (Fig. 14), reproduced in an 1875 Illustrated London News, is certainly better off, but the title tells us that she too is a pitiful figure, slumped alone at her grate. Like many Victorian paintings, these prints sweetened social issues with melodrama and sentimental anecdote. Theatrical staging, a host of details, and a repertoire of gestures or expressions underscore the family's or the woman's predicament. And these concerns are forced home by the empowered position of the middle-class viewer/reader, who surveys the image in relative comfort and ease. Although he admired and collected such illustrations, by and large Van Gogh avoided their pictorial strategies. As a result, his drawings function rather eccentrically in this discourse, as icons rather than as visual theater. He hoped to make elaborate compositions like the Public Soup Kitchen (see Fig. 27), but either he could not marshal the models, or the representational demands for interacting figures in these scenes eluded him.42 Most of his drawings are single figures posed in some domestic duty or household task, and the settings, in contrast to those of the magazine illustrations, are stark and minimal. Pathos or sentiment is aroused graphically through his "yellow-soap" style of deeply drawn contours, angular lines, selective highlighting. There is so little explanatory detail that the images reverse the conventions of genre imagery and discourage anecdotal or narrative fantasy. T h e result is an emblematic quality that suggests some special emphasis or urgency, so that ordinary tasks, as in The Seamstress (see Fig. 4), acquire the heightened meaning of ritual. In images like these, the particular becomes the general, the individual becomes the type, and the conditions of Sien Hoornik's life acquire symbolic status and meaning. But there is something further in these icons of the everyday. Whether seen full-length or close-up, the women and children in these pictures often pose in profile, or they seem to look away. Not merely unaware of scrutiny, like Louisa Starr's recumbent figure, they avoid the viewer's gaze. T h e result is an aloofness,

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35

Fig. 15. Mourning

V i n c e n t van G o g h , Woman (Facing Right) (F935),

pencil, p e n , sepia, 1882. Collection Kroller-Muller M u s e u m , Otterlo, T h e Netherlands.

a sense of access to the figure denied, or some quality of person alluded to but also withheld, perhaps some persistent privacy. Drawings like Sien in a White Bonnet (see Fig. 3) suggest that combination of intimacy and avoidance. T h e figure is drawn close to the viewer, as if in a portrait, yet she seems impassive and impenetrable, refusing any intimate exchange. Given the qualities of person we expect in such designs, something we might call alienation is pictured here. Indeed, in a sense the relationship of viewer and subject in these images is comparable to that of purchaser and prostitute: both relationships awaken the expectation of intimacy, only to dislocate it with emotional aloofness and closure. Other emblematic drawings fall closer to the category of domestic genre. In one example, dated April 1882 (Fig. 15), Sien assumes the classic pose of dream or melancholy. T h e simple rush chair and foot warmer in the darkened alcove suggest a modest interior, but without the clutter of furnishings typical of the magazine pictures, the emphasis remains on the dark folds and gathers of her merino costume—what Van Gogh called "the right clothes"—and on the sad face

36

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Fig. 16.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , Sien with Cigar, in White Clothes, Sitting on the Floor by the Stove (F898), pencil, chalk,

p e n , sepia, 1882. Collection Kroller-Muller M u s e u m , Otterlo, T h e Netherlands.

whose melancholy saturates the image. Because she is isolated this way as a "type," there is no narrative or anecdotal explanation for her sadness; unlike the working girl's exhaustion, this seems an existential malaise. Furnishings and details in another drawing from the same period (Fig. 16) promise more access to person and circumstance. Sien, dressed in loose white clothing that masks her pregnancy, sits smoking a cigar—a favorite habit, apparently (L215)—though it is neatly tucked along the lines of her skirt and easy to overlook. T h e angles of the stove, coal bin, and ketde on the grate match the craggy contours of her silhouette and declare the modesty of her surroundings, while her position on the floor, casual undress, and thoughtful attitude deliver an intimate at-home mood. We see her erect profile from a position equally low and so draw close to her reverie. Whereas a socially concerned voyeurism charges

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Fig. 17.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , In Church (F967), watercolor, p e n , pencil, 1882. Collection Krdller-Muller M u s e u m ,

Otterlo, T h e Netherlands.

Hardly Earned, the viewpoint and design of this picture underwrite the success of Sien's rescue. As if obedient to the terms of bourgeois morality, Van Gogh, as he grew closer to Sien, abandoned studies of her as a nude and shifted the focus to family. T h e images beginning in late spring 1882 cast her in the roles of good woman, housewife, and mother—the prescribed terms of her rescue. T h e spiritual activity pictured, however, is hardly the cozy or loving family feeling that Michelet prescribed. Whether communal or solitary, religion in these drawings is represented as the solace of the poor and is permeated with resignation. The most elaborate and ambitious image of religious life shows a church in the Geest (Fig. 17) where the weary heads of Sien and her mother appear repeatedly in the frieze of congregants, mainly elderly poorhouse residents who also posed for Van Gogh and who fill the pews. With its bust-length figures aligned in rows, the design compensates for a certain

38

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Fig. 18.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , Prayer Meeting

Kneeling Figures, One Standing)

(Two

(F1058), pencil,

chalk, 1883. C o l l e c t i o n Kroller-Miiller M u s e u m , Otterlo, T h e Netherlands.

lack of compositional skill and allows separately studied heads to become a resigned social company. But prayer, whether in public or private space, is most often a woman's solemn ritual. A drawing with no identifiable setting shows two women kneeling in prayer while a third exits through a darkened door (Fig. 18); the design leads the viewer through every bend of their supplicant forms. Another drawing shows Sien outdoors in a kerchief and a bulky coat (Fig. 19). Framed against a doorway, her figure becomes an icon—a standing saint, with umbrella and prayer book like twin attributes under her arm. In another drawing (F1053), she prays alone at the table, her face lost in shadow and thought. Domestic tasks, equally emblematic, seem no more rewarding or pleasurable. Light falls on austere interiors, scrawny figures, and awkward, blocky furnishings. A gaunt woman peels potatoes, the staple diet of the poor (F1053). Or in a variant of the Seamstress figure, she sews with her daughter huddled and introspective at her feet (Fig. 20). T h e design, counterpositioning them for balance, leaves each one isolated and psychically separate as well. Indeed, no matter how close

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39

Fig. 19.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , Sien Walking (F1052), pencil, chalk, 1883. T h e H a g u e , heirs of H . P. Bremmer.

Fig. 20.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , Sien Sewing and Little Girl (Fl072), pencil, ink, chalk, 1883. Collection

Vincent van G o g h Foundation/Van G o g h M u s e u m , Amsterdam.

or commingled they are in their activities, the figures in these compositions scarcely interact. Although this happens in part because of Van Gogh's inexpertness, the effect is to make their tasks seem solitary rituals. Whereas the fluid lines and lighting of Blommers's Washday (Fig. 21) bind figures and activities in a scene of happy household chores, the "yellow-soap" harshness in Van Gogh's drawings turns housewifery to tedium and anomie.

40

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Fig. 21.

Johannes Blommers, Washday, watercolor. Netherlands, private collection.

This is especially marked where it is least expected, in the images of children, where in addition to a young girl performing typical domestic tasks—knitting, carrying bread—Van Gogh also depicted children in the throes of difficult feelings and distancing moods. T h e mother and daughter walking in the rain (Fig. 22) are hardly a happy pair. T h e mother is downcast and glum, and the little girl, forlorn and shy before the viewer, clings to her mother's skirts. " T h e poor little girl," Van Gogh wrote Theo about his model, five-year-old Maria Wilhelmina: "You can see from the drawing that the old deep misery has not been erased" (L260,January 1883). Hardly the insouciant urchins of the magazines, these children have no mischief, comedy, or charm (Fig. 23). They pose obediently, but they resist the artist/viewer's probing gaze. We are brought very near to an older girl (probably Sien's sister), her hair shorn to prevent lice, but her sidelong glance at her employer is guarded and sullen. Some optimism or a note of cheer, however, is associated with Sien's baby. T h e child born in July 1882 in Leiden hospital certified a sense of family for Van Gogh,

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41

Fig. 22.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , Sien and Child Walking in Rain (F1048), pencil, 1883. C o l l e c t i o n Kröller-Müller

M u s e u m , Otterlo, T h e Netherlands. Fig. 23.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , Head of a Girl Wearing a Shawl (Facing Left) (F1007), chalk, pencil, 1883. Collection

Kröller-Müller M u s e u m , Otterlo, T h e Netherlands.

who reported that Willem "was the prettiest, healthiest, merriest, jolliest child you can imagine" (L260) and the sign of his household's success. 43 Aventurier en voyage (Adventurer setting out, F872), a tiny drawing whose title suggests a French magazine market, shows the infant crawling happily after his toys. More developed works turn from baby pleasures to a traditional Holy Family. A charcoal drawing of a girl (Maria Wilhelmina) kneeling before a cradle (Fig. 24) sets the viewer above a diagonal composition that fuses the forms of the two children into a reverential sibling homage.

42

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Fig. 24.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , Girl

Kneeling before Cradle (F1024), chalk, pencil, 1883. Collection V i n c e n t van G o g h Foundation/Van G o g h M u s e u m , Amsterdam.

Following Michelet, Van Gogh's letters declare with high-minded certainty that Sien's rescue was tied to her maternal role. 44 "I think this child's doing well," he wrote, "keeping [Sien] busy and occupying her thought are important in saving the woman herself" (L297). And he told Van Rappard, "something vain in a woman before she has become a mother is replaced by something sublime later on, when she is working hard for her children" (R21). Having relinquished Sien's sorrowing body, Van Gogh replaced it with forms of domesticity and maternal plenitude, as if determined to demonstrate the "natural" bond of mother and child even in this unlikely candidate. More than anything else, it seemed, maternity guaranteed Sien's success, and so she frequently appears nursing the baby or cradling him in her arms. But where we might expect to find nursery intimacies and gen-

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43

Fig. 25.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , Sien

(Facing Left) with Child in Her

Right

Arm (F1061), pencil, watercolor, 1882-83. Collection Kroller-Muller M u s e u m , Otterlo, T h e Netherlands.

tie sentiment, the mother-child connection in these drawings is governed by the stark graphic relation of child and breast (F1062), or by the thrusting focus of the mother's solemn stare. T h e confronted profiles in Sien {Facing Left) with Child in Her Right Arm (Fig. 25)—Sien's all hooks and angles, Willem's all baby puffiness—dramatize a ferocity of feeling that exceeds the niceties of bourgeois "motherhood." T h e most developed maternal image bypasses maternal pleasure entirely (Fig. 26). Mother and child (as posed, Sien and her sister) gaze hard at each other. T h e lower part of the design is generalized and abrupt; the image concentrates on the mother's taut-lipped face and large hands that seal a fierce embrace. T h e girl be-

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Fig. 26.

Vincent van Gogh, Mother

and Child (F1067), charcoal, pencil, 1883. Collection Vincent van Gogh Foundation/Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

ing comforted here is well beyond the age of any traditional maternal iconography, and one can only speculate on her need. But child mortality was a grim reality of nineteenth-century life, especially among the poor, and pictures of sick or dying children, like Luke Fildes's much reproduced Doctor's Visit (London, Tate Gallery), were mainstays of the Victorian pictorial repertoire.45 Van Gogh's image suggests this situation but again avoids the emotional or anecdotal staging of genre. Without context or setting, the drawing reworks a traditional Madonna and Child schema as a bleak nineteenth-century pietà. By eliminating context and explanatory details in many of these images, Van Gogh depended on the figures—their clothes and postures—to carry all mean-

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45

Fig. 27.

V i n c e n t van

G o g h , Public

Soup

Kitchen (Fi020a), chalk, 1883. Switzerland, collection o f A r n o l d Stoll.

ing and impact. T h e same strategies prevail in another multifigure composition, the Public Soup Kitchen (Fig. 27), in which virtually all the female Hoorniks appear—Sien, her mother holding the baby, her daughter, and her sister. Van Gogh produced the work in his newly furnished studio, where he could vary the poses and lighting at will, and he developed the composition through five drawings and watercolors. 46 T h e signed drawing stages a formal, hieratic scene: four figures are set in crossing axes, with the adults facing and framing the two girls who move to and from the open counter. Directly in line with the viewer's gaze, the girls carefully clutch their soup. But the women wait, and everything about them, from their still profiles to Sien's bowed head at the edge of the darkened hatch, signifies weariness and resignation. Like their reluctance to look back in other drawings, their

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Fig. 28.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , Woman

Weeping, Sitting on an Upturned

Basket

(F1060), chalk on paper, 1883. Collection Kroller-Miiller M u s e u m , Otterlo, T h e Netherlands.

postures here mark their alienation, their refusal to engage the rescuer while submitting to the rituals of life on the dole. These iconic "yellow-soap" designs present the situations of poor women as grim but natural facts. In drawings like Woman with Her Head in Her Hands (F1069) and Woman Weeping, Sitting on an Upturned Basket (Fig. 28), which return to the crying pose of Sorrow and the fallen woman, the situation is more ambiguous, however. As Charles Chetham has pointed out, stooped and crying figures were fixtures of Victorian representations of desperation. For example, in E. G. Dalziel's engraving from an 1874 Graphic, Sunday Afternoon, 1 P.M.: Waitingfor the Public House to Open (Fig. 29), alcoholism is the cause of the young woman's tears.47 Context and caption told the story, as such images displayed

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the perils of poverty to a secure middle-class audience. But even in an iconography of poverty, Van Gogh's format is disorienting. These women in shawls and aprons cry for no reason we can specify, and only the meager details around them hint at a domestic domain. Women's sorrow also reappears in Van Gogh's letters. Writing to Van Rappard in February 1883, Van Gogh promoted his lithographic work for illustrated magazines, with Sien as an example of "types from the people." Nevertheless, the letter presents her again as victim, comparing her to women in pictures by Hood, Fildes, and Holl and emphasizing Van Gogh's role as rescuer: "But as for this woman," he wrote, I thought it so touching that she, a mother, was so alone and forlorn, that I did not hesitate and I think I did nothing wrong then, nor do I think I am doing so now. For when a mother has been deserted, and is in dire distress, one should not avert one's eyes and go on—at least that's what I think. T h i s one is a figure like some Holl or Fildes have drawn. [Rao]

T h e letters to Theo, however, assume a different tone. Once idealistic and optimistic in their outlook, in the spring of 1883 they repeatedly rehearse "the problem with Sien," Van Gogh's growing ambivalence, and the breakdown of his rescue strategy. Where formerly Sien was pitiable, but also good at heart and so recoverable, now she is described as a troubled woman, permanently damaged by evil influence. Again, Van Gogh summons a series of authorities to support these views, but with a different cultural geography: modern Naturalist France replaces reformist Victorian England. When I think of that neglected character of hers, half or rather entirely spoiled—one might almost call it dragged through the gutter—then I say to myself: "After all she cannot be different than she is," and I should think myself-stupid and conceited if I condemned her in big solemn words. . . . I came to apply to her what Father Bienvenue in Victor Hugo's Misérables used to say to ugly, even venomous insects, "Pauvre bête, ce n'est pas sa faute qu'elle est ainsi." [L317]

This presumably compassionate quotation was from Hugo, but the comparison of Sien to dumb beast or "ugly, even venomous insects" is Van Gogh's. Puzzled by her recalcitrance, he naturalized Sien's resistance to reform and turned again to a familiar support. "Michelet rightly says," he wrote Theo, '"Une

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Fig. 29.

