Notes

Notes

 

Chapters

Chapters
497 1. and scores more The 1884 Baedeker guide to Paris (which was still current in 1886) lists more than sixty paintings in the Salon Carré (1884 Baedeker guide to Paris, pp. 116-119). The inventory includes works by an astonishing variety of French, English, Dutch, and Italian masters, among them Perugino, Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, Corregio, Van Ostade, Gerard Dou, Murillo, Van Eyck, Poussin, Hyacinthe Rigaud, Memling, Van Dyck and Holbein. Moreover, the room was not by any means the Louvre's largest, and Veronese's Marriage, at 32 by 21 feet, took up most of the south wall (ibid.). 498 2. Poincaré's proof Living in Paris alongside Theo and Vincent, the mathematician Henri Poincaré came to his conclusions by an unlikely route: sketching and improving mining equipment. His work on simultaneity and the motion of bodies helped break down Newtonian notions of time and space: anticipating, in the first case, Einstein's theory of relativity and, in the second, chaos theory. For more on Poincaré's discovery, see Galison, pp. 62-75. 3. a century that seemed doomed Weber, pp. 67-69: Weber quotes Albert Robida's The Nineteenth Century (1888) declaring that, "nearly all centuries end badly, ours appears to follow the common law." "According to [Robida]," Weber writes, "the nineteenth century would breathe its last 'in an indigestion of iron and steel and chemical products,' not to mention the money and the explosive which he considered as destructive as the rest. The present 'era of scientific barbarism' was bound to end badly." 499 4. and nephew of Vincent's Meyers, p. 74: Joris-Karl Huysmanswas born in Paris in 1848 to a French mother and a Dutch father who was the brother of Vincent's art teacher, Constant Cornelis Hiujsmans. According to Meyers, the younger Huysmans was also Constant's godchild. 5. rocked the literary world Sund, pp. 124. 501 6. "drawings made by people" Cate, in Cate, ed., p. 1: Described by Jules Lévy as "une exposition de dessins executes par des gens qui ne savent pas dessiner," this exhibition, which was held on August 2, 1882, was organized by Lévy as a charity benefit for victims of a gas-main explosion. The name "Incoherents" came out of a later show (on October 1, 1882) that Lévy held in his tiny Left Bank apartment, which was entitled "Arts incoherents." 7. explosive as anarchists' bombs Cate, in Cate, ed., p. 27: In 1882, Rodolphe Salis, founder of the Chat Noir club and one of the leading figures of fumisme, issued a call to arms in the club's eponymous journal. After a bogus (but deadly serious) news story about a coup d'état (at a time of political tension when such a thing was by no means unthinkable), Salis rallied his readers with a cry from the Commune that must have raised bitter memories, even among those who got the joke: "Vive I'anarchie!" (long live anarchy). The motto perfectly crystalized Salis's, and the fumistes,' disruptive, subversive "art." 8. " léchée" Cate, in Cate, ed., p. 31. 9. all-white Cate, in Cate, ed., p. 8. (See Ch. 27, n. 10.) 10. all-black paintings Cate, in Cate, ed., p. 31: In the1882 Exposition des arts incoherents, French poet Paul Bilhaud exhibited an all-black painting entitled Combat de negres dans une cave pendant la nuit (Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night). Monochromatic paintings with ridiculous explanatory titles were a staple of Incoherent art. Cate and Shaw list some of them: Some Pimps. Still in the Prime of Life. Lying on Their Stomachs in the Grass, Drinking Absinthe" (all green); Manipulation of Ochre by Jaundiced Cuckolds (all yellow); Astonishment of Young Recruits Seeing for the First Time Your Azure Expanse. O Mediterranean! (all blue); Tomato Harvest by Apoplectic Cardinals on the Shore of the Red Sea (Aurora Borealis Effect) (all red); First Communion of Chlorotic Young Girls in Snowy Weather (all white) (Cate, in Cate, ed., p. 8). 11. the portrait of a postman Cate, in Cate, ed., p. 1: The painting was titled Le facteur rural (The Rural Postman) and was described as "a painting in relief." It was exhibited under the pseudonym "Ferdirumdus" (many of the works in Incoherent shows were signed with pseudonyms, for obvious reasons). An attendee at the 1882 show described Le facteur rural with evident astonishment: "It really was painting in relief, because the mailman's shoe, a real shoe that had very visibly been worn, vigorously thrust back, protruded from the canvas." Still, according to the writer, "Ferdirumdus: "enjoyed enormous success" with the work (ibid.). Grojnowski quotes a review by Félix Fénéon, describing a work titled Lapin (Rabbit), a portrait of a man and woman: "Out of the man's mouth there extends a rope that is attached to the neck of a live rabbit that is chewing on carrots in a cage installed in front of the painting." Fénéon judged the work "a great success" (Grojnowski, in Cate, ed., p. 107). 12. anticipating by several generations The fumiste version of the Mona Lisa was attributed to "Sapeck," the nom de plume of Eugène Bataille, an early member of the Hydropathes. (See Ch. 27, n. 16.) Bataille anticipated in many ways the antics of the Dadaists, surrealist pranksters like Salvador Dali, and other artists of the twentieth century. Sapeck's Le Rire (A picture of Mona Lisa smoking a pipe) is dated 1883; Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q., a picture of the Mona Lisa with a moustache, is dated 1919. According to Grojnowski, Sapek dressed in evening clothes and had himself pulled through the streets of the Latin Quarter in a cart; he proposed a race of women at the fashionable horse track, Longchamps; and he "painted his head blue to escape from gloomy thoughts" (Grojnowski, pp. 103-104). "Bataille created his own epic legend as a 'work' completely his own and continually fed it with his great feats. He was a precursor of twentieth-century performers whose person is their work of art" (ibid., p. 104). 13. "the subject is nothing" Sonn, in Weisberg, ed., p. 135: Although Signac (Paul Signanc, 1863-1935; French artist) participated in fumiste activities in the early 1880s, this was written in 1902, at a time when he had evolved through several more styles and was painting seascapes on the Riviera. However, it clearly echoes the claims at the time by fumistes like Georges Fragerolle, who wrote in an 1880 manifesto (which, like all fumiste pronouncements, should be taken with a grain of tongue-in-cheek salt): "... Fumisme, borne on its two wings of basic skepticism and superficial wisdom, can finally rise to those philosophical clouds on which synthesis floats. We do not have sufficient space to formulate fumisme in any words other than these: 'Fumisme was nothing, it is everything.'" (Quoted in Shaw, p. 112; emphasis in original.) The same disarming -- and, to some extent, disingenuous -- cry was taken up by the Dadaists in the post-WWI period and, after WWII, by Absurdist playwrights like Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. (Much of the art in the latter period would probably also be seen as "absurd" in this sense if it had not been quickly encased in an armature of formalist criticism.) An echo of the fumiste cry can even be heard a hundred years later, during another period of fin-de-siècle disillusionment, in the proud claim of the television sit-com Seinfeld to be "a show about nothing." 14. its origins in café badinage Wilson, in Weisberg, ed., pp. 182-183: As Wilson and others points out, the irreverence and satiric bite of fumisme was undoubtedly influenced by "la blague" -- "the joking hyperbole and buffoonery of the artist's studio." But the merciless nihilism of fumisme carried the heavier weight of fin-de-siécle hopelessness. When Émile Goudeau, a leading fumiste, defined fumisme in his memoirs as "a sort of dis¬dain of everything, an inward contempt for being and things," surely this reflects a disenchantment far deeper than the vocational frustrations of a studio apprentice (quoted in ibid.). 15. They called it fumisme Wilson, p. 182. 16. café conclaves Cate, in Cate, ed., pp. 3-4. Cate carefully tracks the convoluted evolution of the cultural phenomenon of the cabarets artistiques like Le Chat Noir. The seed was planted in 1875 when Émile Bellot, the engraver and lithographer who posed for Manet's groundbreaking portrait, Le Bon Bock of 1873, organized a luncheon in honor of the Manet painting at a restaurant in Montmartre. This event initiated a series of monthly meals that came to be called the Bon Bock dinners, which were held with a changing cast but almost without interruption for more than fifty years. These early gatherings showed all the playful and profane characteristics that later distinguished the Hydropathes (see below), the fumistes, the Incompetents, and the Chat Noir. Many of the same players participated in one or more of these loose affiliations. The Hydropathes was founded as a literary club in 1878 by Émile Goudeau and some friends. Its meetings were "at once republican, anticlerical, apolitical, and literary," according to Grojnowski (Grojnowski, pp. 95-98). It also introduced the kind of mixed-media entertainments (poetry, songs, recitations, skits) that made their meetings a commercial draw for the cabarets that hosted them. In 1881, Maurice Petit and other dissident members of the Hydropathes formed their own club, the "Hirsutes," which met at the Café du Commerce. Among its members was Jules Lévy. Goudeau eventually (1884) took charge of the Hirsutes, dissolved it, and resurrrected the Hydropathes, but in the meantime Rodolphe Salis had opened the Chat Noir. The former Hydropathes began using it as their meeting place and (in January 1882) Goudeau became editor of Le Chat Noir magazine. In October of the same year, Lévy organized the first Incoherents' show. Other short-lived clubs were formed in the next few years -- the Zutistes (1883), the Jemenfoutistes (1885) -- all modeled on these predecessors. According to Grojnoswki: "Right from the start the [Hydropathes] developed a kind of literary, dramatic, and musical evening that was subsequently copied, particularly by the Hirsutes, and then perfected and commercialized by the Chat Noir" (Grojnoswki, p. 100). 17. Café des Assassins The Café (or Cabaret) des Assassins later became the Lapin Agile. 18. Cabaret des Truands The same or a similar "theme" cabaret opened in 1885 under a similar name: Taverne du Bagne (roughly, The Prison Tavern). A contemporary account of the Taverne gives an idea of the appeal of such places -- what the French called nostalgie de la boue (nostalgia for sordidness): "... a café where the doors are barred, where the tables are chained, where all the waiters are dressed as galley slaves, dragging chains. ... The success has been crazy; one lines up to go drink a bock in the prison of citizen Lisbonne [the proprietor], who makes you pay double on top of it. The society people go in their carriages, and are happy to hear themselves addressed with tu and to be ill-treated by the prison guards, who use the academic language of prison to speak to their clients.'' (Paul Lafargue, quoted in Sonn, p. 128.) 19. "atelier clutter" Wilson, in Weisberg, ed., pp. 181-182: Wilson quotes a contemporary description of the Chat Noir's interior: "A cat hanging from a bracket, a cat on the stained-glass window, wooden tables, massive and solid square seats (sometimes weapons against aggressors), enormous nails, called 'spikes of the Passion' (whose Passion, oh Louis XIII most pure?), tapestries extending the length of the walls over diamond-patterned panels torn out of old cupboards (which Salis had collected since his tender youth), a tall fireplace, whose destiny it was, it later seemed, never to be lit because it sheltered on its mantel and bore on its andirons all sorts of odds and ends: a bedwarmer, gleaming as if Chardin had painted it, an authentique death mask (Louis XIII perhaps), gigantic pitchers -- a jumble; but of kindling, none at all." Wilson notes that the "medieval" furnishings were calculated to "evoke the Gallic popular culture of Rabelais and Villon." 20. the French Academy Cate, in Cate, ed., pp. 25-26: Salis named the dingy back room of the first Chat Noir (1881-1885) the "Institut," after the Academy's Left Bank home, and specifically reserved it for artists -- a brilliant stroke that, of course, made admission a must-have privilege for bourgeois fashionistas. According to Cate, the front room "served the cabaret's less-illustrious clientele" (ibid.). 21. "treating them like pimps" Jullian, quoting Tailhade, Montmartre, pp. 81-86. 502 22. "What was Art, after all" Zola, p. 41. 23. "a failure" Zola, p. 422. 24. shattered into a kaleidoscope Gay, Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, p. 201: The words of the Belgian symbolist poet Émile Verhaeren (are often quoted on this point, by Gay and others): "There is no longer any single school, there are scarcely any groups, and those few are constantly splitting. All these tendencies make me think of moving and kaleidoscopic geometric patterns, which clash at one moment only to unite it another, which now fuse and then separate and fly apart a little later, but which all nevertheless revolve within the same circle, that of the new art." (See Pollock, p. 14.) 25. "What I am not" BVG 451, 2/1/1886-2/15/1886.

Context:
JLB 560, 2/9/1886: "What I'm not sure about is whether we'll get on personally …"

503 26. "If we were together" BVG 453, 2/14/1886.

Context:
BVG 453, 2/14/1886: " And if we were together soon, I should disappoint you in many things, yes, to be sure, but not in everything, and not in my way of looking at things, I suppose."
JLB 562, 2/14/1886: "And were we to be together much more in the near future, I'd disappoint you in things for sure, but not in everything and not in my way of looking at things, I believe."

27. the smartest new trim Perrot, ed., p. 488: Facial hair was so fashionable that "barbers offered men a choice of no fewer than fifteen to twenty different types of mustaches, beards, and sideburns," according to Perrot. 28. a new suit When sister Lies heard that Vincent had re-dressed himself, she wrote mockingly: "Who knows what a good customer the Parisian tailors might get in him and how proud we sisters would be to have [him] as a cavalier" (b4173 V/1989, "Gogh, Elisabeth van" to "Gogh-Carbentus, Anna C., Gogh, Willemina en Cor van", 7/30/1886). 29. fixing his teeth b0942 V/1962, "Gogh, Theo van" to "Gogh-Carbentus, Anna C. van", July 1886: Theo wrote his mother in June-July 1886: "You would not recognize Vincent, he has changed so much, others notice it even more than I do. He has undergone a major operation on his mouth, for he lost almost all his teeth due to the bad condition of his stomach. The doctor says that he has recovered completely." Theo may be referring to the dental work Vincent had done in Antwerp, but the annunciatory nature of the passage seems inappropriate for something that would have happened four or five months previously. Vincent originally planned to have dental work done on both his upper and lower teeth, but completed only the former during his time in Antwerp. In mid-February, less than two weeks before leaving, he wrote Theo: "I'd also so very much like to get the work on my teeth finished" (JLB 563, 2/16/1886 or 2/17/1886; see Ch. 25, n. 211). 30. diet of restaurant fare "Andries Bonger," pp. 8-9: On March 22, 1886, only a few weeks after Vincent's arrival, Theo's friend Andries Bonger wrote to his parents: "Did I already write to you that V.G.'s [i.e., Theo's] brother, who is working to be a painter, has arrived here? The consequence is that we don't see a lot of V. G. anymore, for they eat together in their neighborhood." Theo did not hire a cook until he moved into the rue Lepic apartment in June, so dining "in their neighborhood" must refer here to eating out at the ubiquitous cafés, cafeterias, and brasseries in the area -- as well as, occasionally, the more upscale "restaurants." 31. the fashionable crowds Coquiot, p. 114: In 1923, Coquiot described the rue Laval (which was subsequently renamed the rue Victor-Massé): "It is still bedecked with its Arab or Spanish, Persian or Papuan antiques dealers, with its hotels used as brothels, its ladies' outfitters and other shops, where one goes behind the counter to try on gloves or detachable collars. It is all very peaceful, sleepy even. Ah! Of course, the road used to be a much noisier place, when Rodolphe Salis lived there with his Chat Noir, having come from the boulevard Rochechouart." The Chat Noir's move from Rochechouart to the rue Laval took place in 1885, the year before Vincent's arrival. 32. apartment on the rue Laval Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 54: The address of Theo's apartment was 25, rue Laval. The street has since been renamed rue Victor-Masse. The building at the address today, although much altered on the ground level, shows clearly its haut-bourgeois origins. According to Van Tilborgh, the Van Gogh brothers shared a "small apartment on the first floor in the rear [with] a view on a courtyard and a residential building on the rue de Navarin" (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 67). Welsh-Ovcharov notes that the rue Laval apartment was close to Renoir's residence at number 37, and that Père Tanguy's paint store was located only two blocks away at 14 rue Clauzel (ibid., p. 54). However, Vincent was not doing much painting while living at the rue Laval address (See Ch. 27, n. 34), and he bought at least some of his materials at a different store (see ibid., p. 38). He did do a painting of the view out the apartment's window (as he did in virtually all his new domiciles), but subsequently covered it over with a still-life of shoes (Still Life with Two Herrings, a Cloth and a Glass, [F 255 JH 1124]). Based on his investigations with raking light and infrared reflectography (IRR), Van Tilborgh describes the underlying image as "a view of roofs" with a T-shaped pipe in the left foreground, a flat roof with chimneys to the right, and a large residential building beyond (ibid., p. 67). The current view out the back of 25, rue Victor-Masse, according to Van Tilborgh, "largely agrees with what Van Gogh indicated here" (ibid.). 33. "a rather good studio" BVG 448, 2/1/1886-2/15/1886. In early February, still in Antwerp and desperate to overcome Theo's resistance to Vincent joining him in Paris, Vincent attempts to cast his aspirations for a studio as Theo's plan. But the ambiguous construction suggests that this is sleight of hand. Vincent has had this ambition for an elaborate studio from the beginning of his career. Eager to defuse his brother's anxieties, he manages to revive the plan, in the guise of seconding something Theo has written, while simultaneously disavowing it. For obvious and understandable reasons, Theo resisted living with his brother and never offered any support for Vincent's plan for a "joint studio" where the two brothers "could entertain other painters to everyone's mutual advantage" (Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 10).

Context:
BVG 448, 2/1/1886-2/15/1886: "As to the plan of possibly living together and taking a rather good studio where one can receive people if need be, keep it in mind, and let me keep it in mind too."
JLB 557, 2/2/1886: "As to the plan that we should perhaps live together and take a relatively good studio where we could receive people if need be, keep thinking about it, and let me think about it again too."

34. forced to stop painting According to Van Tilborgh, Vincent "directed his attention in the first three months of his stay more towards drawings" (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 28). Van Tilborgh counts no more than eight paintings that can be securely attributed to this "introductory" period on the rue Laval, including those done at the Fernand Cormon atelier (ibid.). One of these eight was a view from the window of the cramped apartment where the two brothers lived first in Paris, which Vincent then painted over with a still-life of shoes (Still Life with Two Herrings, a Cloth and a Glass, [F 255 JH 1124]) (ibid., p. 29). Van Tilborgh suggests that the two portraits done soon after Vincent's arrival (see Ch. 27, n. 263) may have been done in the rue Laval apartment because some of the material used was obtained at a store nearby, but such materials could easily have found its way, still unused, into the new apartment on the rue Lepic (ibid., p. 38). Jo Bonger reported that the rue Lepic apartment was "too small to paint there," according to Van Tilborgh, but she never visited the apartment and this may reflect just Theo's retrospective complaint about the crowded conditions (ibid., p. 49). 35. temporarily dropped his demand BVG 454, 2/15/1886-2/17/1886.

Context:
JLB 556, 1/29/1886: "Given the desirability, above all, of drawing for another year -- the question of a good studio is very much a side issue for the time being, and so anything will do" (emphasis in original).

36. He even offered to live BVG 452, 2/1/1886-2/15/1886. This was Vincent's counter to Theo's argument that the rue Laval lease did not come up for renewal until June.

Context:
JLB 561, 2/11/1886: "I've given a lot of thought to what you wrote about taking a studio -- but it seems to me that it would be a good thing if we were to look for it together and that before we start living together permanently -- did it for a while -- provisionally -- and I started by renting a garret at the beginning of April, say, until June."

37. wait a year before securing BVG 454, 2/15/1886-2/17/1886: Vincent wrote this on the eve of his departure from Antwerp. As Vincent rambles on, it becomes clear that his uncustomary caution is founded not in artistic or financial concerns, but in deeper anxieties: "if I were to come to Paris and we were to put it off for a year -- in that year we can get to know each other better at close quarters which can change a lot -- and then we can be less afraid to start expanding a little, because in the meantime we'll have strengthened the weak points."

Context:
JLB 556, 1/29/1886: "All the same -- setting up a studio in Paris now, straightaway, might perhaps not be as good as not doing it until after another year of study, both for yourself and for me. Let me draw with Cormon for a year. During that period, you take another really good look at the business, and the opportunities. And then -- I believe -- we can chance it. ... it gives us time to work everything out and consider things at our leisure before we begin." (Emphasis in original.)

38. he took the leadMost accounts assume that the rue Lepic apartment was Theo's choice and that he took the lead in finding it, but we disagree (see Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh, p. 10). While the location was close to Cormon's studio, it was farther from Theo's work than the rue Laval apartment. (Andries Bonger, who worked with Theo, complained about his trips to the new apartment: "It is true that it takes a lot of time, for he is living in Montmartre, and consequently the evenings will be quite lost" [b1844 V/1970, ''Bonger, Andries'' to ''Bonger, H.C. en H.L.'', 8/27/1886].) Surely, it was larger, more luxurious, and more expensive than anything Theo would have chosen on his own, even allowing for Vincent's needs. Theo implies as much in a letter to a friend in 1887: "As [Vincent] requires rather a lot of space for his work, we are living in a rather big apartment in Montmartre" (BVG T01a, 7/10/1887). (Note: JLB does not translate this letter.) Also, Vincent had made his own preference for Montmartre clear in a letter from Antwerp: "As to me, though, if I come I'll be perfectly content to take a cheap little room or a garret in a hotel somewhere in an out-of-the-way quarter (Montmartre)" (JLB 555, 1/28/1886).

The coincidence that the dealer Alphonse Portier lived on the first (i.e., second) floor of the rue Lepic building, suggests only how Vincent and Theo heard about the availability of the apartment, not an underlying rationale for the move (Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 16). Portier was an elderly, small-time "courtier" dealer -- a charming man, perhaps, but hardly a liaison worth developing at such inconvenience and expense. If Portier was, indeed, part of the motivation for the move, then it suggests even more strongly that Vincent was the moving party. It would have been typical of Vincent to undertake the hopeless task of re-igniting Portier's initial faint interest in his Nuenen work by moving into the same building. Of course, because he paid the rent, Theo undoubtedly made the final decision; but after three months in the tiny rue Laval apartment, he must have been desperate to placate his difficult and tenacious brother.

39. "If one wants to start" BVG 454, 2/15/1886-2/17/1886.

Context:
BVG 454, 2/15/1886-2/17/1886: "But if one wants to start a studio, one must consider well where to rent it, where one has the greatest chance of getting visitors, and making friends, and getting known."
JLB 555, 1/28/1886: "But if one wants to start on that, one must think about where one rents it, where one has the best chance of getting visitors and making friends and becoming known."

40. fourth-floor apartment Following Bonger's Memoir, the literature generally places the Van Gogh apartment on the third floor of 54, rue Lepic. Bonger was following the European convention of discounting the ground floor, the rez de chausée (street level), and starting the floor-count on the "second" level. Our designation of "fourth floor" not only follows the more modern usage, it also gives a more accurate idea of the height of the apartment. Unlike in many places, the rez de chausée of 54, rue Lepic is not even partially below street grade. Indeed, the first floor is considerably taller than the other floors in the building and is, itself, raised off the ground somewhat. 41. located in Montmartre BVG 30, 7/6/1875. (See Ch. 7, n. 25.)

Context:
JLB 37, 7/6/1875: "I've rented a small room in Montmartre which you'd like; it's small, but overlooks a little garden full of ivy and Virginia creeper."

