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By Root 964 0

who came to Papa Tanguy’s shop to learn the lesson of Cézanne. (Later, as is well known, Cézanne, never the most conciliatory of men, was to accuse Gauguin of stealing from him his petite sensation.) But there were many other regular visitors, from Octave Mirbeau to Francis Jourdain and Léon-Paul Fargue, and from Toulouse-Lautrec to Dom Verkade and Jacques-Émile Blanche. It was also—and this is a remarkable fact—in Tanguy’s window that in 1892 Ambroise Vollard saw a Cézanne for the first time. Nor, of course, must we forget Van Gogh who in 1886 and 1887 was a daily visitor to the shop. He had a profound admiration for Cézanne, and one day, to his great joy, he lunched with the Master of Aix at Tanguy’s. The two artists set forth their ideas on painting: at the end of the meal Van Gogh gave Cézanne one of his pictures and Cézanne, abrupt as ever, looked hard at it and said: “No, but honestly—that’s a madman’s painting.”

Tanguy held Cézanne in the deepest and most respectful regard; no less strong, for that matter, were his feelings for Van Gogh. And when, on returning from Provence in 1890, Van Gogh shot himself dead at Auvers-sur-Oise, Tanguy wept for him as if he had been his own son.

Octave Mirbeau once described a visit to Tanguy, not long after Van Gogh’s death. “Ah, poor Vincent!” Tanguy lamented. “What a misfortune! Monsieur Mirbeau! What a misfortune! What a great misfortune! A genius like him! And such a delightful fellow! But wait—I’ll show you some more of his masterpieces!” Papa Tanguy went off to fetch more Van Goghs from the back of his shop and came back with four or five in his arms and two in each hand. As he laid them lovingly against the backs of his chairs, shifting and turning them to get the best light, he went on groaning: “Poor Vincent! Are those masterpieces?—Or are they not? And there are so many of them, so many … And they’re so beautiful that when I look at them it gives me a pain here, in my breast … Why should a man like that die? It’s not right, it really isn’t … Poor Vincent … I’ll bet you don’t know his Pot of Gladiolus? It’s one of the last things he did. Marv—ellous, simply marv—ellous! I must show it to you—when it came to flowers there was no one to touch him, no one. He had such a feeling for everything …” And Papa drew a circle in the air, as painters do, as if to single out some part of a painting for particular notice. “Just look at that sky! And those trees! Aren’t they just right? And the color! And the movement, I ask you!”

From time to time some lover of painting would buy a picture from the shop in the rue Clauzel. But Papa Tanguy’s business methods were not at all those of the dealer-speculator. For his Cézannes he had a fixed price: a hundred francs for a large canvas, forty for a small one. The story is told of an enthusiast who asked the price of a Van Gogh: “Just a moment!” said Tanguy, and went and pored over his account book. “That’ll be forty-eight francs,” he said, finally. “Forty-eight? That’s an odd figure—why not fifty? Or forty?” “Well,” said Tanguy, “forty-eight francs is exactly what poor Van Gogh owed me when he died.”

No, Papa Tanguy was not at all a speculator. “How he loved the pictures that he was obliged to sell!” Dom Verkade remembered. “Often he was in despair at seeing so fine a picture go out of his shop.” And there was one picture that he would never consider selling: his own portrait by Van Gogh. (It is now in the Musée Rodin in Paris.) Vollard tells us that when anyone wanted to make a bid for it Tanguy would coldly ask a flat five hundred francs. This, at that time, was enough to put off any potential buyer at the start.

These idiosyncratic methods meant that Papa Tanguy never became rich—was never, indeed, even moderately well off. He remained to the day of his death frugal in the extreme and lived as sparingly as he possibly could. Yet fate had another hammer-blow in store for him: when he died, in 1894, it was of cancer of the stomach, and he had had to suffer appallingly. He had been taken to hospital, but when he sensed that the end was near