E. G . Dalziel, Sunday Afternoon,

1 P.M.: Waiting for the Public House to Open (Graphic,

1874). Collection

V i n c e n t van G o g h Foundation/Van G o g h M u s e u m , Amsterdam.

femme est une malade.' They vary, Theo, they vary like the weather" (L284). Modern medicine was another authority: from Sien's doctor came the opinion that "she possesses the changeability of women to a high degree." " T h e great danger," Van Gogh continued, "is . . . her falling back into former errors. This danger, though of a moral nature, is connected with the physical constitution." In another letter he proclaimed that "retrogression is part of the female character" (L290). In addition to gendered explanations, Van Gogh also invoked rationales of class. If Sien was constitutionally unstable because she was a woman, her faults were also due to her upbringing and environment: "Habits of slovenliness, indifference, lack of activity and ability," he wrote, cataloging her deficiencies as a housewife, "oh, a lot of things . . . they all have the same root: bad education, years of quite wrong views on life, fatal influence of bad company" (L284). And when he

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49

was unable to explain Sien's refusal to be helped by him any longer, he compared her to Gervaise, the ill-fated laundress of L'Assommoir, Zola's novel of urban tragedy among working-class families: I know there is a difference too, but there are similarities between my attitude toward her and that passage in L'Assommoir where that blacksmith sees how Gervaise goes wrong but hasn't the slightest influence on her; because of her hypocrisy and her inability to see things clearly, she cannot make up her mind what course to choose. I pity the woman more than ever, because I see she is more restless than ever. I think she has, for the moment, no better friend than me, who would help her with all my heart if she would let me. But she does not seek my confidence, and makes me absolutely powerless by trusting those who are really her enemies. I am amazed that she doesn't see that she acts wrongly—or doesn't want to see it, for that's what I sometimes think. [L317]

T h e conviction that Sien's character, like her prostitution, was the product of poverty, abuse, and neglect was a modern, even progressive attitude. What Van Gogh could not grasp was the possibility of Sien's refusal of his kind of loving rescue and domesticity. Like the authorities he cited, Van Gogh presumed a universal yearning for this middle-class ideal, and any unwillingness to seize the chance when offered became a failure of the individual—a socially produced failure perhaps, but still a character flaw rather than a response to domesticity's limitations and constraints. At once righteous and confused, his letter confirms the class and gender distance between them and Van Gogh's inability to see Sien's behavior either as a signal of an oppressive domesticity or as a choice. Poverty and hard work within the family may have been better than the labors of the seamstress and the prostitute, but life with Van Gogh in the Schenkweg meant another kind of alienation, one that left Sien equally stranded and severed from her family and community in the Geest. Van Gogh's rescue project was unrealizable not simply because Sien was "damaged goods," but also because the notions of easy class mingling and perfected family life were Utopian fantasies. "She belongs more to those people than to me," he complained possessively about Sien's family, whom he believed would entice Sien back and lead her astray.48 Indeed, the distance of class and culture was not easily bridged. Van Gogh began to describe Sien's temperament as "violent, mischievous, bad" (L254). We read of irrational rebellions, unpredictable (to him) outbursts that Sien, like the women he pictured crying, could not justify or explain. Sien was scarcely repentant and hardly grateful. Van Gogh reported her saying in angry outbursts:

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Fig. 30.

Vincent van G o g h , Woman on Her Deathbed (F841), chalk, pencil, watercolor, 1883. Collection Kroller-

Miiller M u s e u m , Otterlo, T h e Netherlands.

"Yes, I am careless and lazy, and I have always been that way, and it cannot be helped" (L317), and "Yes, it's true I'm a whore and the only end will be to drown myself" (L288). T h e relationship deteriorated, and Sien's place in the images shifted again. After April 1883 she no longer posed for domestic or women's subjects but appears in outdoor settings as an anonymous laborer. Two pictures, however, both titled Woman on Her Deathbed, signal a more drastic evacuation of her presence. Van Gogh's letters refer to women's sadness and mourning and frame the couple's difficulties in a vocabulary of death. Even true love can die, Van Gogh wrote. " C e que l'homme tue Dieu le ressuscite" (L280). This, and a statement innocently dropped later in the same letter—"Some time I shall need figures of corpses or of sick people, men as well as women"—may prepare Theo for this choice of subject. One deathbed image draws close to the dead woman, whose skull face is shrouded by bedclothes and hood (Fi026a).49 T h e other takes a more formal view (Fig. 30). T h e full-length figure is flanked by extinguished candle and open Bible; her legs and ungainly feet protrude from the short shroud, her hands are laid prayerfully across her chest, and Sien's features are profiled against the pillow. It

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is the simplest (and in some ways, the healthiest) ofpsychological gestures: as the dreamer dreams a desired fantasy, Van Gogh deftly removed Sien Hoornik, at the same time endowing her, and his removal, with respectable spirituality. They separated in the fall of 1883. Van Gogh went to provincial Drenthe to paint from nature; it was the farthest he could go from the modernity of the city, its working poor, its class mix, its cultural elite. Sien Hoornik returned to the Geest, where according to the city archives she worked again as a seamstress and housemaid, and presumably as a prostitute. Her children lived with her mother and her artisan brother, Pieter Anthonie, and at his urging in 1901, Sien married a seaman, Anton van Wijk, who agreed to "recognize," or legitimize, her children. She outlived Van Gogh by fourteen years and committed suicide at fifty-four in the harbor in Rotterdam. Something about women and domesticity, as Van Gogh constructed these categories, did not work. Perhaps something was wrong with the rescue fantasy itself, a moralized gender contract that pressed its female subject into a Utopian middle-class mold. T h e paradigm of the fallen woman explained Sien Hoornik's life as a tragic tale of bad company, sexual undoing, and weak will, but it was a tale imagined, written, and pictured by men. Bolstering Van Gogh's representations are the voices and images of Michelet, Hugo, Zola, Fildes, Holl, and Hood, to name just a few. T h e voice we do not hear, or only very selectively, muffled through the letters, is Sien's. But if the domestic project was a failed melodrama, the drawing project inscribes that failure eloquently. Van Gogh may have hoped for rescue and a happy household, but he pictured a world of tedious labor, grave ritual, and a resigned submissiveness. His pictures distill something new from the pictorial codes of portraiture, illustration, and genre, and like his and Sien's relationship, they are laced with utopic complexities of gender and class. They combine the urgency of the bourgeois male artist's rescuing gaze and the inexplicable alienation of his working-class female subjects. T h e sadness, the distance, the refusal to engage in these pictures is not merely Van Gogh's formulation of Sien Hoornik's temperament and environment. It is the product of their partnership and a record of their difference.

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2 THE

"SPOOK"

PICTURES

IN T H E

MACHINE:

OF W E A V E R S

IN

BRABANT

I n December 1883, after three lonely months in provincial Drenthe, Van Gogh returned to his father's parsonage in Nuenen, a village of about four thousand inhabitants in the rural Dutch province of North Brabant. Despite his personal unhappiness—he still mourned the break with Sien Hoornik and felt unwelcome in his father's house—Van Gogh was idealistic about country life. "I for my part," he wrote Theo early in January, trying to minimize the dangers of his cultural isolation, "often find it pleasanter to be among people who do not even know the word in question, for instance, the peasants, the weavers, etc., rather than with those of the more civilized world. That's really lucky for me." 1 Almost immediately, Van Gogh began to depict Nuenen weavers at their looms; he produced approximately thirty drawings, watercolors, and oil paintings of them in the next six months. Although weavers were not his only subject that winter—pictures of mills, churches, village lanes, and snow-covered fields also represent the traditional structures and settings of country life—the images of these men constitute a distinct and ambitious project. As studies of country workers in that simpler, less "civilized" world, they initiated what Van Gogh considered a marketable series on rural artisans. "It would rather disappoint me," he wrote Theo in February, if you sent these little weavers back to me. A n d if none of the people you know would care to take them, I should think that you might take them for yourself, as the beginning of a collection of pen-and-ink drawings of Brabant artisans. W h i c h I should love to make, and which, as I shall be in Brabant pretty often now, I should be very eager to do. O n condition of making a series of them, which must be kept together, I will price them low, so that though I might make many drawings of the same kind, they might be kept together. But I, for my part, will agree to what you think best. [L359] 2

Fig. 31.

Vincent van Gogh, Interior of a Weaver's Workshop with Baby Chair (F1118), pencil, ink, 1884. Collection

Vincent van G o g h Foundation/Van G o g h Museum, Amsterdam.

With his brother as his dealer, Van Gogh embarked on his career as a country artist.3 At first glance, images like Interior of a Weaver's Workshop with Baby Chair (Fig. 31), dated January-February 1884, early in the series, seem to fall comfortably in line with traditional Dutch genre. Adriaen van Ostade's painting of 1650 Siesta of the Weaver, for example (Fig. 32), pictures the artisan and his family in their spacious cottage resting beside a large loom that is bathed in a golden glow.4 In such seventeenth-century images the workshop adjoins, or is combined with, domestic space. Looms, spinning wheels, brushes, and combs are set beside cradles, kitchenware, and the family hearth, underscoring the integration of artisanal production and family life. Van Gogh's drawing also celebrates the weaver's way of life. T h e baby protectively enclosed in his chair will inherit the traditional craft of his father enclosed in his loom, a continuity sanctioned by the institutional pres-

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Fig. 32.

Adriaen van Ostade, Siesta of the Weaver, 1650. Brussels, Musée des Beaux-Arts,

ence of the church seen through the window. But compared to Van Ostade's cozy interior view, Van Gogh's is stark and formal—and a more didactic image. With figures and furnishings counterposed on either side of the window, the arrangement is scarcely casual, and the symmetrical design symbolically registers generational continuities and legacy as much as domestic conditions or events. In Loom with Weaver (Fig. 33), a painting dated May 1884, or Weaver: The Whole Loom, Facing Left, with Oil Lamp (Fig. 34), a drawing of February, loom and weaver are a single important form. Firmly focused on work or the instruments of labor, and lacking anecdote or extraneous detail, pictures like these are virtually emblems of an artisanal trade. As Van Gogh undertook his homage to Brabant artisans, his outlook, judging from his letters, was optimistic and hopeful. After the disappointments of T h e Hague, the rural environment promised the comforting certainties of the seasons

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F'g- 33'

Vincent van Gogh, Loom with Weaver (F30), 1884. Collection Kroller-Miiller Museum, Otterlo,

The Netherlands.

and traditional work. Van Gogh was not alone in this conviction. Nature or the countryside, as middle-class city folk often imagined it, offered a promise of renewal, and peasant ruralism signaled natural continuities. A host of images—by Jean-François Millet, Anton Mauve, and Josef Israels, to name but three of Van Gogh's favorite artists—promoted the country in these terms. 5 Far from slick urban tastes and markets, the peasants and weavers, he told Theo, were uncorrupted, nobler workers; they signified another, less "civilized" but more sincere and, in many respects, Utopian world. Van Gogh may have been emphatic about his images' homage, but for modern viewers, his weaver pictures also invite less celebratory—even disquieting— readings. For the loom and its structure, rather than the weaver and his skills, dominate the images: the worker is reduced to an accessory of the monumental machine. Unlike the straining field-workers that Van Gogh would depict the fol-

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Fig- 34-

Vincent van Gogh, Weaver: The Whole Loom, Facing Left, with Oil Lamp (F1123), P e n i 1 884. Collection

Vincent van Gogh Foundation/Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

lowing year, these men are generally shown at a distance, with little indication of either the skill or effort of their labor, much less their individual character. Even in less stark or emblematic works, where there is some attempt at ambience or contextual detail (see Fig. 47), the worker is almost lost in a dark, cramped interior that is filled with the bulk of the loom. What are we to make of these stark designs, unexpected emphases, and the inversion of conventional man-machine hierarchies? Given what we know now about Van Gogh, it is tempting to find self-expressive answers. From that standpoint, the weaver series both affirms Van Gogh's professional self—the self here as artisan—and displaces his discomfort in his father's house. Indeed, from the moment he arrived, Van Gogh complained, his proper bourgeois family perceived him as a "big, rough dog, who barked too loud and behaved inappropriately" (L346). In these paintings, then, the psychologically oppressed artist projects his

