The Picture Trade

What a junior apprentice at Goupil & Cie handled, in his first weeks at the Hague house on the Plaats, was paper. Prints kept flat in portfolios, laid one on another like a ledger's leaves; photographs of celebrated paintings mounted on card; engravings, lithographs and photogravures of the pictures the Paris Salon had admired, the same picture in several sizes; frames, and the orders for frames; and now and then an actual painting, which arrived in a crate and left, when it left at all, for a house with money in it.

The shop was number 14, and the man in charge of it was H. G. Tersteeg, who had taken over the running of the Hague house when Uncle Cent moved to Paris and who was now the new apprentice's superior. The boy lodged with a family called Roos at Lange Beestenmarkt 32; it was the end of July 1869.

It was an education, and a real one, and it is worth taking seriously as one. A junior in a picture shop learns the names first — which painter, which picture, which plate, which size — and then what each of them costs, and then, if he is any good at it, which customer will want which before the customer has quite decided. He learns how a picture is packed and what breaks in transit. He learns what sells and what does not, which is a different list from what is good and not always a shorter one. Not many painters have known the trade from the counter side before they knew it from the easel, and this one knew it for the best part of seven years.

He was good at it.

He began that first year to collect for himself — photographs, photo-engravings and prints of the kind the firm sold, bought out of his own pay — and within a few years he could fill a letter with the names of more than sixty painters he admired, from Millet and Corot to Gérôme and Meissonier, set down the page like a column of stock, and add at the bottom that he could go on like that for he did not know how long. When he was moved on in 1873, Tersteeg wrote to his parents, Jo van Gogh-Bonger says in her memoir, that everybody at the gallery liked dealing with Vincent — art lovers, clients and painters alike — and that he would certainly succeed in the profession.

In January 1873 he had a rise, and he told Theo about it with the figures: "My new year began well, I was given a monthly rise of 10 guilders, so I now earn 50 guilders a month, and on top of that I received a 50-guilder bonus. Isn't that wonderful?" He sent half the bonus home, and his father wrote to Theo that the money would go on new clothes for Lies and Willemien (Wil).

The correspondence had begun four months before that, and it began with a note. In September 1872 Theo, who was fifteen and still at school, came to stay in The Hague for a few days, and when he had gone home to the parsonage at Helvoirt — the family had moved there from Zundert in 1871 — his brother wrote to him on the Sunday, the twenty-ninth.

"Thanks for your letter, I was glad to hear that you got back safely. I missed you the first few days, and it was strange for me not to find you when I came home in the afternoon."

The rest of it is the weather, which was terrible, and trotting races on the occasion of an exhibition, and the illuminations and fireworks put off for the rain, and regards from friends. Theo walked six kilometres each way to his school at Oisterwijk, and his brother supposed that in that weather the walks must be making him anxious.

In December the news came that Theo was to go into the firm as well, at the Brussels branch, at the start of the new year, placed there by the same uncle. Vincent wrote at once: "I'm so glad that both of us are now in the same line of business, and in the same firm; we must correspond often." So they did, from then on, and from here the record of his life becomes very largely his own record, set down for one reader at a time.

What Theo wrote back in these years is lost.

In May 1873 he was transferred to London. He left Helvoirt on the twelfth, spent several days in Paris on the way, going round the Salon and the Louvre and the Luxembourg and the firm's Paris branch, which was splendid and much larger than he had imagined, and started work about a week later at Goupil's London house, 17 Southampton Street, off the Strand, under a man named Charles Obach.

The London house was not a gallery, and he told Theo plainly in his first letter from there that "the firm here is just a stockroom". But the hours were shorter than at The Hague — nine to six, and on Saturdays he was finished by four — and he had the evenings, and a salary, at first, of ninety pounds a year, which was a little under eleven hundred guilders. It was not as much as it sounds: his father reported to Theo that his board and his midday meal took nearly nine hundred of them.

The cheerful letters are from that first London year, and they are cheerful in detail. He paid eighteen shillings a week for his room, "not including the washing", and had to eat in town. He went walking to Box Hill on a Sunday with Mr Obach, and on the Whitsun holiday with three young Germans from his lodgings who loved music and played the piano and sang in the evenings; but "those gentlemen spend a great deal of money and I shan't go out with them any more." To friends in The Hague he wrote that his neighbourhood was "very pretty, and so peaceful and convivial that one almost forgets one is in London", and that he had been to see the riders in Rotten Row, and that he was reading Keats, who was the favourite of the painters there. According to Jo, who had the family's letters to work from, he bought himself a top hat, on the ground that you could not be in London without one.

