It was at this juncture that Vincent Van Gogh, now at Aries, came forward and offered him a lodging, despite the fact that he himself could not sell his own pictures and was entirely dependent on the self-sacrificing efforts of his brother Theodore. For a time Gauguin did not respond to Van Gogh's generous offer to share their fortunes in common. But he sent his own portrait to Vincent, a gloomy, powerful piece of painting which, in the opinion of some, so startlingly resembles Robert Louis Stevenson--like Gauguin a wanderer, but with what a difference! To Vincent this portrait suggested a prisoner, with its yellow flesh and deep blue shadows. He was more than ever determined to draw Gauguin out of the slough of despond into which he was falling, and to work together with him for the better establishment of both their reputations. One can only admire Van Gogh for this decision. An artist of a childlike simplicity of soul, a combination of Don Quixote, the Good Samaritan and that Jesus of Nazareth whom he loved, Van Gogh was even greater as a man than as an artist. But Gauguin was, as he knew himself later, greater as an artist than as a man. It was natural for him to accept the invitation of a man whom he knew, after all, very slightly, because he saw in this acceptance possible advantages to himself. Van Gogh's enthusiasm was unfortunately not backed, as was Gauguin's, by a strong reserve of nervous strength. His was one of those souls whose longing for spiritual reality followed inevitably the mystic path traced by William Blake:-- I will go down to self-annihilation and to eternal death Lest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilate, And I be seiz'd and given into the hands of my own selfhood. Gauguin's path tended to a different goal and followed the way foreseen by Whitman:-- O, to struggle against odds, to meet enemies undaunted! To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium face to face, To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance, To be indeed a God! Van Gogh was a lyric painter. His desire was to lose himself in the ecstacy of the divine. Gauguin was a narrative, an epic painter. His aim was to grow to divine stature through self-realization. What could there be in common between the fervent admirer of Rembrandt, Delacroix, Monticelli, Ziem, and the brooding, patient workman who was building up his art on the classic tradition of Ingres, Cézanne and Degas? Surely even less than between Michaelangelo and Tintoretto. A drama between these men was inevitable. It was not slow in declaring itself.[1] Of what actually occurred we have only Gauguin's account, of how Van Gogh first attacked him, and then strove to take his own life.