Captions
a. Korte Poten 8.
b. Korte Poten.
c. Possibly the location of Blok’s book stall at Binnenhof.
d. Blok’s book stall in 1905, Haagsche Nieuwsblad, October 14 1905. Copied from Van Gogh Route.
Notes
1. Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, Nienke Bakker (eds.) (2009), Vincent van Gogh - The Letters. Version: January 2020. Amsterdam & The Hague: Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING. Letter 523.
2. Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, Nienke Bakker (eds.) (2009), Vincent van Gogh - The Letters. Version: January 2020. Amsterdam & The Hague: Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING. Letter 529.
3. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh, The Life, (London: Profile Books, 2012), p. 271.
4. Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, Nienke Bakker (eds.) (2009), Vincent van Gogh - The Letters. Version: January 2020. Amsterdam & The Hague: Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING. Letter 302.
5. Judith de Bruijn, 'Blok the Jewish bookseller, The Hague, the Netherlands', Van Gogh Route.
6. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh, The Life, (London: Profile Books, 2012), p. 253.
a. Korte Poten 8.
b. Korte Poten.
c. Possibly the location of Blok’s book stall at Binnenhof.
d. Blok’s book stall in 1905, Haagsche Nieuwsblad, October 14 1905. Copied from Van Gogh Route.
Notes
1. Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, Nienke Bakker (eds.) (2009), Vincent van Gogh - The Letters. Version: January 2020. Amsterdam & The Hague: Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING. Letter 523.
2. Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, Nienke Bakker (eds.) (2009), Vincent van Gogh - The Letters. Version: January 2020. Amsterdam & The Hague: Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING. Letter 529.
3. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh, The Life, (London: Profile Books, 2012), p. 271.
4. Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, Nienke Bakker (eds.) (2009), Vincent van Gogh - The Letters. Version: January 2020. Amsterdam & The Hague: Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING. Letter 302.
5. Judith de Bruijn, 'Blok the Jewish bookseller, The Hague, the Netherlands', Van Gogh Route.
6. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh, The Life, (London: Profile Books, 2012), p. 253.
013. THE HAGUE | THE NETHERLANDS | 20/04/21
Walking away from the Royal Academy, I turn a corner and pass a bookshop. Something yellow in the window catches my eye. I step closer, squint through the glass, reflecting sunlight. A book about Van Gogh’s time in the city, one hundred and forty years ago. A town in black and white.
I’d have bought the book in a different time. But as I’ve resolved to stay outside for the day, I walk on, down the Herengracht, into Korte Poten. The street name’s famous in the Netherlands, but as I walk along it I find it rather run-down. There are small shops on both sides, and at number 8, in a narrow, cream-coloured building, there’s a photography store advertising ‘actioncams’ and ‘passphoto’ in blaring, gaudy capitals.
Korte Poten 8 is where the chemist Hendrik Jan Furnée in the 1880s sold paint to Vincent van Gogh, who gave drawing lessons to Furnée’s son. Van Gogh soon owed money to Furnée, but couldn’t pay him back, and years later wrote to him with a solution that strikes me as both brash and slightly delusional:
I haven't been able to find out whether Furnée accepted this offer. Van Gogh last mentions the matter a few weeks later, writing to Theo that he has 'a chance of persuading' the chemist.2 The fact that Van Gogh had by this time still not managed to sell a single painting makes me suspect Furnée would not have agreed.
Van Gogh was good at buying things. He was less proficient at living within his means. Five months after he arrived in The Hague, he famously had amassed a collection of more than a thousand prints of artworks he admired.3 From Jozef Blok, a bookseller who ran a market stall in the Binnenhof, he bought twenty-one volumes of The Graphic, a magazine through which he wanted to learn to draw illustrations. He spent twenty-one guilders on those. By comparison, his weekly rent was just over three.4
Well then, to the Binnenhof. I’ve been here before, when I was a journalism student, still in my teens, and our class was given a tour of the government buildings. These buildings surround several squares and courtyards, and the roof beneath which Blok had his book stall is supposedly still there.5 I have trouble finding it, though, and take photographs of several arches, entrances that look quite old, but none of them speak to me.
The main square, eventually. A couple of journalists, half a handful of tourists, uniformed officers, guns in holsters. A man in a suit oozing self-importance, obviously a politician, strides from one of the buildings, and the journalists pounce, a man hoists a huge camera onto his shoulder. I move out of the way, out of the frame, hide behind a pillar in the shadow of an archway, and when I look up, I realise this must be the place.
There’s a picture of the stall taken in 1905 for a local newspaper. The wall against which the books were stacked on wooden planks is similar, in so far as a bare wall can show similarities. But the door at the far end, its shape and the wrought-iron curls and whirls decorating the fanlight, the columns and their specific ridges… Yes, this is the place. But what to take away from it?