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identity and alienation into images of caged artisans.6 T h e advantage of such an interpretation is the ambivalence and conflict it allows in the imagery—in this case, both discomfort and reverence. But in turning all attention back to the artist, it overlooks and ignores Van Gogh's subjects, the weavers, who are then overshadowed and absorbed by the artist's compelling biography. Dutch critics at the turn of the century, eager to defend Van Gogh's still contested talent, saw no contradiction in the pictures' homage. Albert Plasschaert admired the sense of "communication between the object and the encaged man working in it," 7 and N. H. Wolf was moved by the representation of "unremitting activity" and "the tragedy of labor that man has in common with the beast." 8 Fifty years later, reactions were more mixed. T h e art historian Carl Nordenfalk wrote: "Van Gogh presents the weaver as a victim held fast in the spiked jaws of the loom, or a captive in a medieval instrument of torture. T h e social significance is quite unmistakable. Still, this is one possible explanation: the paintings also possess a tender, intimate atmosphere." 9 And in 1969 a French text about Van Gogh proclaimed: "Despite a certain awkwardness, even a certain rigidity, the suite of Weavers is stunning in its presence, its mystery, its brutal force." 10 Whether they are writing in his defense or reiterating Van Gogh's mastery, these writers find some universalizing grandeur in images of nineteenth-century cottage laborers. Awkwardness and rigidity are subsumed by "mystery" and "brutal force"; medieval torture coexists, somehow, with a "tender, intimate atmosphere." Disturbing formal qualities and contradictory effects, if not simply ignored, are smoothed over, accommodated to a notion of timeless significance. And "unmistakable social significance" remains unexplained and unrelated to the weavers' specific time, place, or experience. If these analyses are more attentive to the images than to the artist, they nevertheless set historical factors aside. And in their eagerness to defend or confirm Van Gogh's mastery, they do not explore the pictures' unusual features—the remote impassive figures, the stark designs, the unexpected emphases. Recent scholarship has been more equivocal. Explanations of the pictures' unsettling qualities range from Teio van Meedendorp's assertion of the artist's lack of skill to Griselda Pollock's elaboration of the bourgeois conservatism of Van Gogh's ruralism. 11 Indeed, precisely these qualities signal that there is more here and call for a closer look. As pictorial elements, they mark a representational struggle, a point at which the Brabant artisans' situation no longer meshed comfortably with Van Gogh's Utopian ideals or expectations of country life. T h e crude

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or ungainly forms and unusual emphases in these pictures seem to unsettle the codes of ruralist homage. In doing so, they disclose a gap—in Marin's terms, a utopic space of pictorial experiment—between circumstance and ideology. This is not to say that Van Gogh radically dismantled conventions with these pictures. That would impute to him considerable power and complete command of his pictorial language. But neither is it to read the pictures' awkward effects as accidents, the result of artistic gaucherie. On the contrary, the awkward elements in the pictures suggest experiment and indecision, process and change. They imply an artist casting about idealistically for depictive strategies and producing unsettling images within a traditional frame. Indeed, what makes these artisanal images interesting is precisely the shifts and breaks that signal the artist's struggle and concern. In the six-month course of their production, the weaver pictures varied in medium and design, and they hardly set out a single position or attitude. In many respects they suggest reverence for artisanal traditions, but they also tug in other directions that erode any clear-cut or uncomplicated homage. If we examine these images, with their discomforting features and shifting emphases, in two historical contexts—the condition of the Nuenen weavers and the nineteenth-century cultural nostalgia for ruralism and artisanry—they appear to be, not simply reverential emblems or even pictures of a timeless human tragedy, but rather more complex representations of a changing artisanal practice and a difficult way of life. " T h e history of the weavers in the 19th century," E. P. Thompson has reminded us, "is haunted by the legend of better days." 12 In its idealistic dimension, Van Gogh's weaver series is linked to that legend and the many works that perpetuated a reverence for rural custom and the traditions of the artisan. A Golden Age of prosperous and harmonious artisanal communities was, of course, less fact than fiction. Though rural artisans were often independent craftsmen who exchanged their goods at neighboring market towns, they had also been poor for centuries, and their living was precarious. Their earnings were conditioned by local economic factors such as the richness of the harvest or seasonal needs, and they enjoyed nowhere near the wealth or well-being of craftsmen in large textile centers like Leiden in Holland. 13 In the nineteenth century, however, capital investment, industrialization, widening markets, and entrepreneurial demands substantially altered rural commerce and the artisan's way of life. Many artists and writers familiar to Van Gogh—Dickens in Hard Times (1854), Charlotte Bronte in Shirley (1849), a n d later Zola in Germinal (1885)—dramatized the oppressive conditions

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of mill towns and factories. 14 Other writers expressed their dismay through a retrospective ideal, harnessing their anger at the changes to a nostalgic legend of "what once had been." T h e legend was only that—a fable or fantasy, like the harmonious community of Lantern Yard in George Eliot's Silas Mamer (1861)—but it resounded with ideological conviction and generated a widespread literary and pictorial repertoire. As early as 1829 Thomas Carlyle complained of the transformation of artisanal work into spiritless, mechanical labor. " O n every hand," he wrote in "Signs of the Times," "the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster." 15 With his commitment to artisanal production, Carlyle voiced a searing anticapitalist critique. Almost two decades later in Past and Present, he proclaimed, "Industrial work, still under bondage to Mammon, . . . is a tragic spectacle." 16 T h e inflamed rhetoric of Carlyle's text further dramatized this concern. This is his account of Lancashire cotton workers: A million of hungry, operative men rose all up, came all out into the streets, and—stood there. What other could they do? Their wrongs and griefs were bitter, insupportable, their rage against the same was just: but who are they that cause these wrongs, who that will honestly make effort to redress them? Our enemies are we know not who or what; our friends are we know not where! H o w shall we attack anyone, shoot or be shot by anyone? 1 7

For Carlyle, the workers' impotence and these unanswerable questions generated a Utopian fantasy: he envisioned an enlightened "Captain of Industry," who would maintain a sense of community like that of the Middle Ages and a working life predicated on continuity and permanence. 18 "I am for permanence in all things," he declared, "at the earliest possible moment, and to the latest possible. Blessed is he that continueth where he is." 19 T h e novels of George Eliot, whom Van Gogh set with Carlyle "at the head of civilization" (L160), locate a similar reverence for the artisan in rural community and industry. Silas Marner begins, "In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses," and the novel is set, like a fairy tale, "in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills." Life in Eliot's bucolic paradise, however, is interrupted by the intrusion of modern industry and dislocated artisans, described as "pallid, undersized men who by the side of the brawny countryfolk, looked like remnants of a disinherited race." 20 Weavers and

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their families appear—albeit briefly—like specters in Eliot's novels; they haunt the rural landscape and remind the reader of community practices threatened and all but lost. T h e introduction to Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), a book Van Gogh reread while in Nuenen, 21 describes a journey through the Midlands that hurtled the traveler from a vision of "one phase of English life to another." In the country, Eliot wrote, one could still find "trim, cheerful villages . . . [with] the pleasant tinkle of the blacksmith's anvil, the patient cart-horse waiting at his door; the basket-maker peeling willow wands in the sunshine; the wheelwright putting the last touch to a blue cart with red wheels." This rustic Eden, with its roster of happy artisans, resembles what Van Gogh longed for in "the Brabant of one's dreams" (L368) or Brabant"when I wasyoung—say, some twenty years ago" (Ril). In the summer of 1882 he had wistfully written Van Rappard:

I remember as a boy seeing that heath and the little farms, the looms and the spinning wheels in exactly the same way as I see them now in Mauve's and Ter Meulen's drawings. . . . But since then that part of Brabant with which I was acquainted has changed enormously in consequence of agricultural developments and the establishment of industries. Speaking for myself, in certain spots I do not look without a little sadness on a new red-tiled tavern, remembering a loam cottage with a moss-covered thatched roof that used to be there. Since then there have come beet-sugar factories, railways, agricultural developments of the heath, etc., which are infinitely less picturesque. [R11]

Eliot's traveler encountered similar change: "the land . . . blackened with coalpits, the rattle of the handlooms . . . heard in hamlets and villages . . . and the pale, eager faces of the handloom weavers, men and women, haggard from sitting up so late at night to finish the night's work." 22 For writers like Carlyle and Eliot, the artisan had become a frightening sight. Their weavers were haggard, pale, dispirited, forever separated from what Carlyle called the "divineness" of "true hand-labor" 23 and the sunny pleasures of Eliot's village life. Yet as an alternative or Utopian fantasy, these were hardly radical texts. On the continent, Heinrich Heine's poem "Silesian Weavers" (1847) voiced the rage and rhythms of worker discontents—"We weave, we are weaving!" it repeats; but Carlyle's laborers "rose all up . . . and—stood there," stunned and bewildered. Like many others who feared violence and revolt, both Eliot and Carlyle oudined moderate programs of reform, such as Felix Holt's "Address to the Working Man" or Carlyle's vision of society guided by enlightened leaders or elites. Van Gogh

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Fig. 35.

Leon Lhermitte, Woodworker at His

Lathe, 1868. London, Victoria and Albert Museum.

shared this moderate and Utopian outlook. A former evangelist among the poor, he was committed to the spirit of Christian social reform. And while he read the novels about factory towns, he rarely addressed industrial conditions directly in his work. Like Eliot, he was far more captivated by village life as the site of a "simpler," more harmonious society. What is important about this cultural discourse is that a complaint about the present was tempered by nostalgia for lost "good old days." Writers like Eliot and Carlyle saw conditions clearly enough, but they suffused their criticism with a sweetened memory of the past. In doing so, they invoked a Utopian legend of continuity, rural community, and the craftsman's skill—all of them threatened by industrial capitalism. And like the promise of all Utopias, such fantasies assuaged their social concern in the face of widening discontent. T h e pictorial repertoire was even less critical than this literature. T h e once provocative pictures of peasant labor by Millet, Van Gogh's most revered mas-

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Fig. 36.

M a x Liebermann, Weaver Workshop, 1882. Frankfort, Städelsches Kunstinstitut.

ter, were acclaimed in the 1880s as images of biblical dignity and human destiny.24 As for artisans, many artists and illustrators pictured the traditional métiers with craftsmen whose furrowed faces and burly physiques signified years of toil and experience. Pictures like Léon Lhermitte's Woodworker at His Lathe of 1868 (Fig. 35) 25 show concentrating workers—often elderly men—surrounded by a display of products and tools. Set in rural landscapes or rustic interiors, these images were lit with a golden glow, as if already seen in memory. There is little evidence of artisanal dislocation or duress in their emphasis on expertise and traditional skills. Weavers were among the most threatened and unsettled artisans. But paintings of them were rare—Van Gogh knew "only a few" (L351). T h e German artist Max Liebermann depicted them with unflagging optimism. He pictured men cheerfully working the machines of an industrial weaving factory, and the cottage industry shown in his Weaver Workshop of 1882 (Fig. 36) is an even happier fam-

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Fig- 37-

F- Skill, Distress at Coventry: Distribution of Soup for Distressed Weavers in the Kitchen of St. Mary's Hall

(Illustrated London News, 1881). Collection Vincent van Gogh Foundation/Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

ily enterprise: in the sunny workroom of the family home, the mother spins, the daughter spools, and the father, who dominates the image, deftly works his loom. 26 The few weaver images Van Gogh did know were part of his large collection of prints from magazines like LIllustration, the Graphic, and the Illustrated London News, where at one time he hoped to sell his own work. 27 The presentation of weavers in such pictures (at least the ones Van Gogh collected) ranged narrowly from sympathy to nostalgia. Crises and hard times were shown in conventional and comforting pictorial formulas. In F. J. Skill's Distress at Coventry: Distribution of Soup for Distressed Weavers in the Kitchen of St. Mary's Hall from an 1881 Illustrated London Mews (Fig. 37) the viewer's position on the benefactor's side of the food bins—at some remove from the distressed artisans, who could be poor people anywhere—promotes the idea of Christian charity and bourgeois good works. Paul Renouard's series on the Lyons silk-weavers' crisis (published in Ulllustration in the fall of 1884), which Van Gogh was especially eager to own, 28

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L'ILLUSTRATION JOUKNAL

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Fig. 38.

Paul

Renouard, Un Canut à son métier (Illustration, 1884). Collection Vincent van Gogh Foundation/ Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

is more attentive to the plight of the artisan. The concentrating weaver in the first print, Un Canut à son métier (Fig. 38), appears in full command of his work and his machine, while behind him a woman appears to spin. The combination suggests the familiar artisanal and domestic partnership, perhaps a form of cottage industry, but before the disruptions of industrial production illustrated in two successive images.29 Other prints in Van Gogh's collection, such as Ryckebusch's Un Tisserand (see Fig. 46), clearly captioned Les Industries qui disparaissent for an 1881 edition of L'Illustration, and W. Bazett Murray's Jute Industry: Mat Weav-

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Fig. 39.