At the end of August he moved, to save money — a hundred and eighty guilders a year, his father said — to a house south of the river in Brixton, 87 Hackford Road, and in the middle of September he wrote to Theo about it.

"Oh, how I'd like to have you here, old chap, to see my new lodgings, which you'll have heard about. I now have a room, as I've long been wishing, without sloping beams and without blue wallpaper with a green border. It's a very diverting household where I am now, in which they run a school for little boys. Some time ago I spent a Saturday rowing on the Thames with 2 Englishmen. It was glorious."

In the same letter he reported on the English painting of the season. He had seen a picture of the archangel Michael slaying Satan, in which Satan was a sort of fish or dragon no less than six ells long, with a little man about to kill it, and he called it ghastly. He had seen another, of the Gadarene swine: "It showed some 50 black pigs and piglets, running helter-skelter downhill and tumbling over each other into the sea. It was very edifying." Then, being fair, he added that it was a very clever painting.

He was twenty. In November Theo was moved from Brussels to the Hague house, and into his brother's old lodgings with the Roos family, and in the first week of January 1874 Vincent sent him a New Year's letter with the list of painters in it and some advice. "Find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful." And: "Always continue walking a lot and loving nature, for that's the real way to learn to understand art better and better." And then, about himself: "Things are going well for me here, I have a wonderful home and it's a great pleasure for me to observe London and the English way of life and the English themselves, and I also have nature and art and poetry, and if that isn't enough, what is?"

Ten years afterwards, in the autumn of 1883, he told Theo that in London he had often stood on the Thames Embankment on his way home from Southampton Street in the evening and drawn, "and it looked terrible".

The house in Hackford Road belonged to a widow, Ursula Loyer, who kept a small school in it with her daughter Eugénie. It was the daughter he became attached to. When Jo published her memoir, in 1914, she gave the daughter her mother's name, and a great many books have called the girl Ursula since.

And that is very nearly all that is known. Nothing that passed between Vincent and Eugénie Loyer was written down by either of them in anything that survives, and the fuller stories told since, Jo's among them, describe scenes that his own letters do not contain.

What the record does hold is what the family saw. At the end of June 1874 he went home to Helvoirt for a fortnight, and drew there — his mother noticed that he did a fair amount of drawing — and in July he went back to London with his sister Anna, who was looking for a post as a teacher and lodged at the Loyers' with him for a few weeks. Shortly after the tenth of August the two of them left Hackford Road for rooms in Kennington Road, and his mother wrote to Theo on the fifteenth.

"Vincent will also not have had it easy at the Loyerses' – I'm glad he's no longer there, there were too many secrets there and no family like ordinary people, but he will surely have been disappointed by them and his illusions will not have been realized – real life is different from what one imagines."

That is a mother's reading, at a distance, of a household she knew from her son's letters.

From that August the family's letters describe him differently: he was thin, he was sombre, he kept to himself, and his behaviour struck them as strange and unfriendly. Yet in July, still in the house, he had written to Theo that walking through the streets with Anna in the evening he found everything as beautiful as when he first arrived; that Michelet's L'amour had been a revelation to him; and, on a line by itself, "I'm learning to swim." The two sit a few weeks apart in the record.

In October 1874 the firm sent him to Paris for two months, to the headquarters in the rue Chaptal. He spent Christmas at Helvoirt and went back to London in January, where Goupil's had just taken over a dealer's business, Holloway & Sons, at 25 Bedford Street, and was making a proper gallery of it at last. "Our gallery is now finished and it's beautiful," he told Theo. In the middle of May 1875 he was moved to Paris again, and wrote home that the gentlemen had found it best to let an Englishman named Tripp take his place in London for six or eight weeks; the six or eight weeks did not end.

In Paris he rented a small room in Montmartre, which overlooked, he told Theo, "a little garden full of ivy and Virginia creeper", and he listed for his brother the prints on its walls: two Ruisdaels, a Rembrandt of a young mother reading the Bible beside a cradle at night with an old woman listening, a portrait of a lady by Philippe de Champaigne, three Corots, and more below.