Some sympathy, maybe, for those among us who now and then splurge on stuff they don’t really need and really can’t afford? I count myself as a member of that group, though thankfully I’ve never quite reached the heights (or depths) Van Gogh did. Never spent a month’s income within five days just to prove I’m independent, and in doing so proving the opposite.6 But I have felt guilty at times, especially when I was a student and my parents supported me. Studying comparative literature never promised steady economic prospects, and when I decided to become a writer I had no idea how to make a living. It’s uncomfortable to read the letters Van Gogh wrote to Theo, demanding more money all the time, and recognising this part of myself in him.
I want to be like Van Gogh, the grand artist who was obsessed with his painting, and eventually excelled at it. I don’t want to be anything like him, the man who also cared, too much perhaps, about everything else, and while he lived failed in the eyes of the world, and in his estimation of himself. He never really figured out how to live. That’s what this walk, this project is about. How to live through disappointments and rejections and the occasional triumph, too, and mainly, how to keep going, painting, writing, creating.
I continue my walk. The Hague in late September.
Comments? Questions?
︎ eightytoninety
︎ viola@eightytoninety.com
The bookseller
Walking away from the Royal Academy, I turn a corner and pass a bookshop. Something yellow in the window catches my eye. I step closer, squint through the glass, reflecting sunlight. A book about Van Gogh’s time in the city, one hundred and forty years ago. A town in black and white.
I’d have bought the book in a different time. But as I’ve resolved to stay outside for the day, I walk on, down the Herengracht, into Korte Poten. The street name’s famous in the Netherlands, but as I walk along it I find it rather run-down. There are small shops on both sides, and at number 8, in a narrow, cream-coloured building, there’s a photography store advertising ‘actioncams’ and ‘passphoto’ in blaring, gaudy capitals.
Korte Poten 8 is where the chemist Hendrik Jan Furnée in the 1880s sold paint to Vincent van Gogh, who gave drawing lessons to Furnée’s son. Van Gogh soon owed money to Furnée, but couldn’t pay him back, and years later wrote to him with a solution that strikes me as both brash and slightly delusional:
I only have one thing and that is getting better and better, that is my paintings and drawings. I hear both good and ill said of them, and everyone can think of them what they will. As to them — as being the only things with which I can pay you — what do you want? (…) Do you want me to send you some of my work so that you can show it to art lovers? (…) It seems to me that you have nothing to lose by trying whether you might have success with my painting.1
I haven't been able to find out whether Furnée accepted this offer. Van Gogh last mentions the matter a few weeks later, writing to Theo that he has 'a chance of persuading' the chemist.2 The fact that Van Gogh had by this time still not managed to sell a single painting makes me suspect Furnée would not have agreed.
Van Gogh was good at buying things. He was less proficient at living within his means. Five months after he arrived in The Hague, he famously had amassed a collection of more than a thousand prints of artworks he admired.3 From Jozef Blok, a bookseller who ran a market stall in the Binnenhof, he bought twenty-one volumes of The Graphic, a magazine through which he wanted to learn to draw illustrations. He spent twenty-one guilders on those. By comparison, his weekly rent was just over three.4
Well then, to the Binnenhof. I’ve been here before, when I was a journalism student, still in my teens, and our class was given a tour of the government buildings. These buildings surround several squares and courtyards, and the roof beneath which Blok had his book stall is supposedly still there.5 I have trouble finding it, though, and take photographs of several arches, entrances that look quite old, but none of them speak to me.
The main square, eventually. A couple of journalists, half a handful of tourists, uniformed officers, guns in holsters. A man in a suit oozing self-importance, obviously a politician, strides from one of the buildings, and the journalists pounce, a man hoists a huge camera onto his shoulder. I move out of the way, out of the frame, hide behind a pillar in the shadow of an archway, and when I look up, I realise this must be the place.
There’s a picture of the stall taken in 1905 for a local newspaper. The wall against which the books were stacked on wooden planks is similar, in so far as a bare wall can show similarities. But the door at the far end, its shape and the wrought-iron curls and whirls decorating the fanlight, the columns and their specific ridges… Yes, this is the place. But what to take away from it?
Some sympathy, maybe, for those among us who now and then splurge on stuff they don’t really need and really can’t afford? I count myself as a member of that group, though thankfully I’ve never quite reached the heights (or depths) Van Gogh did. Never spent a month’s income within five days just to prove I’m independent, and in doing so proving the opposite.6 But I have felt guilty at times, especially when I was a student and my parents supported me. Studying comparative literature never promised steady economic prospects, and when I decided to become a writer I had no idea how to make a living. It’s uncomfortable to read the letters Van Gogh wrote to Theo, demanding more money all the time, and recognising this part of myself in him.
I want to be like Van Gogh, the grand artist who was obsessed with his painting, and eventually excelled at it. I don’t want to be anything like him, the man who also cared, too much perhaps, about everything else, and while he lived failed in the eyes of the world, and in his estimation of himself. He never really figured out how to live. That’s what this walk, this project is about. How to live through disappointments and rejections and the occasional triumph, too, and mainly, how to keep going, painting, writing, creating.
I continue my walk. The Hague in late September.
Comments? Questions?
︎ eightytoninety
︎ viola@eightytoninety.com