42. "half-wild" Jullian, pp. 26-27. 504 43. painters like Alfred Stevens Jullian, pp. 34-39. Alfred Stevens lived in several places in or near Montmartre, including the townhouse on rue Laval that was converted into the Chat Noir in 1885. He moved to the rue des Martyrs, north of the boulevard Clichy. According to Jullian: "Manet was a frequent visitor and painted more than one watercolour in the garden of the rue des Martyrs. Stevens had opened a studio in the boulevard Rochechouart which was frequented by society women, highly excited at the thought of going up to Montmartre." (Jullian, p. 38.) 44. "society women" Jullian, pp. 34-39. (See Ch. 27, n. 43.) Jullian describes Stevens in his declining years (he died in 1906 at the age of 83): "A magnificent old ruin, broad-shouldered, white-haired, with a fine head and a powerful frame, still erect in spite of his years. ... A great lover of women, he had lived splendidly, he had been wildly extravagant and although he had once owned a whole street, he was now reduced to living in a modest atelier and a couple of rooms ... Still, everyone treated le père Stevens with great respect, for not only had he been a great figure, but he had been a great painter as well." (Jullian, p. 38.) 45. a concierge greeted them Just how much of an improvement the entrance of 54, rue Lepic offered can be seen in this account of the entries to older buildings along the same street: "I dismiss the carriage, half out of pity, and a wish to study the rue Lepic, so typical it is of the upper lower classes. In the rue Blanche there are porte-cocheres but in the rue Lepic the narrow doors, partially grated, open on narrow passages at the end of which, squeezed between the wall and the stairs are small rooms where concierges sit, en camisole, peeling vegetables and sewing. The wooden blinds flung back on faded yellow walls reveal a strip of white bed curtain and a middle-aged woman looking into a cupboard in which a rabbit lies sleeping; her man, a cobbler, sits hammering in the window, and the smell of leather follows the passenger for several steps." (George Moore, quoted in Jullian, p. 59.) 46. boasted huge rooms b1843 V/1970, "Bonger, Andries" to "Bonger, H.C. en H.L.", 6/23/1886: Shortly after Vincent and Theo moved to rue Lepic, Andries Bonger visited and then reported to his parents: "Now they live in a large spacious apartment (by Parisian standards) and have their own household." It appears that almost everyone who visited the brothers shared Bonger's envy. The following year (1887), in a letter to a friend in Holland, Theo describes the apartment with uncharacteristic immodesty: "As [Vincent] requires rather a lot of space for his work, we are living in a rather big apartment in Montmartre" (BVG T01a, 7/10/1887). All these assessments were relative, of course, and should not be confused with modern standards. In fact, the front room of the rue Lepic apartment was only about 9 x 12 feet (as measured by the authors). 47. herringbone parquet floors This and all other details about the interior of the rue Lepic argument are based on the authors' visit to the apartment on the floor below Vincent and Theo's in 2003. Theo had the intention of moving into this apartment in February, but did not actually occupy it until April 20, 1889 (JLB 745, 2/3/1889; n. 16). 48. a single outdoor tap Weber, pp. 58-59: Or sometimes just a pump. Weber points out that not only was washing rare, but "[g]etting water above the ground floors was rare and costly." 49. Chamber pots Weber, pp. 58-59: According to Weber, "two out of every three lodgings in France had no lavatory at all." 50. height signaled status De Maupassant, p. 293. 51. disregard for the lower classes Perrot, ed., p. 370: In this regard, the builders of 54, rue Lepic were typical: "Nineteenth-century architects, at once representative of and shaped by the class from which they sprang, turned their backs on the kitchen. That indispensable room was relegated to the depths of the apartment, to that rear portion filled with acrid fumes and odors, where the heat of the oven was bad for the complexion and where decent people most assuredly did not set foot." 52. a full-time kitchen maid b1843 V/1970, "Bonger, Andries" to "Bonger, H.C. en H.L.", 6/23/1886. 53. "a cook in optima forma" "Andries Bonger", p. 9: Sometimes translated "in top form." 54. He took the smallest Van Gogh-Bonger, p. xl: This is how Jo Bonger, who visited the apartment, recalled the allocation of rooms in her Memoir: "Vincent slept in the small side-room, and behind that was the studio, an ordinary-sized room with one not very large window." 55. fantasies of fraternal domesticity BVG 341, 11/12/1883-11/13/1883: Vincent wrote this from the moors in November 1883.

Context:
JLB 406, 11/12/1883 or 11/13/1883: "… if one only had company it would be such a wonderful thing to rent a peasant cottage and to arrange everything solidly and less precariously than in an inn."

505 56. Theo's collection of paintings Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 138. Émile Bernard recalled seeing in the rue Lepic apartment "some gravures d'apres Millet along with Oriental graphics and a rather good collection of Romantic paintings." The latter surely belonged to Theo. 57. some of his own work Hendriks identifies one of Vincent's Nuenen peasant heads in the background of the Portrait of Alexander Reid (F 270 JH 1207) that Vincent painted in early 1887 (Hendriks, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 123). Since the profile head depicted is not among known Nuenen images, Hendriks infers that it was one of many previous works that Vincent painted over in Paris (ibid.). 58. Vincent found comfort BVG 555, 10/17/1888. Criticizing books that do not end happily, Vincent thinks fondly of Guy de Maupassant's stories, which mostly do.

Context:
JLB 707, 10/17/1888: "I much prefer Guy de Maupassant to [Jean] Richepin, for being more consoling."

59. "lighthearted" BVG 482, 5/4/1888: Vincent wrote this from Arles in 1888.

Context:
BVG 482, 5/4/1888: "I should be heartily glad, I say, if a kind of Guy de Maupassant in painting came along to paint the beautiful people and things here lightheartedly."
JLB 604, 5/4/1888: "I'd be, I tell you -- mightily pleased if in painting a man like Guy de Maupassant came along and cheerfully painted the beautiful people and things in these parts."

60. "a masterpiece" BVG W1, 6/21/1887-12/21/1887. Vincent appears to group Maupassant's Bel-Ami with other "masterpieces" of Naturalist literature, defining their common characteristic as the fact that they: "paint life as we feel it ourselves and thus satisfy that need which we have, that people tell us the truth" (JLB 574, October 1887). He provides both a sample list of titles: "De Goncourt [Edmond or Jules], for example, in Germinie Lacerteux, La fille Elisa, Zola in La joie de vivre and L'assommoir"; and a more extensive list of authors: "Zola, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, De Goncourt, Richepin, Daudet, Huysmans." (ibid.) To this he adds, "Maupassant's masterpiece is Bel-ami" (ibid.).

Sund draws a distinction between Vincent's more serious appreciation of the older Naturalists, with their dedication to "truth, life as it is," and his appreciation of Maupassant -- i.e., "the lightest of Naturalist fare" (Sund, p. 140). However, we see the transition of Vincent's taste in literature to lighter fare (culminating in his obsession with Daudet's comic Tartarin series in Arles) as symptomatic of his increasing disconnection from the real world. Just as his art undergoes a passage from the exaggeratedly dark "de terre" world of Millet and the Potato Eaters to the magically bright world of the wheatfield outside his dark asylum cell at St. Remy, so his taste in literature undergoes a similar withdrawal from reality. Welsh-Ovcharov recognizes this "lightening" transition in Vincent's art, especially his palette, but misattributes it, we believe, to a change in Vincent's appreciation of Zola (Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh, p. 41). Welsh-Ovcharov argues that after he arrived in Paris, Vincent turned from a philosophical appreciation of Zola to a descriptive appreciation (ibid.). We would argue that Vincent's first appreciation of Zola (Un page d'amour) was descriptive, not philosophical (JLB 244, 7/6/1882) (see Ch. 17, n. 534 and n. 532), and that his ultimate appreciation was autobiographical, not descriptive (see Ch. 24, n. 212, n. 214, and n. 230).

Context:
BVG W1, 6/21/1887-12/21/1887: "Maupassant's masterpiece is Bel Ami. I hope to be able to get it for you."
JLB 574, October 1887: "Maupassant's masterpiece is Bel-ami; I hope to be able to get it for you."

61. "civilized people" BVG W1, 6/21/1887-12/21/1887.

Context:
BVG W1, 6/21/1887-12/21/1887: "And the diseases from which we civilized people suffer most are melancholy and pessimism."
JLB 574, October 1887: "And the diseases from which we civilized people suffer the most are melancholia and pessimism.

62. "I, for instance" BVG W1, 6/21/1887-12/21/1887; emphasis in original.

Context:
BVG W1, 6/21/1887-12/21/1887: "So I, for instance, who can count so many years of my life during which I lost any inclination to laugh -- leaving aside whether or not this was my own fault -- I, for one, feel the need for a really good laugh above all else. I've found it in Guy de Maupassant, …"
JLB 574, October 1887: "Like me, for instance, who can count so many years in my life when I completely lost all inclination to laugh, leaving aside whether or not this was my own fault, I for one need above all just to have a good laugh. I found that in Guy de Maupassant…" (Emphasis in original.)

63. For one upscale establishment Van Heugten, p. 96: The name of the restaurant is not recorded, but, strangely, the date is: April 8, 1886. Handmade menus of this type were common. They were given to each customer in turn, but then taken back. Because the course offering changed daily, they were not printed in quantity. Examining the prices listed, Van Heugten concludes that the menu belonged to a restaurant that "was certainly not one at which he and Theo would have eaten every day, for although not exorbitant the prices were a bit steeper than those at the simple Du Chalet. There the price of a main course ranged from 30 to 50 centimes, but on the handwritten menu it was between 40 to 60 centimes." Van Heugten believes that because of the "modest nature" of the ink drawing that Vincent made along the left margin of the menu, oriented vertically (Restaurant Menu [F 1377 JH 1033]), "it [is] unlikely that Van Gogh had any commercial intentions" (ibid.). Given Vincent's promise to Theo to find buyers for his work, however, specifically by designing restaurant menus, we do not believe that he would have gone to this considerable effort purely as a "kind gesture" (ibid.). If he was not paid in advance for this work specifically, he may have submitted it on spec. Corrections to Vincent's menu, in another hand, show that it was, in fact, used. In either case, he undoubtedly kept it in his studio as a sample to show other restaurateurs. 64. he transcribed Van Heugten, pp. 94-96: Van Heugten debates whether the text of the menu (which has since faded to illegibility) was written by Vincent, and finally concludes that it "almost certainly" was. "The handwriting cannot be identified as his for certain, but it is definitely similar. The hand is neat enough at the beginning of the lines at the top but then tails off, and the further the writer progressed down the menu the worse it got, for the dishes at the bottom of the list are in a hurried scrawl. This makes the writing irregular, but the words that look more spontaneous appear to be in Van Gogh's hand." 65. the entire bill of fare Van Heugten, p. 96: Altogether, the menu listed thirty-six items, divided into eight courses: soup, appetizers, fish, entrées, roast meat, vegetables, salad, and desserts. The list was written in ink that was particularly sensitive to light and has faded to illegibility since it was reproduced in an English edition of the letters in 1958. (See ibid., pp. 94-95.) 66. fashionable Parisians Vincent's sketchbooks from this period are filled with images of haute bourgeois Parisians promenading in the city's parks, especially the Tuileries (The Terrace of the Tuileries with People Walking [F 1384 JH 1021], Jardin du Luxembourg [F 1383 JH 1025]) and the Luxembourg (People Walking in Front of the Palais du Luxembourg [F 1385 JH 1030]). This can be explained to some degree by the proximity of these two parks to museums that Vincent undoubtedly visited. But the preponderance of these upscale, Bel-Ami images, reminiscent of his fascination with Rotten Row in London (JLB 10, 7/2/1873) -- during another swelling of bourgeois ambition (see Chapter 6) -- combined with the paucity of city-life images from other social strata, suggests an obsession. With only a few exceptions (Man on a Bench [F 1380v JH 1020], Walking Couple [F 992 JH 1029), the surviving drawings of street scenes from this period uniformly depict men in top-hats (People Walking on a Street in the Evening [F 1380 JH 1019], Jardin du Luxembourg [F 1383 JH 1025], People Walking in Front of the Palais du Luxembourg [F 1385 JH 1030]) and women in broad sunbonnets (Figures in a Park [F 1386 JH 1022]) or carrying parasols (Park with Figures [F 1382r JH1027]). Generally, they walk in discreet pairs. The echo of his parents' promenades through Zundert is also unmistakable. 67. the very demimonde Wilson, in Weisberg, ed., pp. 194-195: Wilson summarizes Aristide Bruant's artistic and political program this way: "Le Mirliton was thus concerned less with the invocation of a specific French past than the reproduction of a present many of its customers would find unfamiliar, both exotic and slightly threatening. Bruant's songs aspire to form a prosopography of the Parisian lower orders, depicting lives of grinding poverty, forced criminality, and little hope. ... Bruant positions himself in his work as the intermediary between two worlds: providing a voice for those socially marginal characters who would otherwise have none, and introducing his bourgeois public to the 'hidden' experiences of the popular classes." Vincent appears to have positioned Woman Walking Her Dog (A La Villette) (F 1704 JH 1035) somewhere between a "socially marginal character" and a gross caricature -- of which many were published in the Mirliton's illustrated paper (see Oberthur, pp. 18-19). 68. a grotesquely obese woman Van Heugten sees a similarity between Vincent's woman in Woman Walking Her Dog (A La Villette) (F 1704 JH 1035) and one in a drawing by Honoré Daumier, La Parade, showing a circus barker with a poster of a sideshow fat lady (Van Heugten, p. 107). This may, however, be just the inevitable affinity of exaggerated caricatures. 69. landmarks carefully drawn in Van Heugten, p. 108: The marquee of the Bal Boule Noir, a famous dance-hall at 120, boulevard de Rochechouart, is visible in the background of Vincent's drawing, with the name carefully lettered in. (The Mirliton was at number 84 on the same street.) The Bal closed shortly before Vincent arrived in Paris, but it had not been replaced and was still an easily recognizable landmark in mid-1886 when Woman Walking Her Dog (A La Villette) (F 1704 JH 1035) was done. 70. inscribed the drawingThe Bruant song, which has given the drawing its title Woman Walking Her Dog (A La Villette) (F 1704 JH 1035), was "À la Villette," referring to the name of the seedy neighborhood to the northeast of Montmartre. Vincent wrote on the drawing at the lower right: " 'De son métier elle ne faisait rien. Le soir elle balladait son chien à la Villette,'" which Van Heugten translates as "A job? She didn't have one. She walked her dog each evening to La Villette." (Van Heugten, p. 107.) Except for the dog, the drawing bears little relationship to Bruant's song, which tells the story of a young pimp. Van Heugten quotes the song's eighth verse (out of fourteen) from which Vincent took his inscription: "De son métier i' faisait rien / Dans l'jour i' baladait son chien, / La nuit i' rinçait la cuvette, / A la Villette" (ibid.). In his drawing and in his inscription, Vincent has changed the protagonist's sex. By making the woman impossibly fat, Vincent has robbed Bruant's original of its down-and-out poignancy and turned it into crude humor. 71. For Le Chat Noir Van Heugten concedes only that this is a possibility. Heenk argues the case (Heenk, p. 158). 72. a tiny illustration Skeleton, F 1361 JH 998, October-January 1886-87, pencil, 4.1 x 2.4 in., 10.5 x 6 cm., Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Hulsker placed this drawing in Antwerp, undoubtedly because of the painting of a skull with a cigarette in its teeth (Skull with Burning Cigarette [F 212 JH 999]) done at that time (Hulsker, The New Complete Van Gogh, p. 218). But because it came from the same unusual piece of thin cardboard as a drawing from Paris (Park with Figures [F 1382r JH 1027]), Van Heugten dates it "indisputably" to Vincent's stay in that city (Van Heugten, p. 179). 506 73. the Moulin de la Galette Richard, p. 18: According to Richard, the denominative "de la Galette" referred to anything within the shaggy entertainment complex at the summit of Butte Montmartre. In common parlance, the name "Moulin de la Galette" was used to refer to the entire complex, not just one or the other of the two windmills incorporated in it. There was, in fact, no windmill named "La Galette." 74. the cahut, a lewd variant Thomson, p. 95: Thomson describes the dance as "a frenetic variation on the can-can sometimes rendered extravagantly lewd by the dancers' wearing no underwear beneath their frothing petticoats." 75. the Blute-Fin Richard, p. 18. 507 76. the same mercenary fervor Van Heugten, p. 83: Van Heugten records that three of Vincent's panorama paintings from spring 1886 (View of Paris from near Montmartre [F 265 JH 1100], View of the Roofs of Paris [F 261 JH 1101], View of Paris from Montmartre [F 262 JH 1102]) and four drawings (View of Paris, with the Hôtel de Ville and the Tour-Saint-Jacques [F 1388 JH 1095], The Roofs of Paris and Notre-Dame [F 1389 JH 1096], View of Paris with the Opéra [F 1390 JH 1097], View of Paris with Notre-Dame and the Panthéon [F 1387 JH 1098]) -- all but one of which (View of Paris, with the Hôtel de Ville and the Tour-Saint-Jacques [F 1388 JH 1095]) appear to be studies for paintings -- are known to have survived. Van Heugten also allows: "It is conceivable that Van Gogh, who lived on Montmartre and was aware of the popularity of the view, saw a potential source of income in paintings of this kind" (ibid.). (Also see Ch. 27, n. 79.) 77. windy lookout of Blute-fin Van Heugten, pp. 83-84: According to Van Heugten, View of Paris with Notre-Dame and the Panthéon (F 1387 JH 1098) (a drawing), The Roofs of Paris and Notre-Dame (F 1389 JH 1096) (a lost drawing), and View of the Roofs of Paris (F 261 JH 1101) (a painting) were made "from a spot on the hill of Montmartre at the height of the Blute-fin and Radet windmills looking south." Van Tilborgh makes the point that Vincent altered the view by moving the Blute-fin mill into the field of vision (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 54). This may have been, as Van Tilborgh suggests, an artistic decision intended to create "a repoussoir," but it may also have been a commercial decision intended to include the distinctive landmark in the picture, thus making it more attractive to tourists. Similarly, Vincent appears to have enlarged some of the city landmarks in the distance, such as Notre Dame, the Panthéon, and the Opera to make them more recognizable (ibid., p. 55). 78. construction site of Sacré Coeur Tralbaut, p. 199: Tralbaut puts the location of at least one of Vincent's panoramas at "the place du Calvaire near the place du Tertre." Both of these lie just to the west of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur, which began construction in 1876 but was not completed until 1914. Tralbaut could be referring to the drawing (View of Paris with the Opéra [F 1390 JH 1097]) which shows the Garnier opera house viewed from the rear, to the northeast, and, according to Van Heugten, from a relatively low angle compared to Vincent's painting View of Paris with the Opéra (Van Heugten, p. 84). This supports the text's point that Vincent moved all over the face of the Butte in search of advantageous compositions of vistas to draw or paint. 79. as did the windows b0727 V/1962, "Gogh, Theo van" to "Stockum-Haanebeek, Caro van", 7/10/1887: In July 1887, Theo wrote a friend about the rue Lepic apartment: "A peculiar feature of our house is that the windows offer a magnificent view; overlooking the town, with the hills of Meudon, St. Cloud, etc. on the horizon and the sky above it is almost as large as when you are standing on top of the dune. With the various effects, brought about by the variation of the sky, it is a subject for I don't know how many paintings ..." Vincent undoubtedly felt the same sentiment, but to hear it from his dealer-brother must have confirmed Vincent's apparent view that these were commercially viable images -- i.e., saleable. Most of the surviving images that show the view from the rue Lepic apartment (e.g., View of Paris from Vincent's Room in the Rue Lepic [F 341 JH1242]) are dated to 1887, but it is unthinkable, given Vincent's long history of memorializing his arrival in a new location by recording the view out his window (see Chapter 17), that he did not render this especially spectacular view as one of his first artistic undertakings after the brothers' move in June 1886. Van Tilborgh identifies at least "two views from the new dwelling" that Vincent made "pretty soon after the move" (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 29). These are View of Roofs and Backs of Houses (F 231 JH 1099) and View of Paris from near Montmartre (F 265 JH 1100). Van Tilborgh dates these to June 1886 and suggests that the view from the apartment gave Vincent the idea of going higher on the Butte to capture even more sweeping panoramas (ibid., p. 57). 80. smokey, unchanging panoramas Van Tilborgh cites the French writer Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) who wrote in 1889 that Paris "always swam in a lake of fog, but 'in between the holes' one could see 'the Notre Dame, the Pantheon, the Invalides, the Tracadéro'" (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 53). 81. Tourists snapped up prints Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 147: Auguste Delâtre, an engraver with a studio not far from Vincent and Theo's apartment on the rue Lepic, "produced a large number of prints of Montmartre landscape motifs, nine of which were reproduced together on a page of the journal L'Artiste during the first half of 1886." Vincent would have been impressed by Delâtre's resumé. Among the many artists whose work he had engraved were some of Vincent's favorites: Daubigny, Millet, Charles Jacque, and Charles Meryon, as well as Dutch giants like Rembrandt and Van Ostade. Welsh-Ovcharov points out that some of Delâtre's prints were "markedly similar in setting to several among Vincent's mill subjects." 82. magazines ran page after page Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 147. (See Ch. 27, n. 81.) 83. street outside the Moulin Van Tilborgh catalogues the many views of the mills, the streets outside them, and their entrances, that Vincent painted; and he ventures that Vincent's motivations for this campaign of imagery was primarily commercial: "All of this looks rather intentional, but we can only speculate over the underlying reasoning. Perhaps he hoped to convince the owners of the area to exhibit his series of the street in their eating and dancing establishments, increasing the chances of a sale." (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., pp. 93-94.) 84. with its signage carefully Le Moulin de la Galette (F 227 JH1170), Le Moulin de la Galette (F 228 JH 1171), and Le Moulin de la Galette (F 226 1172). We think this unusual meticulousness is an indication that Vincent intended these three (and perhaps more) very similar images to sell. A comment from Van Heugten may indirectly support our inference (Van Heugten, p. 28). Referring to the accuracy of line that Vincent could achieve only by using a perspective frame, Van Heugten writes: "Van Gogh was unhappy about his dependence on the perspective frame ... and wanted to practice doing without it. The more highly finished the drawing or painting, the greater the risk of such a free approach, for they would have been easier to sell and had to be utterly convincing." We think these carefully lettered signs were also an attempt by Vincent to provide a more "finished" and "convincing" image -- and therefore one more likely to sell. 85. muted tones of Mauve Van Gogh-Bonger, p. xl: "Here he first painted his immediate surroundings -- the view from the studio window, the Moulin de la Galette viewed from every side, ... little landscapes of Montmartre, which was at that time still quite countrified -- all painted in a soft, tender tone like that of Mauve." Bonger was no art historian, of course, but the commentaries on these 1886 paintings of Montmartre consistently note the soft palette and painterly brush -- both of which were characteristic of Mauve and distinctly uncharacteristic of Impressionism or Neo-Impressionism. Welsh-Ovcharov cites a more esoteric source: Auguste Louis Lepère, whose "Realist style and heavy impasto ... might even have had some influence upon Vincent's studies ... which are similarly picturesque in conception" (Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh, p. 147). If true, this would cast Vincent's early art in Paris in an even more revanchist light, as Lepère, who debuted at the Salon in 1870, abandoned painting in 1876 and dedicated himself exclusively to engraving. Van Tilborgh lists other popular images of Montmartre that might have been familiar to Vincent, including those by Frederico Zandomeneghi and Stanislas Lépine (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., pp. 92-93). Cachin locates the primary influence on Vincent's 1886 Montmartre views in the works of Armand Guillaumin on the same subjects (Cachin, p. 229). Hammacher sees Signac's earlier depictions of the Butte top in Vincent's early attempts (Hammacher, p. 143-145). These and other authorities often conflate the issues of why Vincent chose to paint the windmills and how he chose to paint them, two quite separate questions. But neither discussion would be complete without a mention of Georges Michel (1763-1843; French artist), whose depictions of the Montmartre windmills both Van Gogh brothers had admired for decades. 86. the Hague School See Van Tilborgh, who refers to one of the vistas of Paris (View of the Roofs of Paris [F 261 JH 1101]) as "executed in a traditional style, reminiscent of the style of the Barbizon school" (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 56). 87. tried them in watercolor The Moulin de Blute-Fin (F 1397 JH 1173, 1886, black chalk, watercolor, 12.2 x 9.8 in., 31 x 25 cm., P. and N. de Boer Foundation, Amsterdam). The paucity of surviving drawings and watercolors of Montmartre motifs, despite the relative surfeit of related paintings, might indicate that Vincent achieved some success in selling his cheaper works on these subjects.

Context:
JLB 569, September or October 1886: "At this present moment I have found four dealers who have exhibited studies of mine. And I have exchanged studies with several artists. Now the prices are 50 francs. Certainly not much but -- as far as I can see one must sell cheap to rise, and even at costing price.

88. "One must sell cheap" JLB 569, September or October 1886 (this letter was written in English).

