From age 15, a dozen times, Vincent leaves the family home, with a plan and full of optimism, and within a year he is back, a broken failure. I’ve followed him to each place. To London to work in his uncle’s art gallery, Ramsgate to be a teacher, Isleworth to preach, Dordrecht to work in a book shop, and Amsterdam to train as a pastor. To the Borinage in Belgium as an evangelist to miners, the peat fields of Drenthe to meet painters, and the Hague to live with a prostitute. Each time he returned, to shame his father in front of his congregation (often tiny, 35 at Nuenen), arriving ‘like a shaggy dog’, ‘too loud’, to face his father’s criticism, and on occasion a threat of the lunatic asylum. And to argue back, against Dorus’ intransigence, and the hypocrisy of a pastor who preached charity, then threw tenants off plots when they fell ill. His family don’t know what to do with him, and he doesn’t know what to do with the family.

Age 27 he decides to be a painter, and thereafter is subsidised from his younger brother Theo’s salary at Goupils (later Boussod & Valadon) in Paris.

Age 31 he turns up at the rectory in Nuenen. And stays for two years, his longest time anywhere since childhood. He sleeps in an outhouse, rents a studio from the Catholic priest, pays Catholic peasants as models, and argues with his father. ‘You are killing me!’ ‘You will be the death of me!’ Dorus cries. And then drops dead, at 62, of a heart attack. He is buried on Vincent’s 32nd birthday, another of those potent family anniversaries. At the funeral, Vincent tells a mourner, ‘dying is hard, but living is harder’.

From the day of his father’s death, Vincent’s life begins. It is so with some men, that their true life can begin only when their father dies. An uncle had said, ‘Vincent is like a man who stands in his own light’. Rather it was the implacable, doubting, questioning mountain that was Dorus blocking Vincent’s light. Now the mountain has gone.

And by the end of the year, Vincent was gone. The storm had swept through Nuenen, leaving behind a sister openly accusing him of having killed their father, and a mother deprived of her husband silently agreeing, a breach with Theo (commenting on Delacroix’s painting, Liberty on the Barricades, he sees Theo on the government side, himself with the rebels), and with Van Rappard, his one artist friend. And leaving the scandals of a shy Protestant spinster, encouraged by Vincent, who has tried to kill herself, and a child it is claimed he fathered on one of his Catholic peasant models. He never returns to the family home, to the Netherlands, never sees any of the family, except Theo.

Meanwhile, he has become an artist. He is on his way.

He learned to draw from self-help books, going through Bargues exercises again and again. He believes that time and effort, hard work and repetition, can make up for lack of natural ability. And no one works harder than Vincent.

In Nuenen, financed by Theo’s subvention – double a workman’s wage – he can afford oil paint and canvas. In two years he paints 197 pictures. He paints landscapes, cottages, gardens, peasants at work and, above all, peasant portraits. He is aiming to be a painter of peasants, of rural scenes, like Millet and Israëls, depicting poor people as he’d seen in The Graphic, drawn by Herkomer and Fildes. His sympathy is further animated by his reading of Dickens, Eliot and Zola. But rather than from their distance, he has experienced it directly; when collecting school fees in the East End; and from his work in the Borinage, where he gave away his food and clothes to the striking miners (and was withdrawn for ‘excessive zeal’). And when he kept Sien the prostitute and her extended family in the Hague.

He sees himself as a manual worker, like a weaver or harvester. He works in the fields alongside the Catholic peasants, looking more like a peasant than them, weather-beaten and ill-dressed. As they plant potatoes, he draws. ‘I’m ploughing my canvas as they do on their fields’. They allow him into their poor homes, to paint and just to sit. They model for him, as long as he pays. He is, if not accepted, tolerated. His family is appalled.

Towards the end of the first year, he has the idea for his first great painting, of a peasant family sitting around a table, by lamplight, eating: ‘The Potato Eaters’. In preparation he paints 62 portraits in three months. What he learns from these portraits prepares him for his later portraits, and self-portraits. He sketches, drafts, does versions, paints and repaints and adds paint, piling on ever thicker and darker pigments, finishing it a month after his father’s death. It depicts, he explains to Theo, ‘a way of life quite different from ours, from that of civilised people’. ‘It comes from the heart of peasant life’. Van Rappard thinks it laughable. Theo is more circumspect, but clearly hates it. Still, two years later, Vincent calls it his best work.

But even he soon admits that this is not the future, that a painting that’s painted and repainted, that looks like a piling on of layer upon layer of Brabant mud, is a dead end. It is the end of the past rather than the beginning of the future. That lies elsewhere.
In one of his characteristic volte faces, when the present has become tangled, and the future incoherent, he suddenly changes direction. He rediscovers the master Romantic and colourist, Delacroix, and his colour theories as codified by Charles Blanc. After two years faithfully reproducing the dark and muted local colours of Brabant,  he suddenly writes, ‘a painter does better to start from the colour on his palette than to start from the colours in nature’. He reads Blanc’s books carefully, and writes out many pages for Theo, and begins to apply his theories.

For Blanc, there are three primary colours, ie colours that cannot be created by mixing other colours: red, yellow and blue.

Mixing two creates secondary colours: orange, green, purple. Complementary colours are those opposite on the colour wheel; side by side with the primary colour, it creates a vibrant contrast. But, ‘In a singular phenomenon, these same colours which are heightened by being juxtaposed, will destroy one another by being mixed.’ (Vincent’s emphasis.) It is the idea, adopted by the Pointillists, that pure colours should be placed on the painting, so they mix in the eye, not be mixed on the palette. And additional subtleties can be achieved if the complementaries are mixed but not in equal proportions, when a new broken colour will be produced which may be in harmony.
With various mixings and juxtapositions, there are ‘different ways of strengthening, supporting, attenuating and neutralising the effect of colour, and they involve working on what is next to it – by touching what isn’t the colour itself. He heightens and harmonises his colours, using the contrast between complementaries and agreement between analogues all together.’ Vincent becomes a master of the application of Blanc’s theories, in general and in detail, which can be seen in painting after painting.

At the same time he visits the newly-opened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, his first gallery visit in years, and is bowled over. And seeing the pictures now as an artist (he was an assiduous gallery-visitor when working at Goupils), he studies them with a new intensity. Of Rembrandt and Hals, he notes the speed with which they painted, and the unpolished surfaces they left. He sees the value of finishing a painting at one sitting. And to Hals’ paintings, ‘a colourist among colourists’ (he acknowledges Rembrandt’s mastery, but sees him as a harmonist – and puts himself firmly in the colourist camp), he applies Blanc’s theories in detailed analyses. Vincent has an acute and developing eye for colour, and his letters are full of such details. (As this, from St-Rémy – ‘The olive trees are very characteristic, and I’m struggling to capture that. It’s silver, sometimes more blue, sometimes greenish, bronzed, whitening on ground that is yellow, pink, purplish or orangeish to dull red ochre’ – all of which colours he included in his painting.)

Digesting Blanc’s theories, seeing great art, and seeing himself as an artist, made Vincent realise that he would get nowhere in rural Brabant. The radioactive meteorite has begun to scrape off the Brabant mud. Vincent heads for Paris.