Editor’s Note: The following text has been excerpted with permission and adapted from A Fire in His Soul: Van Gogh, Paris, and the Making of an Artist (2025) by Miles J. Unger, published by Pegasus Books and available online.
“I shan’t be asking you whether you approve or disapprove
of anything I do or don’t do — I won’t be embarrassed and,
if I feel like going to Paris, for instance, I shan’t ask you
whether or not you object.”
—Vincent to Theo van Gogh, December 6, 1884
Paris loomed large in the mind of any ambitious artist. It was a capstone to an aesthetic education, a mountain to climb, a rite of passage. Even those like Millet who wore their contempt for the city as a badge of honor built their careers there, knowing that fashionable Parisians who would never dream of actually setting foot in a barn would pay handsomely for images of sturdy peasants and rosy-cheeked milkmaids. Here one could find the best of the old and the new. Paris was a treasure house, overflowing with monuments of past greatness, as well as the center of art as a living practice.
In many neighborhoods, from Montmartre and Batignolles in the north to the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse to the south, upper floors with large north-facing windows still mark the studios where painters and sculptors once toiled, usually in obscurity but always in hope. The vast population included professionals of every stripe and status: a few Salon stars with international reputations and fat bank accounts, an untold number of hacks catering to the whims and pocketbooks of the burgeoning middle class, and scruffy provocateurs who lived for scandal and thrived on outrage.
They came in the thousands, attracted by the unmatched opportunities to learn the trade, by enrolling at the world-famous École des Beaux-Arts or in one of the many independent ateliers, where the rules were a bit more relaxed but the training every bit as rigorous. At the very least, a monthslong stay in Paris meant that you were up on the latest trends; it was a mark of sophistication you could turn to profit back home. Even if you had no intention of making it your permanent home, it was necessary to test yourself in this most competitive arena, to see if you measured up and how much you still had to learn. Some stayed only weeks, leaving with renewed inspiration, while others retreated as fast as they could for calmer waters. Just as many were seduced and remained a lifetime. It was no different for Vincent van Gogh. His journey would inevitably take him to Paris. If not now, then someday.
The truth is that van Gogh was deeply conflicted about Paris. He’d spent almost a year there — from May 1875 through April 1876 — but at a time in his life when he was least able to appreciate what it had to offer. With his career at Goupil’s grinding to its sorry conclusion and plunged in the depths of religious mania, the city’s cultural riches left him cold, its pleasures passed him by. “Too large, too confused,” he’d pronounced on his first visit, and familiarity didn’t necessarily increase its appeal. For a time his loneliness was eased by the arrival of his friend Harry Gladwell, whom he’d met in London and who shared his pious bent, but either alone or in company he was out of step with the joyful, hedonistic spirit of the city. His sister-in-law said he preferred “his ‘cabin’ in Montmartre where, morning and evening, he read the Bible with his young friend Harry Gladwell, [to being out] among the worldly Parisian public.” Despite unequaled opportunities to indulge his love of painting, he made no attempt to connect with the city’s diverse community of artists, too consumed by his own obsessions to make note of the momentous changes taking place around him.
But from the summer of 1880, when he took up his new calling, Paris took center stage, in his thoughts if not in fact. The prospect of living with Theo appealed to him, at least in theory, particularly during those periods when he felt most isolated. “The thing that attracts me most about Paris,” he wrote from Drenthe, “that would be of most use in my progress, is actually being with you, having that friction of ideas with someone who knows what a painting is, who understands the reasonableness of the quest. I think Paris is all right because you’re in Paris, and if consequently I were less alone I would get on faster, even there.” Sometimes he talked of moving there as a practical matter, as the means to acquire the skills necessary to start earning a living; sometimes its allure was more aspirational, a distant goal to be approached only after he was accomplished enough to make his own mark. It served as both a spur to his ambition and a safety valve in case he wore out his welcome closer to home.
Vincent and Theo danced around the issue for years. It would be mentioned first by one and then the other, usually tentatively and with many caveats, each hoping his brother wouldn’t pursue the matter since they both suspected that life together might prove unbearable. In 1883, when he was dragging his easel about the moors of Drenthe, it had been Theo urging him to come back to civilization and Vincent who balked, suggesting instead that Theo come join him on the heath. The calculus shifted over time, pros and cons taking on different weights depending on the nature of their latest quarrel or the balance in Theo’s bank account. By late 1884 — Vincent having stumbled from crisis to crisis, changing addresses as he fled one impossible situation only to find himself mired in another equally bleak — the city where his brother already enjoyed independence and material comfort seemed to offer refuge from the storms of life. “If I feel like going to Paris,” he warned Theo, “I shan’t ask you whether or not you object.”