Context:
JLB 569, September or October 1886: "Certainly not much but -- as far as I can see one must sell cheap to rise, and even at costing price. And mind my dear fellow, Paris is Paris, …"

89. his Prince-of-Wales pipe The stem of the pipe depicted is long for a "Prince of Wales," a pipe originally designed for Prince Albert in 1854 but widely reproduced and modified. It could also be a "Galles" (named after the colony in Africa to which Portugal exported tobacco farming and popular with Dutch settlers in South Africa), distinguishable by its squat, backward-tilting bowl. In another self-portrait (Self-Portrait with Pipe [F 180 JH 1194]), Vincent appears to be smoking a Poker pipe, in which the stem enters the bowl distinctly from the side. Although Vincent's chronic ineptness with perspective makes certain identification problematic, it does appear in both works that he has made an effort to depict the shape of the pipe with some precision. 90. for the first time Self-Portrait with Pipe, F 180 JH 1194, Spring 1886, oil on canvas, 18.1 x 15 in., 46 x 38 cm., Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. For dating issues, see Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., pp. 36-39. 91. at least four more versions At last four other self-portraits in roughly the same palette and same motif date from the first year of Vincent's arrival in Paris. These are Self-Portrait with Dark Felt Hat at the Easel (F 181 JH 1090), Self-Portrait with Pipe (F 180 JH 1194), Self-Portrait with Dark Felt Hat (F 208a JH 1089), and Self-Portrait with Pipe and Glass (F 263a JH 1199). Van Tilborgh suggests that the first two of these were the two "heads" (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 31) about which Vincent brags to Horace Mann Livens, "I dare say are better in light and colour than those I did before" (JLB 569, September or October 1886). Only the first of these shows Vincent with the attributes of a painter -- loaded palette and foreground easel -- and these seem almost an afterthought. Vincent is dressed in an overcoat with the collar turned up and wearing a businessman's respectable felt hat (not the straw or fur of the country) -- a hat, in fact, that looks very much like the hats worn by his classmates Louis Anquetin and Toulouse-Lautrec in contemporary portraits. The palette and easel could be removed and the image would function almost as well in terms of the position of the sitter in the canvas. Through infrared examination, Hendriks has identified at least two other works that may have been self-portraits en trois quarts dating from this period but subsequently painted over (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., pp. 102-103). 92. each one bigger Self-Portrait with Pipe (F 208 JH 1195) is 10.5 x 7.5 in. (27 x 19 cm.). Self-Portrait with Dark Felt Hat (F 208a JH 1089) is 16.25 x 12.75 in. (41.5 x 32.4 cm.); both Self-Portrait with Dark Felt Hat at the Easel (F 181 JH 1090) and Self-Portrait with Pipe (F 180 JH 1194) are roughly 18 x 15 in. (46.4 x 38.3 cm. and 46 x 38 cm. respectively); and Self-Portrait with Pipe and Glass (F 263a JH 1199), the largest and last in the group, is 24 x 14.75 in. (61 x 50 cm.). This progression in size holds true even though the focal length varies, from three-quarters (Self-Portrait with Dark Felt Hat at the Easel [F 181 JH 1090]) to bust (Self-Portrait with Dark Felt Hat [F 208a JH 1089], and Still Life with Scabiosa and Ranunculus [F 666 JH 1094). Self-Portrait with Pipe and Glass (F 263a JH 1199), like Self-Portrait with Pipe (F 208 JH 1195), falls somewhere in between. 93. Fernand Piestre 1845-1924; French painter. The name "Cormon" was first adopted by the artist's father, the last in a long line of doctors from Lyons. Fernand's father wrote poetry and novels under the pseudonym "Eugène Corman" (Destremau, p. 174). According to Destremau, one of his novels, Les deux orphelines, was a bestseller (ibid.). 508 94. sprung up in major cities Milner, p. 20. According to Milner, "[t]he Beaux-Arts atelier, or studio-teaching system with a celebrated artist directing each studio, was set up in 1863" and "flourished in the 1880s and 1890s." (Milner, p. 22.) 95. children of the École des Beaux-Arts See Ch. 27, n. 96. 96. pledged to the same goal Destremau, p. 171: "Initially, the main aim of these studios was to prepare candidates for the competitive examinations, but many of the students quickly gave up on the idea of putting themselves in for it at all and completed all their training under the same master." 97. former Salon stars Milner, p. 25: Milner names the most popular studio tutors in order of their popularity: Alexandre Cabanel, Jules Lefebvre, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Léon Bonnat, Adolphe Bouguereau, Jean-Paul Laurens, Fernand Cormon, and Benjamin Constant. "They were all members of the Institut. If their names are little known today, it is clear nonetheless that their fame and influence was widespread and far-reaching in their day amongst the mass of artists whose conflicting hopes and ambitions were fighting for recognition in the studios of Paris." Multiple individual studios were sometimes offered under the auspices of larger "academies," like the Julian Academy, and sometimes under the umbrella of the national École des Beaux-Arts itself -- the clearest signal that they were considered supportive of, not competitive with, the academy system. 98. he opened an atelier "Fernand Cormon Maître en Peinture," p. 7: Cormon first opened a studio for students at 10, rue Constance. It soon moved to 104, boulevard de Clichy, where it was when Vincent arrived in spring 1886. Milner points out that the atelier system held more advantages for the teachers than the students: "its large classes did not promote close contact or cordial relations with the professors who directed the studios and assessed the work produced in them. But it did attract acolytes to celebrated artists who in turn, for relatively little contact in teaching, could earn useful amounts of money. For this reason, private or commercial teaching studios independent of the Beaux-Arts flourished in the 1880s and 1890s." (Milner, p. 22.) Milner also explains the rationale for the atelier's move to the boulevard Clichy in 1883: "The area around the boulevard de Clichy was home to a number of teaching ateliers organised as commercial concerns comparable to Cormon's and headed by respected and officially honoured artists whose reputations attracted many students both French and foreign" (Milner, p. 137). 99. his own checkered history "Fernand Cormon Maître en Peinture," p. 3: Cormon was twice expelled from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts (national fine arts school) in Paris. A biographer blames the incidents on Cormon's "temperament" which he describes as "disobedient ... especially with regard to academic discipline." 100. he painted Hindu kings "Nécrologie de Fernand Cormon," n.p. 101. and Wagner heroes "Nécrologie de Fernand Cormon," n.p. 102. the meticulous craftsmanship Destremau, p. 176: In 1912, one of Cormon's students, Louis Anquetin, described the "craft" he had learned in the master's atelier: "There is the student firmly installed in front of a sheet of Ingrès paper (45 x 60 cm.) [17.75 x 23.5 in.] on which he draws a vertical line, which he will cut across with three lines, at the top, in the middle and at the bottom. Using a plumb line he tries to find the vertical in the model in front of him, and at which points or near which points it is cut. This first process is not without difficulty due to the model moving. Second stage: using the handle of a paintbrush held vertically at arm's length between his eye and the model, he will check the latter for height in order to determine where the middle and the other divisions and subdivisions lie which he will then transpose onto the horizontal to check the width of the shoulders, chest, hips, thighs etc." 103. annual competition or concours Murray, p. 75: Cormon student Toulouse-Lautrec wrote to his mother in the spring of 1886: "Cormon was satisfied with my work on Sunday. The competition will be judged on Wednesday." 104. the Salon jury "Fernand Cormon Maître en Peinture," p. 7. 105. a large private studio "Fernand Cormon Maître en Peinture," p. 7: Located, at that time, at 159, rue de Rome. He needed a large private studio to accommodate his fondness for huge canvases. At the time Vincent was a student at the atelier, Cormon was undoubtedly working on his painting Return of Salamis's Conquerors, which earned a gold medal at the Salon the following year. 106. and an apartment "Fernand Cormon Maître en Peinture," p. 7: As of 1873, Cormon lived on the rue La Bruyère. 107. traveled exotically "Fernand Cormon Maître en Peinture," p. 5. 108. The son of a stage manager "Fernand Cormon Maître en Peinture," p. 3. 109. dress up in theatrical costumes "Fernand Cormon Maître en Peinture," p. 3: In the portrait of Cormon by Royet, he is shown dressed as a musketeer. 110. keeping three mistresses Hartrick, pp. 48-49. 111. a feat that earned him Hartrick, pp. 48-49: In his account of Cormon's atelier, Hartrick recalled, "The crown of his reputation in the studio, however, was that he kept three mistresses at one time!" 112. his stupendous canvases Milner, p. 137: "The theatricality and size of Cormon's major compositions ensured that they attracted attention at the crowded market of the Salon." 113. The turn of fortune Schimmel, pp. 100-101: Toulouse-Lautrec wrote his mother in spring 1886: "It's dismal here. Cormon is down in the dumps and doesn't have a penny." 114. why Cormon agreed Rewald, p. 20: Even so circumspect a chronicler as Rewald concedes, "it is not easy to explain how he gained admission to Cormon's class." (Also see Ch. 27, n. 119.) 115. his exclusive atelier Hartrick, pp. 46-48: Hartrick's account gives a good sense both of the exclusiveness of Cormon's studio and of the rigors of the admissions process: "[John Peter] Russell had kindly offered to sponsor my entry into the Atelier Cormon. I had taken some of my work to show the great man at his private studio; he had been interested and accepted me as a pupil -- quite a feather in my cap, I thought, because Cormon's studio at that time was small and select, not more than thirty to thirty-five pupils all told, of whom few were foreigners." This raises the question of whether Cormon conducted a similar interview with Vincent and, if so, what paintings Vincent brought to show him. Both these aspects of the admissions process (interview and sample work) support our conclusion (see Ch. 27, n. 118) that Vincent did not enter Cormon's studio immediately after arriving in Paris, but took time to restore his health and appearance, and probably to make some new paintings to show. 116. despite his lack of credentials Most of the students at the ateliers arrived with several years of formal training, sometimes at schools in other cities in France or elsewhere in Europe. This was especially true of the many foreign students who filled out the ranks of the ateliers in Paris. Hartrick describes the hurdles he encountered, as an English applicant, even with the good recommendation of another Cormon student (Russell), who was rich: "I had taken some of my work to show the great man at his private studio; he had been interested and accepted me as a pupil -- quite a feather in my cap, I thought, because Cormon's studio at that time was small and select" (Hartrick, p. 46). 509 117. Theo was well positioned Hartrick, p. 40: This may be the suspicion that Vincent's fellow student Hartrick was hinting at when he wrote in his memoir: "To tell the truth, I fancy the French [in Cormon's atelier] were civil to him [Vincent] largely because his brother Theodore was employed by Goupil and Company and so bought pictures." For the commercially-minded and financially strapped Cormon (see Ch. 27, n. 113), a connection to Goupil would have been almost as valuable as the jury-seat at the Salon that he accepted (see Ch. 27, n. 104) about the same time he admitted Vincent into his exclusive atelier. 118. But sometime that spring In his essay, "The Dating of Van Gogh's Time at Cormon's Studio: Spring or Autumn?," Van Tilborgh masterfully summarizes the various arguments and advocates on both sides of the question he poses (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., pp. 37-51). For all the reasons he marshals so persuasively, we agree that Vincent went to Cormon's in the spring of 1886 and it is not necessary to recapitulate his arguments here. The text takes only one exception to Van Tilborgh's expert analysis: we do not believe Vincent began at Cormon's immediately upon arrival in Paris in early March (ibid., p. 38). The arguments for an immediate start are, in fact, much weaker than the arguments for completion by June. To support the June termination argument, Van Tilborgh rightly recognizes that Hartrick's 1939 account (A Painter's Pilgrimage Through Fifty Years) embellishes on his sketchier 1913 account in ways that suggest he fleshed out his own recollection with material from Jo Bonger's Memoir, which had been published with the letters in the interim (ibid., p. 39). But in making the case for an immediate start in March, he relies on the later Hartrick account, not the earlier one, which does not address either the start date or the length of time Vincent spent at Cormon's, only when he left (ibid., p. 40). While it is true that Vincent claims in his letter to Livens in the fall that he had studied at Cormon's for "three or four months," this letter is fraught with other inflations (JLB 569, September or October 1886). 

Because Vincent had every reason to exaggerate his success at Cormon's given how he must have bragged about it during his time with Livens in Antwerp, we do not take it as probative, much less dispositive. Van Tilborgh coaxes unconvincing support for his argument from the ambiguous passage in Andries Bonger's letter from April 1886 in which he informs his parents: "Theo's brother is here for good, he's staying for at least three years to work in the painter Cormon's studio" -- a passage that Van Tilborgh acknowledges "has always been read as if this was a future plan" (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 41, n. 21). Indeed, Van Tilborgh's extrapolation from this passage inadvertently raises the strongest circumstantial argument against an immediate start at Cormon's in March. "[F]rom this we can infer that there was no longer any doubt about his admission to the studio. The length of his period of study -- at least three years -- was already fixed, and this also tends to confirm that he already had a place. In Antwerp, Vincent had been thinking in terms of staying at Cormon's for just one year [JLB 556, 1/29/1886], and this drastic extension and change to the original plan would seem to reflect consultation and an arrangement with the studio itself." (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 41.)

But surely Vincent's "plans" for three years of study at Cormon's -- like his Antwerp plans for one year -- were little more than ambition. After he arrived unannounced in Paris, he must have been desperate to justify his coming with renewed, redoubled pledges of hard work at Cormon's studio. We know from Vincent's Antwerp letters, indeed from the entire corpus of letters, that he was always full of ambitious hopes. That he would, in discussing his plans for Cormon with Theo or Bonger, inflate his enthusiasm and intentions can hardly be surprising. Bonger's report, which came either directly from Vincent or from Vincent via Theo, surely represents yet more of the same -- hardly a "confirmation" of a settled plan, as Van Tilborgh would have it. Furthermore, Van Tilborgh nowhere else addresses the issue of "consultation" with Cormon.

Vincent's admission was by no means inevitable (as Vincent acknowledges), and Theo no doubt had to do some persuading to secure Cormon's permission (JLB 555, 1/28/1886).  The text also makes the point that Vincent, for all his professed enthusiasm from Antwerp, admitted to being sharply insecure and apprehensive about joining a prestigious atelier like Cormon's and competing (there was, after all, a concours) with academy-trained artists ("I'd always have trouble with fellows who had been at some academy or other -- that I couldn't draw -- according to them") and undoubtedly wanted to look and feel his best before jumping in (JLB 563, 2/16/1886 or 2/17/1886). 

This reticence becomes apparent almost as soon as the plan for Cormon is agreed upon -- a plan that, for Vincent, appears to include an interim transition period between his arrival in Paris and his start at Cormon's. "If I take a garret in Paris," he wrote from Antwerp, "I can finish the most pressing things at once -- those studies of plaster casts that will certainly help me when I go to Cormon's. ... after March I could come straight to Paris and start drawing, in the Louvre, for instance." (JLB 561, 2/11/1886.) The insistence in the literature (by Hulsker and others) that Vincent came to Paris in a fever of enthusiasm for Cormon's studio and therefore could not have put it off, is mistaken.

As discussed in Chapter 26, the plan for Cormon was probably Theo's proposal originally, and Vincent was ambivalent about it from the start. He came to Paris in a fever, all right, but for Theo's companionship, not for Cormon's instruction. Of course, if Van Tilborgh's arguments about the end-date are correct (and we believe they are), then the later Vincent started at Cormon's studio in the spring of 1886, the less time he spent there. The closest thing to a certain start-date is given in Bonger's April letter, which means Vincent probably spent only two months at the atelier, and might have spent less. In his very first account of Vincent, Bernard wrote that "il est resté deux mois" [he remained two months] à l'atelier Cormon" (Bernard, quoted by Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 40, n. 20). This short stay would explain the slight accounts (or lack thereof) of Vincent's time at Cormon's from his fellow students (he and Hartrick never overlapped) or even Cormon himself. It would also be consistent with Vincent's previous academy-like experiences.

Finally, a later start date would also explain one of the strange contradictions in Bernard's story of meeting Vincent. Bernard left the Cormon studio in early April 1886 (ibid., p. 39), but almost certainly did not meet him until the fall of that year (despite his occasional claim to an earlier encounter). If Vincent did not start until after early April, it would explain the otherwise inexplicable failure of these two artists to connect in March.

119. some time to collect himself BVG 448, 2/1/1886-2/15/1886: Only a few weeks before leaving Antwerp, contemplating coming to Paris, Vincent wrote about this anxiously.

Context:
JLB 557, 2/2/1886: "… it's become dreadfully apparent to me that there are other things that I absolutely definitely have to change. When I compare myself with the other fellows, there's something much too stiff about me, as if I'd been in prison for 10 years. ... And it's important for me to smarten up my appearance a bit. Perhaps you'll say that it has nothing to do with art -- and -- perhaps you'll agree with me. I'm seeing about getting my teeth put right again. I have no fewer than 10 teeth that I've either lost or am losing. And that's too many and too disagreeable, and besides it makes me look as though I'm over 40, which puts me at too much of a disadvantage." (Emphasis in original.)

120. repair his teeth See Ch. 27, n. 29. Vincent would have needed at least a month to arrange the significant dental surgery, recover from it, and have dentures fashioned. 121. teacher who rarely imposed Murray, quoting R. H. Serard, p. 42: Murray quotes another student of Cormon's in the 1880s: "Cormon did not seek 'to impose his particular views on art, his private way of seeing things, on his pupils.'" 122. "more sympathetic" Hartrick, pp. 48-49. Cormon's own writings bear out Hartrick's observation: "Nothing can remain stationary in this world. Everything changes and must change. A school [of art] must therefore, cannot stand still. It must be subject to transformation if it is to endure; and, having regard to this fact, I consider it an excellent thing that each of us watches his neighbour, profits by his progress, seeks to correct his own weaknesses, and to assimilate what may advantageously be absorbed." (ibid., quoted in Murray, p. 42.) 123. elicited his contempt Hartrick, pp. 32-33: Hartrick recounts the story of a former Cormon student who, under the sway of Paul Gauguin, changed his style to pointillism in the style of Georges Seurat and then bragged about the change to his former teacher. "Six months later he wrote to Cormon, whose pupil he had been, bumptiously congratulating his master that he, the pupil, had been awarded a gold medal for this picture at Amsterdam, and also announcing that he had turned 'intransigeant,' as the 'spot' painters at that time were labelled. I heard Cormon himself tell the story to his pupils at the studio. He spoke with much amusement and some contempt." (ibid.) 124. When he visited the atelier Destremau, p. 173: "[I]t consisted of a large central space with beams around the sides and natural overhead lighting; there was robust shelving all the way around, on which various plaster models were kept. ... The furniture was reduced to a minimum, a few straw-bottomed chairs, tripods and easels." Bernard provided additional details about the interior of the atelier: "walls covered with copies after museum old masters and a variety of sketches, a corner crowded with armour, embroideries, rich fabrics, and a gold Buddha" (Bernard, quoted in Murray, p. 40). This and some other descriptions in the literature (e.g., Fernier, quoted in Tralbaut, p. 194) sound as if they come from a later period in the atelier's history. According to Destremau, the building had been recently built at the time Cormon moved his atelier there in 1883 (Destremau, p. 172). He also deduces that the atelier's actual location on the property was not in the large, limestone building that fronts on the boulevard Clichy, nor in the various glass-walled additions that continue through a series of inner courtyards that are accessible through the pedestrian passageway at number 104, but rather in the low, windowless, "beamed warehouse" building to the right as one enters the first courtyard (ibid., pp. 172-73). 125. he would pass quietly Hartrick, pp. 48-49: This is Hartrick's oft-quoted description of Cormon: "[He] was a sharp-featured little man, dark-haired, with the quick movements of a small bird, which he somehow resembled." Toulouse-Lautrec described him, more summarily, as "the ugliest and thinnest man in Paris. All eaten away." Cormon's nickname among his students was "Old Patella," a reference to the projecting bone of the kneecap that may have been intended to evoke his extreme gauntness, as well as his insistence on anatomically correct drawing. 126. "only a few well-chosen" Hartrick, pp. 49-50: This is Hartrick's description of Cormon accompanying a group of his students to a Salon, so it should not be read necessarily as a showing of tolerance for anything outside the jury-approved system. 127. "three years at least" Andries Bonger, quoted in Van Gogh, pp. 523-524: Sometime in 1886, probably in the spring, Theo's friend Andries Bonger wrote his parents: "It now appears that Theo's brother has come to stay; for the next three years at the least he is going to work in the painter Cormon's studio." Bonger could have heard this from either Theo or Vincent, as he was a regular guest in the brothers' apartment. The projection of three years represents an extension of Vincent's original plan, in Antwerp, to study at Cormon's "for up to a year" (JLB 558, 2/4/1886). In fact, at that time, Vincent seemed to disparage those students who had to spend longer at the Academy: "I tell you that there are people here who've been in the class for 3 years and are still not allowed to stop" (ibid.; emphasis in original). This suggests an escalation in the promises Vincent felt compelled to make his brother to justify his early arrival in Paris. (Also see Ch. 27, n. 118.) 128. only once or twice a week The infrequency of Cormon's visits to the studio is a matter of relative unanimity among his students' accounts. However, it appears that he was more attentive during the infancy of his atelier. Toulouse-Lautrec wrote his mother in December 1882: "[Cormon] often drops in on us and wants us to have as much fun as we can painting outside the studio." Toulouse-Lautrec, who was eighteen at the time, may have been trying to reassure his mother that he was receiving adequate adult supervision. "Often" is also relative. According to Milner: "the studios were in the charge of particular professors who paid twice weekly visits at most, the professors concerned themselves very little with the day-to-day practicalities of studio life" (Milner, p. 20). 129. Most were French Hartrick, pp. 46-48: "Cormon's studio at that time was small and select, not more than thirty to thirty-five pupils all told, of whom few were foreigners. ... To begin with it was very French, and the foreigner was kept rather apart." 130. thirty or so students Hartrick, pp. 46-48. 131. Vincent's accented French Rewald, p. 20. 132. Students under eighteen Toulouse-Lautrec was seventeen when he began at Cormon's studio. Émile Bernard was sixteen. 133. those over twenty-five were rare The evidence for this figure is incomplete and, to some extent conflicting. Rewald claims that Vincent "was about ten years older than the average art student" (Rewald, p. 20). He may be speaking more broadly than specifically about Cormon's atelier. Of the forty-seven known Cormon students between 1882 and 1887, Destremau lists the dates for only twenty-seven (Destremau, p. 184). Of these, five were over thirty at the time Vincent arrived at the atelier in early 1886, nine were twenty-six to thirty years old, ten were twenty-one to twenty-five, and three were twenty or less. We have been able to ascertain the age of an additional artist on Destremau's list, Léon Fauché, who was eighteen in early 1886. Also, Edwin (Reginald) Bottomley, whose name does not appear on the list but who entered a work in the 1887 Salon des Artistes Français as a Cormon student, was twenty-one (ibid., p. 174). Although hardly a representative sampling (it includes artists who entered Cormon's studio at the time it opened in 1882), the list does skew somewhat older than Rewald's generalization. We suspect that older students were less likely to veer off course from the artistic life they had chosen and therefore were more likely to find their way onto Destremau's list. This would account for the conflicting evidence and we have adjusted the text accordingly. 134. called nouveaux Milner, p. 21: The other common term was rapin. 135. mercilessly teased and humiliated Milner, p. 22: Milner quotes a veteran of nouveau hazing: "References to our personal appearance were many and insulting, and any particularly brilliant sally would be greeted with roars of laughter. Then would follow discussions as to what should be the treatment awarded to us, and some alarming suggestions were made." 136. his prickly dignity BVG 458, 2/20/1886-2/28/1886: Only days before arriving in Paris, Vincent complained defensively of his frustration at being treated as a "green" in Antwerp. This strongly suggests that he would have had no tolerance for the fraternity hazing at Cormon's atelier.

Context:
JLB 566, 2/24/1886: "Of course I wish I'd come here [in Antwerp] with the experience of it that I have now, at the moment I'm leaving. But if that were possible, things would be easier, and one always begins by coming in green." (Emphasis added.)

