Editor’s Word: The next textual content has been excerpted with permission and tailored from A Hearth in His Soul: Van Gogh, Paris, and the Making of an Artist (2025) by Miles J. Unger, printed by Pegasus Books and obtainable on-line.
“I shan’t be asking you whether you approve or disapproveof anything I do or don’t do — I won’t be embarrassed and,if I feel like going to Paris, for instance, I shan’t ask youwhether or not you object.”
—Vincent to Theo van Gogh, December 6, 1884
Paris loomed giant within the thoughts of any bold artist. It was a capstone to an aesthetic schooling, a mountain to climb, a ceremony of passage. Even these like Millet who wore their contempt for town as a badge of honor constructed their careers there, realizing that modern Parisians who would by no means dream of really setting foot in a barn would pay handsomely for photographs of sturdy peasants and rosy-cheeked milkmaids. Right here one might discover the perfect of the previous and the brand new. Paris was a treasure home, overflowing with monuments of previous greatness, in addition to the middle of artwork as a residing follow.
In lots of neighborhoods, from Montmartre and Batignolles within the north to the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse to the south, higher flooring with giant north-facing home windows nonetheless mark the studios the place painters and sculptors as soon as toiled, normally in obscurity however at all times in hope. The huge inhabitants included professionals of each stripe and standing: a number of Salon stars with worldwide reputations and fats financial institution accounts, an untold variety of hacks catering to the whims and pocketbooks of the burgeoning center class, and scruffy provocateurs who lived for scandal and thrived on outrage.
They got here within the hundreds, attracted by the unequalled alternatives to study the commerce, by enrolling on the world-famous École des Beaux-Arts or in one of many many unbiased ateliers, the place the principles had been a bit extra relaxed however the coaching each bit as rigorous. On the very least, a monthslong keep in Paris meant that you just had been up on the most recent tendencies; it was a mark of sophistication you could possibly flip to revenue again residence. Even in case you had no intention of creating it your everlasting residence, it was needed to check your self on this best area, to see in case you measured up and the way a lot you continue to needed to study. Some stayed solely weeks, leaving with renewed inspiration, whereas others retreated as quick as they may for calmer waters. Simply as many had been seduced and remained a lifetime. It was no completely different for Vincent van Gogh. His journey would inevitably take him to Paris. If not now, then sometime.
Vincent van Gogh, “Restaurant la Sirene” (1887)
The reality is that van Gogh was deeply conflicted about Paris. He’d spent nearly a yr there — from Might 1875 by means of April 1876 — however at a time in his life when he was least capable of recognize what it needed to provide. Together with his profession at Goupil’s grinding to its sorry conclusion and plunged within the depths of non secular mania, town’s cultural riches left him chilly, its pleasures handed him by. “Too large, too confused,” he’d pronounced on his first go to, and familiarity didn’t essentially improve its attraction. For a time his loneliness was eased by the arrival of his good friend Harry Gladwell, whom he’d met in London and who shared his pious bent, however both alone or in firm he was out of step with the joyful, hedonistic spirit of town. His sister-in-law stated he most popular “his ‘cabin’ in Montmartre where, morning and evening, he read the Bible with his young friend Harry Gladwell, [to being out] among the worldly Parisian public.” Regardless of unequaled alternatives to indulge his love of portray, he made no try to attach with town’s numerous neighborhood of artists, too consumed by his personal obsessions to make observe of the momentous modifications going down round him.
However from the summer season of 1880, when he took up his new calling, Paris took middle stage, in his ideas if not in reality. The prospect of residing with Theo appealed to him, a minimum of in principle, notably throughout these intervals when he felt most remoted. “The thing that attracts me most about Paris,” he wrote from Drenthe, “that would be of most use in my progress, is actually being with you, having that friction of ideas with someone who knows what a painting is, who understands the reasonableness of the quest. I think Paris is all right because you’re in Paris, and if consequently I were less alone I would get on faster, even there.” Typically he talked of transferring there as a sensible matter, because the means to accumulate the talents needed to begin incomes a residing; generally its attract was extra aspirational, a distant aim to be approached solely after he was achieved sufficient to make his personal mark. It served as each a spur to his ambition and a security valve in case he wore out his welcome nearer to residence.
Vincent and Theo danced across the challenge for years. It could be talked about first by one after which the opposite, normally tentatively and with many caveats, every hoping his brother wouldn’t pursue the matter since they each suspected that life collectively may show insufferable. In 1883, when he was dragging his easel concerning the moors of Drenthe, it had been Theo urging him to return again to civilization and Vincent who balked, suggesting as a substitute that Theo come be a part of him on the heath. The calculus shifted over time, professionals and cons taking up completely different weights relying on the character of their newest quarrel or the stability in Theo’s checking account. By late 1884 — Vincent having stumbled from disaster to disaster, altering addresses as he fled one not possible state of affairs solely to seek out himself mired in one other equally bleak — town the place his brother already loved independence and materials consolation appeared to supply refuge from the storms of life. “If I feel like going to Paris,” he warned Theo, “I shan’t ask you whether or not you object.”
