A picture of Vincent?

A photo historian named Joseph Buberger recently emailed me a copy of the photograph that you see on the left.  As reported by USA Today, the photograph was discovered several years ago by artist Tom Stanford in an album of cabinet card photographs that he found in an antiques shop in Massachusetts.  It has since been featured in an exhibit titled Discovering Vincent Van Gogh: A Forensic Study of Identification--at the Seton Gallery at the University of New Haven in 2004--and has been widely circulated through the internet.  As soon as he saw the photograph, Stanford felt certain it was Vincent, and Joseph, who assisted with the aforementioned exhibit, agrees.  Joseph also has forwarded to me an email from Pascal Bonafoux, French art historian and curator, who seems to accept that the man in the picture could likely be Van Gogh himself.   Not all experts concur, however, at least not those at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.  The reason why this became a hot topic of conversation is that until the photograph in question surfaced, it was assumed that no adult photographs of Van Gogh existed.  Or rather, no photographs in which his face is visible.  There is one standard photograph of him sitting at a table beside the Siene with Emile Bernard, but in that picture Van Gogh's back is to the camera.   The only photographs that represent his face are from earlier in life, when his identity was still very much in formation: one when he is boy and another late in his teens, after he had worked for a couple years as an art dealer in The Hague.  (See that one below.)  Thus everyone who looks at this "recent" photograph wants to  know: Is this what the famous post-Impressionist actually looked like?

To be honest, I have my doubts.  While the man in the photograph does bear a resemblance to some of Van Gogh's painted self-portraits, he seems less akin to others.  (For instance, the self-portrait on the left, painted during his Paris years, bears a stronger resemblance--in my opinion--to the teenager photograph than this new one.)  Besides, portait paintings are by no means a scientifically accurate reflection of what a person looks like.   It would seem to make sense to compare the photograph first to the known photographs of Vincent, especially the one from his late teens.  When I do that, I have a hard time saying that the men in the two pictures are the same person.  The photograph Stanford discovered dates from 1886.  As you can see from the name and address imprinted on the picture, the photographer who took it worked in Paris.  Indeed, in late February of that year Vincent moved to Paris from Antwerp and stayed in the city for two years.  So if the picture does show Vincent, it is Vincent as he was when he shared an apartment with his brother Theo, circulated among the post-Impressionists, and learned a lot about brightening his palette.  However, in 1886 he was only thirty-three years old.  Less than fifteen years had passed from the time when the other photograph was taken.  Is that enough time for a person to change as drastically as Vincent would have had to?  One could easily argue that those were a very hard fifteen years for Van Gogh.  He gave up art dealing and tried to become a minister and then later decided to be painter. He suffered through a series of dispiriting romantic upheavals--I've written about those before--lived for long stretches in dire poverty and on little food, endured bouts of poor health, and worked himself ragged.  At thirty-three, he'd already lived a couple lifetimes.  Too, while his life was never truly stable, it was in some crucial ways more stable when he lived in Paris with Theo than at any other period in his adult life.  He was no longer starving; he started to look after his health, especially his teeth; and he tried to dress more like a professional man than a laborer.  If there was ever a time he would get such a photograph made, it would be during those years.


But even so, I'm still not convinced.  Van Gogh never had--not at any time in his adult life--much money to burn. In fact, what money he had came in the form of handouts from Theo.  That money typically went to paint and other supplies, books, and--at least while in Paris--visits to cafes.   There would not have been much leftover to pay a photographer.  (Of course, maybe Theo wanted the photograph made and paid the fee.)  Nor is there any mention in his letters of him sitting for a photograph.  (Then again, he wrote far fewer letters when he lived in Paris than before or after.)  And I have to ask why, if this is a legitimate photograph of Van Gogh, it only surfaced now and not much earlier?  Would not Theo have held on to it after Vincent left Paris for Arles?  (Theo religiously saved all the letters Vincent wrote him; why not a photograph too?)  Wouldn't some other family member have taken possession of it after Theo died in 1891?  If it is Vincent, why was the photograph included in an album of photographs featuring mostly clergymen?  And, most important, does it really look that much like the man?   It could be Vincent, or it could simply be an anonymous 19th century Parisian who bears a passing resemblance to him.   If it is Vincent, than we can surely say that the man changed a great deal between his late teens and early thirties.  (It's not just that he's older--that's to be expected--but the very structure of his face, and even his nose, looks different to me.) Just as a comparison, look at these two photographs of Paul Gauguin.  The one on the left dates from 1880, when the artist was 32; the one on the right dates from 1891, when Gauguin was 43.  That's an eleven year time span, and yet there's no mistaking either image for anyone but Paul Gauguin.  The man on the left is quite obviously the same man as on the right.  I know it's not fair to compare how one person ages to how another does, but it gets to the heart of the question for me.  Would an even older-than-his-years Vincent looked like the man in the recently discovered photograph, or would he have looked more like his own photograph from fourteen or so years earlier?

Postscript:  Happy New Year!  I hope everyone is enjoying a pleasant start to 2013.