137. forced to do menial chores Hartrick, pp. 49-50: "It was much like being a fag at school again; my chief duty as a 'nouveau' was to see that the stove was lit and properly stoked; no nonsense was allowed about doing this properly." Milner describes the newcomer's lowly station more generally: "he was obliged to arrive very early at the studio to sweep it, tidy it and light the stove in preparation for the day. A nouveau remained a nouveau for a whole year and had many menial duties. A newcomer studying sculpture, for example, could expect to arrive early, sweep up, fetch clean water, mix clay and keep it fresh and each week break up some forty figures and restore them to the clay bins. He suffered every kind of ignominy and provocation until the arrival of the next rapin and his eventual acceptance by the group and participation in its rituals." (Milner, p. 21.) Gauzi describes his initiation at the Cormon studio: "when I turned up by myself, unknown, in front of a group of painters, good fellows but cocky with it, I felt a few butterflies in my stomach; I was expecting the traditional ragging. ... [Toulouse-Lautrec, as massier] listed the duties a newcomer had to take on board, if he valued his peace and quiet. 'When the caretaker is absent, which happens almost all the time,' he said, 'it will be your job to scrape out the stove and refill it with coal. Don't worry about keeping an eye on it; if the model is cold you'll hear your colleagues yelling at you, and then you'll have to get your skates on and see to the fire. Secondly, you'll keep everybody happy if you buy a little something as a welcome present, but it's not compulsory. If you do want to, give the caretaker ten francs to go and buy some punch and some portions of French fries. We'll all drink your health.'" (Gauzi, Lautrec mon ami, p. 17.) Presumably, Vincent received the same "welcoming" speech from Toulouse-Lautrec. 138. made to fence Milner, p. 22: "New students could face the relatively gentle but ignominious paintbrush rite whereby two newcomers were forced to strip naked and fence with brushes on the model's dias. One brush was loaded with red oil paint and the other with blue, the winner being determined by a count of the marks implanted on the opponents' bodies." 510 139. trussed up on poles Hartrick, pp. 49-50: Hartrick describes this punishment ("à la brosse") inflicted on one obstreperous nouveau: "he was trussed like a fowl, with a long pole run through at the back of his knees and his hands tied in front of them. He was then placed on the throne, or some place raised from the floor, from which he was bound to fall if he tried to move. ... Next, he was carried on the pole, surrounded by the whole class, outside across the road to a brasserie. As one of the latest 'nouveaux,' it was my duty, together with three others, to carry the pole with the dissenter suspended from it. One man was told off to turn the victim upright from time to time, before the blood had gone too much to his head. In the brasserie he had to stand drinks all round." The victim, according to Hartrick, emerged from the ordeal "half insensible with hysteria and rage." 140. marrying into a wealthy family Bernard, "Louis Anquetin, artiste-peintre," pp. 595-596: According to Bernard, when Anquetin's mother died, "[h]e inherited from her, and set himself up in sumptuous accommodation in the rue de Rome, in a large studio overlooking the gare Saint-Lazare." In the literature, Anquetin's humble origins are often overplayed. 141. Twenty-five-year-old Louis Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh and the Birth of Cloisonism, p. 228: Louis Anquetin was born in the Normandy town of Etrépagny on January 26, 1861, so he had just turned twenty-five when Vincent arrived in Paris. 142. he had learned to ride Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh and the Birth of Cloisonism, p. 228. 143. He kept an apartment Rewald, pp. 29-30. 144. on the avenue Clichy Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 247: At number 86, on the far (west) wide of the cemetery Montmartre from the Van Gogh apartment on the rue Lepic. 145. Toulouse back to 1196 McEwen, n.p.: According to legend, Toulouse-Lautrec's ancestors were present at the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 C.E. 146. inbreeding McEwen, n.p.: According to McEwen and others (Spalding), Toulouse-Lautrec was "almost certainly suffering from pyknodysostosis, a dwarfism resulting from inbreeding." 147. His parents, first cousins McEwen, n.p.: Toulouse-Lautrec's grandmothers were also sisters. 148. "an aristocratic floating world" Janusczcak, pp. 8-10. 149. a misshapen body Toulouse-Lautrec had a large head, normal-size body, and stunted legs. 150. Young Henri broke both legs These childhood accidents were long proposed, incorrectly, as the reason for his stumpy adult stature. 151. "my family has done nothing" Quoted in Spalding, n.p. 511 152. "my great man" Destremau, p. 177. 153. rarely left his side Bernard, "Louis Anquetin, artiste-peintre," pp. 592-593. 154. This unlikely pair In his subsequent accounts, Émile Bernard did his best to recast the close friendship of Anquetin and Toulouse-Lautrec into a trio that included him. Much of the literature follows this misleading path. In fact, Anquetin and Toulouse-Lautrec met as early as 1882 in Bonnat's atelier and then moved together to Cormon's atelier when Bonnat's closed down. They had both been at Cormon's for two or three years when Bernard arrived in 1884-1885, an ambitious seventeen year old already possessed by the image of himself as an art-world wunderkind. 155. "most promising younger" Salter, pp. 57-58. 156. official power of a massier Murray, p. 75. According to Milner, the massier was elected by his atelier colleagues (Milner, p. 20). 157. He and Cormon worked together Murray, pp. 48-51: In 1884, Cormon chose Toulouse-Lautrec and one other student to help him prepare illustrations for a deluxe edition of the works of Victor Hugo. Murray quotes a congratulatory letter from Toulouse-Lautrec's mother that indicates what an honor this was: "Henri has definitively been chosen from all of Cormon's atelier to work alongside of the best and the most grand, on a prime edition of the works of Victor Hugo. ... They are predicting now for Henri an unbelievably glorious future." 158. front row center Gauzi, Lautrec mon ami, p. 24. According to Milner, Toulouse-Lautrec's position was not just a matter of favor, but also of rank: "the massier was normally given first choice of view-point" (Milner, p. 20). 159. The two enjoyed a liberty Destremau, p. 178: As recounted by Toulouse-Lautrec's classmate and friend, François Gauzi: "Around ten o'clock in the morning the painter [Henri] Rachou took me to Cormon's place in the rue La Bruyère. That day the Master had invited his students to bring the studies or pictures they had produced at home for him to correct them. When I went in Cormon was looking at the drawings of a small young man [Toulouse-Lautrec] who was gaily explaining them in impulsive terms, apparently no more intimidated in front of the boss than he would have been with a friend. Cormon was smiling at his rejoinders whilst giving his rather benevolent advice. ... the boss seemed to consider him as a student apart, gifted as a caricaturist, to whom great art was forbidden, someone who needed to be left free to follow his whim." 160. Cormon's open-houses Destremau, p. 178: Held at Cormon's apartment on the rue La Bruyère. 161. hosted weekly get-togethers Valadon, "Vincent van Gogh," in Stein, ed., p. 87. 162. studio on the rue Caulaincourt Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh and the Birth of Cloisonism, p. 319: Toulouse-Lautrec's apartment was located at the corner of the rue Caulaincourt (no. 27) and the rue Tourlaque (no. 7). Only one block southeast of the corner, the rue Tourlaque intersects with the rue Lepic. Vincent's and Theo's apartment was another block beyond that intersection. 163. ragging of the nouveaux Destremau, p. 179: Destremau quotes Gauzi's account: "Everything was going fine and nobody seemed to be taking any notice of me, when a voice cried, 'The new arrival is going to sing us a song, he must know some, he's from the south, from Toulouse, the land of the tenors; he must have a fine voice, to be sure!' The ragging I had hoped to avoid had landed in my lap. ... Then Toulouse-Lautrec came to my rescue and in his powerful baritone he announced: 'We shall sing La Vigne au Vin,' and without further ado he broke into the old marching song ... I was forgotten; the whole studio began to sing as one, to the very last line." 164. Bruant's latest song Gauzi, Lautrec mon ami, p. 22. 165. his booming baritone Destremau, p. 179. 166. "partes naturales"Milner, p. 20: Inspecting, choosing, and booking the models was one of Toulouse-Lautrec's (more pleasant) duties as the atelier's massier. Milner’s Latin is suspect here. He says that “every Monday morning from ten to twenty [models] present themselves, male and female, for inspection, in parts naturalibus, before the critical gaze of the students of the different ateliers.” There is no such form as "parts." Given Milner’s choice of “naturalibus,” the ablative plural (following “in”), the phrase would have to be "in partibus naturalibus." Normally, one would leave the Latin in the nominative, and write either, "pars naturalis," (singular) or "partes naturales," (plural), since the context is not Latin. Because if the whole text were Latin, one would use the accusative (either "partem naturalem," (singular) or "partes naturales," (plural), that is what we have chosen to do. Since the putative Latin verb is examinare, it would be hard to construe anything but the accusative unless the source were trying to suggest that Lautrec wanted to examine them (the models) with respect to their genitalia, a construction that would require the dative. “Naturabilis" was very rarely used in Latin. Our thanks to Giovanni Favretti for helping us track the twisted grammatical course of this colorful Latin expression through the various layers of sources (correspondence with authors, May 6, 2011). 167. "Velasquez dwarf" Salter, p. 58. 168. his Michelangelesque partner Bernard, "Louis Anquetin, artiste-peintre," p. 590: According to Bernard, Anquetin had broken his nose as a child and the still-apparent knob "gave him a look of Michelangelo, facially." 169. Young men from good families Destremau, pp. 171-172. 170. Prone to anger Tralbaut, p. 200: "When discussing 'art,' if one disagreed with him and pushed him to the limit, he would flare up in a disturbing way." (See Ch. 27, n. 171.) 171. storms of vehement protest Tralbaut, p. 200: "He was vehement in speech, interminable in explaining and developing his ideas." Bernard goes on to defang the comment by adding, somewhat contrarily, "but not very ready to argue." This caveat does not conform either to Vincent's history or to the other accounts of his behavior in Paris, especially his brother's: "Even for those who are his best friends it is not always easy to get along with him, since he spares nothing and nobody. ... It is impossible for him to keep silent when he sees something that is not as it should be, and thus quarrels arise." Theo's friend, Andries Bonger, who saw Vincent regularly during the time he was attending Cormon's atelier (unlike Bernard), described Vincent as "quarrelling with everyone in sight, including Theo" (Bonger, quoted in Stolwijk, p. 39, n. 114). 172. lip-quivering passion Gauzi, "Lautrec et son Temps," in Stein, ed., p. 71: "Delacroix was his god, and when he spoke of this painter, his lips would quiver with emotion." 173. Shouting and gesticulating Erpel, p. 46: A later companion in Paris, Paul Signac, wrote about an encounter with Vincent's heedless vehemence in argument: "Sticking close to me, he shouted and gesticulated, brandishing his large, freshly covered canvas, and with it he polychromed himself as well as the passers-by." 174. pouring out sentences Hartrick, p. 40. 175. "then glance back at you" Hartrick, p. 40. 176. the sly, carefree atmosphere Rewald, pp. 28-29. Milner describes two photographs of the Cormon studio, taken the year before Vincent arrived (1885), that illustrate the adolescent informality of the studio in the master's absence: "[They] show Bernard and Toulouse-Lautrec among a group of over thirty students with the usual plaster casts in the background and a starkly naked middle-aged male model. In the first photograph Cormon plays out his role as tutor seated at the easel and posing as if adjusting a student's painting, his students gathered respectfully around him. The second is an informal snapshot taken after Cormon's departure from the room. The studio dog has appeared and a feigned experiment in mesmerism, popular at the time, is underway. The art-school skeleton joins the group and a top-hatted student has his arm around the model who flagrantly displays his physique. Together the photographs reveal the importance of the master but also permit a glimpse of the studio life which was an important aspect of such ateliers, where much was learnt by the exchange of ideas between students." (Milner, p. 23.) 177. Vincent's humorless intensity Rewald observes: "in the carefree atmosphere of Toulouse-Lautrec's studio van Gogh's intensity -- even the intensity of his humility -- must have made the others feel quite uncomfortable" (Rewald, pp. 28-29). In his memoir, A.S.A. Hartrick, a fellow student of Vincent's, takes the more sympathetic position that it was Vincent's childlike directness that alienated him from his subtle, ironic, and detached classmates: "In some aspects Van Gogh was personally as simple as a child, expressing pleasure and pain loudly in a childlike manner. The direct way he showed his likes and dislikes was sometimes very disconcerting." (Hartrick, p. 44.) 178. while never cruel Gauzi, Lautrec mon ami, p. 25: According to Gauzi, Toulouse-Lautrec "had a knack for attracting people's sympathy; all his friends liked him; he had never said an aggressive word to anyone and never looked to make a witty remark at anyone's else's expense; he would laugh at himself and at what came from the end of his pencil." 179. sociable, even jovial Merlhès, pp. 154-155: Theo's friends Andries Bonger and A. H. (Arnold Hendrik) Koning were the only witnesses to testify to Vincent's sense of humor. In letters to his parents, Bonger described his eventual brother-in-law as "frank, open, alive to the possible, with a certain hint of droll mischief about him." Bonger's recollections to Coquiot were even more flattering: "When Vincent was on form he was blithe, jovial, dropped jokes along with funny stories and proved to be likeable and an excellent impersonator" (Bonger, quoted in Merlhès, p. 155). Koning gave Plasschaert this account of a dinner with Vincent at which the waitresses were the object of Vincent's humor: "Vincent thought up typical Dutch names, which they [the waitresses] couldn't pronounce. There was this giantess, who was pale and fat, as if she was made out of margarine. Vincent kept calling her 'the invertebrate.'" (b3024 V/1982, "Koning, A.H." to "Plasschaert, A.", 5/8/1911.) Bonger's sympathetic characterizations should probably be discounted somewhat for the family connection (especially the ones written when Theo was courting Bonger's sister Jo, a liaison that Bonger encouraged), and both Bonger's and Koning's accounts should be read with attention to cultural differences. The examples they give involve only mocking mimicry ("an excellent impersonator") and crude insults of women based on their appearance. Apparently, Vincent and his Dutch companions were not above humor at the expense of their non-Dutch friends: "Whenever we were laughing about that [the fat waitress]," Koning continues, "[Alexander] Reid the [Scottish] art dealer would think that we were laughing about him and then he wouldn't eat with us any longer." 512 180. "a man of the north" Gauzi, "Lautrec et son Temps," in Stein, ed., p. 71. 181. "What laughter behind" Hulsker, Vincent and Theo van Gogh, p. 250: The translations of the original passage in Bernard's account vary in significant ways. Hulsker offers a very sympathetic version, conferring on Vincent a stoic nobility in the face of his classmates' taunts: "what laughter behind his back, while he did not condescend to notice anything" (ibid.). Erpel leaves out the mitigation entirely: "how one laughed behind his back 'which had no eyes'" (Erpel, p. 46). However, like all of Bernard's memories, especially those about Vincent at Cormon's studio (where the two never overlapped) this one should be read not as an account of an actual event, but as an indication of how Vincent's fellow students, many of them Bernard's friends, talked about him at the time and afterwards (see Ch. 27, n. 232). 182. Whether out of fear Gauzi, "Lautrec et son Temps," in Stein, ed., p. 71: "The mischievous members of the atelier avoided kidding him. They were a bit afraid of him." 183. or deference to Hartrick, p. 46: Hartrick, the Englishman who came to Cormon's atelier immediately after Vincent left so knew many of his classmates: "I think the French generally rather tolerated him on account of his brother Theodore's position in Goupil's." 184. "not interesting enough" Hartrick, p. 46. 185. Son of a South Seas adventurer Galbally, p. 1. 186. a striking blonde Italian girlfriend Anna-Maria (Marianna) Antonietta Mattiocco. Many, probably Vincent included, thought that Russell and Marianna were married at this time. In fact, they did not marry until February 1888, about the time Vincent left Paris for the south of France. By then, however, Marianna had borne three children by Russell. (See Salter, pp. 65-67.) 187. Rodin, for whom she modeled Salter, pp. 59-60. 188. "the most beautiful woman" Smee, p. 13. 189. his own horse and carriage Salter, pp. 70-71: Eschewing public conveyances, Russell "bought a 'horse and cart' as he called it, and drove his visitors through the goats and fowls scattered around the slopes of Montmartre, usually to Le Chat Noir." 190. in the Bois de Bologne Salter, pp. 70-71: According to Salter: "When his family were on a visit, John Peter, who delighted in shocking them, made a point of the Sunday ride, so that he could point out the more notorious members of the demi-monde, as they drove by in their long silk dresses, more elegant than the most elegant of society women and escorted by top hatted gentlemen bearing a close resemblance to the heroes of a novel by Guy de Maupassant." 191. sailed his yacht Salter, pp. 70-71. 192. A steady stream of visitors Two likely but undocumented visitors to Russell's studio were Claude Monet, who was a neighbor and acquaintance of Russell in Belle-Île, where he had a summer home; and James McNeill Whistler, a friend of Russell's teacher and sponsor in England, Alphonse Legros. 193. Rodin, a personal friend Salter, pp. 73-74: Russell's girlfriend, Marianna, was posing for Rodin's Gates of Hell at the time, so going regularly to his studio at rue de L'Université. It was she who introduced Russell to Rodin. 194. Robert Louis Stevenson Salter, pp. 21-24: Stevenson visited Paris in 1886 to see his friend Auguste Rodin, who brought him to Russell's studio. Two years later, Stevenson left for the Sandwich Islands and, according to his daughter's account, his encounter with the South Seas raconteur Russell played a major part in the writer's decision to migrate there in 1888 and stay until his death in 1894, taking multiple extended cruises to Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, and many other islands, as well as Russell's native Australia (ibid.). Another visitor to the Impasse Hélène in the winter of 1886-87, Paul Gauguin, may have heard similar enticing stories of the South Seas and may have been similarly persuaded to experience them for himself. 195. the grand staircase Salter, pp. 65-67: According to Salter, Russell's studio at 1, Impasse Hélène, close to the boulevard de Clichy, "was on the first floor above a staircase that fanned out to make an impressive and very decorative Y." Russell had bought the studio from the composer Hector Berlioz (ibid.) and his mistress Marianna lived here, not in the separate apartment that Russell kept in a handsome limestone building at 73, boulevard de Clichy, just across the boulevard from the Cormon Atelier at number 104 (Galbally, p. 33). 196. often mistaken for American Salter, pp. 58-59. 197. family connections to Goupil See Ch. 27, n. 241. 198. "cracked, but harmless" Hartrick, p. 46: Hartrick, a friend of Russell who stayed in his apartment during the latter's absence in the winter of 1886-87, recalled: "I frankly confess that neither myself, nor any of those I remember of his friends, foresaw that Van Gogh would be talked of specially and considered a great genius in the future. We thought him 'cracked' but harmless, perhaps not interesting enough to bother much about." The "we" in the last sentence must include Russell, as Vincent had few "friends" and Hartrick knew no one, outside Russell's circle in Paris, who also knew Vincent. The view of Vincent that Salter records strikes the same two notes but dressed up for posterity: "To Van Gogh Russell seemed 'a countryman at heart; not uncouth, but with a certain innate sweetness of far off fields'" (Salter, p. 26). 199. never merited a mention Galbally, p. 33. 200. "weedy little man" Salter, p. 80. 201. "glittered frighteningly" Salter, pp. 79-80. 202. a talented portraitistAround the same time he did Vincent's portrait, Russell made an oil sketch of another odd figure who hung on the periphery of his circle, a flamboyant Andalusian painter named Fabian de Castro, whom he had met on a trip to Spain in 1883. According to Galbally, Fabian fashioned himself "El Gitano," the gypsy, and Russell portrayed him in the full regalia of his à la bohème self-delusion (Galbally, p. 41). Only the single name "Fabian" appears in Vincent's letters. Writing to Russell from Arles in April 1888, Vincent recalls seeing and admiring the portrait of "Fabian" in Russell's studio (JLB 598, 4/19/1888). A landscape sketch (Roadway with Fence) signed "Fabian" found its way into the collection of Theo and Vincent, presumably a gift or exchange with the painter shown in Russell's portrait, who is only identified as "M. Fabian." Galbally proposes (with reservations), that this is, in fact, Fabian de Castro, a Spanish painter who was in Paris at the appropriate time and was "well known around the studios of Montmartre and Montparnasse"(Galbally, p. 41).

Fabian de Castro exhibited with the Indépendents and later knew both Picasso and the sculptor Manolo (Manuel Martínez Hugué) (ibid.). Salter adds an additional piece to the puzzle: in 1883, Russell traveled to Grenada, Spain to meet up with the American painter Dodge MacKnight (1860-1950) who was "on a visit to the wretched hovel of a studio belonging to the Spanish painter Fabian" (Salter, p. 51). For unstated reasons, JLB doubt that the "Fabian" Vincent refers to is Fabian de Castro (JLB 598, n. 7). The identification is problematic because the sitter in Russell's portrait looks somewhat older than nineteen; and Fabian de Castro would have been only fourteen or fifteen when MacKnight visited his studio in Grenada in 1883 (MacKnight was twenty-three at the time). This may point only to a mistake in the birthdate listed for De Castro. Fabian's name, like Vincent's, does not appear in Russell's correspondence from the time (Galbally, p. 41) -- another indication that a portrait by Russell did not necessarily betoken a close relationship with the artist. Finally, it seems likeliest that Vincent knew Fabian through their mutual association with Russell, not because Fabian was a fellow student at Cormon's, the common assumption in the literature. 203. used on society matrons Salter, pp. 41-42: According to Salter, most of Russell's commissions came from "women of leisure." 204. Vincent wanted the world Hartrick, p. 44: Hartrick reports that Vincent "dressed quite well and in an ordinary way, better than many in the atelier." Russell may have intended some mockery of Vincent's bourgeois pretensions in this portrait, which shows Vincent in exaggeratedly formal attire. Compare Russell's portraits of another friend, William Maloney, and his self-portrait, both from around the same time, in which the dress is very studio-casual. (See Galbally, plates xiv and xv.) 205. did Russell hint at Bailey, p. 104: In his 1913 memoir, Hartrick commented about Vincent and the Russell portrait of him: "In fact, when excited, he [Vincent] looked more than a little mad: and this look Russell had caught exactly" (Hartrick, quoted in Bailey, p. 104). 513 206. Lautrec, a precocious Schimmel, p. 66: Like many in the atelier, Lautrec had been attracted to Cormon's studio specifically on account of the master's reputation as a draftsman. After Léon Bonnat closed his atelier in the fall of 1882, Toulouse-Lautrec chose to continue his art training with Cormon instead of Carolus Duran, a prominent painter, for one reason: "I would very much have liked to try Carolus," he wrote his father, "but this prince of color produces only mediocre draftsmen, which would be fatal for me." 207. Cormon's acolytes put a high Salter, p. 54: For example, Russell had come to Cormon's on the recommendation of Alphonse Legros, an old Salon favorite who was spearheading a revival of realism in England. According to "the annals of the Russell family," writes Salter, Russell went to Cormon's "armed with a letter of recommendation [from Legros] to Cormon himself." However, the only hint Russell left on the question was this cryptic comment: "'Tis my word that compels me" (Russell, quoted in ibid.). Citing Legros's reported opposition to his best students defecting to Paris (he called the road to Paris the "via damnosa," according to Hartrick), Salter expresses some doubt about the family legend; but, in fact, the two accounts do not necessarily conflict (Hartrick, p. 9). Legros could have disapproved of the tendency, even of Russell's going in particular, but still agreed to give him a recommendation -- without which he probably could not have gained admission -- once he had determined to go. 208. "If one doesn't measure" BVG 539, 9/17/1888: We have altered the quotation slightly. This sentence is a quote from Vincent who afterwards, in Arles, recalls a "thunderbolt" from Cormon of which he may have been the target (see Ch. 27, n. 227).

Context:
BVG 539, 9/17/1888: "I am definitely opposed to Cormon, who says that if he did not measure, he would draw like a pig."
JLB 683, 9/18/1888: "I'm quite categorically opposed to Cormon, who says that if he didn't measure he would draw like a pig."

