More and more he had the feeling that the drawing of the figure was a good thing, and that indirectly it had a good influence on the drawing of landscape. If he drew a willow tree as if it were a living being—and it really was so after all—then the surroundings followed in due course, if only he concentrated all his attention on that same tree and did not give up until he had brought some life into it. He loved landscape very much, but ten times more he loved those studies from life, sometimes of startling realism, which had been drawn so well by Gavarni, Daumier, Doré, De Groux and Felicien Rops. By working on types of labourers, he hoped eventually to be able to do illustrations for the magazines and newspapers; he wanted to support himself completely during the long hard years in which he would perfect his technique and go on to higher forms of expression.
One time his father, who thought he read for entertainment, said, “Vincent, you are always talking about how hard you must work. Then why do you waste your time on all those silly French books?”
Vincent placed a marking finger in “Le Père Goriot” and looked up. He kept hoping that some day his father might understand him when he spoke of serious things.
“You see,” he said slowly, “not only does the drawing of figures and scenes from life demand a knowledge of the handicraft of drawing, but it demands also profound studies of literature.”
“I must say I don’t gather that. If I want to preach a good sermon, I don’t spend my time in the kitchen watching your mother pickle tongues.”
“Speaking of tongues,” said Anna Cornelia, “those fresh ones ought to be ready by tomorrow breakfast.”
Vincent did not bother to upset the analogy.
“I can’t draw a figure,” he said, “without knowing all about the bones and muscles and tendons that are inside it. And I can’t draw a head without knowing what goes on in that person’s brain and soul. In order to paint life one must understand not only anatomy, but what people feel and think about the world they live in. The painter who knows his own craft and nothing else will turn out to be a very superficial artist.”
“Ah, Vincent,” said his father, sighing deeply, “I’m afraid you’re going to develop into a theorist!”
Vincent returned to “Le Père Goriot.”
Another time he became greatly excited at the arrival of some books by Cassagne which Theo sent to correct the trouble with his perspective. Vincent ran through them lovingly and showed them to Willemien.
“I know of no better remedy for my ailment,” he said to her. “If I am cured of it, I shall have these books to thank.”
Willemien smiled at him with her mother’s clear eyes.
“Do you mean to tell me, Vincent,” asked Theodorus, who was distrustful of everything that came from Paris, “that you can learn to draw correctly by reading ideas about art in books?”
“Yes.”
“How very odd.”
“That is to say, if I put into practice the theory they contain. However, practice is a thing one cannot buy at the same time with the books. If that were so there would be a larger sale of them.”
The days passed busily and happily into summer, and now it was the heat that kept him off the heath, and not the rain. He sketched his sister Willemien in front of the sewing machine, copied for a third time the exercises after Bargue, drew five times over a man with a spade,
The townspeople still thought him queer and kept him at arm’s length. Although his mother and Willemien—and even his father in his own way—heaped kindness and affection upon him, in those innermost recesses to which no one in Etten or the parsonage could ever possibly penetrate, he was frightfully alone.
In time the peasants grew to like and trust him. He found in their simplicity something akin to the soil in which they were hoeing or digging. He tried to put that into his sketches. Often his family could not tell where the peasant ended and the earth began. Vincent did not know how his drawings came out that way but he felt they were right, just so.
“There should be no strict line between,” he said to his mother who asked about this one evening. “They are really two kinds of earth, pouring into each other, belonging to each other; two forms of the same matter, indistinguishable in essence.”
His mother decided that since he had no wife, she had better take him in hand and help him become successful.
