He was busy painting a sloping ground in the woods, covered with moldered, dry beech leaves. The ground was light and dark reddish brown, made more so by the shadows of trees which threw streaks over it and sometimes half blotted it out. The question was to get the depth of colour, the enormous force and solidness of the ground. While painting, he perceived for the first time how much light there was still in that darkness. He had to keep that light, and keep at the same time the depth of rich colour.
The ground was a carpet of deep reddish brown in the glow of an autumn evening sun, tempered by the trees. Young birches sprang up, caught light on one side, and were sparkling green there, the shadowy sides of the stems were warm, deep black-green. Behind the saplings, behind the brownish red soil was a very delicate sky, bluish grey, warm, hardly blue, all aglow. Against it was a hazy border of green and a network of little stems and yellowish leaves. A few figures of wood gatherers were wandering around like dark masses of mysterious shadow. The white cap of a woman, who was bending to reach a dry branch, stood out brusquely against the deep red-brown of the ground. A dark silhouette of a man appeared above the underbrush; moulded against the sky, the figure was large and full of poetry.
While painting he said to himself, “I must not go away before there is something of an autumn evening feeling in it, something mysterious, something serious.” But the light was fading. He had to work quickly. The figures he painted in at once by a few strong strokes with a resolute brush. It struck him how firmly the little tree stems were rooted in the ground. He tried to paint them in, but the ground was already so sticky that a brush stroke was lost in it. He tried again and again, desperately, for it was getting darker. At last he saw he was defeated; no brush could suggest anything in that rich loam-brown of the earth. With a blind intuition he flung the brush away, squeezed the roots and trunks on the canvas from the tubes of paint, picked up another brush, and modelled the thick, coloured oil with the handle.
“Yes,” he exclaimed, as night finally claimed the woods, “now they stand there, rising from the ground, strongly rooted in it. I have said what I wanted to say!”
Weissenbruch looked in that evening. “Come along with me to
Vincent had not forgotten his last visit. “No, thanks, I don’t care to leave my wife.”
Weissenbruch walked over to Christine, kissed her hand, asked after her health, and played with the baby quite jovially. He evidently had no recollection of the last thing he had said to them.
“Let me see some of your new sketches, Vincent.”
Vincent complied only too gladly. Weissenbruch picked out a study of Monday’s market, where they were pulling down the stands; another of a line waiting in front of the soup kitchen; another of three old men at the insane asylum; another of a fishing smack at Scheveningen with the anchor raised, and a fifth that Vincent had made on his knees, in the mud of the dunes during a driving rain storm.
“Are these for sale? I’d like to buy them.”
“Is this another of your poor jokes, Weissenbruch?”
“I never joke about painting. These studies are superb. How much do you want?”
Vincent said, “Name your own price,” numbly, afraid that he was going to be ridiculed at any moment.
“Very well, how about five francs apiece? Twenty-five for the lot.”
Vincent’s eyes shot open. “That’s too much! My Uncle Cor only paid me two and a half francs.”
“He cheated you, my boy. All dealers cheat you. Some day they will sell for five thousand francs. What do you say, is it a deal?”
“Weissenbruch, sometimes you’re an angel and sometimes you’re a fiend!”
“That’s for variety, so my friends won’t get tired of me.”
He took out a wallet and handed Vincent twenty-five francs. “Now come along with me to
So Vincent went along. The hall of the club was crowded with men all smoking cheap and strong tobacco. The first tableau was after an etching by Nicholas Maes,
He told his father as much about the story of Christine as he thought expedient, enclosed Weissenbruch’s twenty-five francs, and asked Theodorus to come to The Hague as his guest.