209. "draw like the old masters" Bernard, quoted in Murray, p. 64. 210. no doubt embarrassed him Van Heugten, p. 28: Van Heugten found no assisting lines in Vincent's drawings from the Cormon studio and explains their absence this way: "Van Gogh was unhappy about his dependence on the perspective frame (it might have attracted comments from his friends and colleagues in Paris) and wanted to practice doing without it." Inferential evidence that Vincent's fellow Cormon students did not typically rely on the perspective frame comes from a letter he wrote from Arles in March 1888, after he had reinstituted the practice in his own work: "I made my last three studies with the help of the perspective frame you know about. I attach importance to the use of the frame, because it doesn't seem unlikely to me that several artists will use it in the not too distant future." (JLB 585, 3/16/1888.) As Hendriks points out, Vincent continued to use his perspective frame in Paris the following year (1887) both for cityscapes (View of Paris from Vincent's Room in the Rue Lepic [F 341 JH 1242]) (Hendriks, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 102), and even for still-lifes (Tambourine with Pansies [F 244 JH 1093]) (ibid., p. 128) -- both of which could be done in the privacy of his studio. 211. mostly from the plaster casts Van Heugten, p. 22. 514 212. Cormon emphasized contour Murray, p. 44: "He emphasized contour at the expense of modelling. What concerned him most immediately, perhaps, was capturing the figure's 'line of action,' the basic, continuous flow of movement, around which the artist conventionally organized and harmonized the abstract patterns of the human form." 213. "They were to copy strictly" Gauzi, "Lautrec et son Temps," in Stein, ed., p. 71: Cormon was demanding both about accuracy and detail in drawing. His nickname among his students -- "Old Patella" -- reflects his obsession with precision. It is a reference to the triangular bone of the kneecap, an essential element in the accurate representation of the figure. It may also be a sly reference to his notoriously bony face and body. 214. the kind of precise, polished study Examples of Vincent at his determined academic best are Venus (F 1709v JH 1050), Venus (F 1363g JH 1052, Torso of Venus (F 1363av JH 1063), Torso of Venus (F 1708r 1064), Torso of Venus (F 1708v JH 1065), Torso of Venus (F 1709r JH 1066), Torso of Venus (F 1797 JH 1067), and Torso of Venus (F 1363b JH 1069), all drawings of an armless Venus. Tellingly, the most polished of all the plaster drawings attributed to Vincent, Venus, (F 1363e JH 1049), has been deattributed (Van Heugten, p. 328). 215. with broadened buttocks Most of Vincent's surviving Venus drawings have this problem. Venus (F 1709v JH 1050), Torso of Venus (F 1371r JH 1068), and Torso of Venus (F 1363b JH 1069) are particularly pronounced. The same distortions afflict his drawings from live models, females more so than males (Seated Female Nude [F 1700 JH 1010], Standing Female Nude Seen From the Back [F 1698 JH 1012], Standing Female Nude Seen from the Back [F 1710r JH 1036]). 216. misaligned limbs Standing Male Nude Seen from the Front (F 1364-1 JH 1007), Standing Male Nude Seen from the Front (F 1364-2 JH 1008), Standing Female Nude Seen from the Back (F 1698 JH 1012), Idol (F 1364a JH 1041), Idol (F 1364bv JH 1042). 217. enlarged feet Standing Male Nude Seen from the Front (F 1362 JH 1009), Standing Female Nude Seen From the Back (F 1698 JH 1012), Standing Male and Seated Female Nudes (F 1363ar JH 1014), Idol (F 1364bv JH 1042). In other drawings, the feet are misshapen (Standing Male Nude Seen from the Front [F 1364-1 JH 1007], Standing Male Nude Seen from the Front [F 1364-2 JH 1008], Idol [F 1364br JH 1046]) or don't stand flat (Standing Male and Seated Female Nudes [F 1363ar JH 1014], Idol [F 1364dv JH 1040], Idol and Sketches of Venus [F 1710v JH 1048]). 218. crooked faces Idol (F 1364dv JH 1040). Perhaps because of Vincent's difficulty with faces, most of the surviving plaster drawings (presumably his favorites) show the model either from behind or, in the case of the Venus, headless. With live models, when he often did not have a choice of position and time was limited, the results could be truly unfortunate. (Standing Male Nude Seen from the Front [F 1364-1 JH 1007], Standing Male Nude Seen from the Front [F 1364-2 JH 1008], Standing Male Nude Seen from the Front [F 1362 JH 1009], Standing Female Nude Seen From the Back [F 1698 JH 1012], and Standing Female Nude Seen from the Back [F 1710r JH 1036.]) 219. quivering contours Torso of Venus (F 1708r JH 1064), Torso of Venus (F 1708v JH 1065), Torso of Venus (F 1709r JH 1066). Presumably because of time limitations, this is even truer of the drawings from live models (Standing Male Nude Seen from the Front [F 1364-1 JH 1007], Standing Male Nude Seen from the Front [F 1364-2 JH 1008], Seated Female Nude [F 1700 JH 1010], Standing Female Nude Seen From the Back [F 1698 JH 1012], Standing Female Nude Seen from the Back [F 1710r JH 1036]). Even where he arrives at a definitive contour, the struggle to find it sometimes leaves clear signs of multiple, erased attempts (Torso of Venus [F 1708r JH 1064], Torso of Venus [F 1708v JH 1065], Seated Male Nude Seen from the Back [F 1701v JH 1085]). 220. "We considered his work" Hartrick, p. 46. 221. "nothing remarkable" Gauzi, "Lautrec et son Temps," in Stein, ed., p. 71. 222. He painted three studies Rewald, pp. 71-72: From an unpublished manuscript of Émile Bernard quoted in Rewald: "[Vincent] painted three studies during every sitting, drowning himself in heavy impastos, continually starting all over again on new canvases, painting the model from every possible angle while the miserable pupils who mocked him behind his back spent eight days, stupidly copying a single foot." (See Rewald, p. 71, n. 23 and n. 65.) 223. not even pausing Gauzi, "Lautrec et son Temps," in Stein, ed., pp. 71-72. (See Ch. 27, n. 224.) 224. "He worked in a chaotic fury" Destremau, p. 177. 225. the other students mocked Rewald, pp. 71-72. (See Ch. 27, n. 222.) 226. fell silent with anticipation Gauzi, "Lautrec et son Temps," in Stein, ed., p. 72: "But the moment Cormon had placed himself in front of Van Gogh's study, the silence became absolute, oppressive; everyone looked at his drawing and listened closely: What would the master say?" 227. placid master would react Schimmel, p. 73: Despite his seeming complacency, Cormon was known to occasionally throw fits. In 1883, Toulouse-Lautrec complained of being on the receiving end of "Cormon's thunderbolts." Since Toulouse-Lautrec is the primary source for generalizations about Cormon's easy-going pedagogical style, we take this as convincing evidence of a contrary streak. Bernard, who, unlike Toulouse-Lautrec, did not like Cormon, spread the rumor that he was a drinker. (See Destremau, p.174.) 228. Cormon only criticized Gauzi, "Lautrec et son Temps," in Stein, ed., p. 72: "Situated not far from Vincent, I watched Cormon from the corner of my eye. Impassively he looked at Van Gogh's painting without uttering a word. Finally he spoke, and the correction he gave, neglecting color, was solely directed at the drawing." 229. advised him to work more Van Heugten, p. 24: "As was customary in academic teaching, Cormon laid great stress on getting proportions right. Writing from Arles, Vincent reminded Theo that he utterly disagreed with Cormon's view that everything had to be measured." Van Heugten is referring to JLB 683, 9/18/1888. 230. in the afternoons Bernard, "Émile Bernard on Vincent (1886-1887)," pp. 38-40. 231. his eraser wore holes Bernard, "Émile Bernard on Vincent (1886-1887)," pp. 38-40. 232. "like a prisoner in his cell" Bernard, "Émile Bernard on Vincent (1886-1887)," pp. 38-40: This is from Bernard's recollections and must date from the fall or winter of 1886, not the spring, because Bernard was absent from Paris from April to October that year. The two artists did not encounter each other until after that. (See Ch. 27, n. 347.) While it is possible that such a chance meeting at Cormon's atelier did occur, it is equally possible that Bernard is just conveying an account he heard from one of Vincent's Cormon classmates, many of whom were friends of his in the winter of 1886-87. As discussed in the next chapter, Bernard is not the most reliable of witnesses. 233. less than three months See Ch. 27, n. 118. 234. "I did not find it" JLB 569, September or October 1886 (this letter was written in English).

Context:
JLB 569, September or October 1886: "I have been in Cormons studio for three or four months but did not find that so useful as I had expected it to be."

235. he never wrote another He wrote the one bitter criticism of Cormon (see Ch. 27, n. 208), but nothing about his experience at the atelier. 236. the subject never came up In one passage, Theo might have been referring obliquely to the Cormon atelier: "He is also more cheerful than in the past and people like him here. To give you a proof, almost no day passes or he is asked to come to the workshop of well known painters, or they come to him." (b0942 V/1962, "Gogh, Theo van" to "Gogh-Carbentus, Anna C. van", July 1886.) If "workshop" refers to Cormon's studio, Theo uses it in a very misleading way to support his reassurance to their mother that Vincent is more sociable and better-liked in Paris than in the past. (See also Ch. 27, n. 359.) 515 237. he spun a farrago Theo's letters to his mother, especially after his father's death, were crafted with one goal in mind: to allay her anxieties. Primary among these was that Vincent could not support himself and, as a result, he continued to be a weight upon Theo, her "crown and joy" (b0901 V/1962, "Gogh, Theo van" to "Gogh-Carbentus, Anna C. van", 5/19/1885). Typical is this passage from June 1885: "Even well known painters currently have difficulties selling. So the more difficult it is for an unknown who has only worked for a few years to sell something. But that will come." (ibid.) In the same letter, Theo tries to convince his mother that Vincent's paintings, which she dislikes, are better than they look, and also to justify his involvement with the peasants -- a major source of her disapproval: "his figures are so true, for it is certainly the truth that one finds among the farmers and farmers wives in Brabant many more on whose faces are carved the sharp lines of hard work and also of poverty than that one finds lovely faces among them" (ibid.). Similarly, in a letter from the summer of 1885, when Vincent's affair with Gordina de Groot is roiling Nuenen, Theo makes excuses for his brother, redirecting his mother's condemnation to the Catholic church: "What a pity about Vincent, he wrote me also, what all do those priests meddle in. If he only finds something else that is suitable!" (b0902 V/1962, ''Gogh, Theo van'' to ''Gogh-Carbentus, Anna C. van'', 9/8/1885.)

In letters like this one, Theo often plays the enabler to Vincent's excuses. From Paris, he writes as if Vincent's dental procedures will be the answer to a lifetime of social and professional problems: "You would not recognize Vincent, he has changed so much, others notice it even more than I do. He has undergone a major operation on his mouth, for he lost almost all his teeth due to the bad condition of his stomach. The doctor says that he has recovered completely. He is improving a lot in his work, proof that he is becoming successful." (b0942 V/1962, "Gogh, Theo van" to "Gogh-Carbentus, Anna C. van", July 1886.) This upbeat campaign, of course, included relentlessly glowing reports on the quality (and eventual salability) of Vincent's work, his hard work, and his popularity among his fellow painters. (The latter of these was designed to gratify his mother's conviction that Vincent's problems had always stemmed from his failure to mingle with the right people; thus his report in June 1886: "[Vincent] also has acquaintances who give him a collection of flowers every week which may serve him as models" [see Ch. 27, n. 359].)

When Vincent was in Antwerp, Theo wrote his mother, "I received a few letters from Vincent. He works a lot, and seems to specialize in portrait painting; that always brings in a bit more money." (b0905 V/1962, ''Gogh, Theo van'' to ''Gogh-Carbentus, Anna C. van'', 1/12/1886.) It should be noted that Theo's father, Dorus, calculated his letters to Vincent in exactly the same way, as he revealed to Theo in a letter from 1876: "We expect Vincent tomorrow. He will leave Paris tonight at 8 o'clock. What emotions he will have! And how emotional for us as well. I think you will understand. It is bitter sorrow, yet I always kept on writing to him in a cheerful tone." (b0955 V/1962, ''Gogh, Theodorus van'' to ''Gogh, Theo van',' 3/31/1876; emphasis added.) Interestingly, subsequent commentators readily allow that Theo calculated his reports so as to "spare his mother anxiety"), but only on the issue of his personal relationship with Vincent (Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 9). "[W]hen Theo himself wrote to their mother, he avoided complaining about Vincent's unruly behavior" (Rewald, p. 23). In fact, all of Theo's reporting on Vincent's life was shaped first and foremost by the need to reassure his mother (or, earlier, keep family peace) and should be seen in the same sympathetic but skeptical light.

238. "He is much more" Hulsker, "What Theo Really Thought of Vincent," pp. 8-9: We have chosen Hulsker's translation because, as Hulsker points out, Bonger's translation inexplicably leaves out some of the key passages in the letter. 239. not sold a single painting Hulsker, "What Theo Really Thought of Vincent," pp. 8-9: In his relentlessly upbeat letter to his mother in June, Theo admitted: "He [Vincent] has not yet sold paintings for money." Given that the clear purpose of this letter was to reassure his mother, it is certain that Theo would have reported any transaction that looked remotely like a sale as if there had been one. Nor had the situation improved by October 1886, when Vincent wrote Livens without mentioning any sales, as surely he would have (JLB 569, September or October 1886). 240. his attempts to win dealers There is much speculation in the literature about Vincent's efforts to exhibit and sell his paintings, but little is known for sure. Many possible outlets existed, from great galleries like Goupil (by now renamed Boussod & Valladon), to prominent dealers like Durand-Ruel, to auction houses like Drouot, to tiny, one-man, at-home "courtier" operations like Portier's, to frameshops and paint stores like Tanguy's. Excluding the latter two (Portier and Tanguy), Vincent's commercial contacts must have been either limited, or unsuccessful, or both, as he emerged after two years in Paris with only a few dealer-acquaintances -- a remarkably poor showing given his brother's contacts in the business. Furthermore, those few with whom he did, apparently, do business were a sorry lot, indeed. (He names them in JLB 718 [11/10/1888].) Georges Thomas was a former wine merchant who had a small shop at 43, boulevard Malesherbes. One contemporary account describes him as "gros, l'air bistrot, très rapace" (roughly: "fat, coarse, and very greedy") (Thomas, quoted in Coquiot's unpublished notes in the Van Gogh Foundation Archives, quoted in Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 215).

Nevertheless, according to another account, Theo did some business with Thomas. That, and not an interest in Vincent's art, may explain the visit that Thomas paid to the rue Lepic apartment as recalled by Vincent from Arles in 1889 (JLB 753, 3/29/1889). Looking at Vincent's sketch of "a faded woman" with "strange eyes," Thomas commented: "Ah but -- are those the kind of women to make a man horny?'" Pierre Firmin Martin (whom Vincent refers to as "père" (father) Martin (a generic term for an old man, not necessarily intimate), was an even more marginal dealer than Thomas. A former mason, Martin, like Portier, combined home and shop, and even then moved locations frequently. During Vincent's stay in Paris, Martin had a tiny apartment (one room and a kitchen) at 29, rue St. Georges from which he tried to sell, mostly unsuccessfully, a small inventory of paintings (Coquiot, p. 147). Like Thomas, Martin was known for being "unscrupulous" (ibid.). Artists complained that he had their paintings repainted to his own taste by a third party then demanded that artists re-sign the altered works (ibid.).

Probably in Theo's company, Vincent met other dealers while in Paris, dealers like Gabriel Delarebeyrette (referred to by Vincent as "Gabriel de la Roquette" (1862-1891) [JLB 625, 6/15/1888-6/16/1888]), son of Joseph Delarebeyrette, the leading Monticelli dealer, who died in September 1886 (Sheon, p. 56). A joint visit to the gallery is mentioned in JLB 830, 12/22/1889 and Vincent apparently knew members of the dealer's family well enough to write one of them from Arles (JLB 686, 9/23/1888 or 9/24/1888), but he referred to another one as "malicious" (JLB 635, 7/1/1888) and to the son Gabriel as a "scoundrel" (JLB 625, 6/15/1888-6/16/1888).

Similarly, Vincent is known to have patronized paint merchants other than Tanguy (e.g., Arnold & Tripp [JLB 699, 10/8/1888] and Guillaume Charles Tasset [JLB 700, 10/9/1888 or 10/10/1888]) where he may have displayed his works alongside those of other customers. But Thomas and Martin were the only dealers Vincent felt he knew well enough to call upon after leaving Paris. If the vehemence and persistence of his calls are an indication of how well he knew them, then he knew Thomas much better than Martin. Throughout 1888 and into the following year, he cajoled and demanded that his brother extract money from Thomas, through either sales or advances. (JLB 617, 5/29/1888 or 5/30/1888; JLB 625, 6/15/1888-6/16/1888; JLB 697, 10/4/1888 or 10/5/1888; JLB 637, 7/8/1888 or 7/9/1888; JLB 639, 7/13/1888; JLB 640, 7/15/1888; JLB 683, 9/18/1888; JLB 689, 9/26/1888; JLB 699, 10/8/1888; JLB 702, 10/10/1888 or 10/11/1888; JLB 709, 10/21/1888; JLB 718, 11/10/1888; JLB 753, 3/29/1889.)

When these efforts failed, he wrote Thomas directly, leading, inevitably, to a complete break. The relationship with Martin ended abruptly, apparently, in April 1888, only a few months after Vincent's arrival in Arles (JLB 592, 4/3/1888). Although Martin, like Thomas, may have visited the rue Lepic apartment once (JLB 634, 6/28/1888), we dismiss as apocryphal the story that Vincent painted a portrait of Martin's daughter "in the style of Renoir " (Coquiot, p. 147). That leaves only the question of when during his time in Paris Vincent knew and exhibited with these two dealers. The story about Thomas's visit to the brothers' apartment does not give any clue, as it is not clear which of Vincent's paintings, or drawings, elicited the dealer's crude comment. Woman Sitting by a Cradle (F 369 JH 1206), Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin (F 370 JH 1208), Nude Woman on a Bed (F 330 JH 1214), Portrait of a Woman (F 357 JH 1216), and Italian Woman (Agostina Segatori?) (F 381 JH 1355), or related drawings, are all possibilities, although Vincent's imprecise renderings of faces, and particularly eyes, makes the descriptor "strange" a difficult one to apply. The reference to a "faded woman" surely excludes not only Woman Sitting by a Cradle (F 369 JH 1206) but also Portrait of a Woman with Hat (F 215c) and Portrait of a Woman Seated (215d), which would argue for a dating sometime after the summer of 1886, which is the position of the text.

Moreover, Thomas was not fully converted to the "new" art until 1890, according to Thomson, making it unlikely that he would support Vincent this early in his career, except as a favor to Theo (ibid., p. 76). The dating of Thomas's interest would determine the possible start-date of Martin's involvement, as Vincent later recalled that Thomas was the second venue in Paris (after Tanguy's) where his work was "exhibited" (JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888). As discussed in Chapter 27, we do not take as probative at all Vincent's claim in his letter to Livens that, as of October 1886, his work was being exhibited by four dealers (JLB 569, September or October 1886). Thus, the extensive effort in the literature to identify those dealers is, we believe, misguided.

241. despite his brother's connections Vincent clearly used his connection to Theo often and openly to win attention to his art. This is not just a matter of obvious inference. For example, in a letter to the painter Charles Angrand in which Vincent proposed an exchange of paintings, he also pointedly encouraged Angrand to contact "Theo van Gogh at Boussod et Valadon," where one could see "a very beautiful Degas" (Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, pp. 37-39). This last appears to be Vincent's effort to help Theo at the same time that he helped himself. Angrand told Coquiot, "I knew his brother better than I knew Vincent himself" (Coquiot, p. 149). 242. "used to rage from time" Bailey, p. 103: One can hear the same bitter complaint in his letter to Livens from the fall of 1886: "Trade is slow here. The great dealers sell Millet, Delacroix, Corot, Daubigny, Dupré, a few other masters at exorbitant prices. They do little or nothing for young artists. The second class dealers contrariwise sell those at very low prices. ... But for the present things are awfully hard." (JLB 569, September or October 1886.) 243. abruptly withdrawn his supportSee Ch. 23, n. 244. 244. promising vaguely to mount Hulsker, "What Theo Really Thought of Vincent," pp. 8-9: Theo writes his mother, "There is a dealer in pictures who has now taken four of his paintings and has promised him to arrange for an exhibition of his work next year." If this detail is not entirely invented, which it may be, we suspect Theo's mission of reassurance has transformed it into a harder, more specific commitment from Portier than it was in fact. Tellingly, in Vincent's letter to Livens a few months later, the possibility of an exhibition in the future is not mentioned at all. Instead, Vincent inflates Portier's involvement in a different, more dramatic and immediate way: "At this present moment I have found four dealers who have exhibited studies of mine" (JLB 569, September or October 1886). This probably represents a compound exaggeration: the four paintings that Portier took on consignment (whether reluctantly or not) have now been spread around to four dealers, all four of whom have actually "exhibited" the works. The exaggeration serves the letter's larger purpose, which is to portray Vincent's professional life in Paris as attractive enough to lure Livens to join him there. 245. The only place Vincent Vincent wrote Theo from Arles in 1888: "We've hardly ever exhibited, have we? There were a few canvases at Tanguy's place first of all, at Thomas's and then at Martin's." (JLB 718, 11/10/1888.) This clearly indicates that the first place Vincent was able to show his work was at Tanguy's shop. Interestingly, he does not mention Portier. 246. "a small and shabby" Zemel, p. 179: Zemel quotes Albert Aurier, an art critic: "A nasty boutique and so small! but in little boxes, come fine salves. Enter and you will see the treasures of a thousand and one nights." 247. an old student tradition Hulsker, "What Theo Really Thought of Vincent," pp. 8-9: Theo wrote his mother: "[Vincent] has not yet sold paintings for money, but is exchanging his work for other pictures. In that way we obtain a fine collection which, of course, also has a certain value." For someone as clear-eyed and business-minded as Theo, this was surely putting the best face on a bad circumstance. It is not plausible that he expected Vincent would be able to exchange his work for any work valuable enough for Theo to have sold at Goupil, or for any work "fine" enough for Theo to buy for his own collection. Thus, the enterprise of exchange was, at best, a marginal one -- yet another hope of future value, but no more substantive than his faith in Vincent's eventual success -- hardly a substitute for an actual sale. This calculus may have changed the following year (1887) when Theo entered the world of avant-garde art for the first time, both as dealer and collector. Ending his long-time exclusive focus on blue-chip artists and images, he embraced the new paradigm of art dealing: i.e., "betting" that works by obscure, marginal artists (like his brother) might skyrocket in value. Only at that time would the works that Vincent brought in through exchanges have begun to represent "value" -- and even then, only potential value, not the "certain" value he represents to his mother. Rewald tries to suggest that Vincent found the idea of artists' exchanges in his study of Japanese art (Rewald, p. 51). We believe that this suggestion is both unnecessarily obscure and premature. 248. Only those artists as obscure JLB list the artists with whom Vincent is thought to have successfully made exchanges at this time (JLB 569, n. 13). They are Frank Myers Boggs, Charles Antoine (also known as Antonio Cristobal), and "Fabian" (see Ch. 27, n. 202). JLB put Russell on this list, but we would not. Even if Vincent gave Russell a painting as a "thankyou" for the portrait, he was not receiving anything of monetary value in exchange for it, which was the point Theo was trying to argue. There was no re-sale market for a portrait of Vincent. 249. Charles Angrand Angrand (1854-1926), who was one year younger than Vincent, had both a paying job (teaching) and an established position in the avant-garde art world of Paris, having helped found the Salon des Indépendants. By this time, he had already adopted the signature broken brushwork of Impressionists like Monet and was moving toward Neo-Impressionism after befriending Georges Seurat and seeing the gestation of La Grande Jatte. 250. simply ignored his overtures Coquiot, p. 149: Vincent's entreaty began with a letter (postmarked October 25, 1886) in which he characteristically sidled up to the proposal, recommending an exchange between Angrand and the American painter Frank Boggs (1855-1926) before proposing his own Montmartre paintings (2 vues du Moulin de la Galette) as available for an échange. Unwilling to leave the proposal even slightly vague, he then names the Angrand painting that he wants in exchange, Jeune fille aux poule (Girl with Chickens). (See Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, pp. 37-39.) While Angrand apparently did agree to a face-to-face meeting with Vincent (also proposed in the letter), he did not, by his own account, follow through on the exchange. He later told Coquiot, "I remember very little about Van Gogh. No doubt we met at Tanguy's sometimes, but the thing I remember best, is when he paid me a visit at the end of November one year at the Collège Chaptal [where Angrand was teaching]. ... Mostly he had come to entreat me to exchange pictures with him. That was his passion for a while, I think. ... In any case we never followed it up." (Coquiot, p. 149.)

The year of the meeting Angrand describes is not clear from his account, but given that he mentions the same painting, Jeune fille aux poules, as being the object of Vincent's exchange proposal, it must have been November 1886. Elsewhere in his account, Angrand appears to point to an 1887 date for the meeting, as he told Coquiot that Vincent "was obliged to leave Paris shortly afterwards" (i.e., after their meeting). This could be merely the compression of memory. Both the letter and the subsequent meeting were probably prompted by Vincent seeing Angrand's six works in the Indépendants exhibition that ran from August 20 to September 21, 1886. (See Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 218.) However, the painting that Vincent had picked out for exchange, Jeune fille aux poules, was hanging at Tanguy's at the time, according to Angrand's account (Coquiot, p. 149).

