important that he be under the care of a doctor. At first Theo van Gogh had hoped that his brother could board with the Pissarro family, but Madame Pissarro did not care to receive a recovering mental patient into a home full of small children.
Pissarro then thought of me, his former neighbor. I practiced medicine in Paris, seeing patients four days a week. On Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, I was a rural family man in Auvers, where Pissarro thought Vincent could find inexpensive lodgings and paint in the country. I had a great deal of experience with nervous ailments, I knew painters, and voilà—I was the solution to Theo van Gogh’s difficulty. I replied to Pissarro, saying that I would be happy to meet with Theo.
But I heard no more from Pissarro for several months. I had put the matter out of my mind when, one day in March of 1890, an extremely courteous young man arrived at my Paris premises on the rue du Faubourg St. Denis, a busy street between the Gare de l’Est and the Gare du Nord. My consulting room was dark and formal, with tobacco-colored velvet curtains and many framed prints on the wall. I had long since grown accustomed to the noise from the street—carriages, wagons, hawkers, even the omnibus—but new patients were sometimes distracted by it.
At first I thought this was the case with my new visitor, Theo van Gogh. He was well dressed and well groomed, in a frock coat and silk hat, a conventional bourgeois like thousands of others you would pass in the street. He was no taller than I, and pale-skinned, with short russet hair and a sandy mustache. He spoke flawless but faintly accented French and exhibited the highly attentive air of a man who sold things for a living. Yet he seemed to lose the thread of his tale from time to time. Now, as I think back, I realize that he may simply have been selecting what to tell me—and what, strategically, to leave out.
Vincent, Theo told me, was his elder brother by four years, not the firstborn but the first surviving son of a Protestant pastor in the Netherlands. Several uncles of the family were art dealers like Theo, and Vincent himself had originally worked in the Hague branch of Goupil, a gallery with Parisian roots. It was a kind of apprenticeship, I gathered. He did well, Theo said, and was transferred to another branch.
“And did he always demonstrate interest in painting?” I asked. “Painting, for himself?” I had been sitting near Theo in an armchair, but now I stood and moved to my desk. I began taking notes as Theo spoke.
“Not until about ten years ago, when he was twenty-seven,” Theo answered. “He had made a few drawings at home, but that was all.”
“Was he gifted?” I asked.
Theo hesitated. He was evidently torn between honesty and affection. He shrugged slightly, indicating to me that Vincent’s talent had not been visibly overwhelming but that Theo’s fraternal loyalty forbade him to say so.
Vincent’s career as an art dealer came to an end when the young man took it into his head to be a teacher instead, but after a brief spell at a small boarding school in England, he abandoned that career. “He decided to become a minister,” Theo said. “Mind, I am telling you everything. It would be very painful for him to talk about these things, but you should know them. Earlier there had been a situation with a young woman, a cousin of ours. Vincent …” He fell silent again, eyes on a rather gloomy etching of a Dutch landscape. Apparently there was no way to tell the tale that reflected well on his brother. “Vincent could not believe she did not have feelings for him. He, his fervor—it alarmed her. Then there was another young woman in England, and another unhappy outcome. So, the church.”
“Like his father. A familiar way of life, perhaps,” I suggested, trying to make the decision seem rational.
But Theo could not quite accept my reasoning. “Yes and no. He went to the Borinage as a missionary to the coal miners. I don’t know if you know anything about that part of the country—perhaps you’ve read Zola’s Germinal?” I nodded, recalling the bleak account of unremitting labor, poverty, and violence. “Zola spares nothing. It is as he portrays it, a terribly harsh way of life. Vincent became ill. He gave away all of his food, all of his furniture.”