W. Bazett Murray, Jute Industry: Mat Weaving in England {Illustrated London News, 1881). Collection

Vincent van Gogh Foundation/Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

ing in England (Fig. 39) in an 1881 Illustrated London News, nostalgically invoke the traditions of the artisan or the buzzing activity of cottage industry. In the face of present problems and future uncertainties such pictures offered readers the satisfaction of good works or nostalgia for a picturesque and idealized past. Perhaps nowhere is the tragic-nostalgic sentimentality of this discourse more evident than in André Theuriet's La Vie rustique, published in 1888, four years later than Van Gogh's pictures. Theuriet's chapter on "Le Tisserand" is both poetic and gloomy. The weaver is described as a strange, pale figure "in harmony with his gloomy abode," his limbs "misshapen by the practice of the heavy and awkward loom." The loom too was personified; it was made of "rough and coarse posts of old oak, which age and atmosphere have darkened to a tragic physiognomy." "One had to admire their resignation," Theuriet wrote, "for it was a hard existence, that of a weaver."30 The illustrations by Léon Lhermitte tell the other

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side of the story, for they picture a weaver of the good old days, happily ensconced in his heavy-timbered loom, chatting with his wife, whose spinning wheel appears in the foreground. Many of these images, by celebrating artisanal production, thus buffered social problems with comforting sentiment and masked the weavers' desperate—apparently inevitable—situation with pictorial reminders of legendary "better days." Van Gogh admired these images and collected them avidly, but his outlook and his own vision of the artisans was soon complicated by the conditions he encountered in Brabant. Around 1815 a newly constituted United Kingdom of the Netherlands sought to invigorate its textile industry through protective tariffs and commissions to North Brabant manufacturers to supply cloth for the military, for charitable institutions, and for the court. 31 The small city of Eindhoven, not far from Nuenen, became a center of textile manufacture, although the largest installations were around Tilburg, in the eastern part of the province. 32 For some time, though, the scale of this production, devoted largely to simple woolens and cottons for domestic markets, remained modest—or modest enough for one visitor to London's 1851 International Exhibition to remark that Holland's textile industry was "so miserably represented that every Netherlander in the Crystal Palace denied he was Dutch." 33 Entrepreneurs in Brabant, with government patronage and limited competition for markets, did little to introduce sophisticated technologies. Steam-powered machines appeared as early as 1820, 34 but manufacturers were unwilling to make large capital investments, and expansion was slow. Between 1859 and 1870, for example, there were eighteen mechanized textile factories in Tilburg, the most industrialized area, but also fifty that relied exclusively on human labor and horsepower. And in 1881, of the 145 woolen manufacturing enterprises in Brabant, only fifty-seven used steam power of any kind. 35 The steam-driven machines, in any case, were generally limited to only part of textile production—to spinning, dying, or finishing processes. As a result, long after spinning had moved to the mills, weaving was still done outside the factories, consigned to small workshops in the towns or to artisans in neighboring villages like Nuenen. In 1851 five wool and cotton factories in Eindhoven employed forty-five workers, but three hundred weavers produced cloth for these enterprises at home. 36 By 1864, when almost all the linen factories in the eastern part of the province operated with steam, the weaving was done on hand-looms in the surrounding villages.37 And as late as the mid-i88os, when Van Gogh was painting there, mechanized weaving was still

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rare. Nuenen remained an outpost of traditional weaving until well into the twentieth century.38 The 440 village weavers, about one-third of the male population, constituted a considerable cottage industry.39 Country weavers often did not work the year round. Weaving was something they did in the winter months to satisfy their own domestic needs and to supplement their income when agricultural work was at a standstill. But the Nuenen weavers were not seasonal producers. The village had been a weaving center for centuries, and the artisans there, full-time craftsmen for the most part, sold their cloth locally or at the nearby market town of Helmond. These workers experienced most acutely the shift to an entrepreneurial industry, for as textile manufacturing in Brabant expanded, and with it the demand for goods, the village weavers came to depend on the manufacturers in the towns. Where once they had served community needs and local markets, increasingly they were drawn into another mode of production and a large-scale manufacturing enterprise. For some years Nuenen weavers could sell their goods to local factories owned by Louis Tirion and Lodewijk Begemann, son of the former Protestant pastor and a neighbor of the Van Goghs. 40 These had been prosperous enterprises through the late 1860s and 1870s—in 1876 Begemann employed sixty-three workers—but the factory closed in 1879, and village statistics list no factories or enterprises as large as this between 1880 and 1895. 41 Contracting with businesses in Eindhoven and Helmond, the weavers became pieceworkers in the service of a changing economy and another scale of supply and demand. To keep pace with mechanized phases of production, the village hand-loom weaver had to turn out more—at a wage considerably lower than that of factory employees in the towns. And ironically, because the demands of the larger markets could be erratic, there were times when he had little work at all. This was the situation Van Gogh encountered in Nuenen in 1884. " I don't hear [the weavers] complain," he reported the following winter to Theo, "but they have a hard time of it." A weaver who works steadily weaves, say, a piece of sixty yards a week. While he weaves, a woman must spool for him, . . . so there are two who work and have to live on it. On that piece of cloth he makes a net profit, for instance, of 4.50 guilders a week, and nowadays when he takes it to the manufacturer, he is often told that he cannot take another piece home for one or two weeks. So not only are wages low, but work is pretty scarce too.

[L392]

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Fig. 40.

Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters (F82), 1885. Collection Vincent van Gogh Foundation/

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Given the scanty statistics for the period, it is difficult to assess the meaning of these figures. But in 1870, fourteen years before Van Gogh wrote, it cost a Tilburg factory worker—who earned more than the village weaver—approximately eight guilders a week to support his family of seven. More than half of this, 5.50 guilders, was spent on food—bread, meal, and potatoes.42 With 3.50 guilders less in his pocket in 1884, and prices higher, the village artisan was scarcely better off than the peasants who gleaned their existence from the sandy North Brabant soil.43 Often they fared less well. As full-time artisans with no land to garden or livestock for milk,44 the Nuenen weavers were particularly vulnerable to market fluctuations. Their households were meager—the public sale of the weaver Hendrik Maas's household in 1885 brought a mere 1.75 guilders—their children's schooling was often paid for by the state, and they frequently depended on poor relief from the community and church.45 Like the peasants Van Gogh pictured in The Potato Eaters (Fig. 40), the weavers lived on coffee, rye bread, or mash and occasionally some animal fat or oil. Meat and cheese were luxuries.46 And while they

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Fig. 41.

Weaver Cottage, Nuenen. Photograph, Van Gogh—archief T. de Brouwer, Nuenen.

might own their tiny cottages (Fig. 41), as the textile industry grew, many of them paid rent for their looms. In letters outlining his own financial needs, Van G o g h calculated 18.75 guilders to cover his expenses—four times more than the weaver earned. 47 Relocating his studio that spring from the parsonage laundry room to the attic of the Catholic sexton Schafrat meant another 75 guilders for the year, or a rent of 6.25 guilders per month. His "poverty" was hardly that of his artisan subjects. "Consequently," Van Gogh's letter continued, "there is often something agitated and restless about these people." It is a different spirit from that of the miners, among whom I lived during a year of strikes and many accidents. That was even worse, yet it is often pathetic here too; the people are quiet, and literally nowhere have I heard anything resembling rebellious speeches. But they look as little cheerful as the old cab horse or the sheep transported by steamer to England. [L392]

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As much as it tells us about the weavers' situation, Van Gogh's letter also reveals his own—rather changed—perception of these artisans. He sensed their unhappiness and described their difficulty, but he was also struck by their passivity, and he contrasted their silence with the outspokenness of the Belgian miners he had lived with five years earlier. In 1881, he had considered the country weaver "somewhat absent-minded," dreamy, and "almost a somnambulist" (L136). But in the winter of 1885, he chose a more ominous metaphor. Much like Carlyle's bewildered workmen, the weavers now seemed liked tired workhorses or animals slated for slaughter—resigned, cheerless, and doomed. This is hardly an account of contented artisans. And it is an interesting appraisal from the artist who considered himself lucky to be among country people "who do not even know the world." Written one year after he returned to Nuenen, and with the signs of modernization ever more present before him, the letter points to a more complex view of village life and suggests the ruptures and revisions in his representation of these provincial artisans. Van Gogh's letters refer to several phases of textile manufacture in Nuenen: women spooling for weavers, weaver workshops, new spinning machines.48 His pictures, however, avoid references to modern technologies or even to an expanded cottage industry. A small ink drawing (Fig. 42) shows four workers tending a large machine, and tantalizingly hints at more than home laborers, but the sketchiness of the image tells us little about the work or workplace. A letter of January 1884 refers to a workshop with two looms—a space, Van Gogh hoped, that would allow the distance necessary to represent the entire machine. "These people are very hard to draw," he complained, "because one cannot take enough distance in those small rooms to draw the looms. I think that is why so many drawings turn out failures" (L351). Indeed, rather than allow conditions to govern his imagery— spaces that would cramp the painter as much as the artisan—Van Gogh's first impulse was to emblematize the structure and the weaver's métier. Although he later produced three images of a woman spinner and of an old man working a bobbin winder in a domestic interior, nowhere did he picture the joint enterprise of a woman spooling with the weaver, the "two who work and have to live on it." Alone like this, the figures are artisanal, not industrial, laborers, with the focus on traditional tools and practices. "The subject of the looms," Van Gogh wrote in February 1884, "with their rather complicated machinery, with a figure sitting in the middle, will also lend themselves to pen drawings, I think, and I will make some" (L355). A few weeks later, well into the project, he wrote: "These looms will cost me a lot of hard work yet, but in reality they are such splendid things,

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Fig. 42.

Vincent van G o g h , Four Figures in Attic (Weaving Shed) ( F u l l ) , ink, 1884. Collection

Kroller-Muller M u s e u m , Otterlo, T h e Netherlands.

all that old oakwood against a grayish wall, that I certainly believe it is a good thing that they are painted once in a while. But we must try to get them so that the color and tone will harmonize with other Dutch pictures" (L367). T h e letter states his intentions: harmony and continuity with the masters of Dutch genre. As much as any modern condition, the pictorial traditions of old Holland were important to Van Gogh's image of Brabant country life. Van Gogh began nostalgically with the oldest looms he could find. "I am painting a loom of old, greenish-browned oak," he reported to Theo in February, "in which the date 1730 is cut" (L355). And a few weeks later he wrote: "Nowadays they use a kind of suspension lamp, but from a weaver I got a little lamp like the one in La Veillee, by Millet, for instance. They used to work by them before" (L355). The old loom appears in several pictures, but the lamp Van Gogh acquired does not. Three weavers are pictured with the suspension lamps then in use, and in Loom with Weaver (see Fig. 33) the lamp is silhouetted prominendy beside the dark-timbered loom. Nevertheless, an emphasis on traditional tools is striking in this picture and in Weaver with Loom and Spinning Wheel (Fig. 43), where the

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MACHINE

Fig. 43.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , Weaver with Loom and Spinning

Wheel (F29), 1884. T o m p k i n s C o l l e c t i o n , courtesy

M u s e u m o f Fine Arts, Boston.

complexity and completeness of the machine, not the figure or setting, determine the composition and the depth of field. Rustic floors and whitewashed walls serve as neutral stages to dramatize looms that are consistently presented in profile or frontally, that is, in formal, emblematic views. The sloping brick floor in the Boston picture enlivens the foreground space with pattern, but the prominent loom masks and flattens the corner and with the traditional spinning wheel—tool of the unpictured woman worker—it takes over the image entirely These looms not only dominate, they are also pictured in unusual and enlivening detail. This quality is even more prominent in the ink drawings made apparently at Theo's suggestion. There light and dark contrasts enhance the design and steer the viewer's gaze through every corner of the machine. No knob, curve, or corner escaped Van Gogh's attention in Weaver: The Whole Loom, Facing Left, with Oil Lamp (see Fig. 34). He rendered each beam, strut, and spindle so carefully, hatched and crosshatched it so vigorously that the loom acquires a magnified, almost animate presence and individuality. In watercolors like Weaver:

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Fig. 44.

Vincent van G o g h , Weaver: The Whole Loom, Facing Left (F1114), pencil, watercolor, 1884. Collection Vincent van G o g h Foundation/Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

The Whole Loom, Facing Left (Fig. 44) slanted timbers seem to quiver and lean forward with the dynamism of an unruly creature about to lumber off on its own. The detailed presentation of the looms occurs at some expense to the weaver, however, who seems hardly more than a cog in the machinery. We know the names of these workers—Pieter Dekkers, Pieter Smeulders, Antonie Swinkels, Adriaan Rijken 49 —and the images suggest at least three models, but they are so little individualized, their faces and bodies so little shown, that their identities are hardly uppermost in the image. Obscured by the loom's housing, impassive and remote, the weaver seems an ancillary, distant figure. Even when he is shown outside the loom—in images produced later that spring—bending to adjust the threads or to brush the woven cloth, as in Weaver and Loom (Fig. 45), the weaver's form is angular and wooden, an extension of the contours of his machine. Like mannequins in conventional poses, these workers provide no sign of either character or attitude. It is the loom, not the weaver, that we encounter with unusual intimacy in Van Gogh's pictures, the tool, not the task, that we see. This effect is even clearer in comparison with the Ryckebusch print (Fig. 46)

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Fig. 45.

Vincent van Gogh, Weaver and Loom (F35), 1884. Collection Kroller-Miiller Museum,

Otterlo, The Netherlands.

Fig. 46.

Ryckebusch, Un Tisserand (Illustration, 1881). Collection Vincent van Gogh Foundation/

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

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in Van Gogh's collection. There the slender loom canopied over the concentrating figure brings us closer to the artisan and, with the light from a large window, surrounds him with a protective ambience. But Van Gogh's images allow no such access to man or mood. Unlike Ryckebusch's conventional representation of a skilled worker relying on time-worn tools, in Van Gogh's pictures the weaver has become the tool, and the loom the locus and embodiment of artisamy. We might assign this unusual treatment to Van Gogh's difficulty rendering the figure, the area where his lack of training was most obvious—and most bedeviling. Ryckebusch's line is cursive, flowing, and it brings an easy ambient to an image of social loss. But there is an expressive advantage in Van Gogh's awkward figure style, for the absence of conventionally formed figures produces objects that are charged with unusual presence and significance. Seen this way, the Nuenen artisan is managed by both the traditional character and the modern demands of his métier. T h e pictures force attention to objects rather than to men and, doing so, both dislocate a familiar site of identification and deny the viewer the cushioning response of compassion and sympathy. Dislodging the primacy of the figure and funneling attention to the loom was perhaps one way to manage a problem of skill, but the resulting upset in conventional hierarchies effectively refocused and rephrased the nostalgia for artisanry. Van Gogh's letters promote this sort of reading, somewhat defensively, for the unusual emphasis and disconcerting treatment of the figure did not go unnoticed. Theo van Gogh was reluctant to show the images; he counseled hard work and patience—to his brother's chagrin. But Anton van Rappard shared the interest in worker and artisanal subjects, and in March Van Gogh decided to show his sketches to his friend.50 Van Rappard seemed to like the work—"Your letter about the drawings delighted me," Van Gogh's reply begins—but he queried the unconventional hierarchies and treatment of figures. Van Gogh stood by his pictorial strategies and intentions. "I did include the figure in the drawing after all," he admitted to Van Rappard, But what I wanted to express by it was just this: " W h e n that monstrous black thing of grimed oak with all those sticks is seen in such sharp contrast to the grayish atmosphere in which it stands, then there in the center of it sits a black ape or goblin or spook that clatters with those sticks from early morning till late at night." A n d I indicated that spot by putting in some sort of apparition of a weaver, by means of a few scratches and blots, where I had seen it sitting. Consequently I hardly gave a thought to the proportions of arms and legs. [R44] 51

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The letter offers no apology for apparitional or disproportionate figures rendered as mere "scratches and blots." On the contrary, this was a deliberate strategy, for according to Van Gogh, it was the loom, not the weaver, that had to speak. He continued: When I had finished drawing the apparatus pretty carefully, I thought it was so disgusting that I couldn't hear it ratde that I let the spook appear in it. Very well—and—let us say it is only a mechanical drawing—all right, but just put it beside the technical design for a loom—and mine will be more spectral all the same, you may be sure of that. As a matter of fact it is no mechanical drawing—or it may be except for a "je ne sais quoi."

