London Heartbreak

In May 1873, aged twenty, he was transferred by the Goupil gallery from The Hague — by way of Paris — to its London branch. It was the first time he lived alone.

Two things happened in London at once.
One he knew immediately: he declared himself to Eugénie, his landlady's daughter, and was refused — she was already secretly engaged to a former lodger. He would not accept it. He went back to her again and again, slipped letters under the door, left gifts on the step; he believed that if he was patient enough, pure enough, she would change her mind. She did not.
The other he did not yet know: in those days he moved daily among Goupil's prints and reproductions, and outside of work he went to the National Gallery, to Dulwich, to the South Kensington Museum. For the first time he looked at originals in quantity, intensely. The social conscience of the English novel was entering him over these years too — Dickens, George Eliot, Carlyle would become authors he returned to again and again in his youth. He had not yet imagined that one day he would pick up a brush; he was a man who sold pictures, a reader, a young man unseen by a woman.
But in a way he did not yet recognize, he was gathering all the material a painter would later need — the eye being trained, the first groove cut into the heart.

That pattern of Eugénie's — throwing himself in completely and then hitting a wall — he would repeat with Kee, with Sien, with Margot: each time handing himself over whole, then striking a wall he had not seen. Meanwhile Goupil went from bad to worse: shuffled from branch to branch, more and more impatient with customers, dismissed in 1876. He no longer believed in what he was selling. But the pictures he had seen in London, the books he had read there, would not resurface until seven years later, in the ruins of the Borinage, to become his first drawings of miners.