1885 letter from Vincent to Theo, that includes a sketch of “The Potato Eaters”
Vincent van Gogh, “The Potato Eaters” (1885), oil on canvas
The prospect of Paris at all times regarded brighter when issues had been darkish at residence. Because the scandal involving Margot Begemann, the rift between Vincent and his dad and mom had grown right into a yawning chasm; the residents of Nuenen had been now overtly hostile, offering a form of damaging stress that compelled Vincent to think about different choices. The difficulties of his home state of affairs had been compounded by disagreements with Theo over the course of his artwork. He nonetheless favored darkish canvases of peasant topics, bleak visions of grinding poverty, clumsily rendered, with little industrial attraction and displaying little consciousness of current tendencies. Vincent’s complaints that his brother wasn’t doing something to advertise his work in Paris had been met by Theo’s exasperation along with his cussed refusal to deviate from his chosen path.
However whilst Vincent’s artwork appeared to have fossilized, the person was altering. He was experiencing an inner revolution, one which was largely invisible however that will erupt within the radical improvements of his Paris years. In battles along with his father, he honed his worldview, his hatred for the suffocating degelijkheid of his dad and mom giving him a brand new conception of who he was and what he stood for. His considering on artwork, on politics — his perspective towards the trendy world basically — underwent an important transformation, a change mirrored in his style in literature as he moved away from the tear-soaked tales of Dickens, Hugo, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, towards the incisive portraits of city life within the novels of de Maupassant, the Goncourt brothers, and, above all, Émile Zola. These “modern” novelists shared the social consciousness of their predecessors, however they couched their critique in a extra goal type. Zola was as a lot journalist as novelist, his writings an accumulation of details all of the extra devastating for the dispassionate manner they had been offered. As he wrote in his preface to L’Assommoir, he supposed it to be “the first novel about the common people which does not tell lies but has the authentic smell of the people,” including, “my characters are not bad, but only ignorant and spoilt by the environment of grinding toil and poverty in which they live.” Just a few years earlier, Vincent had urged his brother to destroy such books to be able to repair his eyes on heaven, however now he embraced their godless creed. As he steeped himself in tales of Parisian life, high and low, town grew to become ever extra the main target of his ideas. It was there, within the French capital, the place the good drama of contemporary civilization was enjoying out, and it was there that, increasingly, he noticed his personal future taking form.
Vincent van Gogh, “Agostina Segatori in the Cafe du Tambourin” (1887), oil on canvas
The trials of current years had hardened van Gogh. He nonetheless recognized with the much less lucky, however now his love for humanity took on a sharper edge. His two disastrous courtships brought on him to despise those that’d denied him his happiness and to lash out in opposition to something that smacked of hypocrisy. At residence he provoked his father by carrying round books by radical or anticlerical authors, upsetting accusations from Dorus that he was attempting to “infect him with his French fallacies.” Vincent’s evangelical fervor was changed by an instinctive socialism — not a scientific program however reasonably an emotional identification with society’s outcasts and an growing alienation from the category into which he was born. “The working man against the bourgeois,” he rumbled, “is as justified as the third estate against the other two a hundred years ago.”
Unable to just accept duty for household quarrels, he rebranded private antagonisms as ideological disagreements. His fights with Theo over cash grew to become skirmishes within the countless struggle between the haves and have-nots, a matter of precept reasonably than self-interest: “I’m on one side, you on the other of a certain barricade that may no longer be visible in the form of paving-stones,” he informed him, “but which still definitely exists and persists in society.” Who had been these on the flawed facet of the barricade? “They were people, as I see it, like, say, Pa and Grandfather old Goupil . . . people in short who look almighty respectable — profound — serious — yet if one looks at them a bit sharply and at close quarters, there’s something lugubrious, dull, even feeble about them, to such a degree that they make one sick.” Would Theo make his stand with the “mediocrities,” or would he be a part of him as a crusader for Reality and Magnificence?
This line of argument, originating in petty slights, would have profound penalties for van Gogh’s artwork — particularly for his choice to go to Paris and to throw his lot in with the avant-garde. Beforehand he tended to consider France (Theo’s world) solely by way of the superficiality of contemporary life; it was glitz and glamour, all these empty vanities he couldn’t stand. However now he found one other side of the Metropolis of Gentle and of the modernity with which it was so intently related, one which was radical, socially aware, subversive, as disdainful of excessive society as he was. The extra estranged he was from his household, the extra he noticed their straitlaced degelijkheid as the basis of all his troubles, the extra he was drawn to this different world. In a dialectic worthy of Marx himself, he started to see fashionable capitalist society not merely because the oppressor of the widespread man, however because the inventive engine setting up a brand new and higher world — a revolution of the thoughts in addition to in social preparations. “One feels instinctively that a tremendous amount is changing, and everything will change,” he opined. “We’re in the last quarter of a century that will end with another colossal revolution . . . but the next generations will be able to breathe more freely.” For the remainder of his life this hope that modernity may usher in a brand new world wherein creativity was rewarded and social justice achieved vied along with his earlier, extra romantic view of the countryside, and the peasant who labored the land, because the supply of all advantage. It’s a contradiction he by no means totally resolved, one which drew him to town after which to the countryside once more, a backwards and forwards that mirrored his personal profound ambivalence.
Cowl of A Hearth in His Soul: Van Gogh, Paris, and the Making of an Artist by Miles J. Unger (Pegasus Books, 2025)