Van Gogh's letter, then, acknowledges special attention to the loom and a somewhat grudging decision to "let the spook appear." But clearly he believed that the expressive effect of the machine was paramount. He reiterated the point. And—if you were to put my study beside the drawing of a mechanic who had designed a weaving loom—mine would express more strongly that the thing is made of oak grimed by sweaty hands; and looking at it (even if I had not included him in the drawing at all, or even if I did add his figure out of proportion), you could not help thinking occasionally of the workman, whereas absolutely nothing like it would occur to your mind when you looked at the model of a loom drawn by a mechanic. A sort of sigh or lament must issue from that contraption of sticks now and then.

In addition, he told Van Rappard: I very much enjoy seeing your drawings of machines. Why?—because when you draw nothing but the flywheel, I for one cannot help thinking of the boy who turns it, and I feel his presence in a way I can't define. And those who look upon your mechanical drawings as designs for apparatuses do not understand your art at all.

Van Gogh emphasizes differences between technical and expressive illustration clearly enough, but the letter's insistent tone calls attention to a crucial issue wound within the artistic argument: the increasingly problematic relationship between man and machine. The looms pictured in mechanical drawings might advertise technical advances, but they hardly alluded to the issue of labor, to the worker or artisan. His own machine images, Van Gogh insisted, did precisely that. Emblematic in their presentation, nostalgic in their configuration, and visually lively in their unusual detail, his looms embodied a tradition of production and,

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as far as Van Gogh was concerned, evoked its laborers as well. One can understand, perhaps, Van Rappard's complaint and criticism, though Van Gogh insisted on the similarities of their enterprise. But by revealing labor and its history in this unconventional way, Van Gogh's images addressed the most threatening aspect of industrial production—the fetishized commodification that masked human labor and skill. No longer dreamy, somnambulant figures, or even nobler, less civilized men, the weavers that spring seemed to him like ghostly creatures, their persons—like their labor—contained by grimy, aged machines. In this respect, the letter and the pictures suggest a rather complicated, layered sort of reverence. Indeed, rereading his text, one wonders just who is sighing here—man or machine? T h e loom, as Van Gogh described it, was haunted. It was evocative and "spectral," a "monstrous black thing," manned by "a sort of apparition" or, more fantastically, "a black ape or goblin or spook." Griselda Pollock has called attention to the class-determined nature of this language and Van Gogh's use of terms that set these artisans and peasants at some social and even human distance from himself.52 Such fanciful language is characteristic of an equally classbound literary rhetoric. Van Gogh's letter itself quotes an unidentified Victorian text; Theuriet's La Vie rustique also described ghostly workers and "some ancient slave labor" punctuated by the plaintive creaking of the great machine. 53 But Van Gogh's terms suggest more than social distance. Like his images, they evoke the unsetding effects of industrial production: a worker who hovered liminally in viewer consciousness, or an artisan about to disappear. Van Gogh's reliance on these terms to defend his efforts after months of work also suggests a tug away from his rural subjects toward his pictures' audience. In his denim clothes, Van Gogh had a "rough dog" appearance that was meant to identify him with the Nuenen peasants, but the weavers saw him as the schildermenneke (little painter-guy) who paid village youths to collect birds' nests. As eager as Van Gogh was to assume the dress and identity of the countryside, his language signals his appeal to a bourgeois market and—to borrow Gerard Rooijakkers' label—his role as beeldenmakelaar, or image broker.54 Perhaps in response to Van Rappard's and Theo's lack of enthusiasm, the format and character of the weaver images changed by late spring and early summer of 1884. Less emblematic in design and the loom less fetishized, the pictures are more "social" and genre-like in design, more attentive to figure and setting in their presentation of the artisan at work. If he initially avoided showing the small, dark quarters, now he more fully pictured the cramped, low-ceilinged workshops or tiny rooms adjoining the weavers' cottages. In Interior with Weaver (Fig. 47) the 80

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Fig. 47.

Vincent van Gogh, interior with Weaver (F37), 1884. Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo,

The Netherlands.

weaver rises from the bulky structure of the loom as if he were fabricated from it or weaving himself from the blue cloth rolled across the loom bed. But even here, in this close-up view, he is an inaccessible figure, fortressed in the machine's housing and distanced by tentacular beams that menace the foreground space. Light scarcely penetrates these gloomy interiors. Red curtains add a gemütlich touch to Liebermann's sunny Weaver Workshop (see Fig. 36), and in Van Rappard's Weaver of 1883-84 (Fig. 48) the artisan is dramatically masked and enshrined in contrasts of dark and light.55 The sun catches only the contours of Van Gogh's worker and his machine, however, and provides no warming atmosphere. The small windows neither expand nor illuminate the space, but instead reinforce the darkened confines. The windows, however, do offer telling glimpses of the outside world. The symbolism of nature and church combine in some images where the old Catholic tower in Nuenen caps the horizon of a lush green field (F24, F37, both probably painted in July 1884), or the tower appears between father and baby (see Fig. 31) to suggest a continuing legacy of spiritual and artisanal harmony.56 This symbolism can also have a bitter edge. The thickly painted yellow-green landscape accentuates the contrast between the sunlit world of nature and the darkening one of artisanal " S P O O K "

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Fig. 48.

Anton van Rappard, Weaver, ink, 1883-84. Private collection.

practice (see Fig. 47). And the windmill, its tilted cruciform blades seen through the leaded pane in Weaver, Facing Front (see Fig. 50 and Plate 1), sets the ungainly worker beside allusions to rural traditions, natural forces, and spiritual martyrdom. As if to answer Van Rappard's critique, Van Gogh acknowledged some interest in a figure-centered design. "If it were to be a black-and-white drawinghe wrote his friend (by which he meant a graphic work for an illustrated magazine), "which I hope to make it someday, if I can get hold of the right model—that little black spook in the background must be the center, the starting point, the heart of it, most deeply felt, most elaborately finished, and all the rest must be subordinate to it" (R44). Two such images57—a drawing produced early in January or February, and one of the last in the series, a painting dated July—show evidence of this concern and Van Gogh's shifting presentation of the artisan. The worker in Weaver: Half-Length, Facing Right (Fig. 49), his eyes downcast in concentra-

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Fig. 49.

Vincent van

Gogh, Weaver:

Half-

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Right

(F1122), ink, 1884. Collection Vincent van Gogh Foundation/ Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

tion, is comfortably housed in his loom; his body sets the scale and proportions of the image. Contours of both figure and machine are bound by a resdess hooking rhythm that darts along the worker's craggy face, from point to point of sleeve and vest, through his bony hands, across the pattern of the cloth, and into the notched timbers of the loom. Quickened by sudden contrasts of light and dark, the line veers back and forth, as if approximating the energy of the task and the action of the shuttle. The drawing typifies the particular character of Van Gogh's graphic skill. Compositionally it repeats a standard formula, with the weaver at the center or helm of his loom, and the design affirms the artisan's expertise and control. The image is similar to Renouard's illustration Un Canut à son métier

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Fig. 50.

Vincent van G o g h , Weaver: Facing Front (F27), 1884. Rotterdam, Boymans-van Beuningen Museum.

(see Fig. 38), published later that year, and would undoubtedly have satisfied Van Rappard's (and his public's) concern with emphasis. 58 But such an emphasis belied the changing character of textile production in Brabant. T h e weaver, as Van Gogh came to realize, was less and less in charge of his work, and the Rotterdam picture ofJuly (Fig. 50 and Plate 1) suggests as much. T h e figure at the center is a starting and ending point. But something has gone awry. The interior is unusually claustrophobic, with objects and space compressed into a cluttered visual geometry. T h e lines of the machine and workshop furnishings produce a disorderly space, crisscrossed with distracting and obstructing verticals and horizontals. In the center sits the weaver—certainly no "little black spook," but no contented individual either. Now an ungainly giant, his overlarge proportions seem forcibly confined, and despite his prominence, he is very much a spectral presence. Some quality of person, mind, or being is absent, simply not there. His face is vacant and wooden, as if hacked from the same aged oak as the loom. His paw-like hands reach mechanically into the loom; his torso is severed 84

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from his head by its timbers; and his head is framed—guillotined almost—by the wooden beams. This is indeed a ghostly artisan, an awkward, apparitional figure who haunts and is brutalized by the machine. From homage in one to horror in the other, these two works seem to frame a sobering change in outlook, some loss of innocence about artisanal life. And in the later picture's unpitying ugliness, the weaver's troubled situation overrides nostalgia or reverence for the past. Van Gogh stopped painting weavers in mid-July. Except for a few pictures the following winter of women spinning or spooling, he never returned to the subject of the rural artisan. But as if taking up where his Rotterdam picture left off, his representations of country people that next year became increasingly grotesque and grim, like the gnarled, misshapen peasants in The Potato Eaters (see Fig. 40) huddled in darkness around their meager meal.59 Unlike those peasants, the weavers seem like a phantom force, distant or difficult to see. As impassive accessories to their machines, separate from the domestic relationships of family or community artisanal practice, they hardly rouse the viewer's horror, pity, or compassionate gaze. They are objects, never subjects, seen yet unseen, and like Carlyle's workhouse poor they seem to say, " D o not look at us. We sit enchanted here, we know not why." 60 Despite the Utopian idealism of the pictures' origins, this inexplicable "enchantment" becomes the persistent and disquieting theme of the series. T h e pictures do not appeal to us with pathos or dramatic anecdote; they advance no social radicalism; nor, it seems, do they even preach reform. Instead, they represent a more uncertain zone or interstice between traditional artisanal practice—a Utopian memory—and modern industrial production. Van Gogh shows neither the unalloyed ruralist nostalgia of Jules Breton or Léon Lhermitte, nor the social reform of Renouard, nor even the biblical fatalism and timelessness of Millet's country life. Instead his series attempts to mark a progressive, utopie space, a space that would acknowledge the past, engage the present, and—with difficulty— imagine a future. However much they began for Van Gogh as emblems of artisanry, and however much they draw on established pictorial codes, with their disquieting features and unusual emphases, these pictures also show the erosion of that simple reverence and the certitudes of those codes. They refuse to picture smoothly the transition from artisan to laborer and the loss of status and identity that change entailed. Begun in homage, the representation of Brabant weavers ultimately relinquishes the comforting legend of an artisanal Golden Age. In the discontinuities of the series we can see the Utopian promise falter and the dream dissolve. " s p o o k "

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3 MODERN

CITIZENS:

CONFIGURATIONS IN VAN G O G H ' S

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PORTRAITURE

I n the spring of 1890 Van Gogh wrote to his sister Wil from the hospital at SaintRémy, "I have always believed that one learns to think by painting portraits. This is something the art lovers like least, but portraits are something almost useful and at times pleasant; like furniture one knows, they remind one of things long gone by" (W20). Portraits, in this remark, are tokens of the familiar and intimate— an understandable attitude for someone far away from family and friends. Van Gogh also acknowledged that this category of painting was not highly valued in the art world. Nevertheless, the letter suggests more serious claims for the process of portraiture; these reappeared a few weeks later in a much quoted passage of another letter, where Van Gogh recast nostalgic pleasure into aesthetic principle:

What impassions me most—much, much more than all the rest of my métier—is the portrait, the modern portrait. I seek it in color, and surely I am not the only one to seek it in this direction. . . . I should like to paint portraits which would appear after a century to the people living then as apparitions. By which I mean that I do not endeavor to achieve this by a photographic resemblance, but by means of our impassioned expressions—that is to say, using our knowledge of and our modern taste for color as a means of arriving at the expression and the intensification of the character. [W22]

Portraiture in this manifesto-like statement has a much grander purpose than the production of mementos. Van Gogh declares it a major focus of his œuvre and, based on color, an important form of modern painting. Portraits also have a distinctive function and capacity: to stir—or haunt—viewers in the future with the expressions of the present and so stand as emblems of one society for another. It was not the first time Van Gogh had made such insistent claims. Eight months earlier, writing to his brother, he hailed portraiture as the site of something new.

