Vincent worked in the art trade with Goupil and Company
for six and a half years in total, although we only have documentation
of about four of those years. Initially, it seems that he enjoyed
the work and thrived in the art business, garnering praise from
his superiors. As in all endeavors, Vincent allowed his job to
absorb him completely, only to abandon it suddenly in depression,
frustration, and spiritual and emotional dejection, the first casualty
of his unstable psychological condition (most likely bipolar disorder–also known
as manic depression–or mild schizophrenia.) In 1872, Theo came
to visit Vincent in The Hague, eliciting Vincent's first recorded letter
upon his brother's departure, expressing his reluctance to see his
Theo leave. In December, Theo began work at the Brussels branch
of Goupil and Company. Soon afterward, in 1873, Vincent was transferred
to London on a promotion, stopping in Paris to visit the art museums
there, and Theo took his brother's position in The Hague offices
of Goupil.
Vincent's first trip out of his homeland proved both difficult
and exciting, and it afforded him the opportunity to be exposed
to a wealth of English and international art. His interest in art
history and literature (particularly Shakespeare) grew, and his
informal education led to the formation of rudimentary opinions
about the role and value of art. His reverence for the old Dutch
masters (especially Rembrandt and Rubens) grew, while he simultaneously became
attracted to the more contemporary landscape painting of the English
artists John Constable, and William Turner, the important Realists
Corot and Millet, and the work of Emile Wauters; he read Keats,
Dickens, and Longfellow and relished the ecstatic romanticism of
philosophical historian Jules Michelet. In general, he was not
a great fan of English painting, but he was able to find much art,
both old and new, in London, that he appreciated (much of which
was, not coincidentally, the primary fare of Goupil's business)
– particularly the work of the French Realist Barbizon School (which
included Corot and Jules Breton) and the lesser- known Dutch equivalent,
The Hague School. He explored the city on long walks that soon
became a necessary routine in his life, eschewing the popular tourist
sites for more authentic areas. He met his uncle by marriage, the
painter Anton Mauve, whom he greatly respected and with whom he
would study a few years later. Homesick but generally happy, Vincent
had his somber moments even early in his life–he wrote to Theo
in 1873, quoting Dickens, that smoking pipe tobacco was a "good
remedy" for the suicidal thoughts he occasionally had (L five,
Mar. 1873).
Vincent was a lodger with the Loyer family in Brixton,
South London, and his earliest extant drawing is a sketch of his
street. His choice of residence turned out to be unfortunate, however–in
the spring of 1874, after a visit home to Brabant, during which
he did a little sketching and a lot of reading, he declared his
love to his landlady's daughter Eugenie Loyer, a pivotal episode
that about which his family knew but about which Vincent himself
hardly wrote, like most of his crises. Influenced by his favorite
writer, Michelet, and his idea "that a woman is 'a quite different
being' than a man" and that "there is much more to love than people
generally suppose" (letter twenty, July 1874), he proposed to Eugenie,
who was already secretly engaged. Vincent pursued the situation
anyway, but was rejected, and this first taste of a long career
of romantic failures, what he later defined as unbalanced "intellectual
passion" (L 157, Nov. 1881) crushed him emotionally. His Uncle
Cent had him transferred to Paris for three months as a distraction,
but upon his return to London, and by his second, permanent transfer
to Paris in May 1875, Vincent was completely miserable. His letters
were melancholy and sometimes muddy or confused–he seemed passionate only
when discussing painting and religion. He became more and more
introverted and depressed, and the inclination towards religion
that he had felt since a boy was steadily magnified, until he became
profoundly spiritual, spending his nights studying the Bible, John
Bunyan's A Pilgrim's Progress, and Thomas a Kempis's Imitation
of Christ (L forty-two, Oct. 1875).
Vincent and his family both understood that his career
was in jeopardy–his personal appearance became increasingly shabby,
and his depressed, temperamental attitude and general apathy and
carelessness with his work annoyed his employers and clients. Vincent left
Paris without telling Goupil and Company to visit his family at their
new home in Etten, The Netherlands, for Christmas 1875, and when
he returned to Paris, he was fired effective April 1876. His distraught
family was not excited about his move to England, where he taught
briefly as assistant master to a reverend at a religious private school
in Ramsgate. In July 1876 he took a position as an assistant preacher
in Islesworth and delivered his first sermon, a moment that he
considered a great triumph and turning point. The devout Vincent
read, wrote, and walked compulsively in an attempt to understand
his desperate psychological condition and his periods of spiritual
ecstasy, and his unorthodox religious beliefs began to verge on
Christian fanaticism, which worried his family, especially his
pastor father. Vincent spent Christmas 1876 in Etten, and his parents
managed to find him a job at a bookstore in Dordrecht, but he was
as despondent there as he had been in England, and he spent his
time translating the Bible, writing ecstatic, confusing symbolic sermons,
and sketching.