251. "people like him here" Hulsker, "What Theo Really Thought of Vincent," pp. 8-9. (See Ch. 27, n. 238.) 252. betray not a hint Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, pp. 25-26: Welsh-Ovcharov acknowledges that Vincent left no mark on the contemporary accounts of other artists -- "a reading of published letters and reminiscences written by the relevant individuals reveals that such artists as Degas, Renoir, C. Pissarro and Monet write of Vincent as anything other than a close acquaintance." Galbally confirms this is also true of the correspondence of John Peter Russell, one of the few people in Paris with whom Vincent seems to have had at least an acquaintanceship (he sat for a portrait by Russell and wrote him numerous letters after leaving Paris) (Galbally, p. 41). Nevertheless, Welsh-Ovcharov accepts the "widespread assumption" (Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 19) that "Vincent managed to accommodate himself to the Parisian art community with a speed and efficacy that the various reports of his eccentric behavior have managed to obscure" (ibid., p. 52). Despite any evidence and despite Vincent's manifest inability to get along with practically anyone over long periods of time (Van Rappard being the notable exception), most art historians have assumed that he regularly mingled in the company of other "masters" during his time in Paris. In his second year in Paris, Vincent did begin to meet and learn from other later-prominent artists, although, we will argue in the next chapter, the inspiration went mostly one-way. It would be several more years before other artists began to learn from Vincent. 253. A. S. Hartrick Archibald Standish Hartrick. 254. "more than a little" Bailey, p. 104. 255. Henry Ryland reacted Hartrick, p. 50. 256. "That terrible man" Hartrick, p. 50. 257. "anaemic and useless" Hartrick, p. 50: "Vincent frequently came to see me in the Impasse Hélène, to the horror of poor Ryland [Henry Ryland, 1856-1924; British artist], who, having hung up a set of weak watercolours of the 'La belle dame sans merci' type, found himself unmercifully attacked by the free tongue of Van Gogh, who promptly told him that they were anaemic and useless reflections of Pre-Raphaelites -- a kind of artist that he mostly despised. I would return, from going up and down in Paris, to find Ryland, who suffered from sick headaches, with his head wrapped in a towel soaked in vinegar and looking a sickly yellow, while he wailed: 'Where have you been? That terrible man has been here for two hours waiting for you and I can't stand it any more.'" 258. extinguished his welcome BVG 625, 2/2/1890: The record contains only one hint as to the reason why Vincent somewhat abruptly stopped going to Russell's studio in Paris, even though they continued, intermittently, to correspond.

Context:
JLB 850, 2/1/1890: "In any case, Russell has outbursts, he gets angry, he says something true, and that's what I need sometimes" (emphasis in original).

516 259. whom he barely knew See Ch. 27, n. 91.  260. "I work alone" JLB 569, September or October 1886 (this letter was written in English). Vincent cryptically admits that his abrupt departure from Cormon's studio resembled his departure from the Antwerp Academy and that in both cases, "[i]t may be my fault" (JLB 569, September or October 1886). Putting as good a face as possible on his fears of an unbreakable cycle of failure and loneliness, he writes: "I left [Cormon's] too as I left Antwerp and since I worked alone, and fancy that since I feel my own self more" (ibid.).

Context:
JLB 569, September or October 1886: " And so I am struggling for life and progress in art. … It may be my fault however, any how I left there too as I left Antwerp and since I worked alone, and fancy that since I feel my own self more."

261. he begged the distant Livens JLB 569, September or October 1886. The invitation is the culmination of a letter that can only be described as fatuous. 

Context:
JLB 569, September or October 1886: "Now I would very much like to know what you are doing and whether you ever think of going to Paris. If ever you did come here, write to me before and I will, if you like, share my lodgings and studio with you so long as I have any."

262. "In spring, or even sooner" JLB 569, September or October 1886 (this letter was written in English). Where did Vincent get the idea of going south? Given the timing of this proposal to Livens, it is likely related to Anquetin's departure for the south that summer, as reported in a letter from Toulouse-Lautrec to his mother: "Anquetin is going to leave for the south, somewhere near Nice. Now that really annoys me and if I felt strong enough I swear I'd follow him." (Toulouse-Lautrec, quoted in Schimmel, p. 101.) It may also have been prompted by the death of the Provençal artist Adolphe Monticelli in June 1886. A year later, when Vincent finally did leave for Provence, one of the justifications he used was to seek out some works by Monticelli that the brothers could then sell at a profit (see later in this chapter). Of course, Vincent had been hearing about the south of France since his childhood, when his Uncle Cent began to winter in Menton, on the Riviera. In the same letter to Livens (the only one Vincent is known to have written him), Vincent also invited Livens to visit him in Paris: "If ever you did come here, write to me before and I will, if you like, share my lodgings and studio with you so long as I have any" (JLB 569, September or October 1886).

Context:
JLB 569, September or October 1886: " In spring -- say February or even sooner -- I may be going to the south of France, the land of the blue tones and gay colours. And look here, if I knew you had longings for the same we might combine." (Emphasis in original.)

263. two portraits of the same These two paintings (Portrait of a Woman with Hat [F 215c] and Portrait of a Woman Seated [F 215d]) have no JH number because their authenticity has long been disputed. The latest scholarship argues on the basis of both stylistic and technical evidence that they are, in fact, by Vincent, and places them firmly in the first months after Vincent's arrival in Paris (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., pp. 33-40). Both portraits were long thought to show Theo's eventual wife, Jo Bonger, which confused their dating. Van Tilborgh debunks that identification, and offers a conjecture that the sitter was either Theo's mistress, "the mysterious S.," or the Van Gogh brothers' housekeeper in Paris, a woman named only "Lucie" (ibid., p. 39). We think that both portraits depict the same woman, which is not only apparent, but also consistent with Vincent's work pattern in the past. 264. his mania returned Welsh-Ovcharov has done the pioneering and crucial work on Vincent's Paris period, but we would suggest that her assertion about Vincent's single-mindedness in Paris is overbroad: "one may assume that for Vincent while in Paris no less than elsewhere during his career as an artist his temperament allowed for little else but devotion to the single pursuit which then held his interest" (Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 53). The "single pursuit" in Welsh-Ovcharov's view is "self-abnegating devotion to a career in art throughout his Paris stay" (ibid.). In his life before coming to Paris and after leaving it, Vincent certainly pursued his artistic goals with fervor, but, as we have seen and will continue to see, those goals were a function of even deeper, more compelling, and more defining goals -- belonging, control, redemption, consolation, serenity -- goals that often found other, more immediate, forms of both reinforcement and assuagement: in particular, women, sex, and drink. 265. unbroken stream of models Milner, p. 20. 266. voted on their favorites Milner, p. 20: According to Milner, the model's pose was also "established by a vote." 267. set out to arrange Jansen and Robert, pp. 160-161: In February 1889, Theo wrote to Jo, recalling Vincent's days in Paris: "In Paris he saw masses of things he wanted to paint, but time and again he was prevented from doing so. Models didn't want to pose for him." We take it as an inevitable predicate for Theo's report that Vincent, in fact, sought models to pose for him; that is, privately, outside the atelier. 268. "[They] did not want" Jansen and Robert, pp. 160-161. (See Ch. 27, n. 267.) 269. pierreuse Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 200. 270. lorette King, p. 134. 271. gigolette Gronberg, pp. 331-333: Defined by Gronberg as "a type of prostitute active on the outskirts of the Parisian Right Bank. 'Comme elle passe généralement la nuit à boire, elle dort tard le matin, se lève vers onze heures pour prendre 1'absinthe, passe la journée à se trainer dans les caboulots en compagnie de son rouquin.'" (As she generally spends the night drinking, she sleeps in late, gets up around 11 o'clock to take some absinthe, spends the day hanging out in bars with her redheaded friend.) 272. apéritive Gronberg, p. 334: Gronberg describes the defining characteristic of an apéritive as "her social mobility, her hopes and prospects for climbing further the ladder of unlicensed prostitution. ... if the gigolette and the lorette represented one end of the spectrum of clandestine prostitution, this spectrum faded in no very easily definable manner into the apéritive." 273. Even Russell would leave Salter, p. 55: According to Salter: "[Russell] had been initiated by a people for whom sex was a part of living, as unstressed as it was pleasurable. For the kind of girl he looked for, he coined his own title. She was a 'fornarina' and her role was to provide an outlet for energy. She was to be valued, if only as an insurance policy against a too early marriage. Nor did he confuse the issue. There were 'ladies' and there was the demi-monde. Like his father before him he respected both. But one must never be mistaken for the other. ... A gentlewoman was for marriage, and the founding of a family. This was a practical matter, to be thought of in practical terms." (Salter, pp. 36-37.) 274. and pregnant Salter, pp. 73-74. 517 275. "screw 5 or 6 times" JLB 633, 6/27/1888. We have slightly altered the translation.

Context:
BVG B5, 5/20/1888: "Something like this is not characteristic at all, for the women of our boulevard -- the little one -- usually sleep alone by night, for they have five or six hauls during the day or in the evening. and très tard there is that honorable carnivore, their maquereau, who comes and takes them home, but he does not sleep with them (or rarely)."
JLB 633, 6/27/1888: "Something like that -- it's not characteristic, because the women of our boulevard -- le petit -- usually sleep alone at night because they screw 5 or 6 times during the day or the evening and -- late at night it's that honourable carnivore, their pimp, who comes to collect them and take them home, yes, but he doesn't sleep with them (only rarely)."

276. " macquereaux" BVG B5, 5/20/1888: As Vincent clearly was not referring to a particular pimp, we have taken the liberty of changing his generic singular ("maquereau") to a plural construction.

Context:
BVG B5, 5/20/1888: "… and très tard there is that honorable carnivore, their maquereau [pimp], who comes and takes them home, but he does not sleep with them (or rarely)."
JLB 633, 6/27/1888: "… late at night it's that honourable carnivore, their pimp, who comes to collect them and take them home, yes, but he doesn't sleep with them (only rarely)."

277. "The whore is like meat" BVG B9, 6/24/1888: In fairness to Vincent, this alarmingly insensitive comment should be read in the context of his relationship with Bernard, to whom it is addressed. Their letters are deeply marked by competitive sex talk and À rebours cynical posturing, much of it centered around brothels and sexual conquests. Indeed, the instant passage appears to have been triggered by similarly provocative comments in a letter from Bernard, and in Vincent's full response one can hear him struggling to reconcile his young friend's sexual cynicism with his own older, sentimental notions of "fallen" women. It should also be noted that the comparison of prostitutes to cuts of beef was not original to Vincent at the time. Coquiot describes the sexual underworld of Montmartre in similar terms: "In order to reach his gallery at 19, boulevard Montmartre, Theo would go down the teeming rue des Martyrs, where he found the real spirit, vitality and life of Montmartre, tumbling right down to the bottom, to the foot of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. He would cross the Châteaudun crossroads; and then he would pass through that part of Montmartre, whose bars are a meeting-point for pimps and prostitutes, all jumbled up with managers of low dives and 'meat dealers' [marchands de viande]." (Coquiot, p. 114.)

Context:
BVG B9, 6/24/1888: "That's all right, the whore is like meat in a butcher's shop. I, though, having become a mere brute, I understand, I feel it, I rediscover a sensation in my own life; I say, That is well spoken -- for the sonorous rhythm of the colorful words evoke for me with great intensity the brutal reality of the slums, but on me, the brute, the reproaches directed against society, such hollow words as 'le bon Dieu' -- the good God -- no longer make any impression. I say, That isn't the real thing -- and I sink back into my brutish state; I forget poetry, which was powerful enough at first to dispel my stupefaction."
JLB 633, 6/27/1888: "Very good, that, the whore is like meat at the butcher's. For myself -- numbed -- I understand, I feel that, I recognize a sensation from my own life, I say: that's well said. Because the sonorous rhythm of the colourful words suggests to me the brutal reality of the dive with great intensity. But the reproofs addressed at the end to 'society,' a word as hollow as 'the good Lord' to me, numbed as I am, no longer have any effect on me. It isn't there, I say, and I sink into my numbness again; I forget the poem, at first strong enough to dispel my lethargy." (Emphasis in original.)

278. about forty-five According to Van Tilborgh, Agostina Segatori's life dates are 1841-1910 (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 76). 279. aged into a savvy, bosomy Bernard, "Julian Tanguy, Called Le Père Tanguy," in Stein, ed., p. 93: Anatomical amplitude was undoubtedly the point of Bernard's colorful description of Segatori as "an extremely beautiful Italian woman, a former model, who let sprawl her robust and imposing charms onto a bar-top she made exclusively hers." 280. bohemian signora Gachet, p. 6. 281. a young lover Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh and the Birth of Cloisonism, p. 100: Her lover was the Swedish painter August Hagborg. Hagborg was only a year older than Vincent and about eleven younger than Segatori. Unlike Vincent, Hagborg had been a successful Salon painter since as early as 1876, when he was still in his early twenties. He was best known, fittingly, for paintings that idealized and heroized beautiful women. 282. two blond Great Danes Coquiot, p. 127. 283. languorous authority Coquiot, pp. 126-127: "Une grande et belle fille brune, aimable et un peu languissante, Agostina Segattori." 284. "imposing charm" Bernard, "Julian Tanguy, Called Le Père Tanguy," in Stein, ed., p. 93: This is Émile Bernard's assessment of Segatori: "an extremely beautiful Italian woman, a former model, who let sprawl her robust and imposing charms onto a bar-top she made exclusively hers." 285. the big establishment "Advertisement for Le Tambourin," n.p.: According to the illustration for an advertisement for Le Tambourin (in the Van Gogh Foundation Archives) the cabaret consisted of two levels: a street-level with banquettes and round tables and a balustraded second level overlooking the first floor, accessible by a staircase beyond the front room. 286. tambourine-shaped tables Coquiot, p. 127. 287. Italian peasant dresses Oberthur, p. 56. Gronberg traces the origin of brasseries à femmes to the Universal Exhibition of 1867, where "various stalls and restaurants sold alcoholic drinks from participating countries; these beverages were served by girls in national costume -- Italian, Spanish, German, etc." (Gronberg, p. 336). Gachet confirms both that Le Tambourin servers were women and that they were dressed in Italianate costumes (Gachet, p. 6). An advertisement for Le Tambourin shows a woman in Italian costume serving a drink to a man (“Advertisement for Le Tambourin,” n.p.). She is wearing a jumper over a blouse with a very large apron with wide horizontal decorative bands and, on her head, a large piece of cloth that trailed back down her back. 288. the allure was moreCoquiot, pp. 126-127: The evidence that Segatori was more than just an ambitious restauranteur is more than just circumstantial. Coquiot hints at the hidden part of her business: "Elle craignait surtout de causer de la peine à un homme pour peu qu'il fût d'apparence luronne" (Her greatest fear was causing a man any difficulty if he seemed like a bit of a likely lad); and Bernard's (expurgated) account of Madame Tanguy's objections to Le Tambourin clearly indicates that the attractions of Segatori's establishment went beyond the food: "The fact that he [Vincent] led Tanguy into this establishment greatly upset Tanguy's good wife, who could scarcely imagine innocent and infantile reasons for such ... escapades" (Bernard, in Stein, p. 93). 289. side business in prostitutionGronberg, p. 337: According to Gronberg, there were one hundred and eighty-one brasseries à femmes in Paris in 1882 and, by some estimates, as many as six hundred by 1894 (Gronberg, p. 338). Le Tambourin is referred to variously as a "tavern" and a "café," not as a "brasserie," but the categories were fluid, largely unregulated, and certainly unrecognized. 290. their servers' Corbin, pp. 168-169: The serving girls were known as verseuses (pourers). 291. "knew a lot of women" BVG 439, 12/8/1885-12/15/1885. In her publicity material, Segatori clearly played to her own racy reputation as a model-prostitute to great artists, which only underscored the implicit promise of sexual opportunity that attached to all establishments like Le Tambourin. Oberthur quotes from a Le Tambourin publicity flyer: "To enhance her café even more, Madame Segatori has engaged the most charming young ladies you'd ever hope to see, fresh-blown flowers budding in the Italian sun and blossoming in the warm radiance of our capital" (Oberthur, p. 57).

Context:
BVG 439, 12/8/1885-12/15/1885: "Now she is a washerwoman and knows a lot of women, and could always supply some, she said."
JLB 547, 12/14/1885: "Now she's a washerwoman and knows a lot of women, and would always be able to provide them, she says."

292. eavesdropping sketches Van Heugten allows that none of these images, drawings or paintings, is datable with any degree of specificity or confidence. Most are dated generally to the winter of 1886-87 but even this broad range could be mistaken. The dating of some drawings (Couple Making Love) depends on the dating of Vincent's time at Cormon's studio, about which there is considerable disagreement. (See Ch. 27, n. 118.) Nude Woman Squatting Over a Basin (F 1376 JH 1162) is drawn on the back of a menu, but there is no external evidence as to when Vincent began patronizing that restaurant. Van Heugten dates the group of drawings and paintings that appear to depict the same "pierreuse" (Nude Woman Reclining, Seen from the Back [F 328 JH 1212], Study for 'Reclining Female Nude' [F 1404 JH 1213], Nude Woman on a Bed [F 330 JH 1214], Nude Woman Reclining [F 329 JH 1215], Portrait of a Woman [F 357 JH 1216], and perhaps Seated Woman [F 1781 JH 1152]) to the winter of 1886-87 primarily on the basis of the style of pen strokes or brushstrokes Vincent employs. By discussing these images in the text prior to the flower paintings that are firmly dated to the summer of 1886, we do not mean to imply that all, or any, of them necessarily date from earlier than Van Heugten's window. But we find it unthinkable that Vincent waited six months or more to dive into the famous and ubiquitous world of Parisian prostitution, in search of both sexual fulfillment and subjects for his artistic obsessions. We suspect that the surviving drawings and paintings represent only a small portion of a larger body of work that Vincent began building almost immediately after his arrival in Paris. 293. a woman lying naked Study for 'Reclining Female Nude', F 1404 JH 1213, January-June 1887, pencil, 9.4 x 12.4 in., 24 x 31.5 cm., Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 294. a woman sitting Seated Woman, F 1718 JH 1152, January-June 1887, pencil, 11.8 x 9.8 in., 30 x 25 cm., Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The woman, who is only roughly sketched, may or may not be the same sitter as in Study for 'Reclining Female Nude' (F 1404 JH 1213), Nude Woman on a Bed (F 330 JH 1214), and Portrait of a Woman (F 357 JH 1216). Although the bed referred to in the text is not visible, Vincent seems to have made some crude effort to show the figure perched on the edge of something. Because she is just taking off (or putting on) her stocking, and because that action would be a key moment in the seductive arc of the event, we think this is the moment Vincent sought to capture. 295. a woman squatting Nude Woman Squatting Over a Basin, F 1376 JH 1162, 1887, pencil, 8.3 x 5.3 in., 21 x 13.5 cm., Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 296. the peep-show scene Gay, The Tender Passion, p. 354. Van Heugten takes a different view on the background of this drawing, with which Vincent took surprising pains (Van Heugten, p. 177). "It is not clear whether he saw a couple making love out of doors or added some trees and undergrowth to an erotic scene." The first of these explanations seems less convincing to us -- even in Paris. On the other hand, erotic theatricals were readily available (including acts far more exotic than this), and a theatrical setting would explain Vincent's effort, on the left side of the drawing, to suggest through hatching that the distant landscape is two-dimensional (the depicted "outdoor" horizon sits well above the edge of the floor). The couple appears to be working in a corner created by two panels which meet behind them. The outdoor "set" would be appropriate for a Dionysian-themed sequence of staged sexual acts, which could include, according to Gay, "homosexuality, sadism, masochism, oral or anal intercourse, group sex, [and] every conceivable variety of sexual pleasure including bestiality with Great Danes" (Gay, The Tender Passion: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, p. 354). 297. a couple copulating Couple Making Love, December 1885, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam. This drawing has no Jan Hulsker (JH) number or De la Faille (F) number. According to Van Heugten, "It is impossible to make out why neither De la Faille nor Hulsker included it in their oeuvre catalogues. They may have been unaware of its existence, apprehensive about the consequences of publication, or simply did not believe the attribution, but it is certainly remarkable that Hulsker omitted it from the addenda in the revised edition of his book, which came out in 1996. Matthias Arnold, obviously ignorant of the 1987 catalogue, actually thought he had stumbled across a minor scandal in 1995, voicing his suspicion that the drawing had been suppressed out of respect or narrow-mindedness." (Van Heugten, p. 177.) 518 298. overripe body and coarse face Van Heugten, pp. 249-253: Vincent's friend, Émile Bernard, later claimed to recognize the sitter in these images. According to Van Heugten: "Bernard was the only one who gave some hint as to her identity when he said that he knew her, and called her a 'pierreuse,' or streetwalker." Even without that identification, there can be little doubt, based on her body, her come-hither poses, and her gargoyle features, that this woman was not a professional model -- and certainly not a working girl or bourgeois lady whom Vincent has persuaded to such liberties. For these reasons, as well as her apparent youth, the sitter is surely not Madame Tanguy, as some have concluded (Van Heugten, pp. 252-253). 299. as a grotesque odalisque The drawing is Study for 'Reclining Female Nude' (F 1404 JH 1213); the paintings are Nude Woman Reclining, Seen from the Back (F 328 JH 1212), Nude Woman on a Bed (F 330 JH 1214), and Nude Woman Reclining (F 329 JH 1215). Much scholarly attention has been given to the divan in Nude Woman on a Bed (F 330 JH 1214). Gauzi claimed that Vincent invented it, whereas Welsh-Ovcharov limits the possibilities of its location to "the atelier Cormon or the rue Lepic apartment" (Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 200). We think there is a third possibility: the room where the prostitute received her customers. It seems highly unlikely that Vincent brought this woman back to the apartment that he shared with his brother. Even if Theo was out of town, the building had a concierge and neighbors. (Besides, Theo recalled that "Models didn't want to pose for [Vincent]" in Paris" [b2007 V/1982, ''Gogh, Theo van'' to ''Bonger, Jo'', 2/4/1889].) Vincent's descriptions of the rooms that Paris prostitutes occupied demonstrate first-hand knowledge (JLB 612, 5/22/1888; see Ch. 27, n. 275).

Van Heugten entertains the possibility that not all of these images show the same woman, but largely dismisses it (Van Heugten, p. 252). He also points out that Vincent probably depicted the same woman in yet another painting which he later covered over with a self-portrait (Self-Portrait with Pipe and Glass [F 263a JH 1199]) (see Van Heugten, p. 252, n. 9). He then conjectures that only the drawing, Study for 'Reclining Female Nude' (F 1404 JH 1213), was done from the live model: "The drawing is not a preliminary study in the sense of a rapid sketch in which the artist tries to find the right pose. It is too detailed for that. Van Gogh probably made it as an aide-mémoire which he could use to help him finish the painting after the model had left. Working with small dabs of paint was a time-consuming business, and it would have been very expensive to keep the woman posing all that time." (ibid.)

We would agree, with only two caveats: the painting was probably not done at his studio and Vincent was probably paying the "sitter" sexual wages, not modeling wages (either one of which would have been too expensive for dallying). Also, one version of the odalisque (Nude Woman Reclining [F 329 JH 1215]) is done in a much smaller version that Vincent boldly signed (although there are questions about the attribution of this painting [see Van Heugten, p. 249, n. 6].) If it is Vincent's, he might have made it as a gift for the model, although the fact that it survives would suggest that she never took possession of it. If Van Heugten is right about the aide-mémoire, then Vincent must have done another quick drawing, since lost, showing the same woman turned with her back facing him, as there is an elaborate painting showing her from that angle (Nude Woman Reclining, Seen from the Back [F 328 JH 1212]).

