“Wait,” said Henri, sounding desperate now. “In those days, did you ever buy color from a strange little man? Smaller even than me. Dark, almost apish? Broken?”
Suddenly, whatever sweet melancholy had animated Renoir a moment ago drained from his face.
“Oh yes,” he said. “I knew the Colorman.”
“I like big butts.” Self-Portrait—Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1910
THEO VAN GOGH’S GALLERY STOOD IN THE SHADOW OF THE BASILICA OF SACRÉ-COEUR, the white, Moorish–meets–Taj Mahal fairy-tale church built on Montmartre by the state to atone for the army massacring the Communards (the leaders of whom came from Montmartre) after the Franco-Prussian War. Like Paris’s other architectural anomaly, the Eiffel Tower, Sacré-Coeur would often cause neck-wrenching double takes to those new to the city. But because it was visible from the entire city, it provided a convenient landmark to help travelers find Montmartre and patrons to find the Boussod et Valadon gallery, run by Theo van Gogh. “It’s right behind that big, white, mosque-looking thing on the butte,” they would say.
“Have you ever been tempted to paint Sacré-Coeur?” Henri asked Lucien as they swung the blue nude around to fit it through Theo’s door. The gallery had a glass storefront framed in red and a wide red canvas awning with the words ART DEALER sewn on its outside edge.
“You mean paint the whole thing or make a painting of it?”
“Make a painting of it.”
“No.”
“Me either.”
“My mother says that God wouldn’t be caught dead in that garish harlot of a church.”
“A moment, Lucien, I may have just had a religious epiphany,” said Toulouse-Lautrec.
They rested the canvas on its edge as Lucien opened the door.
Theo van Gogh, thirty-three years old, thin, sandy haired, with a meticulously trimmed beard, wearing a houndstooth suit with black cravat, was sitting behind a desk at the rear of his gallery. When he heard the door open he rose and hurried to the front to help.
“Oh my. Henri, is this yours?” Theo said, holding the door out of their way as they carried the painting in. His French was slightly clipped by a Dutch accent.
“Lucien’s,” said Henri.
“Bonjour, Monsieur van Gogh,” Lucien said with a nod as he steered the painting to the middle of the gallery. Lucien knew Theo, had sold some paintings in the gallery, but remained a bit formal with him out of respect for his position. The younger van Gogh looked thinner than when Lucien had last seen him, alert to the point of being almost jumpy but not healthy. Pale. Tired.
“Shall I fetch an easel?” asked Theo. “I don’t know if I have one large enough.”
“The floor will be fine. Just a wall to lean it against. The paint is still wet, I’m afraid,” said Lucien.
“And you carried it here uncrated? Oh my,” said Theo. He ran
to the back of the gallery, grabbed the chair he had been sitting on, and brought it to Lucien. “Lean the stretcher against this.”
The entire gallery, which took nearly the whole lower floor of the four-floor brick building, was hung floor to ceiling with paintings, prints, and drawings. Lucien recognized the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec and Pissarro, as well as Gauguin, Bernard, and Vuillard; drawings by Steinlen and Willette, the butte’s leading cartoonists; the odd Japanese print by Hokusai or Hiroshige; as well as many, many canvases by Theo’s brother Vincent.
Once they had the painting in place, Theo stepped back to take a look.
“It’s not finished, I—” Lucien started to explain about wanting to add the blue scarf, but Henri signaled for him to be quiet.
Theo took a pair of spectacles from his waistcoat and put them on, then crouched down and looked more closely at the canvas. He removed the spectacles and stepped back again. Here, for the first time, really, Lucien could see in the younger brother the intensity he’d seen in Vincent. Theo tended to be a bit fussy, often had the air of a clerk, assessing, accounting, measuring, but now he was evincing the sort of burning concentration that Vincent seemed to wear constantly, like a mad prophet. Henri had teased him that he knew he could always find a seat at a party next to Vincent because the Dutchman’s gaze had frightened everyone away.
Lucien was beginning to fidget under the pressure of Theo van Gogh’s silence when the gallery owner finally shook his head and smiled.
“Lucien, I don’t know where I could hang it. As you see, the walls are full. Even if I took down all of the prints—it’s so large.”
“You want to hang it?” Lucien said. He hadn’t really heard Renoir’s praise over the piece, so now, for the first time, he looked at it as something besides a reminder of Juliette.
“Of course I want to hang it,” said Theo. He offered his hand to Lucien, who took it and endured a shoulder-wrenching handshake. “You know, Vincent used to say that someone needed to do for figure painting what Monet had done for landscapes, and that no one had. I think you have.”
“Oh, come now, Theo,” said Henri. “It’s a nude, not a revolution.”