By that summer the religion had taken the letters over. He copied out texts for Theo, and English hymns, and reported the Sunday sermons he had heard, and in September he wrote, "I'm going to get rid of all my books by Michelet &c. &c., you should too," and a few weeks later asked his brother whether he had done it. It was neither a fashion nor a pose. It was a serious attempt at a vocation, made by a young man whose father's working week was sermons and sickbeds, and he gave it what he gave everything, which was all the hours he had.

In October he described his evenings. A young Englishman lodged in the same house, eighteen years old, an employee of the firm and a London dealer's son, named Harry Gladwell, who had never been away from home and who ate, when he first arrived, four to six sous' worth of bread in the morning, the afternoon and the evening — "bread, nota bene, is cheap here" — with pounds of apples and pears on top of it, and stayed as lean as a pole, with two strong rows of teeth, large red lips, and a pair of large, usually red, jug-ears. He was ridiculed a good deal at first, "even by me," Vincent admitted, and then Vincent warmed to him. "Every evening we go home together, eat something or other in my room, and the rest of the evening I read aloud, usually from the Bible. We intend to read it all the way through." Gladwell woke him between five and six, and they breakfasted in the room and were at the gallery by eight.

"At the gallery I simply do whatever the hand finds to do," he wrote, which is Ecclesiastes. What the hand found to do at Goupil's was to sell fashionable pictures to the people who wanted them, and he no longer thought well of the pictures, or of the wanting. In September he had asked the firm's cashier to keep back part of his monthly wages for the fare home at Christmas, and in October the family moved again, to a new parish at Etten, in the west of Brabant.

He went home for Christmas.

He arrived at Etten on the twenty-third or twenty-fourth of December and stayed until the third of January. He should not have left his work at the end of the year, his father wrote afterwards, "when it became apparent to him that he was needed". His father wrote to Theo on the last day of December: "He is certainly not happy. I believe it is not the right place for him there." He had a private talk with his son and thought he might advise him to resign in two or three months; his father's brother Cor, the art dealer in Amsterdam, consulted, advised against it, and on the third of January Vincent took the train back to Paris.

On the fourth he went in to wish Mr Boussod a happy new year. Léon Boussod had been a partner in the firm, alongside Adolphe Goupil and Uncle Cent, since 1856.

Vincent wrote to his parents that same day, and to Theo six days later, and the two accounts do not agree. To his parents, as his father passed it on, the meeting had turned very unpleasant — the going home at the end of the year had been much resented — and after it he had no choice but to resign as from the first of April. To Theo, on the tenth, he told it differently. In that letter "His Hon." is Mr Boussod.

"When I saw Mr Boussod again I asked if His Hon. indeed thought it a good thing for me to go on working in the firm this year, since His Hon. had never had any very serious complaints against me. The latter was indeed the case, though, and His Hon. took the words out of my mouth, so to speak, saying that I would leave on 1 April, thanking the gentlemen for anything I might have learned in their firm. When an apple is ripe, all it takes is a gentle breeze to make it fall from the tree, it's also like that here. I've certainly done things that were in some way very wrong, and so have little to say."

He asked Theo to let Tersteeg read the letter and, for the time being, to speak of it to nobody else.

His father's letter to Theo about it says: "How much he has spurned! What bitter sorrow for Uncle Cent." He had advised his son to tell Mr Boussod frankly that he regretted his error. Vincent went back to Boussod and was, his father reported, "not received unfavourably", and the notice stood.

So the leaving was slow. He had the whole of January, February and March to work through at the gallery with his notice given, selling pictures he no longer admired. He read George Eliot, Felix Holt and then Scenes of Clerical Life, and sent Felix Holt on by way of Theo for the family at Etten. "I read the advertisements in the English newspapers," he told Theo in January, "and have already written to a couple"; by the end of March he had answered more, and most of his letters had gone unanswered. On the evening of Friday the thirty-first of March 1876 he left Paris, and he was at Etten the next morning.

His mother wrote to Theo on the Tuesday. "Vincent arrived home safe and sound on Saturday, we were glad he was here."

He had been nearly seven years in the picture trade, in three countries, and he had no other.