It comforts me to know that Vincent had good friends after all, like Toulouse–Lautrec, even if just for a brief period of time. They had studied together at Fernand Cormon’s Atelier in Paris. The young Toulouse even defended Vincent in a fight when another artist disparaged Vincent’s paintings at an exhibition. They influenced each other’s work too, but most importantly they used to booze together, the magical green goddess of every artist, the absinthe.
The absinthe dominated the latter half of the nineteenth century, as it was the most popular beverage of France. People walked the boulevards’ bars one by one every afternoon to taste the divine drink, which contained an abnormally high level of alcohol, and there was a whisper that absinthe produced insanity. These facts did not stop people from drinking it and the boulevards’ air was full of the absinthe’s fulsome scent.
Toulouse himself had a special, scooped walking stick with absinthe in it and created different absinthe cocktails and named them poetically like Maiden Blush. That was how artists worked, under the influence of this alcohol, maybe we even thank impressionism to it. It is similar to the way songwriters created music under the influence of drugs in the twentieth century.
So when Toulouse sketched his drinking mate, he set the scene in a bar, with the magical green goddess in the glass before him. He used pastel chalk to depict Vincent, whose hair and beard resplendent in many shades of orange and blue. His runaway chalk strokes race through and through on Van Gogh’s overcoat, making it crumpled and shabby. My eyes vibrate from the vivid lines.
Vincent leans on the table with a straight back, intently watching something out of the picture. He looks good, it is just his vague hands that make me think he needs help. The hands are in a close position like Vincent is on edge or maybe tenuous. I do not know but there is something poignantly sad in him. I wish I could help him! At least the absinthe could help for a while until he succumbed under all the tensions that life faced his misunderstood soul.
Vincent left first, in 1890, then Toulouse in 1901. They were both 37. And with the approaching world war the magical green goddess disappeared as well, liberating or depriving artists from her unearthly, crazy impact.
