15

Deaths of Two Brothers

Before departing for Paris, Vincent spent two weeks getting his life in order, finishing paintings, and making sure that the canvases could spend the next month in the room to dry143 before being sent after him to Paris. Van Gogh was focused again. He took with him thirty kilos of luggage,144 the French box, painting supplies, and articles of clothing.

On April 17, 1890, Vincent traveled north. He boarded the train that would travel for fifteen hours from Arles to Paris. He had ample time to decompress, and he did not worry about the reoccurrence of an attack, since he wouldn’t be alone on the train that would make several stops along the way. He reflected on what had taken place during his years in the South of France, including his one-year self-imposed exile at the asylum, and looked forward to a fresh start, a reset—as well as to meeting Jo van Gogh-Bonger, his sister-in-law, and his nephew, named after him, for the first time. The destination was important in other ways. It would be a return to a city where he was introduced to the Impressionist movement of Gauguin, Monet, Pissarro, Bernard, and other great masters.

From the rolling train, Vincent gazed out at the spring fields of green wheat and the thousands of stalks of sunflowers not yet ready to bloom, and thought about all of the art, the hundreds of paintings and sketches and drawings that he had sent by the very same railway.

When he finally arrived in Paris in the morning, he was greeted by his brother. They walked over to Theo and Jo’s new apartment at 8 Cité Pigalle and climbed up four flights of stairs.

Vincent knew he wouldn’t be staying long, as did his brother. For one, the hectic pace of city life no longer suited Vincent’s needs or mental state, as a person or as an artist. He wasn’t sociable. And whatever desire he had ever had to converse with strangers had been diminished by his year in the asylum. It was no longer people and streets that provided him with the stirring “models” from which to paint; instead, he looked outward to the countryside with its riot of bright colors. He anticipated—or feared—that his attacks in Paris might be fiercer during the extremes of heat and darkness. So Theo and his close friend, Impressionist artist Camille Pissarro, felt it would be best to send Vincent out into the country nearby to be looked after.

After arriving at the apartment, Vincent reviewed the few paintings that Theo kept in Vincent’s room, The Potato Eaters hanging in the dining room and The Orchard in Bloom in the bedroom; a number of others from The Hague, Arles, and Saint-Rémy were stashed under the bed and in the closets.145

Next, Theo took his brother to Tanguy’s shop in the Rue Clauzel. The visit was a shock for Vincent: “My paintings and those of other painters piled haphazardly. A real mess! In vain did I grumble, Tanguy opposed me his usual affable smile: ‘Where do you want me to put your paintings, Vincent! You know I lack space.’”146

The conditions he saw stressed Vincent to the point that he wanted to find a new home to store his paintings. He worried about holes and bedbugs. He must have wondered about the arrangement Theo made with Tanguy. In those stacks of paintings, Vincent’s canvases from Arles and the asylum were showing signs of accelerated aging, as well as the impacted impasto, the cracking and chafing from being rolled up and stacked on top of one another.

On the third day back in Paris, Vincent packed for the next, and last, leg of his journey: he was heading to Auvers-sur-Oise, a rural country town northwest of Paris.

Upon arrival, he met Dr. Paul Gachet. He would be the last doctor to care for Vincent, a physician who had been referred to Theo by Camille Pissarro. Old man Gachet had narrow eyes and a high, square forehead cut by a receding hairline. The odd look was emphasized by a thick, amber-highlighted mustache with a speckle of hair beneath his lower lip. The look caught Vincent’s artistic eye. But the rent to live at Dr. Gachet’s home was twice what he would end up paying across town at Auberge Ravoux, a bed-and-breakfast inn in its day. Dr. Gachet steered his patient to the quaint inn across town, saying: “daily bed and board priced at 1 franc and 2.50 francs respectively.”147

By declining Gachet’s steeper price of six francs a day, Vincent had money left over to drink, enabling a return to the mind-bending blur of absinthe that stoked his demons and bedazzled his imagination with a radiance of bright yellow colors. He was once more surrounded by the beauty of wheat fields, and he felt the desire to paint again, as he did when he first arrived at Saint-Rémy a year before.

Painting at a rapid pace—eighty paintings over his last seventy days—Vincent wrote to his mother and sister on July 14, 1890:

For my part, I’m wholly absorbed in the vast expanse of wheatfields against the hills, large as a sea, delicate yellow, delicate pale green, delicate purple of a ploughed and weeded piece of land, regularly speckled with the green of flowering potato plants, all under a sky with delicate blue, white, pink, violet tones.148

The last letter Vincent wrote to his brother Theo—less than two weeks later—had a change in tenor at the outset: “I’d perhaps like to write to you about many things, but first the desire [to paint] has passed to such a degree, then I sense the pointlessness of it.”149

Without missing a beat, Vincent wrote on discussing family issues and tidings before he moved on to Paul Gauguin’s Brittany paintings that he found “beautiful” and moving; he also added remarks on other artists. Although he admired his peers’ artwork, he spoke little about his paintings other than applying himself “to my canvases with all my attention.”150 The pointlessness he referred to might have been a sense of hopelessness that he felt begin to well up deep inside him. He must have sensed the end was near. If he did, he put on a good mask.

On a hot Sunday afternoon, July 27, 1890, right after lunch, Vincent left the inn for the field with his easel and folding stool. As the day progressed, with the suffocating heat bearing down on him, Vincent suffered attacks once more, whether from sunstroke or seizures or a bioaccumulation of toxins. Either way, the nomad artist was staring into the abyss, the great void in his life. He saw darkness. He took out a pistol he had acquired the day before and stared at the bright yellow madness of the sun as it snarled at him. His usually steady hand began to waver with the gun sitting heavy in his palm, his fingers wrapped around the metal stock instead of the customary wooden paintbrush. Desperate, he aimed the barrel at his chest. But when he squeezed the trigger, his trembling hand dropped, and he shot himself in the stomach instead. Struck with immense pain, but not yet dead, Vincent watched the sunset come and go. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a murder of crows disperse to the sky, scared off by the thunderbolt strike. The crows flew away just as he had imagined them scattering in a raucous flight in his last painting, Wheat Field with Crows.

By nine o’clock that evening, he staggered back to the inn. The innkeeper and his wife, Madame Ravoux, were sitting on the front porch, worried about why Vincent was late for dinner. Seeing him clutch his stomach, Mme. Ravoux asked Vincent if he was okay, and he wheezed, “No….”

The pair took van Gogh upstairs to his room, then went to fetch Dr. Gachet, who dressed the wound that night. By the next day, the innkeeper had sent a telegram to Vincent’s brother in Paris. Theo was on a train to Auvers-sur-Oise later that morning to see his dying brother one last time.

By his bedside, Theo urged his brother to live, strive on, not to give up. But for Vincent, there was no turning back, no more heading down to the wheat fields to paint, no more sunsets or sunrises, no more handshakes or letters to write, no more absinthe to mute his pain, no more nightmares or attacks. No more hopelessness.

Vincent rebuffed his brother’s pleas, stating, “The sadness will last forever.”

He then fell into a coma. At 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday night, July 29, 1890, Vincent van Gogh was pronounced dead by the innkeeper. By the next day, word had spread. Many of his fellow artists came to Auvers to join the funeral procession.

The death of Vincent was a cold blade plunged into Theo’s heart.

The younger brother, whose own health had been failing for years, must have felt his own mortality and been shaken by it. Theo had contracted syphilis a few years before his marriage to Jo Bonger; the disease must have gnawed at his mind. The death of Vincent more than wounded Theo’s heart—it had to be a psychological and physical blow as well. Suffering and aware of his coming demise, he knew time was short.