300. a portrait done in the same Portrait of a Woman, F 357 JH 1216, 1886/87, oil on canvas, 16.5 x 13.8 in., 42 x 35 cm., Kunstmuseum Basel, on loan from the Rudolf Staechelin Family Foundation. 301. He even sketched her Sorrowing Woman, F 1378v, January-June 1887, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. This drawing has no JH number, but is reproduced and discussed in Van Heugten (pp. 260-262, cat. no. 305). Although too sketchy to make out any of the model's identifying features, it was made on the same sheet of paper as two other drawings, Seated Woman (F 1787 JH 1152) and Study for 'Reclining Female Nude' (F 1404 JH 1213). In both sketches, the model is identifiable as the pierreuse depicted in Nude Woman on a Bed (F 330 JH 1214) and Portrait of a Woman (F 357 JH 1216). Still, Van Heugten refrains from confirming the identification (Van Heugten, p. 262). 302. the little nude statuettes Van Tilborgh lists eleven pieces of table-top plaster sculptures that ended up in the Van Gogh brothers' collection: a death mask of a young woman, a bust of a man, a Dante mask, a kneeling muscleman, a copy of Michelangelo's Dying Slave, a horse after the antique, a seated woman's torso, a standing Venus, a Venus torso with one left, a male torso, and a copy of Michelangelo's Young Slave (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 44). The last four of these -- unfortunately, the ones that Vincent depicted most often -- did not survive (ibid., p. 45). 303. shoes, which he painted A Pair of Shoes, F 255 JH 1124, second half of 1886, oil on canvas, 17.8 x 17.9 in., 37.5 x 45.5 cm., Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. In fact, Vincent painted two very similar versions of this subject at this time (i.e., fall or winter of 1886). The other is A Pair of Shoes [F 332a JH 1233]. Probably around the same time, he also painted a larger painting that depicts three pairs of shoes (Three Pairs of Shoes [F 332 JH 1234]). In 1887, he painted two additional still-lifes of shoes (A Pair of Shoes [F 331 JH 1235] and A Pair of Shoes [F 333 JH 1236]). Van Tilborgh summarizes the astonishingly ample literature on these images (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., pp. 65-73). It is only necessary to point out where our account differs from others. We believe that these shoes, like the birds' nests in the Nuenen studio, represent a genuine, spontaneous vignette from his life in Paris, and that Gauzi's anecdote (that Vincent bought them and dirtied them for the painting) is spurious. The shoes depicted are undoubtedly a "worker's," not those of a "citizen of standing" (ibid., p. 66), but until after his arrival in Paris, Vincent dressed routinely in the blue blouse of a worker (on his visit to Amsterdam in 1885, he boasted when someone mistook him for "an ironworker" [JLB 550, 12/28/1885; see Ch. 26, n. 5]), and he probably brought these shoes with him to Paris in February 1886. Only then did he begin to dress regularly like a bourgeois gentleman. We do agree with Van Tilborgh's rejection of the many layers of socialist commentary that have accreted to these images over the years (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., pp. 68-71). Vincent's images (and metaphors) were always first and foremost autobiographical; his artistic intents rarely reached beyond his tumultuous inner world. Obviously, we also agree with Van Tilborgh's repudiation of the earlier date sometimes attributed to this painting; however, as the text indicates, we believe the backward-looking subject matter, palette, and mood are important clues to the significance of the image, both for Vincent's art and for his life at the time (ibid., pp. 67-68). 519 304. "Color drove him mad" Gauzi, "Lautrec et son Temps," in Stein, ed., p. 71. 305. "simultaneous contrast" BVG 428, 10/15/1885-10/31/1885. This, of course, was the title of Michel Chevreul's landmark treatise: De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (The Law of Simultaneous Contrasts of Colors). Vincent recognized that the clash of complementaries was only part of Blanc's theory, but he considered it the most important part (that is: for him, the most compelling part), writing in October 1885 from Nuenen. While Vincent made paintings that explored all three of these corollaries of the law of simultaneous contrasts during his time in Paris, including works "with an almost monochrome colour scheme" (i.e., using "tones of which vary chiefly in intensity and in value") (the "third question" in his summary), he returned again and again to the first and "foremost" one: complementaries (JLB 483, 2/5/1885-2/26/1885). In this, too, he was hewing to Chevreul, who wrote: "In the Harmony of Contrast the complementary assortment is superior to every other" (Chevreul, p. 237).

Context:
BVG 428, 10/15/1885-10/31/1885: "These things concerning complementary colors, simultaneous contrast, and the neutralizing of complementals, this question is the first and principal one ..."
JLB 536, 10/20/1885: "These things that relate to complementary colours, to simultaneous contrast and to the way complementaries neutralize each other, this question is the first and foremost."

306. "an intense, unexpected blue" Gauzi, "Lautrec et son Temps," in Stein, ed., p. 71. 307. drab brown back-drop Murray, p. 84. 308. "with violent new tones" Gauzi, "Lautrec et son Temps," in Stein, ed., p. 71. 309. "He never stopped talking" b3024 V/1982, "Koning, A.H." to "Plasschaert, A.", 5/8/1911. 310. a torchlight parade Chevreul, p. 15. 311. They recruited scientists Rewald, p. 13: "A young scientist, Charles Henry, at the same time concluded a study on L'Esthétique Scientifique which appeared, like Fénéon's articles, in the little review La Vogue." Henry was a lecturer at the Sorbonne. 312. "exactitude of atmosphere" Lövgren, pp. 70-71: From a review appearing in L'Art Moderne on June 27, 1886, entitled Les Ving-tistes Parisiens, possibly written by Octave Maus, according to Lövgren. 313. acolytes of Huysmans's À rebours Gustave Kahn (1859-1936; French writer) wrote this famous affirmation of Symbolist first principles: "The essential purpose of our art is to objectify the subjective (the exteriorization of the Idea) in lieu of subjectifying the objective (nature through a temperament)" (Kahn, quoted in Sund, p. 124). 314. the power of suggestion Sund, p. 123: Sund offers a beautiful discussion of what she calls "The Symbolist Offensive" at this time. 315. The arguments reached Zola's call to unity in The Masterpiece (L'oeuvre) was met only with deeper and more rancorous divisions, dueling manifestos, and reciprocal denouncements. In the fall of 1886, Jean Moréas published Manifesto du symbolisme, marking the first time artists embraced the name. That same year, the critic Félix Fénéon published a collection of his articles in a booklet called Les Impressionnistes en 1886, which served as a counter-manifesto for divisionism in general and La Grand Jatte in particular: "These colors, isolated on the canvas, recombine on the retina: we have, therefore, not a mixture of material colors (pigments), but a mixture of differently colored rays of light" (Fénéon, quoted in Lövgren, p. 73). 316. according to one account The story of the Cormon Atelier "insurrection" in the first half of 1886 comes from Émile Bernard, who had left the studio by the time Vincent arrived there. Like many of Bernard's accounts, it suffered inflation over time -- the inevitable by-product of his self-promotional approach to the past. Bernard, of course, places his eighteen-year-old self at the center of the artistic debates that preoccupied artistic conversation at the time, not just at Cormon's atelier, but everywhere in the Paris art world. "[A] breath of revolt had blown through the theories of the place as soon as I entered the studio," he wrote in 1932 (Bernard, "Louis Anquetin, artiste-peintre," p. 591). It was in that spirit, according to Bernard, that he took it upon himself to paint the drab brown backdrop in the studio in bright stripes of red and green. Outraged by this rebellious act (which shattered Cormon's dreams of a "gifted" young protégé, Bernard claims), Cormon expelled him (ibid.). Bernard's father promptly burned his son's paints and brushes and ordered him to quit his career as an artist -- an order that Bernard heroically refused (Rewald, p. 21). That, at least, is the kernel of Bernard's story.

Over many retellings, by Bernard and others, the story was aggrandized into an "historic revolt" (Salter, p. 83) and attracted a number of unlikely, contradictory, and even absurd details: that Cormon was, in fact, a doctrinaire taskmaster (Destremau, quoted in Bernard, p. 128); that Bernard's "protest" spoke for a group of "radicalized" Cormon students (Murray, p. 84); that Bernard won Toulouse-Lautrec over to the insurgents (ibid.); that Toulouse-Lautrec and Bernard were co-leaders of the rebellion (Hartrick, p. 43); that Anquetin led the "hardliners" (Destremau, p. 174) and "carried most of the studio with him" (ibid.); that many students, including Toulouse-Lautrec, were expelled by Cormon (Coquiot, quoted in Hartrick, p. 48); that the atelier was forced to shut down as a result of the "upheaval" (Destremau, p. 174); that Cormon closed the atelier prematurely for the summer (Salter, p. 84); and that Van Gogh was among the rebels (Hartrick, p. 48).

Pursuing the last of these fictions, Hartrick, a fearless storyteller who had no first-hand knowledge of the event, retails an embellishment on Bernard's story that was clearly crafted to foreshadow Vincent's death four years later: "Vincent, full of indignation, took [Cormon's] interference with the free expression of the artist so much to heart that he went round with a pistol to shoot Cormon, but, fortunately, did not find him in" (Hartrick, p. 42). Even in its essence, however, Bernard's story is lame and suspect. The sources cannot even agree on a date for this so-called insurrection. Some put it in spring, right before Bernard left for Brittany in April; some insist on putting it that summer, even though Bernard wasn't in Paris at that time. The only contemporaneous letters of a participant are those of Toulouse-Lautrec and they suggest business as usual at the atelier in both the spring and summer of 1886. "Cormon was satisfied with my work on Sunday," he wrote his mother that spring. "The competition will be judged on Wednesday. ... Nothing new apart from that." (Schimmel, p. 100; letter 125.) And in the next letter: "Anquetin is going to leave for the south, somewhere near Nice. Now that really annoys me and if I felt strong enough I swear I'd follow him. It's dismal here. Cormon is down in the dumps and doesn't have a penny." (ibid., pp. 100-101; letter 126.)

To support the story of the rebellion, Destremau cites several passages from other Toulouse-Lautrec letters that ring with revolutionary fervor ("There is a revolt in the studio!" [ibid., pp. 78-79; letter 93], "There has been a revolution at the studio" [ibid., p. 78; letter 92]); and that paint Cormon as a harsh oppressor ("for two weeks he [Cormon] has been fighting back and he has laid down the law to some of the students" [ibid., pp. 70-71; letter 82]) (Destremeau, p. 179). But these are all from 1883, before Bernard's arrival at the atelier in 1884, and they reflect Toulouse-Lautrec's sense of relieved isolation, at that time, in his enthusiasm for Impressionist ideas ("Viva Manet!" [ibid., p. 73; letter 85]), not Seurat's neo-Impressionist ideas, which were the primary source of debate in 1886 and with which Anquetin experimented that summer (Rewald, p. 30).

Bernard may well have appropriated the story of this earlier unrest at the atelier, undoubtedly heard from Toulouse-Lautrec, as a way of inflating what was probably just a disciplinary incident involving only him, or perhaps an altercation with his father (one of many), into personal myth. As for whether or not he actually painted the drab backdrop in bright colors, we cannot help but notice how Bernard uses this defiant act to connect himself to Van Gogh. Arrogating Vincent's posthumous celebrity to himself was the overriding purpose of Bernard's "recollections," and this incident represents the birth-myth of that narrative. Several weeks after being expelled for painting the backdrop, according to his version of events, Bernard returned to the Cormon studio only to find a new student, Vincent van Gogh, hard at work painting a model. The drape in the studio that Bernard had colored had been replaced by another drab one. But, on his canvas, Vincent had ignored the brown backdrop and painted instead a colorful background of his own invention. Lesson: Vincent had brought to the canvas for the first time the new ideas about color that Bernard had introduced to the Cormon studio. At the dawn of their respective careers, they had mystically shared the same impulse to color, exercised on exactly the same object: the atelier backdrop.

Some commentators have tried to mend Bernard's excesses by arguing that he meant to say that he, too, painted the background on his canvas colorfully, not the actual drapes themselves, citing the impracticability of the latter (Salter, p. 84). Others have stoutly defended Bernard's original version, and even purchased its intended message. ("Thus van Gogh achieved in his sketch what Bernard had attempted to do to the object itself" [Rewald, p. 71, n. 20].) Neither version, however, confronts the transparently self-serving and therefore suspect nature of the entire story. The text cites it not as a true account but only as an indication of the pervasiveness of debate and depth of feeling about color in the Paris art world at the time Vincent entered it in 1886.

317. Vincent found only confirmation Vincent's idea of what exactly Impressionism was never completely formed until he arrived in Paris at the end of February 1886. Only the previous month, he had written Theo a letter that appears to equate Impressionism with the work of Manet and Courbet -- an extremely constricted view (JLB 552, 1/12/1886-1/16/1886). Interestingly, Theo must have already told him before he arrived that the Impressionists were in eclipse. In the same letter in January, Vincent refers to the issue of "[w]hether impressionism has already had its last say or not" (ibid.). A measure of Vincent's continued rejection of the Impressionists right up until his arrival in Paris is the fact that he knew of an exhibition of their work in Brussels ("There is said to be a fine exhibition of impressionists in Brussels") but made no effort to take a side trip from Antwerp or stop there on his way to Paris (ibid.). The exhibition he missed was undoubtedly the Les Vingt show from 1886 which was held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts and exhibited works by Renoir and Monet, among others (Walther, p. 760). 318. "When one sees them" Hulsker, Vincent and Theo van Gogh, p. 230. 319. "Neither your color nor mine" JLB 569, September or October 1886. We have slightly altered Vincent's original language (the letter was written in English).

Context:
JLB 569, September or October 1886: "I felt sure at the time that you are a thorough colourist and since I saw the impressionists I assure you that neither your colour nor mine as it is developping itself, is exactly the same as their theories but so much dare I say, we have a chance and a good one of finding friends" (emphasis in original).

320. "I have faith in color" JLB 569, September or October 1886 (this letter was written in English); emphasis added.

Context:
JLB 569, September or October 1886: "However I have faith in colour, even what regards the price the public will pay for it in the longer run."

520 321. a suite of nude women Rewald, pp. 17-18: It may provide an insight into why these particular works appealed to Vincent that, on a tour to New York City that year, the same suite of pastels was singled out by a local critic for their pornographic appeal, calling Degas "nothing but a peeping Tom behind the coulisses [scenes], and among the dressing-rooms of the ballet dancers, noting only travesties on fallen, debased womanhood, most disgusting and offensive." 322. almost 350 artists Lövgren, pp. 75-76. 323. exhibition of the Incoherents Vincent's classmate Toulouse-Lautrec exhibited an "oil painting on sand-paper" under the pseudonym "Tolau-Segroeg, Hungarian of Montmartre." In another Incoherents' show where Toulouse-Lautrec exhibited under this pseudonym, the work was entitled Les Batignolles, trois ans et demi avant Jesus-Christ (The Batignolles District, Three and a Half Years before Jesus Christ). Murray suggests that this might have been a parody of Cormon's prehistoric scenes. Toulouse-Lautrec exhibited with the Incoherents again in 1889 after their popularity had begun to wane. (See Cate and Shaw, eds., pp. 40-41.) He listed himself as a pupil of "Pubis de Cheval" (the pubes of a horse and a parody of the name of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes) and the work was entitled Portraits d'une malheureuse famille atteinte de la petite grelure (Portraits of an Unfortunate Family Stricken by Chicken-pox) -- a parody of Neo-Impressionism, Murray gamely guesses (ibid.). 324. the nearly-bankrupt dealer's Rewald, pp. 17-18. (See Ch. 27, n. 325.) 325. unsold stock Rewald, pp. 17-18: "[S]ince 1871, [Durand-Ruel] had accumulated an enormous stock of their paintings and had been reduced almost to bankruptcy by the general apathy towards the painters he represented. Visitors who were genuinely interested were always welcome there, even if they were not buyers; they were allowed to spend hours looking at unsold pictures dragged in by an assistant from the apparently inexhaustible reserves." 326. Le Mirliton Van Heugten, p. 231. 327. including some by Lautrec Thomson, p. 98. Sometime between late 1885 and late 1886 Toulouse-Lautrec executed two grisaille panels depicting the "history" of Le Mirliton (see Murray, p. 98). When Bruant moved his cabaret into the space formerly occupied by Salis's Le Chat Noir, he discovered a Louis XIII chair had been left behind by his chief rival. In announcing his new location, Bruant cagily cast his new establishment as the true successor to Le Chat Noir by portraying the chair as the grail of Le Chat Noir's success that Salis had carelessly discarded and that he, Bruant, had recognized and recovered. (In his publicity for Le Chat Noir, Salis had made much of its off-beat "Louis XIII" décor.) Toulouse-Lautrec's panels, grandly titled Le Quadrille de la Chaise Louis XIII a L'Elysee Montmartre and Le Refrain de la chaise Louis XIII au cabarets d'Aristide Bruant, advanced Bruant's publicity stunt by depicting the delirious celebrations that accompanied the reinstallation of this sacred object in its rightful place. 328. where frame dealersWelsh-Ovcharov, Van Gogh à Paris, p. 17: "[A] part of the Faure collection file past in the little window of a framer's shop in rue Lafitte." Vincent recalled this in a letter from Arles (JLB 743, 1/28/1889). 329. "Delacroix was his god" Gauzi, "Lautrec et son Temps," in Stein, ed., p. 71. Two years later, in Arles, Vincent wrote: "When Delacroix paints humanity, life in general instead of an epoch, he belongs to the same family of universal geniuses all the same" (JLB 651, 7/30/1888). 330. he kept a lacquered box Coyle, p. 119. The red Chinese lacquer box, with sixteen balls of wool still inside, is preserved in the archives of the Van Gogh Foundation. In an article after Vincent's death, his friend Émile Bernard recalled seeing on Vincent's table in Paris "balls of wool whose interlaced strands played a surprising symphony" of colors" (quoted in, ibid.). 331. The Bark of Dante Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 132: Welsh-Ovcharov lists the other Delacroix works discussed in Charles Blanc that Vincent was likely to have studied in Paris: Femmes d 'Alger, the Taking of Constantinople by the Crusaders, and the Apollo Ceiling, in the Louvre, and "various paintings such as versions of the Barque of Don Juan and Jesus Endormi seen elsewhere, and, of course, from the San Sulpice frescoes."  332. lesser-known images Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 61: In one of her many extraordinary feats of research, Welsh-Ovcharov identifies the Delacroix "sketch" that, two years later, Vincent cryptically refers to having seen with Theo while in Paris. Vincent gives it the name "Bark of Christ" and says he saw it on the Champs-Elysées. Welsh-Ovcharov writes: "[This] doubtless refers to the Delacroix painting in the Saulnier collection Jesus endormi dans la barque, pendant la tempête sur la lac de Tiberiade [Jesus sleeping in the boat during the storm on the Sea of Galilee], no. 78, which was present in April-May 1886 at the Exposition de Maîtres du Siecle at 3 rue Bayard (just off the Champs-Elysees in the ex-studio of Gustave Dore) ... The painting has been identified as the version of the 'Christ on the Lake of Genezereth' now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York." Van Tilborgh claims this image in particular was seminal to the resurgence of Vincent's devotion to Delacroix in Paris: "there is a big possibility that especially this work set him on the road to again take on the renewing of his palette that was started at the end of 1885" (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 72). 333. like Anquetin Rewald, p. 30. 334. his own private pantheon At the end of his life, in a letter to a critic, Vincent recommended Georges Jeannin and Ernest Quost, as well as Monticelli (see later in this chapter), implicitly citing their work as comparable to and sources for his own flower paintings (JLB 853, 2/9/1890 or 2/10/1890). In the same letter, he recommends the color of Diaz de la Peña and Félix Ziem and cites them as the sources for Monticelli's mastery of color -- the highest possible accolade, given Vincent's "fanatical admiration" for Monticelli (of whom he writes "no colourist who comes so straight and directly from Delacroix" [JLB 853, 2/9/1890 or 2/10/1890]) (Hulsker, Vincent and Theo van Gogh, p. 234)). In the cases of all these artists except Diaz (whose work he first mentions in 1873 [JLB 11, 7/20/1873]) and Ziem (for whom he expresses admiration in Antwerp [JLB 551, 1/2/1886]), Vincent could only have seen their work during his time in Paris. 335. Henri de Braekeleer See Ch. 26, n. 155. 336. Diaz de la PeñaSee Ch. 27, n. 334. Vincent included Diaz de la Peña on a list of his favorite artists that he had drawn up for Theo early in 1874 (JLB 18, 2/9/1874). This suggests how outdated and counter-revolutionary Vincent's notions of color must have been considered at this time. Diaz had died ten years earlier (1876) at the age of sixty-nine. In a later letter from Auvers, Vincent appears to argue that Monticelli learned his understanding of color (and Delacroix) from Diaz (JLB 853, 2/9/1890 or 2/10/1890). Despite the seventeen-year age difference, the two painters (Diaz and Monticelli) did apparently work together for a time in the Barbizon in the 1850s, and the younger Monticelli's work thereafter shows the influence of both the older man's style (heavy impasto, free brushwork) and subject matter (fêtes galantes). Vincent may have heard more about their connection from his neighbor Félix Ziem, the other artist to whom Vincent later attributes Monticelli's true discipleship to Delacroix.

Ziem was a successful commercial artist of sixty-five when Vincent met him on the rue Lepic in 1886. He had traveled extensively over his long career (North Africa, Russia), but his primary destination, and eventually his artistic home, was Venice. His candy-colored, light-filled depictions of that city had become the foundation of his success. As a landscape painter, he had also been an active member of the Barbizon school in the 1850s and probably knew Millet -- one of many facets of his long life that would undoubtedly have been of interest to Vincent. Although primarily a landscape painter, Ziem also applied his virtuoso brush to vibrant, daring still-lifes -- images that bear a striking relationship to those of Manet, on the one hand, and to those of Vincent during his first year in Paris, on the other (e.g., Still Life with Mussels and Shrimps [F 256 JH 1169]). In Still Life with Bloaters (F 283 JH 1120) and Still Life with Bloaters (F 203 JH 1123), Vincent treats the scales of fish with the same iridescent light as Ziem famously applied to the Venetian lagoon. The elder painter must have been "courtly" as he had spent many of his travels accompanied by members of the European aristocracy.

Although Vincent attributes Monticelli's understanding of Delacroix color to Ziem, as well as to Diaz de la Peña (JLB 853, 2/9/1890 or 2/10/1890), it is not clear how well Ziem actually knew either Monticelli or Diaz. Very early in his career, Ziem had briefly shared a drawing class with Monticelli in Marseille. But soon thereafter, he left for Nice and then began decades of travel and never spent more than a part of each year in the rue Lepic apartment. They both visited the Barbizon in the 1850s (along with a cascade of other artists) and both lived primarily in Paris, apparently, between 1863 and 1870, when Monticelli returned to Marseille. There is no record of Ziem meeting or knowing Diaz personally. There are two possibilities: Vincent conflated these three names in his later recollections; or Ziem, who was undoubtedly a charming raconteur, inflated his personal connections with the other two artists in his conversations with Vincent.

337. the truest disciple of all BVG 626a, 2/10/1890-2/11/1890: Vincent does not report this judgment in his rare letters from Paris, but it is evident in a letter he wrote in early 1890 to the critic Albert Aurier who had praised Vincent's flower paintings.

Context:
JLB 853, 2/9/1890 or 2/10/1890: "… as far as I know there is no colourist who comes so straight and directly from Delacroix."

338. "He was always quarreling" Van Gogh, pp. 523-524. 339. "He persists in replying" BVG 460, 8/1/1886.

Context:
JLB 568, 8/18/1886: "He keeps replying: but I wanted to get this or that colour contrast into it. As if I gave a damn what he wanted to do!" (Emphasis in original.)

