Vincent and Theo: Gallery Ten–Exit

He uses his old perspective frame often as he orients himself to the landscapes of his new home.

But maybe his fatigue is exacerbated by the potassium iodide he's taking.

He encourages Theo to come south and visit him, since his own health is much better in Arles, though he does still “suffer from unaccountable, involuntary feelings, or a stupor on some days, but it’s getting calmer.”

There’s one unequivocal piece of good news: the crate of two dozen paintings that Vincent had sent three weeks earlier, the first shipment from Arles, finally arrives in Paris.

One critic praises not only the show but the entresol itself, admiring the lack of “high class decor,” no plush drapes or gilded cornices, as in the rest of the gallery.

He writes to his sister Wil that Whitman “sees in the future, and even in the present, a world of health, of generous, frank carnal love—of friendship—of work, with the great starry firmament, something, in short, that one could only call God and eternity, put back in place above this world.”

Gauguin’s impending arrival is making him think even more than usual about sales.

He can be a difficult man—self-centered and selfish, brash and conceited.

And when he gets angry and impassioned, he turns bellicose.

But after arguing with Gauguin for weeks, he finally capitulates.

Vincent and Gauguin are both prolific, and Theo is having success selling Gauguin’s work.

It is hard to believe Gauguin always answers with such equanimity.

After all these years of Theo's liaisons with “inappropriate” women, women his parents would never approve of, the woman he had set his eyes on three and a half years earlier, the woman whom his mother certainly approves of, the woman who had rejected him a year and a half ago, now this woman has promised to spend her life with him.

But Gauguin was a fencer and had his sword with him in Arles....Some historians postulate that Gauguin cut Vincent's ear (by accident) and Vincent agreed to keep quiet.

“He seemed to be all right for a few minutes when I was with him, but lapsed shortly afterwards into his brooding about philosophy and theology,” Theo writes to Jo later.

He’d gone to lie down in another patient’s bed and would not leave it, despite the doctor's entreaties.

Writing in Dutch (he has been writing to Theo solely in French for two years now), he says, “Would you be so good as to take note that I’m dropping you this line in case Theo should have told you something about my being indisposed for a few days....It wasn’t worthwhile telling you about it.”

She finds their Paris neighborhood daunting, though: “The bustle and activity of people and omnibuses—well it is just awful.”

He is settling in well and thinks he will be able to be calm at the asylum, and to paint well. This despite that he “continually hears shouts and terrible howls as though of the animals in a menagerie.”

He demurs about the name, though: wouldn’t Ma be happier if they named him after Pa?

They are—after all this time, from Zundert to now, through all their ups and downs, their divergent and convergent paths—bound together, brothers, friends.

A critic calls him a diverting colorist. Finally, Vincent is a colorist.

The article in the Mercure is a review—the first critical appraisal of Vincent's work, and an exuberantly positive one it is.

He writes that Vincent's technique matches his temperament: “vigorous, exalted, brutal, intense.”

He does, however, end the article by mourning what they all fear: that Van Gogh will never be completely understood, for he is “too simple and at the same time too subtle for the contemporary bourgeois mind.”

About the Aurier review, he writes, “I feel mired in flattery.”

He thinks Aurier should have applied the adulation to other painters, to Monticelli above all.

He paints not in the colors of the Dutch masters, but in what has become his palette, one full of sun and color, rich and vibrant, the paint thick, tactile, reaching out, begging the viewer to touch Vincent's memories of home.

She’d expected someone who looked sick, but instead she is face-to-face with “a sturdy broad-shouldered man, with a healthy colour, a smile on his face and a very resolute appearance.”

Vincent laughs and says, “The cock crows cocorico,” placating the baby.

“Here in Paris the best milk one can get is a veritable poison,” he writes.

“You’ve never heard anything so painful as this almost continual plaintive crying lasting several days and several nights and with us not knowing what to do.”

Theo’s own health, always precarious, is not getting any better.

“We have too much in our noodles for us to forget the daisies and the freshly stirred clods of earth, and the branches of the bushes that bud in spring, nor the bare tree branches that shiver in the winter, nor the serene skies of limpid blue..."

He is reassured, he writes back; her letter felt like a gospel to him, like deliverance.

He has captured the sun, given a blessing to the world, a benediction of color.

Jo is lucky, he’d told Theo—she has “no inkling of life’s sadness.”

Camille Pissarro could not quickly catch the train and go to the funeral with his son Lucien, but “I really felt a great affinity for your brother. I feel really sad for you, my dear friend.”

They are beginning to suspect that perhaps there is something to it, but Lies and the rest of the family renounce their claims to Vincent's paintings.

In the article in the Dutch paper, the reporter had said that Vincent's “love of art was a religion, an effusive honoring and sacrificing of himself.”