Painting for Painting

A situation you can measure

In the autumn of 1886, writing from Paris to a painter he had known in Antwerp, Van Gogh put his position into his own English:

At this present moment I have found four dealers who have exhibited studies of mine. And I have exchanged studies with several artists. Now the prices are 50 francs. Certainly not much but — as far as I can see one must sell cheap to rise, and even at costing price.

Three things are in that passage: he had outlets, he was trading, and he was asking fifty francs. The last clause is not a complaint but a strategy — he believed cheapness was the route upward, and was willing to let work go at cost.

"Van Gogh could not sell his paintings" is usually said as a lament. It can also be measured. The way to measure it is not to count sales, but to ask what his work fetched in a market that rarely used cash.

Exchange was not desperation. It was the system.

In August 1886 his sister wrote to a friend that his paintings were getting so much better, and that he had begun swapping them for other painters' work — that this was how it would have to come, slowly. That autumn he confirmed it himself: I have exchanged studies with several artists.

This was ordinary practice in the avant-garde. The dealer system did not serve young painters. The big dealers sold Millet, Delacroix, Corot and Daubigny at exorbitant prices; the second-rank dealers sold the same names very cheaply and did "little or nothing" for young artists. That is Van Gogh's own observation, in the same letter.

So exchange was not a loser's fallback. It was how the layer without cash settled its accounts. What makes it useful now is that the settlements were written down, which means the exchange rates can be read.

The rates

With Emile Bernard: he gave a self-portrait (F 526 / JH 1309) and received Bernard's portrait of his own grandmother. Four or more pictures moved between them, most in the second half of 1887. Before leaving Paris he also traded Japanese prints for several works by Bernard.

With Lucien Pissarro, Camille's son: a set of prints in return for one painting.

With Charles Angrand: he wanted a canvas of Angrand's from 1884, and offered two of his own views of the Moulin de la Galette for it.

At the end of 1887: two sunflower still lifes, traded for one landscape.

The catalogue's verdict on that last one is blunt: it says enough about his modest position as a foreign newcomer among the Paris avant-garde.

Two of his for one of theirs. And he set the terms himself — he knew his own rate, exactly as he knew that fifty francs was not much.

What came back was not always a painting

The dealer Gabriel Delarebeyrette later held several oil studies by Van Gogh; the catalogue takes the view that they may have come to him in return for around a hundred Japanese prints. The direction is still work going out, but what came back was not another picture — it was a stock of images that could themselves be given away, hung and traded on.

There is a coincidence folded into that transaction. The Delarebeyrette gallery specialised in Monticelli, with nearly fifty of his paintings in stock in 1885, and it was probably there that Van Gogh came to know Monticelli's work. In the summer of 1886, Monticelli was the painter he most wanted to become.

Oil studies went out; a pile of paper came back. And the shop was one of the places where he learned how to use colour.

There is a plainer entry in the same ledger: he gave "two or three" still lifes of smoked herrings for a carpet.

Four dealers, and a promise with no sequel

In the summer of 1886 he left work with several small dealers, most of them people his brother knew. One of them dealt mainly in Barbizon pictures and took on younger painters on the side.

That August, Theo wrote to their mother with the best news the brothers had had in years: one of the dealers had already taken four of Vincent's paintings, and had promised to hold an exhibition of his work the following year.

That sentence in a letter home is where the trail stops in the surviving record. His pictures scattered early — "even when he was still alive" — and the scattering is hard to reconstruct now. What became of those four paintings, and of the exhibition somebody promised in the summer of 1886, is not something the record can currently tell us.

The two exhibitions he pushed for, and what each person got

Since nobody would put on a show for him, he arranged them himself.

Early in 1887 he hung his own collection of Japanese prints in the café Le Tambourin, whose proprietor — Agostina Segatori, his lover — let him use her walls. Van Gogh wrote afterwards that the exhibition had an influence on Anquetin and Bernard.

His own verdict on it, looking back from Arles a year later: it was such a disaster.

The second was at a showroom on the boulevard de Clichy. In the same letter he adds up what everyone got. Bernard sold his first painting there. Anquetin sold a study. And he himself made an exchange with Gauguin.

"We all got something," he wrote.

Three men. Two of them got money. He got a swap.

The colourman's account

This cash-poor economy is most fully documented in his dealings with Julien Tanguy.

Tanguy sold paint and let painters who could not pay take it anyway. Van Gogh took it — on credit, or against canvases Tanguy would try to sell for him. It went on until Tanguy's wife put a stop to the generosity; in a furious letter, Van Gogh called her an old witch.

When the argument came, he wrote out the accounts himself from Arles:

He had painted Tanguy, and Tanguy still had that portrait. He had painted Tanguy's wife, and they sold that one. He had painted a friend of theirs, and for that one he was paid twenty francs. And he had bought two hundred and fifty francs' worth of colours from Tanguy, at full price, with no discount, on which Tanguy of course made his profit.

So when Tanguy began asking for cash, Van Gogh's answer was that the debt was already settled — by the study of his that Tanguy was still holding.

There is an irony in it. Tanguy's materials were cheap and of doubtful quality: a surviving price list of his, set beside the catalogues of the large Paris colour houses, shows him undercutting them by at least ten per cent. Van Gogh knew, and did not mind. In June 1888 he wrote that he was always glad to get paint from Tanguy, even if it was a little worse than elsewhere, as long as it was not too expensive.

He never turned on the man. To the end he was willing to overlook the flaws in the materials because of the kindness that came with them.

What the system bought

In cash terms the ledger is grim: fifty francs asked and less accepted, twenty francs for a portrait, two sunflower still lifes worth one landscape.

But what the exchanges bought was not money.

Bernard's grandmother, Lucien Pissarro's prints, a painting by Gauguin — the other side of each of those is that a picture of his went into someone else's rooms. An exchange is an exhibition in both directions: a painting that leaves stays on another painter's wall, seen again and again by him and by his friends.

And the show of Japanese prints that he himself called a disaster fails by any cash measure. It did not bring in money. It did bring the influence that Van Gogh himself recorded.

He earned almost nothing in Paris. What he traded his way into was a position — one where pictures, materials, images and attention could be settled against each other.