Free Van Gogh by Steven Naifeh Page B

state-supplied cadet gun, he dreamed about the Grote Beek, heath bugs, and larks’ nests hidden in the rye.
    All of the Tilburg experience seems to have passed the same way: in a haze of mental absenteeism. In a lifetime of correspondence, he never once mentioned his time there. While most of his fellows struggled with the heavy course load, Vincent filled his lonely hours by memorizing great swaths of French, English, and German poetry. By July 1867, he had compiled the fourth-best record of any of his classmates, entitling him to advance to the next level (the second of five). Still, none of Vincent’s course work, as successful as it was, seems to have interrupted his inner drama.
    Not even art class.
    The class’s charismatic teacher, Constantin Huysmans, was the brightest star on the Tilburg faculty. The preeminent art pedagogue in Holland, Huysmans had virtually written the book on art education, championing the central role of drawing in preparing young people for the challenges of the new, industrial era. Fifty-five years old when he began teaching at Tilburg, Huysmans had been leading the fight for more and better art instruction in schools since long before Vincent’s birth. What had started out as a simple drawing manual in 1840 had grown into a full-fledged popular movement. Huysmans argued that art education held the key to a new Dutch golden age: economic success through better design. A student who learned to draw well would not just acquire “a quick and sure eye,” he promised, but also develop a mind “accustomed to steady attention” and alert to “impressions of beauty.”
    The classroom that Vincent entered for the first time in the fall of 1866 reflected Huysmans’s lifetime of thinking about art education. Each student was assigned his own bench and drawing board grouped around a large table in the center of the room where the “model” of the day was displayed—a stuffed bird or squirrel, a plaster arm or foot. Huysmans moved around the room, giving each student, in turn, an exclusive share of his attention—a radical new way of teaching in an educational system just emerging from its dreary, lectern-dominated past. “The teacher himself must be the living method,” Huysmans declared, “adapting himself to the subject and especially to the greater or lesser capacity of the pupil.” Students hailed him as “stimulating” and “inspiring.”
    In his classroom, as in his writings, Huysmans made a galvanizing case for a new way of thinking about art—a new way of looking at it as well as creating it. He rejected the “tricks and techniques” that had been the staple of art schools for so long and urged his students instead to seek “power of expression.” As a champion of practical art, he opened their eyes to the “art” in commonplace images such as botanical illustrations and atlases. He airily eschewed technicalprecision and encouraged his students to “sketch the impression the object makes rather than the object itself.” In drawing a wall, he said, “the artist who must copy every small stone and each stroke of whitewash has missed his calling: he should have become a bricklayer.”
    Given his own love of landscape drawing, Huysmans inevitably led his students outside to sketch what he called “the source of all beauty, God’s glorious nature.” He was a spirited advocate of perspective, too. The first and foremost aim of art education, he said, was to “foster a keen power of observation.” And nothing was more crucial to achieving that aim—to
seeing
—than perspective. Studying other works of art was another pillar of Huysmans’s method. He lavished class time on a huge collection of reproductions that he used to illustrate his classroom lessons. He encouraged students to visit museums and exhibitions at every opportunity and develop their own “artistic sense.” Without that sense, he argued, “one cannot bring forth anything beautiful or