The prospect of Paris always looked brighter when things were dark at home. Since the scandal involving Margot Begemann, the rift between Vincent and his parents had grown into a yawning chasm; the residents of Nuenen were now openly hostile, providing a kind of negative pressure that forced Vincent to consider other options. The difficulties of his domestic situation were compounded by disagreements with Theo over the direction of his art. He still favored dark canvases of peasant subjects, bleak visions of grinding poverty, clumsily rendered, with little commercial appeal and showing little awareness of recent trends. Vincent’s complaints that his brother wasn’t doing anything to promote his work in Paris were met by Theo’s exasperation with his stubborn refusal to deviate from his chosen path.
But even as Vincent’s art appeared to have fossilized, the man was changing. He was experiencing an internal revolution, one that was largely invisible but that would erupt in the radical innovations of his Paris years. In battles with his father, he honed his worldview, his hatred for the suffocating degelijkheid of his parents giving him a new conception of who he was and what he stood for. His thinking on art, on politics — his attitude toward the modern world in general — underwent a crucial transformation, a change reflected in his taste in literature as he moved away from the tear-soaked tales of Dickens, Hugo, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, toward the incisive portraits of urban life in the novels of de Maupassant, the Goncourt brothers, and, above all, Émile Zola. These “modern” novelists shared the social consciousness of their predecessors, but they couched their critique in a more objective form. Zola was as much journalist as novelist, his writings an accumulation of facts all the more devastating for the dispassionate way they were presented. As he wrote in his preface to L’Assommoir, he intended it to be “the first novel about the common people which does not tell lies but has the authentic smell of the people,” adding, “my characters are not bad, but only ignorant and spoilt by the environment of grinding toil and poverty in which they live.” A few years earlier, Vincent had urged his brother to destroy such books in order to fix his eyes on heaven, but now he embraced their godless creed. As he steeped himself in tales of Parisian life, low and high, the city became ever more the focus of his thoughts. It was there, in the French capital, where the great drama of modern civilization was playing out, and it was there that, more and more, he saw his own future taking shape.
The trials of recent years had hardened van Gogh. He still identified with the less fortunate, but now his love for humanity took on a sharper edge. His two disastrous courtships caused him to despise those who’d denied him his happiness and to lash out against anything that smacked of hypocrisy. At home he provoked his father by carrying around books by radical or anticlerical authors, provoking accusations from Dorus that he was trying to “infect him with his French fallacies.” Vincent’s evangelical fervor was replaced by an instinctive socialism — not a systematic program but rather an emotional identification with society’s outcasts and an increasing alienation from the class into which he was born. “The working man against the bourgeois,” he rumbled, “is as justified as the third estate against the other two a hundred years ago.”
Unable to accept responsibility for family quarrels, he rebranded personal antagonisms as ideological disagreements. His fights with Theo over money became skirmishes in the endless war between the haves and have-nots, a matter of principle rather than self-interest: “I’m on one side, you on the other of a certain barricade that may no longer be visible in the form of paving-stones,” he told him, “but which still definitely exists and persists in society.” Who were those on the wrong side of the barricade? “They were people, as I see it, like, say, Pa and Grandfather old Goupil . . . people in short who look almighty respectable — profound — serious — yet if one looks at them a bit sharply and at close quarters, there’s something lugubrious, dull, even feeble about them, to such a degree that they make one sick.” Would Theo make his stand with the “mediocrities,” or would he join him as a crusader for Truth and Beauty?
This line of argument, originating in petty slights, would have profound consequences for van Gogh’s art — in particular for his decision to go to Paris and to throw his lot in with the avant-garde. Previously he tended to think of France (Theo’s world) exclusively in terms of the superficiality of modern life; it was glitz and glamour, all those empty vanities he couldn’t stand. But now he discovered another aspect of the City of Light and of the modernity with which it was so closely associated, one that was radical, socially conscious, subversive, as disdainful of high society as he was. The more estranged he was from his family, the more he saw their straitlaced degelijkheid as the root of all his troubles, the more he was attracted to this other world. In a dialectic worthy of Marx himself, he began to see modern capitalist society not simply as the oppressor of the common man, but as the creative engine constructing a new and better world — a revolution of the mind as well as in social arrangements. “One feels instinctively that a tremendous amount is changing, and everything will change,” he opined. “We’re in the last quarter of a century that will end with another colossal revolution . . . but the next generations will be able to breathe more freely.” For the rest of his life this hope that modernity might usher in a new world in which creativity was rewarded and social justice achieved vied with his earlier, more romantic view of the countryside, and the peasant who worked the land, as the source of all virtue. It’s a contradiction he never fully resolved, one that drew him to the city and then to the countryside again, a back and forth that reflected his own profound ambivalence.