521 340. arguing color theory Bernard, in Stein, p. 92: Bernard recalls that Vincent "was the most frequent visitor in [Tanguy's] shop. He practically lived there." Combining this with Koning's report (b3024 V/1982, "Koning, A.H." to "Plasschaert, A.", 5/8/1911) that Vincent "never stopped talking about his ideas about color," and the multiple reports from Paris of Vincent's inability to conduct calm discussions ("When discussing 'art,' if one disagreed with him and pushed him to the limit, he would flare up in a disturbing way" [Gauzi, "Lautrec et son Temps," in Stein, ed., p. 71]) and Vincent's own accounts of his disputatious temper ("I can't always sit quietly by; it sometimes seems to me as if people are physically touching me, so bound to the question do I sometimes feel and so much is my conviction sometimes a part of myself" [JLB 528, 8/18/1885]), we think this picture of Vincent's extended visits to Tanguy's is clear and convincing, even if conjectural. It is also consistent with all of his past interactions with other artists, as well as with his brother. Further evidence is provided in Hartrick's account of Vincent's blistering attack on his friend Ryland's watercolors: "to the horror of poor Ryland, who, having hung up a set of weak watercolours of the 'La belle dame sans merci' type, found himself unmercifully attacked by the free tongue of Van Gogh, who promptly told him that they were anaemic and useless" (Hartrick, p. 50). 341. He clashed spectacularly In addition to the clash reported by Bernard and cited in the text, a continuing bone of contention between Tanguy and Vincent must have been the latter's dislike for Paul Cézanne's work. According to Bernard: "Vincent did not understand Cézanne's style in the least; he could not acknowledge that one could admire it. No matter how hard he looked at Cézanne's paintings, he found nothing in these efforts that he liked." (Bernard, in Stein, p. 93.) For Tanguy (whom Jullian describes as "stubborn"), any criticism of Cézanne would have sounded a call to the barricades (ibid, p. 71). Later accounts tend to beatify Tanguy, largely because of his connection to Vincent, although it is true that, despite their clashes, he did continue to do business with the Van Gogh brothers until the end of Vincent's life. (See Ch. 27, n. 344.) 342. Impressionists' cheerful palette Jullian, pp. 71-74: Jullian quotes Ambroise Vollard's account of how resolutely Tanguy held the Impressionist "party line" in his arguments with young painters: "'To belong to the School' was, for him, the same thing as that other quality: 'to be modern'; and to encompass such an end, according to Père Tanguy, it was necessary, first and foremost, to banish the 'tobacco juice' from one's palette and 'paint thick.' Anyone who had the nerve to ask for a tube of black was therefore unpopular in his house." 343. including Monet and Renoir Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 213. 344. a grizzled old socialist Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh: His Paris Period, 1886-1888, p. 213. Tanguy, whose first profession was plasterer, had been imprisoned by the government after the fall of the Commune in 1871. In 1886, he turned sixty-one years old. Tanguy's radical politics may have been, to some degree, posturing. Business always came first. Ambroise Vollard, who knew him, wrote: "This worthy man, who had been arrested by mistake as an insurgent during the last days of the Commune, and had barely escaped being shot, had ended, in all good faith, by convincing himself that he was a genuine réfractaire" (Vollard, p. 25). Vollard called Tanguy "a communard by suggestion ... the most bourgeois of men" (ibid.). 345. "he would erupt" Bernard, "Les Hommes d'Aujourd'hui," in Stein, ed., p. 283. 346. turned to a new subject Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p.74. 347. in Paris and elsewhere Shoen describes the Monticelli market on the eve of the artist's death in June 1886 (Shoen, pp. 56-58). In addition to Paris, where the dealer Joseph Delarebeyrette anchored the market out of his three-room gallery at 43, rue de Provence, Monticelli's work sold especially well to English dealers and collectors. In fact, Theo's first sale of a Monticelli, in February 1886, was to a London dealer, Thomas Richardson (ibid., p. 58). Other sales were recorded to Glasgow, Edinburgh, New York, and Boston (ibid.). In addition, in December 1885, the Belgian group Les XX invited Monticelli to show three of his late works at the group's exhibition in Brussels in July 1886 (ibid., p. 56). 348. Theo not only dealt Stolwijk and Thomson, pp. 88-89: Stolwijk and Thomson's review of the stock books of 19, boulevard Montmartre shows that, during Theo's tenure as gérant, the gallery handled forty-five works by Monticelli. This number put the Marseilles artist in fifth place behind Corot (seventy-five), Vittorio Matteo Corcos (seventy), Monet (seventy), and Daubigny (forty-six). According to Shoen's reading of the ledgers, Theo sold his first Monticelli on February 2, 1886 -- before Vincent's arrival in Paris -- to the London dealer, Thomas Richardson (ibid.). And he made another, much larger and more lucrative sale to another London dealer, Charles Obach, also in 1886. Interestingly, both of these buyers were former Goupil colleagues, and both were known to Vincent (Obach had been Vincent's boss in the London office in 1873-75). According to Silverman, Theo had sold three Monticelli still-lifes by the time Vincent arrived in Paris in early March (Silverman, p. 438). On the same question, Hulsker says only: "Already in 1886 Théo possessed some paintings by Monticelli, among which was a flower still life" (Hulsker, Vincent and Theo van Gogh, p. 234). (See Ch. 27, n. 349.) 349. he kept several of them Rewald, p. 34: According to Rewald, the "several" Monticelli works that Theo owned by mid-1886 were still-lifes, not fêtes galantes. Hulsker finds only "a" still life among the Monticellis that "[a]lready in 1886 Théo possessed" (Hulsker, Vincent and Theo van Gogh, p. 234). The boundary between Theo's personal collection and the stock he intended to sell is not always clearly demarcated. According to Stolwijk and Thomson, all five of the Monticelli works still in the Van Gogh brothers' collection at the time of Theo's death "were actually intended for sale" (Stolwijk and Thomson, p. 157). As to when Monticelli's work first came into Theo's collection. 350. lure of fraternal solidartiy The literature generally assumes that Theo's interest in Monticelli followed Vincent's enthusiasm, but surely this is incorrect. Even if the Boussod & Valadon account books didn't show that Theo was already dealing in Monticelli's work by the time Vincent arrived in Paris, it is impossible to believe that Vincent's enthusiasm alone would have led his cautious brother into the major initiative in Monticelli's work that he ultimately undertook and that was already underway by the end of 1886 in collaboration with Theo's Glaswegian colleague, Alexander Reid (Stolwijk and Thomson, p. 157), who had been sent to Paris by his art-dealer father with specific instructions to acquire Monticellis (Shoen, p. 445).

Because Vincent eventually painted at least two portraits of Reid (Portrait of Alexander Reid [F 270 JH 1207] and Portrait of the Art Dealer Alexander Reid [F 343 JH 1250]) and later, in Arles, fanatically self-identified with the Marseilles painter (JLB 670, 8/26/1888), some authorities (Jampoller) have assumed that Vincent persuaded both his brother and Reid to the merits of Monticelli. But this is clearly backwards. Reid disliked Vincent (see Chapter 26) and the suggestion that the sober Scotsman followed Vincent's volatile enthusiasm rather that Theo's knowledgeable judgment -- especially on commercial issues -- is untenable. It is far more likely that Vincent's enthusiasm was validated and reinforced by Theo's (and Reid's), not the other way around. And this analysis would not be altered by a finding that Reid, an amateur artist himself, met Vincent first during his brief experience at Cormon's studio or, perhaps, through Russell (Shoen, p. 445). It is possible, as Shoen argues, that Vincent first saw Monticelli's work during his earlier stay in Paris in 1874, 1875-76 (after the artist had left for Marseilles), but that would not alter the text's analysis that Vincent's enthusiasm for it was not ignited until a decade later when a number of vectors (Theo's sponsorship, Vincent's passion for Delacroix and anti-Impressionist contrarianism, the wider controversy over color, the artist's death, etc.) all intersected (ibid., p. 444).

351. it was said he drank BVG 478, 4/21/1888: Later, from Arles, Vincent rejects the rumors about Monticelli that he heard in Paris. According to Shoen: "Many writers promulgated the notion that it was Monticelli's alcoholism and 'madness' that were at the root of his pictures' 'savage' appearance" (Shoen, p. 56). The truth of the rumors was, of course, of no matter, as Shoen acknowledges the dynamic of celebrity that would soon play such an important part in Vincent's rise to fame also: "the legends surrounding Monticelli helped his sales" (ibid.).

Context:
JLB 600, 4/20/1888: "I'm increasingly doubtful about the truth of the legend of Monticelli's absorbing huge quantities of absinthe. When I think of his work it doesn't seem possible to me that a man who's jittery from drink could have done it."

352. small, impacted still lifes We see two distinct subsets among Vincent's surviving flower paintings from this period. The first is characterized by tighter brushwork, darker over-all tonality, and smaller canvases -- all hallmarks of Monticelli's work. Paintings we include in this group are Glass with Hellebores (F 199 JH 1091), Vase with Myosotis and Peonies (F 243a JH 1106), Still Life with Meat, Vegetables and Pottery (F 1670 JH 1119), Ginger Jar Filled with Chrysanthemums (F 198 JH 1125), Vase with Carnations (F 220 JH 1138), White Vase with Roses and Other Flowers (F 258 JH 1141), and Glass with Roses (F 218 JH 1144). Because these images are so derivative of Monticelli's work, we suspect they represent the first act of Vincent's campaign of flower paintings in the summer of 1886. Van Tilborgh appears to identify the same progression: "it is notable how much more stylized and structured [Vincent's] work is in comparison with that of his example [Monticelli] ... in a relatively short time he was able to broaden both his color repertoire and the variation in his touch" (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 74). 353. He painted orange lilies BVG 460, 8/1/1886. We are grouping this unidentified painting in the early stage of Vincent's Monticelli passion because Vincent describes it in a way that directly invokes the Marseilles painter's dark backgrounds and sharp, vivid highlights (see context).

Context:
JLB 568, 8/18/1886: "I have a pendant for that bouquet that you have with you, and also a branch of white lilies -- white, pink, green -- against black, in the spirit of black Japanese lacquer inlaid with mother-of-pearl that you know -- then a branch of orange tiger lilies on a blue ground."

354. ocher chrysanthemums Ginger Jar Filled with Chrysanthemums, F 198 JH 1125, 1886, canvas on panel, 15.7 x 11.6 in., 40 x 29.5 cm., Private collection. 355. show them at Le Tambourin The story of Vincent showing his paintings at Le Tambourin sometime in the winter-spring of 1886-87 is a muddled one. From Vincent's letter in the summer of 1887, we hear only about the denouement of the relationship with Segatori (JLB 572, 7/23/1887-7/25/1887). Le Tambourin is about to be sold and Vincent is worried about the ownership of his paintings that are still on the walls. He wants them back and Segatori (or somebody speaking for her) has apparently refused, claiming that they belong to the establishment. Other than this bare, backward-looking account, we have only Bernard's changing and scarcely reliable testimony as to how the paintings came to be there in the first place. His initial account is straightforward enough: "Vincent agreed to do several paintings a week for Le Tambourin in exchange for meals. He wound up covering the large walls of the establishment with his studies. They were mostly flower studies." (Bernard, in Stein, p. 93.) The arrangement Bernard describes here is consistent with the "dispute" over ownership of the paintings the following summer. In a later "souvenir" about Vincent, however, Bernard overlays the original story with a heavy gloss of romance, both amorous and artistic: "[Vincent] had fallen in love with the proprietress, it struck him as amusing to invade the place, which was dotted with inferior work, with his passionate intransigence. So he visited Le Tambourin assiduously, and then courted the beautiful Romanian [sic], bringing her painted flowers which last forever instead of real flowers which fade. His gallantry and custom were welcomed, but as his paintings were not hung he demanded an exhibition; this was done because of the business he brought to the restaurant. Indeed, not content with coming by himself, he had brought Toulouse-Lautrec, Anquetin and others, persuading them that there was a future in a place where the beauty of the Lady and his flower paintings created an attractive and youthful feel." (Bernard, "Souvenirs sur Van Gogh," p. 394.)

Virtually every detail of this lavish re-telling can be dismissed or discounted. While there is a possibility (discussed in the next chapter) that Vincent became emotionally involved with the aging but still sensuous Segatori -- a woman fifteen to twenty years his senior but whose Italian warmth and flirtatious charms must have been a welcome contrast to his mother's northern iciness and disapproval, the initial arrangement was not based on amore in either direction. As the text discusses, Segatori was already showing art in her restaurant and Vincent had already proposed earning money by painting "theme" still-lifes for retailers and restauranteurs. The fit of buyer and seller was obvious. Once that fit was established, the next logical step was for the proprietess to pay the painter "in kind": i.e., with food and drink rather than cash. This is not to take sides in the subsequent controversy over ownership of the paintings. It would have been very much like Vincent to hang as many paintings as he could, regardless of the meals he took, subject only to available space and Segatori's tolerance. This would account for Bernard's report that Vincent "invaded the place ... with his passionate intransigence." However, it is surely Bernard's embellishment that Vincent had the power, either amorous or artistic, to "demand" an exhibition, and we know from other, more honest testimony, that far from drawing people to the restaurant with "their attractive and youthful feel," Vincent's work was more likely to frighten them away. (See Ch. 27, n. 391.)

356. "more museum than café" Oberthur, p. 57: Oberthur quotes from a publicity flyer for Le Tambourin. "At the Tambourin you'll find none of those bare and delapidated [sic] walk that account for the poor originality in most inns. You''ll find nothing in common with those pretentious cafes whose gilded ceilings leave you blinded and senseless. It is a cozy little corner, more museum than café, revealing in its decor the touch of a woman of taste. It is indeed Madame Agostina Segatori, proprietress of Le Tambourin, who has brought together, sorted and hung with artistic feeling the works of masters, transforming her establishment into one of the most interesting art galleries in existence." 357. "works of masters" Oberthur, p. 57. 358. as payment for meals Bernard, "Julian Tanguy, Called Le Père Tanguy," in Stein, ed., p. 93. (See Ch. 27, n. 355.) 359. sent him flowers b0942 V/1962, "Gogh, Theo van" to "Gogh-Carbentus, Anna C. van", July 1886. Among the many miscues on Vincent's life in Paris that Theo sent his mother in July 1886 is this odd report: "To give you a proof, almost no day passes or he is asked to come to the workshop of well known painters, or they come to him. Thus he also has acquaintances from whom he gets a beautiful shipment of flowers every week that he can use as models." As discussed in the text, Vincent did not interact with any "well-known" painter in Paris at this time, unless Theo is referring to Cormon, who sometimes invited atelier students to his own studio or apartment. The "workshops" may refer to the Cormon atelier itself -- which is nowhere else mentioned in the letter -- or to Russell's studio on the Impasse St. Hélène. But Russell had left Paris by this time and Hartrick, who was occupying Russell's studio that summer, dreaded Vincent's visits. If he sent Vincent flowers, it was only to preoccupy him in his studio and thus avoid his company. As for Theo's claim that well-known painters "come to [Vincent]," there are no records of such visits except perhaps by Hartrick or by someone acquainted with Gauzi. Besides, Theo constructs this passage carefully to suggest but not say that the flowers came from Vincent's "well-known painter" friends. Yet the detail seems too strange for Theo to have invented whole-cloth. The possibility should not be discounted that Theo himself bought the flowers as a way of keeping his wayward brother busy and of guiding him toward more colorful (saleable) images -- astutely capitalizing on Vincent's enthusiasm for Monticelli to press an argument the brothers had been having since Vincent started painting. Even if he did not guide Vincent's course, he was certainly pleased with it. In the July letter to their mother, he wrote: "He paints mostly flowers with the goal to make his next paintings more fresh in color." 522 360. Chevreul's voluminous studies BVG W4, 6/22/1888: Interestingly, two years later in a letter to his sister Wil, Vincent "explains" the laws of color using flowers as illustrations. He continues the lesson in the next letter to Wil, describing his own work in a language he knows she will understand, the family language of flowers: "I have a study of a garden, almost a metre wide. Poppies and other red flowers in green in the foreground, then a patch of bluebells. Then a patch of orange and yellow African marigolds, then white and yellow flowers and finally, in the background, pink and lilac and also scabious, dark violet, and red geraniums and sunflowers." (JLB 653, 7/31/1888; emphasis in original.)

Context:
JLB 626, 6/16/1888-6/20/1888: "Cornflowers with white chrysanthemums and a few marigolds. There you have a motif in blue and orange. Heliotrope and yellow roses, motif in lilac and yellow. Poppies or red geraniums in bold green leaves, motif in red and green. There you have basics that one can subdivide further, can elaborate, but enough to show you without a painting that there are colours that make each other shine." (Emphasis in original.)

361. red gladioli Vase with Gladioli and Carnations, F 237 JH 1131, 1886, oil on canvas, 25.8 x 13.8 in., 65.5 x 35 cm., Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam. 362. orange coleus leaves Coleus Plant in a Flowerpot, F 281 JH 1143, 1886, oil on canvas, 16.5 x 8.7 in., 42 x 22 cm., Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 363. purple asters Vase with Asters, Salvia and Other Flowers, F 286 JH 1127, 1886, oil on canvas, 27.8 x 13.4 in., 70.5 x 34 cm., Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. 364. meditations in red Vase with Asters and Phlox, F 234 JH 1168, late 1886, oil on canvas, 24 x 18.1 in., 61 x 46 cm., Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 365. harmonies of green and blue Sketch of a Right Arm and Shoulder, F 1693j JH 1006, February 1886, black chalk, 4.5 x 3.5 in., 11.5 x 9 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 366. red-green riots of contrast Vase with Carnation and Roses and a Bottle, F 246 JH 1133, Summer 1886, oil on canvas, 15.7 x 12.6 in., 40 x 32 cm., Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller, Otterlo. 367. "gymnastics" JLB 569, September or October 1886 (this letter was written in English).

Context:
JLB 569, September or October 1886: "Now after these gymnastics I lately did two heads which I dare say are better in light and colour than those I did before."

368. lilacs Vase with Gladioli and Lilac, F 286a JH 1128, 1886, oil on canvas, 27.2 x 13.2 in., 69 x 33.5 cm., Private collection. 369. zinnias Vase with Zinnias and Geraniums, F 241 JH 1134, 1886, oil on canvas, 24.8 x 18.1 in., 63 x 46 cm., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. 370. geraniums Vase with Zinnias and Geraniums, F 241 JH 1134, 1886, oil on canvas, 24.8 x 18.1 in., 63 x 46 cm., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. 371. hollyhocks Vase with Hollyhocks, F 235 JH 1136, August-September 1886, oil on canvas, 37 x 21.1 in., 94 x 51cm., Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich. 372. daises Vase with Daisies, F 197 JH 1167, 1886, paper on panel, 16.9 x 22.4 in., 43 x 57 cm., The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. 373. dahlias BVG 460, 8/1/1886: This is from Vincent's report, referring to an unidentified painting that may have since disappeared. In addition to those mentioned in the text, the known flower paintings also depict scabiosa and ranunculus (Still Life with Scabiosa and Ranunculus [F 666 JH 1094), fritillaries (Fritillaries [F 214 JH 1092]), hellebores (Glass with Hellebores [F 199 JH 1091]), viscaria (Vase with Viscaria [F 324a JH 1137]), salvia (Vase with Asters, Salvia and Other Flowers, [F 286 JH 1127]), cineraria (Cineraria in a Flowerpot [F 282 JH 1165]), and sunflowers (Bowl with Sunflowers, Roses and Other Flowers [F 250 JH 1166]). Numerous blossoms in surviving paintings remain unidentified.

Context:
JLB 568, 8/18/1886: "I have ... a branch of orange tiger lilies on a blue ground, then a bouquet of dahlias."

374. a score of images Of the flower images that Vincent painted around the summer of 1886, approximately forty have either survived or are known to have existed, but surely these represent only a portion of the original work product, even accounting for the canvases that Vincent intentionally destroyed, scraped off, or painted over. Some of the flower paintings originally attributed to 1886 (e.g., Tambourine with Pansies [F 244 JH 1093]) have recently been re-dated to 1887. 375. Segatori's continued support See Ch. 27, n. 355. 376. bigger and bigger canvases See Ch. 27, n. 377 and n. 378 377. still-lifes of boots A Pair of Shoes (F 331 JH 1235, first half 1886, cardboard, 13 x 16.1 in., 33 x 41 cm., Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) and A Pair of Shoes (F 333 JH 1236, early 1887, oil on canvas, 13.4 x 16.3 in., 34 x 41.5 cm., The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Cone Collection, Baltimore). 378. scenes of MontmartreLe Moulin de la Galette (F 227 JH 1170), Le Moulin de la Galette (F 226 JH 1171), Le Moulin de la Galette (F 226 JH 1172), The Café Terrace (F 238 JH 1178), Montmartre (F 272 JH 1183), Le Moulin de la Galette (F 349 JH 1184). 379. the little plaster nudes Plaster Statuette of a Female Torso (F 216g JH 1055), Plaster Statuette of a Female Torso (F 216h JH 1058), Plaster Statuette of a Female Torso (F 216i JH 1072). According to Van Tilborgh, Vincent painted two groups of studies of the plaster statuettes in his studio, separated by some months: the first, dating from the summer of 1886 soon after he moved into the rue Lepic apartment, of eight canvases; the second, from the winter of 1886-87, of eleven canvases (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., p. 29-30). 380. some in vivid contrasts Two still lifes of boots have completely shed the moody darkness of Nuenen: in A Pair of Shoes (F 331 JH 1235) the shoes are painted in bright green against an ochre-red background; in A Pair of Shoes (F 333 JH 1236) they appear as orange against a vivid blue. 381. some in tonal harmonies A view of the Blute Fin windmill in Le Moulin de la Galette (F 348 JH 1182) is a symphony of blues and greens with only a pale-pink sightseer's dress and the red stripe of the French flag as contrasting highlights. Compare to a similar view of the other windmill in the Moulin de Galette complex, the Radet (Le Moulin de la Galette [F 349 JH 1184]), in which Vincent pits a lushly purple sky against a stone wall and predominantly yellow ground. Another painting from the outskirts of Paris, Outskirts of Paris (F 264 JH 1179), takes yet another harmonious approach: the sky is filled with ominous purple clouds, except in the distance where the clouds are fringed in white and then yield to a ribbon of powder-blue sky at the horizon. The ochres and oranges of the foreground road, muted by more of the same lavender as the sky, blend quickly into the harmonious greens and gray-greens of the middle distance. Only a few red rooftops at the horizon line disturb the tranquility of the color harmony when ground meets sky. 382. some in both Three identical views of the Moulin de Galette, Le Moulin de la Galette (F 227 JH 1170), Le Moulin de la Galette (F 226 JH 1171), Le Moulin de la Galette (F 226 JH 1172), appear to be virtually an exercise in color variations, not unlike Monet's Haystacksor Rouen Cathedral series. Le Moulin de la Galette (F 227 JH 1170) fills the foreground and buildings with various shades of orange against a powder-blue sky. Le Moulin de la Galette (F 226 JH 1171) takes exactly the same scene and fills in the ground and some buildings with shades of green, the central structure with bright red, and the sky with an improbable pink. The colors of Le Moulin de la Galette (F 226 JH 1172) have faded somewhat as a result of over-cleaning, but it appears to be another, more moderated effort to pit green against red only using softer, more pastel variations. (The authenticity of the last of these versions has been questioned [see Bailey, p. 60].) 383. vignettes of city life Outskirts of Paris, F 264 JH 1179, 1886, canvas on cardboard, 18.3 x 21.5 in., 46.5 x 54.5 cm., Private collection. 384. dressed in blue and orange Le Moulin de la Galette, F 349 JH 1184, 1886, oil on canvas, 21.7 x 15.2 in., 55 x 38.5 cm., Private collection. In this painting, the digger's blue smock and orange pants echo the cloudy blue sky and an orange rock wall. 385. He turned again and again Self-Portrait with Dark Felt Hat (F 208a JH 1089), Self-Portrait with Dark Felt Hat at the Easel (F 181 JH 1090), Self-Portrait with Pipe (F 180 JH 1194), Self-Portrait with Pipe and Glass [F 263a JH 1199]. 386. in satin-trimmed collar Self-Portrait, F 178v JH 1198, 1886, oil on canvas, 15.6 x 11.6 in., 39.5 x 29.5 cm., Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. 387. with a bright orange beard Self-Portrait with Dark Felt Hat, F 208a JH 1089, Spring 1886, oil on canvas, 16.1 x 12.8 in., 41 x 32.5 cm., Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 388. wearing a deep green coat View in Paris, F 1405 JH 1187, Fall 1886, watercolor, 13.4 x 20.1 in., 34 x 51 cm., Vincent van Gogh Foundation, Amsterdam. 389. He painted still lifes Still Life with Mussels and Shrimps, F 256 JH 1169, 1886, oil on canvas, 10.6 x 16.9 in., 27 x 43 cm., Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Van Tilborgh discusses this painting in some detail, comparing it in style to The Café Terrace (F 238 JH 1178) and dating it to around the same time: autumn 1886 (Van Tilborgh, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, eds., pp. 61-62). "The painter played cleverly with the complementing contrasts red-green and blue-orange and we recognize a comparable use of color in his Mackerels, tomatoes, and lemons [F 285 JH 1118] from the same time. ... He abandoned his old palette of earth tones ... and chose in favor of mixtures of bright pigments, including cadmium-yellow and viridian-green." Van Tilborgh also marks the similarity to Vincent's Monticelli-inspired flowers of summer "in which he often chose dark backgrounds" (ibid.). 390. "fierce" Hartrick, p. 44: According to Hartrick: "From what I remember, as well as from recent examination, I am certain that time has toned down the fierceness of his pictures very considerably, and many who accept them now for their undoubtedly fine colour would have been scared of them when freshly painted." 391. "scared of them" Hartrick, p. 44. (See Ch. 27, n. 390.) Hartrick's recollection is confirmed in an account from Coquiot, quoting Adolphe Albert: "[Vincent] hung a certain number of his pictures up on the walls of the bar; and this collection gave us all an irritating surprise. There was a real personality and quite unexpected strangeness which was becoming more marked in these paintings. Some were in the 'pointillist' style, others were already full of that violent originality which was to develop so quickly." (Coquiot, p. 130.) The reference to "pointillist" pictures probably refers to some additional paintings that Vincent hung in Le Tambourin in the spring and summer of 1887. (See Chapter 26.) In his first-hand account, Ambroise Vollard referred to the color-schemes of Vincent's paintings as "startling" and tartly labeled their "exhibition" at Le Tambourin a "succès de rire" (Vollard, p. 21).