the right of Tanguy’s hat floated the pink cloud of a blossoming cherry tree set in a landscape of beauty and peace, with a stream leading the viewer’s eye through green fields to a series of low hills beneath a sky stippled with white clouds.
I had never seen brushwork like this. I owned at that point a Monet, several Pissarros, many Cézannes. I was and still am fascinated by the technique, inaugurated by the Impressionists, of breaking up the application of color. Those painters drew attention to their method of placing paint on the canvas while still constructing a complete image. But Van Gogh, if it were possible, took this tendency further. His paint lived. It seemed to flicker or dance on the canvas—yet the image held together. I have seen canvases rendered in this manner that do not, somehow, engage your eye. You are so distracted by the brushwork that you cannot see the picture. This portrait, though, seized my gaze and my emotions. Moments earlier Theo had told me that Vincent believed he could elicit certain feelings through his juxtapositions of color. I was struck to the core by the beauty, the peacefulness, and the intricacy of what he had created.
Above all I was astonished at his mastery. Composing a canvas is harder than it looks. Painters like Amand Gautier, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, go through an extensive series of preparations. They draw components of their painting in charcoal. They try out different angles, different combinations of elements. They make oil sketches, to see how their colors work together. Then they build the painting slowly, first drawing on the canvas, then filling in areas of dark and light, gradually thinning their pigments and using smaller brushes until they have created their picture. It seemed as though Vincent had omitted those steps, somehow creating an immensely complicated image in a single burst of energy, using large quantities of bright, unmixed colors. He had depicted Tanguy—a former radical, a man of the people—in his blue workman’s jacket and brown trousers. But the jacket was grooved with vertical strokes of paint, lighter and darker blue, yellow for highlights, curving with the collar, rumpled at the elbow, heavy and thick. His beard and eyebrows—white and brown mixed—were laid in with a finer brush and bristled off the canvas. Vincent had painted the background prints with thinner pigments, emulating the flat quality of Japanese woodcuts. Somehow a harmony of colors and shapes reigned among them. Yet if one brushstroke had been in the wrong place—one flicker of blue highlight on the brown trousers, one fleck of greenish shadow on the backs of the hands—the painting would have dissolved into a wreck. I was awestruck. How could this be the work of the high-strung man with the damaged ear whom I had examined days earlier? I felt there should have been some physical sign that he was a genius.
I looked down and found my hands locked together like those of Tanguy in the painting.
“Everyone does that,” Theo said, nodding at my hands. “You don’t even know you’re doing it.” He looked back up at the portrait and shrugged. “So you see, my brother is brilliant. There is no one like him.”
He did not say it with excitement or pride. There was no sense of anticipation, no vision of a future in which Vincent’s paintings would be prized and Vincent himself—Well, what would one hope for Vincent? Even based only on my short acquaintance, I could not imagine a glowing future for him. He was not a man made for success, I thought. He could never tolerate having a busy studio, multiple commissions, an assistant to run errands, and a dealer to broker sales. He was like a monk. He belonged in a different setting, somehow withdrawn from the world.
Tanguy closed the drawer of the massive cash register, and the sole customer edged past us with both of the palettes beneath his arm. “Monsieur van Gogh,” Tanguy greeted Theo. “And I
I had never seen brushwork like this. I owned at that point a Monet, several Pissarros, many Cézannes. I was and still am fascinated by the technique, inaugurated by the Impressionists, of breaking up the application of color. Those painters drew attention to their method of placing paint on the canvas while still constructing a complete image. But Van Gogh, if it were possible, took this tendency further. His paint lived. It seemed to flicker or dance on the canvas—yet the image held together. I have seen canvases rendered in this manner that do not, somehow, engage your eye. You are so distracted by the brushwork that you cannot see the picture. This portrait, though, seized my gaze and my emotions. Moments earlier Theo had told me that Vincent believed he could elicit certain feelings through his juxtapositions of color. I was struck to the core by the beauty, the peacefulness, and the intricacy of what he had created.
Above all I was astonished at his mastery. Composing a canvas is harder than it looks. Painters like Amand Gautier, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, go through an extensive series of preparations. They draw components of their painting in charcoal. They try out different angles, different combinations of elements. They make oil sketches, to see how their colors work together. Then they build the painting slowly, first drawing on the canvas, then filling in areas of dark and light, gradually thinning their pigments and using smaller brushes until they have created their picture. It seemed as though Vincent had omitted those steps, somehow creating an immensely complicated image in a single burst of energy, using large quantities of bright, unmixed colors. He had depicted Tanguy—a former radical, a man of the people—in his blue workman’s jacket and brown trousers. But the jacket was grooved with vertical strokes of paint, lighter and darker blue, yellow for highlights, curving with the collar, rumpled at the elbow, heavy and thick. His beard and eyebrows—white and brown mixed—were laid in with a finer brush and bristled off the canvas. Vincent had painted the background prints with thinner pigments, emulating the flat quality of Japanese woodcuts. Somehow a harmony of colors and shapes reigned among them. Yet if one brushstroke had been in the wrong place—one flicker of blue highlight on the brown trousers, one fleck of greenish shadow on the backs of the hands—the painting would have dissolved into a wreck. I was awestruck. How could this be the work of the high-strung man with the damaged ear whom I had examined days earlier? I felt there should have been some physical sign that he was a genius.
I looked down and found my hands locked together like those of Tanguy in the painting.
“Everyone does that,” Theo said, nodding at my hands. “You don’t even know you’re doing it.” He looked back up at the portrait and shrugged. “So you see, my brother is brilliant. There is no one like him.”
He did not say it with excitement or pride. There was no sense of anticipation, no vision of a future in which Vincent’s paintings would be prized and Vincent himself—Well, what would one hope for Vincent? Even based only on my short acquaintance, I could not imagine a glowing future for him. He was not a man made for success, I thought. He could never tolerate having a busy studio, multiple commissions, an assistant to run errands, and a dealer to broker sales. He was like a monk. He belonged in a different setting, somehow withdrawn from the world.
Tanguy closed the drawer of the massive cash register, and the sole customer edged past us with both of the palettes beneath his arm. “Monsieur van Gogh,” Tanguy greeted Theo. “And I
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