The seeds of our projects

Novelist Elise Blackwell visited my university last week and told some interesting stories about how she found her way to the novels she eventually wrote. What she said reminded me of how serendipitous--or simply unexpected--our writing lives can be. Yes, we work and work and work, trying to realize our various projects, trying to get them under control, to make them more polished or perhaps less. Then when we're done with them we try to find the best possible outlet through which to show them to the world. It's all on us, it seems.

But one can't ignore the power of the unexpected, the circumstantial, and how profoundly that can affect what we do and how it turns out. After finishing her MFA at Cal-Irvine, Blackwell was living in California with her husband, trying to make ends meet through a series of jobs and also trying to keep writing. In part simply to economize, the couple decided to grow their own produce. What started as a private, low level initiative became more successful, and they started growing produce for profit. Around this time, and as part of their business efforts, Blackwell joined the Seed Savers Exchange. It was through her participation in this organization that she heard a fascinating story about Russian scientists who worked at a botanical institute during World War Two. During the seige of Leningrad, as they--like most people in that city--found themselves starving, the scientists refused to eat any of the seeds or rare plants in their possession. They died in order to save the exotic plants and seeds they had worked so hard to collect. Blackwell did not speak Russian nor did she have any particular knowledge of or interest in Russian history. At the time she had never considered writing a historical novel. Yet she knew she needed to tell the story of these scientists. What followed was years of research and writing which resulted in her short novel Hunger, a project her agent thought she was "f****** crazy" to take up but which he eventually championed and which became her first published book. She has since gone on to publish two more novels--Grub and The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish (another historical fiction)--with her fourth novel, An Unfinished Score, set to appear within the next few weeks.

Obviously, Blackwell did the work to make Hunger the fine novel it is. Yet it's curious to consider what would have happened if she'd never joined the Seed Savers Exchange and never heard about those Russian scientists. Me too. What if I'd never been selected to teach in the UCA-Netherlands program for the summer of 2001 and thus hadn't visited Amsterdam and not stepped through the doors of that city's Van Gogh museum? Easy answer to that one: I would never have started writing Yellow. What would I be writing instead? And what will I write next? No easy answers there. Too much relies on what you can't predict and what you can never expect.

What it's about

I've only been on this project for four+ years. I guess it's about time I tell somebody about it. I'm writing a historical novel and mine happens to feature as its subject the infamous--and I think misunderstood--Vincent Van Gogh. Historical fiction comes with its own set of problems and challenges, in addition to all the usual problems and challenges of writing fiction, and so I thought it would be good--especially as I'm moving into the phase of some serious decision making about the book--to share these challenges with anyone who is interested. And, of course, hopefully, to hear back from others who have sallied forth into historical terrains of their own. Maybe we can all learn from each other.

Why Van Gogh, you ask? I suppose he is a rather familiar--overly familiar?--figure. Everybody knows he cut off his own ear. Everybody's seen Starry Night. Novels have featured him already, to say nothing of feature films, educational videos, children's books, neckties, baby bowls, t-shirts, and postcards. Everybody thinks they know about Vincent. But do they? The truth is, when I chose this subject I didn't care if Van Gogh was familiar or not. I chose this subject because I couldn't not choose it. It chose me. I visited the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam one summer, several years ago, and was stunned by what I saw. I simply could not get enough. Let's just say that all those reproductions you see of Van Gogh's paintings don't begin to do justice to the real thing, live in the flesh. The light coming from his paintings was--and is--simply brimming. I'm a fiction writer, so how do I respond to something that moves me? Right. It took a while, believe me. The idea didn't coalesce immediately. But I remember mentioning it to someone a few months after I came back from that trip. And then some years went by while I worked on another book. And then a few more years reading up on the man himself, learning the very much that I did not know about him, and that most people still don't. And after living with, next to, nearby, and inside Vincent Van Gogh for over four years now I can tell you that the Van Gogh that comes to mind when you hear his name probably isn't the Van Gogh in my novel, because it's not the man either. At least not in my book. (Excuse the pun.) But, then again, I find myself constantly asking each day: So who is the Vincent I want in my book? And how do I make him happen? Nagging but imporant questions--and finally my inspiration for this blog.

I can only assume that various others out there are similarly struggling, trying to bring alive other historical figures. Some famous, some unknown. I remember William Styron writing, in regards to Nat Turner, that he was grateful that so little was known about Turner, because it freed him to create a Nat Turner of his imagination. I'm in the opposite position: there's a lot known about my character. In fact, he filled whole volumes with his correspondence. Yet, finally, my daily struggle is the same as Styron's: to create a Vincent in my imagination that feels right and who interests me. Does that make me a hypocrite when I proudfully announce, as I just did, that the Vincent of my novel is closer to the truth? Is there a Truth about someone? Do I really just mean that my Vincent is closer to how I want to perceive him? Does it mean that all I'm doing is frantically writing against type? I don't think so. Maybe. Hell no. Or yes, I guess so. How do I answer these questions? That's the point of this blog. They ARE questions. And I'm smack dab in the middle of trying to figure answers to them, along with what seems like a million other questions that leap up everyday. (Some of those being downright teensy-weensy.) I'll use this space to share some of those questions--big and small--with you. Whether we get answers, I can't promise. But I can promise a finished novel someday.