Now what really is it that we are now beginning to catch a timid glimpse of, original and enduring?—;portraiture. You may say that it is an old story, but it is also new. We shall talk of this again—but let's keep looking out for portraits, especially by artists such as Guillaumin, and the portrait of the girl by Guillaumin, and carefully keep my portrait by Russell that I am so fond of. Have you framed the portrait of Laval? [L604] 1

Van Gogh's most concentrated production of his more than one hundred portraits was in 1888 and 1889,2 when he painted forty-nine portraits of men, women, and children in Aries. Each of those images represents a specific person whose identity, in most cases, is known. But Van Gogh also styled—and often labeled— his subjects as general types: Patience Escalier was the peasant, Lieutenant Milliet the lover, Marie Ginoux the Arlésienne, Eugène Boch the poet—the role assignments seem like those of stock characters in a social primer or an encyclopédie, and, taken together, they constitute a social panorama of Provençal citizens. In this chapter I examine that portrait gallery of social types. If we, "after a century," are the artist's imagined spectators, who, I want to ask, are the "apparitional" figures, the modern men and modern women Van Gogh sought to represent? T h e question takes us beyond individual models to the social identities the pictures define and encode. Obviously age and class are important terms of such analysis. Van Gogh's sitters range from infancy to old age, and from petit bourgeois to worker and peasant class. But as Joan Scott and countless feminist scholars have shown, gender is no less crucial a determinant of modern experience than the order and consciousness of class. 3 I want to propose, then, a reading of Van Gogh's portraits as gendered icons, that is, as emblematic configurations of men and women of a particular time and culture that personify a range of modern masculinities and femininities. T h e rapid expansion of nineteenth-century cities and the proliferating sites of public pleasure brought sexual conduct and categories, as well as class positions, to public consciousness and scrutiny. Modernity, as Baudelaire had defined it in " T h e Painter of Modern Life" (1859), and as many late-nineteenth-century painters pictured it, was figured around the experience of the strolling urban flaneur and the sexual economies of the streets and cafés. In our own day, feminist scholars have positioned that preoccupation with women and sexuality at the forefront of art historical analysis: Griselda Pollock's account of Baudelaire's "city of women" effectively demonstrates how modernity was charted and pictured through the city's "erotic territories." 4

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Van Gogh's paintings only occasionally engage that world of modern theater and sexual spectacle. Like the pictures by Pissarro and Signac, his images are far more attentive to a rural society, and to the economies of artisanal labor and the field. But as Van Gogh wrote his brother, even in representations of such a "natural" social order there was no escaping the issue. 5 "It is the same everywhere," he wrote from Antwerp in 1885; "in the country as well as in the city, one must take women into account if one wants to be up-to-date" (L442). Whether for or against its urban formulations, any programmatic concern with the modern, such as Van Gogh claimed for portraiture, was likely to engage sexuality and gender roles. If sexuality is most often discursively framed and elaborated through representations of women, how might these concerns appear in images of men? T h e position of the masculine is the "neutral" or "universal" voice in our culture; the silent but authoritative masculine "we" establishes standards and norms, with the result that, until recently, masculinity as such was rarely discussed or explicitly defined. One analytic strategy has been to derive historical notions of masculinity or masculine terrain from and against the discourses on women. Seen this way, masculinity becomes everything that the feminine is not. While such an approach is effective, it sets out a binary structure that does not easily accommodate indeterminacy, conflict, or change. Another approach begins with the body. 6 Medical discourse can provide scientific definitions of male and female behavior and character. In late-nineteenth-century France, potency or the ability to father loomed large in this literature, as did concern with masturbation and its perverting effects. 7 Such notions of "manliness" were also linked politically to the "health" of the nation, and after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, to a national birthrate that seemed alarmingly low. In literary discourse, and certainly in many of the novels Van Gogh most admired, masculinity or manliness centered on sexual conquest and social place. For bourgeois men in particular, ambition and merit replaced aristocratic heritage and genealogy as routes to social position and success. Eugène Rastignac in Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot (1834) "resolved to open two parallel lines of attack on Fortune, to lean on Knowledge and on Love, to be a learned doctor of law and a man of the world." 8 Guy de Mauppassant's Bel-Ami (1885), whose central figure, Dupont, climbed to fortune and social status through sexual liaisons, was virtually a manual of this masculine agenda. By the end of the century, the public face and private mood of manhood were

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increasingly infused with anxiety and doubts. Annelise Maugue labels it a moment of crisis, when "the masculine sex," was "uncertain, anguished, torn apart."9 The much discussed position of the bachelor, or célibataire, was symptomatic of the malaise. As Dr. Pierre Gamier was quick to point out in his book Célibat et célibataires (1887), marriage and the ability to father were the norm, from which any departure was potentially perverse or at least discomforting. Among the most distinguished writers of the period, Gustave Flaubert, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, Guy de Maupassant, and Joris-Karl Huysmans were unmarried—happily unmarried perhaps—but their literary production often bore the imprint of some ambivalence. John Grand-Carteret, bon vivant, man-about-Paris, and chronicler of cultural pleasures, evoked the sense of discomfort at the end of the century: "In 1800 a man is master of his self; in 1892 he is no longer the owner of his physical person." 10 How, then, might we see these issues of heightened sexuality and gender malaise in Van Gogh's Aries portraits? And how as a group might these portraits enunciate a Utopian program or ideal? For some figures, the gender signposts seem obvious. At a time of imperialist expansion, pictures of soldiers like the Portrait of a Zouave (see Fig. 51 and Plate 2) are clear markers of masculine terrain. And at a moment when women's place in society was the subject of argument and legislative debate, recurring images of mothers like La Berceuse (see Fig. 69) demarcate—if they do not insist on—a domestic femininity. In general, the portraits locate men and women in familiar roles. But these pictures also inflect standard categories like "soldier" and "mother" with particular meanings and emphases. In its five variations, the image of the Zouave binds rampant male sexuality to notions of class and exoticism; in more than eight pictures, images of the mother register a problematic maternity around an absent child. Considered in a gendered framework, these paintings go beyond specific identities or even class types; as modern social icons, they encompass both familiar and problematic forms of masculinity and femininity. Before taking up specific pictures, I want to consider the claims Van Gogh made for portraiture generally. In part, the production of portraits allowed him to evade the difficulties of figure painting without eliminating human subjects from his œuvre. The difficulties were partly a matter of skill and lack of academic training; in the course of his career, Van Gogh repeatedly turned to Charles Bargue's Cours de dessin to study the nude. But his difficulty with the nude and its intermittent appearances in his repertoire—moralized in the case of Sorrow (F929, see Fig. 7), distanced in pictures of plaster casts (F360), awkward in the case of a re-

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clining female figure (F330)—suggest some reluctance on the part of the artist before the body's sexual terrain. Portrait figures are not without bodies, to be sure, but the conventional bust, half-, or full-length views may be said to enunciate a social relationship to the viewer rather than to invite physical or sexual scrutiny. Portraiture thus offered another sort of opportunity, one in which issues of masculinity and femininity might be deflected from the body onto a more decorous and social face. But Van Gogh's commitment to this kind of painting is also remarkable because portraiture in the nineteenth century was a problematic category. Commissioned portraits were prestige items. Portraits flooded the annual Salons, and painters like Jean-Jacques Henner and Claude-Marie Dubufe grew rich as specialists in the genre. In a chapter titled "La Manie au portrait: Ses Relations avec les artistes," Henri Monnier's Physiologie du bourgeois satirized the bourgeois citizen's passion to "have himself done" ["il se fait faire"]. 11 At the same time, the demands of likeness in portraiture discouraged aesthetic investigation or innovative change. Baudelaire's Salon criticism in 1859 acknowledged the genre's uncertain status by valuing portraits that went beyond mere resemblance and showed the artist's imagination.12 Impressionist portraits of family, friends, and associates somewhat alleviated the pressures of patron demands, but the category was still troubling.13 Portraiture was "a genre secondary to appearance," Raphael Pinset and Jules d'Auriac conceded in their Histoire du portrait en France of 1884, "and therefore full of all sorts of difficulties."14 Van Gogh was careful to distinguish his enthusiasm for portraits from issues of "photographic resemblance"; he focused instead on social meanings and modern style. Describing portraits of Patience Escalier as peasant, Eugène Boch as poet, and Joseph Roulin as republican postman, he wrote to Theo, "Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily, in order to express myself forcibly" (L520). And in his letter to Wil two years later, Van Gogh very likely meant friends like Guillaumin, Gauguin, Bernard, and Toulouse-Lautrec—all of whom produced brightly colored portraits of urban and provincial types—when he stressed the innovative color of modern portraits and assured his sister that "I am not the only one to seek it in this direction" (W22). Van Gogh was more explicit about the social character of portraiture in letters to Emile Bernard.15 In the summer of 1888, the twenty-year-old Bernard was working with Gauguin at Pont-Aven, and he sent poems and sketches to Van Gogh as evidence of his avant-garde concerns. These works had a dual focus. In one

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group of drawings, Bernard represented an urbane Baudelairean notion of modernity through brothel imagery—one image seems to include a portrait of a dapper Van Gogh; other images set modern women among the exotic medievalism of Breton peasants. 16 Van Gogh responded with a watercolor portrait of a Zouave soldier (F1472; see Fig. 55), and he made his own watercolor copy of the Breton women (F1422). But to counter the social positions implied by Bernard's images, that is, the explicit sexuality of the brothel and the archaic costumed spirituality of the rural scene, Van Gogh invoked seventeenth-century Dutch portraiture—Rembrandt and Frans Hals in particular—to remind Bernard of "this whole glorious republic, depicted by these two prolific portraitists, reconstructed in bold outlines" (B13). In this letter, passionate and polemical, he forced home his argument with a lengthy catalogue of Hals's subjects:

He did portraits, and nothing, nothing else. Portraits of soldiers, gatherings of officers, portraits of magistrates assembled to debate the affairs of the republic, portraits of matrons with pink or yellow skins, wearing white caps and dressed in wool and black satin, discussing the budget of an orphanage or an almshouse. He painted the portraits of middle-class men in their homes: the man, the woman, the child. He painted the drunken toper, an old fishwife in a mood of witchlike hilarity, the pretty gypsy whore, babies in their diapers, the dashing, self-indulgent nobleman with his mustache, top boots and spurs. He painted himself, together with his wife, young, deeply in love, on a bench on a lawn, after the first wedding night. He painted vagabonds and laughing urchins, he painted musicians and he painted a fat cook. . . . It is as beautiful as Zola, healthier as well as merrier, but as true to life, because his epoch was healthier and less dismal. A n d now what is Rembrandt? T h e same thing absolutely: a painter of portraits.

T h e list of subjects—many of them remarkably like Van Gogh's—captures the social sweep of Hals's pictures and their brio and energy. In her study of Van Gogh's concept of modern art, Griselda Pollock demonstrates the importance of Hals's paintings for Van Gogh's portraiture, not only for their stylistic bravado but also because seventeenth-century Dutch painters signified a republican Golden Age in nineteenth-century France. 17 Adding to the social comprehensiveness of his Dutch forebears, Van Gogh also cited the French artists Eugène Delacroix, Honoré Daumier, and Millet—whom he described as "the painter of a whole race and the environment it lives in"—and the examples of Balzac and

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Zola, labeling them painters as well. "In their quality as painters of a society, of a nature in its entirety, Zola and Balzac produce rare artistic emotions in those who love them, just because they embrace the whole of the epoch they depict." Portraiture in this text celebrates more than the individual; it is coupled to representation of "this whole glorious republic," "society . . . in its entirety," and "the whole of the epoch." T h e notion resounds through these letters as Van Gogh proposes such social picturing as an alternative to urban or medievalizing genre. "Am I very incomprehensible, my dear comrade Bernard?" he concluded rhetorically. "I am just trying to make you see the great simple thing: the painting of humanity, or rather of a whole republic, by the simple means of portraiture. This first and foremost." No less important to Van Gogh's Utopian plan for portraits was a sense of where, how, and to whom they would appeal. Various schemes were devised for the Aries pictures in the course of their production. Van Gogh hoped to install some of them in his atelier, the Yellow House, as part of an inspiring decorative scheme, but he also planned to show them in Paris as an ensemble. 18 Renouncing the pressures of city life obviously did not mean relinquishing the markets there. Despite the occasional variant given to his model, for the most part Van Gogh intended his portraits for Paris audiences and fashioned them with that public in mind. This intention appears early on as he assessed the local scene. "I think there would be something to do here in portraits," he wrote Theo in May 1888, noting the colorful clothing of the people in Aries. "Now as for portraits, I'm pretty sure they'd take the bait" (L481). The next letter hoped for "a kind of Guy de Maupassant in painting . . . [who would] paint the beautiful people and things here lightheartedly" (L482). With some false modesty, Van Gogh claimed he was not up to the task, but the allusion to the urbane novelist of city types reveals the Parisian framework for his marketing ambitions. And later that fall, with several pictures of Aries citizens completed, he again urged Bernard to consider the public and future for portraiture: "I strongly urge you to study portrait painting, do as many portraits as you can and don't flag. We must win the public over later on by means of the portrait; in my opinion it is the thing of the future" (Big). In fact, while Van Gogh was enthusiastic about Aries and the rural surroundings, he was relatively uninterested in local history or culture. T h e medieval Church of Saint-Trophîme struck him as "so cruel, so monstrous, like a Chinese nightmare" (L470), the ethnographic Arlaten Museum as a "horror and a humbug" (L464), and he showed only passing interest in the Provençal revivalist movement,

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Les Félibriges. 19 An alternative modernity was his concern. Thus, just as he intended The Potato Eaters in 1885 to instruct an urban audience in the realities of peasant life, in 1888 he pictured the people of Aries for Parisian viewers as a modern "not-Paris," a group of countertypes. He even suggested that the portrait of the elderly cowherd Patience Escalier might partner Toulouse-Lautrec's Poudre de Riz, an image of a chemise-clad young woman at her toilette—an "odd juxtaposition," he admitted (L520). Odd or not, the combination effectively neutralizes or balances the sexuality of Lautrec's image.20 And the coupling suggests a Utopian cultural geography: urban and rural, sexual and earthy, modern as well. As genre images of Provençal citizens to be seen in Paris—that is, as one social company made for another—the Aries portraits constitute a Utopian gallery of alternative modern types. Van Gogh began his portraits of men in Aries in June 1888 with images of a Zouave soldier (Fig. 51 and Plate 2).21 The Zouaves were a French-Algerian infantry division formed in 1831 to pacify indigenous African populations; 22 typically for non-European soldiers, they acquired a reputation as fierce combatants. Zouave militia fought in Indochina in the 1880s to secure French colonies there, and the force thus readily signified the Republic's imperial reach and success. T h e Zouaves were, as one military writer insisted, "an emanation of the nation, a synthesis of its military aptitudes." 23 Garrisoned at Aries in the Caserne Calvin at the eastern edge of the town, they were colorful uniformed figures in the streets, associated, as soldiers are, with a swaggering masculinity—faire le zouave was a popular term for boasting and showing off. Van Gogh reported their low-life adventures and their sexual success.24 He even complained that his friend Lieutenant Milliet, whom he hoped to use for "the picture of a lover," had "hardly any time to spare, seeing he must take a tender leave of all the grues and grenouilles de la grenouillère [brothel] of Aries" (L54ia). The bust-length portrait of Milliet, a veteran of the Battle of Tonkin, in uniform with medal and cap (Fig. 52) hints at "la coquetterie militaire," or "l'insouciance martiale," that Baudelaire deemed a subject of modern life.25 But a less refined masculinity permeates several images of the anonymous soldier, whom Van Gogh described in a letter in the language of animality and danger: "a boy with a small face, a bull neck, and the eye of a tiger. . . . [and] that bronzed feline head" (L501). His account of one picture (see Fig. 51 and Plate 2) in a letter to Wil is even more colorfully telegraphic and ferocious: "Also a portrait bust of a Zouave, in a blue uniform with red and yellow trimmings, with a sky blue sash,

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Fig. 51.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait

of a Zouave (F423), 1888. Collection Vincent van Gogh Foundation/ Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 52.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait

of Milliet, Second Lieutenant of the Zouaves (F473), 1888. Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands.

