Vincent laid out some of his sketches of the miners and peasants. Immediately that awful silence fell, the silence famous all over Holland for having broken the indisputable news to hundreds of young artists that their work was bad. Tersteeg looked over the entire lot without even a “Hummmm” escaping his lips. Vincent felt sick. Tersteeg sat back, looked out the window and over the Plaats at the swans in the lake. Vincent knew from experience that if he did not speak first, the silence would go on forever.
“Don’t you see any improvement at all, Mijnheer Tersteeg?” he asked. “Don’t you think my Brabant sketches better than the ones from the Borinage?”
“Well,” replied Tersteeg, turning back from the view, “they are better. But they are not good. There is something fundamentally wrong with them. Just what it is, I can’t say offhand. I think you had better keep to your copying for a time. You’re not ready to do original work yet. You must get a better grasp of elementals before you turn to life.”
“I would like to come to The Hague to study. Do you think that a good idea. Mijnheer?”
Tersteeg did not wish to assume any obligations toward Vincent. The whole situation looked very peculiar to him.
“The Hague is a nice place,” he said. “We have good galleries and a number of young painters. But whether it is any better than Antwerp, Paris, or Brussels, I’m sure I don’t know.”
Vincent left, not altogether discouraged. Tersteeg had seen some progress, and his was the most critical eye in all Holland. At least he was not standing still, He knew that his sketches from life were not all that they should have been, but he was confident that if he worked hard and long they would come right in the end.
THE HAGUE IS perhaps the cleanest and most well-bred city in all Europe. It is, in the true Holland manner, simple, austere and beautiful. The immaculate streets are lined with full-bosomed trees, the houses are of neat and fastidious brick, with tiny, lovingly kept gardens of roses and geraniums in front. There are no slums, poverty stricken districts, or careless eyesores; everything is kept up with that efficient asceticism of the Dutch.
Many years before, The Hague had adopted the stork as its official emblem. The population had grown by leaps and bounds ever since.
Vincent waited until the following day before calling on Mauve at his home Uileboomen 198. Mauve’s mother-in-law was a Carbentus, a sister of Anne Cornelia, and since family ties were strong in those circles, he received Vincent warmly.
Mauve was a powerfully built man with sloping but tremendous shoulders and a large chest. His head, like that of Tersteeg and most of the Van Gogh family, was a more important factor in his appearance than the features of his face. He had luminous eyes, somewhat sentimental, a strong, straight bridged nose springing bonily from his brow without any declivity, a high square forehead, flat ears, and salt-grey beard which concealed the perfect oval of his face. His hair was combed on the extreme right side, a great swash of it lying across the skull and parallel to his forehead.
Mauve was a man full of an energy which he did not dissipate. He painted, and when he got tired doing that he went on painting, and when that fatigued him he painted some more. By that time he would be refreshed and could go back to his painting again.
“Jet isn’t home, Vincent,” said Mauve. “Shall we go out to the atelier? I think we’ll be more comfortable there.”
“Yes, let’s.” He was eager to see the studio.
Mauve led him out to his large wooden atelier in the garden. The entrance was on the side near the house, but some little distance from it. The garden was walled in by hedges, giving Mauve complete isolation for his work.
A delicious smell of tobacco smoke, old pipes, and varnish greeted Vincent as he stepped in. The atelier was quite large, with pictures on easels standing about on a thick Deventer rug. The walls were warm with studies; in one corner was an antique table, and before it a small Persian rug. The north wall was half window. Books were scattered about, and on every available inch of flat space could be found the painter’s tools. In spite of the life and fullness of the studio, Vincent could feel the definite orderliness that emanated from Mauve’s character and dominated the place.
The formalities of family compliments engaged them only a few seconds; immediately they plunged into the only subject in the world that either of them cared a tinker’s dam about. Mauve had been avoiding other painters assiduously for some time (he always maintained that a man could either paint or talk about painting, but he could not do both) and was full of his new project, a misty landscape in a minor key of twilight. He did not discuss it with Vincent, he simply poured it out to him.