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Fig- 53B e l l a n g é , Seated

Eugène Zouave,

from Paul Laurencin, Nos Zouaves,

Paris,

1888. P h o t o g r a p h : Bibliothèque Nationale d e France, Paris.

a blood red cap with a blue tassel, the face sunburned—black hair cropped short— eyes leering like a cat's—orange and green—a small head on a bull's neck" (W5). Like the model, the pictures of the Zouave prompted allusions to unbridled energy and control from the artist: Van Gogh noted the "savage combination of incongruous tones, not easy to manage" (L501), and he labeled the painting "very harsh," "utterly ugly and badly done" (L501, B8). It was a vocabulary he had used before and would use again to describe provocative pictures like The Potato Eaters and The Night Cafe.26 T h e difficulty in this case may have been the color or the figure but Van Gogh described the problem through the language of social ex-

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Fig. 54.

V i n c e n t van

G o g h , Portrait of a Zouave (F424), 1888. Argentina, private collection.

cess. At the same time, he declared, "I'd like always to be working on vulgar, even loud portraits like this" (L501). T h e Zouave infantryman, then, was a savage and exotic figure, and picturing him, Van Gogh could imply adventures that exceeded bourgeois decorum. Paul Laurencin's nineteenth-century study illustrates the activities of these soldiers in their exotic garb. Although somewhat like one of these engravings (Fig. 53), Van Gogh's five pictures of the Zouave use the romantic uniform in a paradoxical fashion: to cloak the body yet assert the man's virile physicality. In a full-length seated portrait (Fig. 54) voluminous red trousers fill the foreground and extend to meet

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the line between floor and wall. With one hand hovering centrally over his veiled genitals and this fabric-filled space, the dark-skinned man appears expansively sexual, a figure whose phallic charge is heightened by his costume's ballooning force. 27 T h e bust-length painting (see Fig. 51 and Plate 2) omits the lower body but is no less a marker of virility. T h e blue-blackjacket with sinuous orange trim clothes a massive girth that seems to push past the boundaries of the frame, while the geometric green and red-brick ground cordons off the man's physical presence. With his eyes slightly lowered and his vigor coiled through color, costume, and physique, the Zouave soldier embodies adventure and adventurous fantasy. Milliet the officer may have spent just as many nights in the brothels, but, as befitting his rank and class, his sexuality was elevated beyond animal virility to the status of "the lover" in Van Gogh's pantheon. The configuration of rampant sexuality and male potency in the Zouave is reiterated through Van Gogh's letters and picture exchanges. He sent an ink drawing to the painter John Russell and offered Bernard a watercolor version, inscribed "a mon cher copain Emile Bernard, Vincent": "I will set apart the head of the Zouave which I have painted for an exchange with you if you like. . . . It would be in response to your sketch of a brothel. If we two did a picture of a brothel, I feel sure we would take my study of the Zouave for character" (B9). T h e bustlength watercolor (Fig. 55) is cool and green, with half the composition devoted to the uniform's masculine message. Above its spreading bulk, the neck and head rise through a red-rimmed opening and culminate in an upright red toque (though the tasseled chechia was usually a soft, floppy form).28 With both the military and the brothels as zones of masculine performance, the image, with its phallicized male body, not only functioned as a sign of sexual potency for Van Gogh and his young colleague but also served, in response to Bernard's brothel images, as a token of male company, sexual fellowship, and artistic collaboration. Such layered sexual and artistic meanings are sustained by Van Gogh's references in letters to Bernard that summer of 1888 to the presumed conflict of energies between artistic creation and sexual intercourse. Nineteenth-century medical practice was elaborately concerned with safeguarding male potency for procreative purposes. Medical texts on bachelordom offered sexual warnings and advice, and a considerable literature on masturbation warned—and titillated— readers about its perversity and wastefulness, enlisting bourgeois notions of expenditure and excess to frame a normative sexual economy. 29 T h e analogy could be applied to artistic powers and continence and appeared this way in fictional

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Fig- 55Portrait

V i n c e n t van G o g h , of a Zouave

(F1472),

watercolor, 1888. N e w York, Metropolitan M u s e u m o f Art.

accounts of artists' lives, like Zola's L'Œuvre or the Goncourts' Manette Salomon, for example, where sexual drives (love of women) conflicted with creative energies. Van Gogh's letters rehearsed the same concern and conflation of potencies. He deemed portraits by Hals and Rembrandt "so virile, so full of male potency, so healthy," and he listed the sexual habits of artists he especially admired: "Degas lives like a small lawyer and does not like women"; Rubens was "a handsome man and a good fucker, Courbet too"; Balzac counseled that "relative chastity fortifies the modern artist"; Delacroix "did not fuck much . . . so as not to curtail time devoted to his work." "As for you," he advised Bernard, "eat a lot, do your military exercises well, don't fuck too much; when you do this your paint-

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ing will be all the more spermatic" (B14). Van Gogh neither censured nor approved sexual indulgence through this roster, but his letter, like his images, flags a preoccupation—and considerable anxiety. "Personally," he admitted, "I feel continence is good for me," and he cautioned against expending "creative sap." "If we want to be really potent males in our work," he told his younger colleague, "we must sometimes resign ourselves to not fuck much, and for the rest be monks or soldiers, according to the needs of our temperament" (B14). "Monks or soldiers." Van Gogh toyed with the idea of soldiering in the foreign legion, but he stuck with the more pacific choice and represented himself symbolically as a Japanese monk, or bonze (see Fig. 93 and Plate 9). T h e characterization, drawn from a figure in Pierre Loti's novel Madame Chrysanthème (1887), was meant to signify membership in a Utopian community, which is how Van Gogh imagined Japanese society.30 A bonze, however, was not necessarily celibate; Japanese monasticism did not require such abstention. But in a letter to Theo, Van Gogh linked this self-image with another artist-priest combination— the mad artist and serene priest of Emil Wauters's picture of Hugo van der Goes— and he alluded to his own "almost double nature, that of a monk and that of a painter" (L556). Such references to fifteenth-century Flanders and Japan are typical of Van Gogh's extensive cultural reach, and they rationalize his own psychological unsteadiness in cultural terms. But to characterize the modern artist here as painter-bonze-priest was telling. I discuss this conception again in chapter 4. In a gender context, however, I want to note that the artist-bonze characterization brings with it not only the expected maleness but also libidinal energy. Van Gogh imagined hard work in a male community as the best mode of artistic production, and in that framework male sexuality—either fully indulged or, preferably, regulated, sublimated, and spiritually recast—was a decisive part of the artist's potency. In addition to the virility of the soldier and the artist-monk, masculinity associated with wisdom, work, and authority appears in these portraits, structured through age, social status, and class. For example, Van Gogh cherished the idea of the peasant as "natural man"—a theme already elaborated in letters and pictures of peasants from Nuenen that were bound, in turn, to the popular literary and pictorial forms of la vie rustique. He drew on standard examples of that discourse—by Léon Lhermitte, Constantin Meunier, Emile Zola, and above all Jean-François Millet—to describe the peasants of Provence, and he characterized his peasant model, the cowherd Patience Escalier (Fig. 56), as "a sort of'man with

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Fig. 56.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , Portrait of Patience Escalier (F444), 1888. Private collection.

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a hoe'" (L520), after Millet's painting of 1860-62. Two portraits show Escalier as a sun-scorched veteran of the fields,31 posed in a blue smock and straw hat against a torrid orange ground, with his work-worn hands central in the composition and folded prayerfully on his staff. So iconic is the image that it virtually gives form to Prime Minister Jules Ferry's proclamation of the peasantry as the bedrock of republican democracy: "the real basis of French society . . . a solid base, and, for the Republic, a granite foundation." 32 But if the picture suggests the republican rural ideal, it also relies on the man's age, posture, and accessories to subdue the peasant's robust—and potentially revolutionary—character and to sacralize devotion to the land. Van Gogh's painting consecrates the marks of Escalier's experience, a life already lived. Fiery red cuffs and cravat call attention to the devotional hands; red brushstrokes accent the hollowed eyes and wrinkled skin; the tilted head is solemn and attentive, the upturned gaze even somewhat supplicant. The cowherd's staff may echo Millet's hoe, but it is a rather different instrument of support, for it turns the fruitless labor of Millet's peasant to meaningful rest, and his exhaustion to reverence. In effect, Millet's image of peasant desperation is pacified here as dignified and docile old age. In contrast, the postal official, or entreposeur des postes, Joseph Roulin is a model of patriarchal vigor and bureaucratic authority.33 Van Gogh recounted Roulin's habits and character—his drinking, his fatherhood, his Socratic wisdom, and his passionately voiced politics, all of which suggested an energetic and engaged masculinity. As a frequent patron of the Café de la Gare, near the railroad postal depot and Van Gogh's Yellow House, Roulin voiced his opinions there á haute voix—"he argues with such sweep, in the style of Garibaldi," Van Gogh reported (L550). But it was notjust the man's fervor; to Van Gogh, Roulin seemed the embodiment of the revolutionary republican ideal. "He is a terrible republican, like old Tanguy," he told Bernard and Wil (B14, W5), and to Theo he wrote, "I once watched him sing the Marseillaise, and I thought I was watching '89, not next year, but the one ninety-nine years ago" (L520). Not surprisingly, given Van Gogh's attention to the man's political character, Roulin appears in all six paintings as a uniformed representative of the state. In the first three-quarter-length portrait he is seated in a round-backed chair, turning from a simple table as if in mid-sentence (Fig. 57). Ronald Pickvance suggests that the position implies a drinking scene—Roulin frequented the café and a glass appears in a drawing by Van Gogh after the same portrait. 34 But there is no hint of drink, or even the café, in the oil version. T h e image is freshened by a sky blue

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Fig. 57.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , Postman Joseph Roulin

(F432), 1888. G i f t o f R o b e r t Treat Paine, 2nd, courtesy, M u s e u m

o f Fine Arts, Boston.

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ground framing the darker silhouette and accenting the yellow-gold braid of the uniform and Roulin's upthrust bearded face. T h e lower part of the picture gives body to the postman's argumentative energy. Peacock blue highlights tighten and expand the chest; hands protrude from the sleeves and hover in space, and pockets of sky blue surface seen through the chair frame accentuate Roulin's longarmed reach. Alert, agile, and imposing, the man who turns to face the viewer is all republican uniform and argument. Roulin's authority as state official is matched in these portraits by his status as father. In 1888 the Roulin sons, Armand and Camille, were seventeen and eleven. A daughter was born that summer, and Van Gogh remarked on Roulin's pride in the child's birth. This pleasure may be explained in part by the parents' ages— Roulin was forty-seven, his wife thirty-seven—and the intervals between the children. 35 Roulin also refused to baptize his daughter, and he named her Marcelle, after the daughter of General Georges Boulanger, the popular military challenger to the Republic. Such gestures underscore the man's active sense of fatherhood and link his paternal pride to a wider social and political sphere. Some months later Van Gogh fantasized about Roulin's fatherly character and role in his own life: Roulin, though he is not quite old enough to be like a father to me, nevertheless has a silent gravity and a tenderness for me such as an old soldier might have for a young one. All the time—but without a word—a something which seems to say, We do not know what will happen to us tomorrow, but whatever it may be, think of me. A n d it does one good when it comes from a man who is neither embittered, nor sad, nor perfect, nor happy, nor always irreproachably just. But such a good soul and so wise and so full of feeling and so trustful. [L583] 36

In no less than five bust-length portraits of Roulin as paterfamilias Van Gogh merged the idea of republican officer with benign patriarch. T h e close-up format suggests an intimacy with the subject, but even close-up, Roulin is a stately presence, with the twin falls of his patriarchal beard curling luxuriantly over the uniform. T h e pictures vary from a serene monochrome scale of blues in the first (F433) to three striking pictures (F435, F436, F439) that set Roulin somewhat lower in the frame and intensify the presence of a red-and-green dahlia-strewn ground (Fig. 58 and Plate 3). 37 Claustrophobic and feverish in its restless energy, like some wallpaper pattern gone amok, and even incongruously "feminine" for a patriarchal figure, the design secures a domestic framework for Roulin père.

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Fig. 58.

Vincent van Gogh, The Postman Roulin (F439), 1888-89. Collection Kroller-Miiller Museum, Otterlo,

The Netherlands.

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Fig. 59.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of a Man (F533), 1888. Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo,

The Netherlands.

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1 ..

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-

.

.

/¡V.

/Í'.

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/'V

tale.

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á

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Fig. 6o.

Nineteenth-century cravats, from Philippe Perrot, Les Dessus et Us dessous de la

bourgeoisie, Paris, 1981.

T h e sexual soldier, monastic artist, work-worn peasant, and patriarchal state official—these men are clear enough as coded masculinities. But two figures in the series appear both troubled and troubling in their representation of masculine attitudes and social types. A dandified man in bourgeois black, probably Joseph Ginoux, owner of Café de la Gare, is all tenacious pride of place (Fig. 59 and Plate 4).38 His costume—dark waistcoat, wide lapels, and prominent tie—is as elaborate a sign of masculinity as the Zouave's colorful uniform. Indeed, for nineteenth-century men of fashion, the collar and cravat were signs of affluence and taste, and various knottings of the tie evoked forms of masculine character— detailed in one fashion manual as Byronic, mathematical, sentimental (Fig. 60). 39 " T h e tie is the man," wrote Balzac in his "Physiologie de la toilette" (1830); "it is through the tie that a man reveals and shows himself." 40 In the symbolic language of clothes, collar and tie are thus distinctive marks of masculinity and class— a gender node, one might call it, displaced upward—and in this sense, the doublebreastedjacket, tall stiff collar, and flowing cravat proclaim the model's masculine success to the point of caricature. But the portrait's design also invokes notions

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Fig. 61.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Armand Roulin (F492), 1888. Essen,

Folkwang Museum.

of status and maintaining place. T h e fellow's haughty stare is activated by the viewer's position: we look up at a raking angle into a face marked, not by kindly beneficence, but by derision and disdain. T h e brow furrows, the mouth twists and curls, the nostrils flare—all this picked out in piquant scarlet accents—while the angular blue-black silhouette against the acrid yellow-green ground sharpens the tension and uneasiness. Drawing back to survey the curious spectator, the bourgeois gentleman seems the very essence of social hauteur, and faintly ridiculous in his posturing. A more nuanced masculinity appears in the two portraits of Armand Roulin, a serious young man of seventeen (Figs. 61,62). The postmaster's elder son was an

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Fig. 62.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Armani

Roulin (F493), 1888. Rotterdam,

Boymans-van Beuningen Museum.

apprentice blacksmith in his parents' home village of Lambesc; he had, in effect, left his father's house and begun to make his way in the world. The pictures, however, show no sign of artisanal status. In a picture that remained with the Roulin family, the frontal view of the young man in his elegant fedora and bright yellow overcoat expansively fills the frame and constitutes a masculine model of assurance and calm. But a second portrait—this one sent to Theo in Paris—is darker in both color and mood. The figure is turned on an angle with eyes downcast and seems to withdraw to introspective sadness in a dark, gray-green space. No other model in this series—not even father Roulin—appears with such a drastic shift in mood. Susan Koslow has described these pictures as physiognomically based stud-

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ies of schema and character,41 and indeed, the change in expression in the two works might be understood as such a study of individual temperament, or even of the contrast between the vita activa and vita contemplativa. But with Armand dressed in both pictures for some public appearance or occasion, his double mood—expansive sunny assurance, retracted dark malaise—is equally a social statement. We may compare the picture with Cézanne's Boy with a Skull (Fig. 63). T h e image of a young man contemplating stacked books and skull is generally interpreted as a memento mori, a pictorial musing by the aging painter on the brevity of life.42 In its unsetding juxtaposition of youth and death, it is also a troubling image of manhood. Cézanne's symbolic apparatus, however—skull, books, musing figure—is entirely conventional. Without such accessories, the figure of Armand Roulin against the cold green ground suggests a more diffuse discomfort and worried atmosphere. Indeed, we need only recall the literary topos of the bourgeois young man eager to make his way in the world, as well as the accompanying neuroses and unease—the heroes in novels by Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant, to name the best-known writers and Van Gogh's favorites—to recognize in Armand Roulin a youth full of promise and confidence at one moment and fraught with uneasiness and doubt at another. Pictured this way, both Armand Roulin and the anonymous dandy generate tension and uncertainties. Their public costume and demeanor bind them as masculine subjects to positions of class and social hierarchy. But their combination of assurance, disdain, and doubt suggests a complexity of mood and attitude not often found in images of social types. Such moodiness—or malaise—appears again two years later in Van Gogh's portraits of Dr. Gachet (see Fig. 77), where the artist described it as the condition of modern man. In the Aries portraits it tinges the well-being and success of bourgeois masculinity with discomfort and anxiety. In comparison with the rather familiar comments on masculine types in his letters, Van Gogh's account of his search for modern female subjects, in order to be "up-to-date" (L442), is more explicit. An increasing public presence of women pardy accounts for Van Gogh's claim that women were the ticket to modernity. Working-class women—laundresses, vendors, market women—had always been part of the urban scene, but in the course of the century, the public presence of women in cafés, theaters, shops, and streets became a fixture of the culture of modernity. "In that vast picture-gallery which is life in London and Paris," Baudelaire wrote, "we shall meet with all the various types of fallen womanhood—of women in revolt against society—at all levels." 43

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Bourgeois women were more cloistered in domesticity, but by the 1880s they too had become assertive parts of the urban spectacle. The Exposition Universelle of 1889 not only celebrated the anniversary of the French republic but was also the occasion of two International Congresses on Women's Rights and Feminine Institutions.44 T h e debate about women's rights and freedoms was widespread and intense, with both progressive and conservative arguments about the benefits and dangers posed by la femme nouvelle. As the range and sheer presence of women's activities expanded, the notion of "modern woman" became a less easily defined, less neady bounded or simple category.45 Images of modern women in the illustrated press vacillated narrowly between those representing sexual behavior—women as mistresses, prostitutes, flirts—and those satirizing, with innuendo, the "new women," like John Grand-Carteret's book on "women in knickers." 46 But as Debora Silverman has shown, by the end of the century, la femme nouvelle, or New Woman, signaled a special challenge for portraiture, and critics predicted a new female iconography. Camille Mauclair claimed that the conventional emphasis on decorative beauty and fine clothing would give way to "a new concept of women's portraits," one that would describe the "new woman" as a "pensive and active being." 47 Mauclair wrote a decade after Van Gogh worked in Aries, but the issue had already surfaced as a Utopian construction in Van Gogh's work. Indeed, nowhere is the desire for modern countertypes, for decorous alternatives to decadent urban prototypes, more evident than in his portraits of women. Before the issue—or problem—appears in the Aries pictures, it surfaces in Van Gogh's Paris portraits. T h e Woman Sitting in the Café du Tambourin (Fig. 64) is an Impressionist image in subject, style, and design, similar to pictures by Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Renoir. T h e woman is thought to be Agostina Segatori, a former model for Jean-Léon Gérome, Camille Corot, and Edouard Manet; in the mid-l88os she was the owner of a brasserie at 62 boulevard de Clichy and, for some months in 1887, Van Gogh's lover.48 Segatori agreed to exhibit Van Gogh's collection ofJapanese prints. T h e display brought a timely chic to the establishment and extended the exoticism of the tambourine decor. But in this painting the large image of a geisha on the right wall also comments suggestively on the European model's social position and feminine character.49 Alone with her beer and cigarette, she is a moody customer, hardly a proprietorin-charge; then as now, her colorful clothing, her smoking and drinking, and her lingering in a café were enough to declare her nonbourgeois status and sexual

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Fig. 64.

V i n c e n t van G o g h , Woman Sitting in the Cafe du Tambourin

(F370), 1887. Collection V i n c e n t van G o g h

Foundation/Van G o g h M u s e u m , Amsterdam.

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Fig. 65.

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Vincent van Gogh, The Italian Woman (F381), 1887-88. Paris, Musée d'Orsay.

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availability.50 By romanticizing the mood and situation and hinting at sexual as well as social access, the picture stages Segatori as a modern geisha/Parisienne. Within the year, however, Van Gogh had changed his portrait style, replacing the naturalistic settings of Impressionism with emblematic designs. T h e shift is marked in the Italian Woman (Fig. 65 and Plate 5), another costumed type and possibly Agostina again.51 T h e subject was familiar enough to Parisian audiences; many models were Italian immigrants, and they were portrayed as stock figures of exotic femininity. In Van Gogh's picture the patterned skirt, turned-back apron, and kerchief mark the model's provincial status, the drooping carnations suit a "natural" country girl, and the heated color scheme—flamboyant red-green and yellow-gold—and brushwork suggest a lively, spirited type, despite the modest pose. T h e yellow-gold ground and a striated blue border also allude to nonParisian forms and subjects: the crinkled surfaces ofJapanese crépon prints or the simple designs of popular Epinal imagery.52 Thus, while the woman is disengaged from any specific setting, her femininity is a colorful, countrified vitality, and this presentation fixes her difference, as a regional type, from Parisian audiences. T h e stylistic shift in these two portraits and the recasting of female sexuality, drawing it away from urban pleasures to a more "natural," rural mode, set an agenda for the Aries portraits as well. Sexuality does not disappear in these pictures; we have seen how it is managed and utopically configured for men through the Zouave and bonze images. But aligning women's sexuality and social decorum was a more challenging task. The effort to curb the sexual meanings associated with women in modern pictures and, beyond this, to imagine and represent some figure like the modern femme nouvelle—shapes the portraits of women in Aries. We find it first in portraits of an anonymous teenager, who posed early in the summer of 1888, shortly after the Zouave. 53 Titled La Mousmé(Fig. 66), after the apprentice geisha in Pierre Loti's popular novel Madame Chrysanthème, the image was promptly assimilated to Van Gogh's Japanist enthusiasm; he described it in these terms to Théo (L514). T h e picture, however, has none of the quaintness or exotic sexuality of Loti's tale. T h e young model is the essence of decorum and propriety,54 posed like an adult for a formal portrait, solemnly enthroned in a bentwood chair, and holding a sprig of oleander—flowers that, according to Van Gogh, "speak of love" (L587). 55 Her grave features and upright demeanor are offset by the exuberant color and patterning of the striped and dotted dress. As a girl on the brink of womanhood, she was not far from Van Gogh's notion of

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Fig. 66.

Vincent van Gogh, La Mousmé (F431), 1888. Chester Dale collection, © 1994, Board of Trustees, National

Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Plate l.

Vincent van G o g h , Weaver,

Facing Front (F27), 1884. Rotterdam, Boymans-van Beuningen Museum.

Plate 2.

Vincent van G o g h , Portrait

of a Zouave (F423), 1888. Collection Vincent van G o g h Foundation/ Van G o g h Museum, Amsterdam.

Plate 3.

Vincent van Gogh, The Postman Roulin (F439), 1888-89. Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo,

The Netherlands.

Plate 4.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of a Man (F533), 1888. Collection Kroller-Miiller Museum, Otterlo,

The Netherlands.

Plate 5.

Vincent van Gogh, The Italian Woman (F381), 1887-88. Paris, Musée d'Orsay.

Plate 6.

Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse: Madame Roulin (F508), 1889. Bequest of John T. Spaulding, courtesy,

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Plate 7.

Vincent van Gogh, L'Artisienne: Madame Ginoux (F488), 1888. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Plate 8.

Vincent van Gogh, Self-

Portrait as a Painter (F522), 1888. Collection Vincent van Gogh Foundation/Van Gogh Muséum, Amsterdam.

Plate 9.

Vincent van Gogh, Self-

Portrait Dedicated to Gauguin (F476), 1888. Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, bequest collection of Maurice Wertheim, Class of 1906.

Plate 10.

Vincent van Gogh, Irises (F608), 1889. Collection of the J . Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, Calif.

Plate 11.

Vincent van Gogh, Le Père Tanguy (F363), 1887. Paris, Musée Rodin, photographer, Bruno Jarret.

Fig. 67.

Vincent Van Gogh, Madame

Roulin and Her Baby (F490), 1888. Philadelphia Museum of Art, bequest of Lisa Norris Elkins.

a "geisha-in-training." Poised between adulthood and lively adolescence, the French mousme is positioned by Van Gogh in a framework of idealized sexual difference. T h e containment of sexual and psychological meanings within decorous social forms also sharpens Van Gogh's maternal images. In the early autumn of 1888, he made a small portrait of his mother from a photograph (F477), attempting in paint to remember her blond coloring. T h e picture was to hang in his bedroom, possibly at the head of his bed—as he sketched it in one of his letters (L554)—or beside his own image, as it may appear in one painting of his bedroom (F484). In either case, taking the image of his mother to his bedside, Van Gogh stages a rather oedipal capture of the maternal subject. T h e subject of the mother is cast in more symbolic terms in several portraits, with interesting emphases and variations. Just as portraits of Joseph Roulin showed him as republican patriarch, all eight portraits of Augustine Roulin allude to fertility and motherhood. In one (F503) she is a buxom figure seated before a window view of sprouting potted bulbs. Two pictures restate the format of a medieval Madonna and Child, with the swaddled infant held in large claw-like hands away from the maternal form (Fig. 67). In five more images, produced at a

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Fig. 68.

Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse: Madame Roulin (F508), 1889. Bequest of

John T. Spaulding, courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

time of extreme stress after Van Gogh's self-mutilation in December 1888, Madame Roulin is labeled La Berceuse, or cradle-rocker (Fig. 68 and Plate 6). All of these images distance the relationship of mother and child. The pictures with the swaddled baby force attention to the child; in one (F491) the mother is pushed to the perimeter of the image, so that the baby is the dominant presence. This presentational effect was the iconographie purpose of the medieval design. But

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as Julia Kristeva suggests in her compelling readings of Giovanni Bellini's Madonna and Child images, the mother-baby configuration—the positioning of maternal hands and baby bodies—also encoded psycho-sexual intimacies. 56 Such readings are especially persuasive when seen through modern domestic ideologies of the loving mother.57 In that light, the attention to the baby in Van Gogh's images dispenses with the parent-child bond and shuns an affective connection where we would expect it most. In contrast to this infant-centered emphasis, the five pictures titled La Berceuse manage to declare maternity while evacuating the child entirely. T h e design sets Madame Roulin on a slighdy oblique angle—just enough of a turn to avert direct contact with the spectator. Enthroned in an armchair, she appears somber, somewhat wooden faced, and lost in thought, looking neither at the viewer nor down at her unpictured child. Indeed, the only reference to the baby is the cradle cord in her hands, and in this iconic format this detail also suggests a rosary. T h e figure seems imperturbable, almost inaccessible, although she is framed by reds and greens that clamor for attention through the skirt, floor, braided topknot, and flowered background. T h e combination of Madame Roulin's impassivity and the visual assault of color and pattern brings a curious double distancing to this picture of maternity, for both expression and color scheme keep the viewer guarded, at bay. As if appropriate for a comforting mother, the woman's plump green bodice at the picture's center is the only calm space in the busy design. Whatever its psychological effects, the picture looms large as a maternal image in Van Gogh's letters, which insist on its capacity to console and on its modernity, invoking a mixture of cultural referents as support. Van Gogh described it to Gauguin as a comfort to lonely souls, like the sailors on a fishing-boat in Pecheurs d'Islande (1886), another novel by Loti. 58 T h e sense of parental absence and selfinduced loss—of yearning for a comforting cradle-rocker—is reinforced in that letter with an account of Joseph Roulin's sad farewell to his baby daughter upon his transfer to Marseilles, followed immediately by Van Gogh's comment on Gauguin's recent departure from Aries: "At present I feel remorse that it was me who so much insisted that you stay here to await events and me who gave you so many good reasons for that, now I feel remorse to have perhaps really caused your departure—unless this departure was perhaps decided beforehand?" 59 T h e suspicious query that ends this passage, and indeed, the tone of the entire letter to Gauguin, connects the adult Roulins and Van Gogh's pictures of them

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