Van Gogh: The Life

PROLOGUE

A Fanatic Heart

THEO IMAGINED THE WORST. THE MESSAGE SAID ONLY THAT VINCENT HAD wounded himself. As Theo rushed to the station to catch the next train to Auvers, his mind raced both backward and forward. The last time he received a dire message like this one, it was a telegram from Paul Gauguin informing him that Vincent was gravely ill. Theo had arrived in the southern city of Arles to find his brother in the fever ward of a hospital, his head swathed in bandages and his mind completely unmoored.

What would he find at the end of this train ride?

At times like these—and there had been many of them—Theo’s mind wandered to the Vincent he had known once: an older brother of passion and restlessness, but also of boisterous jokes, infinite sympathy, and indefatigable wonder. On their childhood hikes in the fields and woods around the Dutch town of Zundert, where they were born, Vincent had introduced him to the beauties and mysteries of nature. In the winter, Vincent tutored him in skating and sledding. In summer, he showed him how to build castles in the sandy paths. In church on Sundays and at home by the parlor piano, he sang with a clear, confident voice. In the attic room that they shared, he talked until late at night, inspiring in his younger brother a bond that their siblings teasingly called worship, but Theo proudly acknowledged, even decades later, as adoration.

This was the Vincent that Theo had grown up with: adventurous guide, inspiration and scold, encyclopedic enthusiast, droll critic, playful companion, transfixing eye. How could this Vincent, his Vincent, have turned into such a tormented soul?

Theo thought he knew the answer: Vincent was the victim of his own fanatic heart. There’s something in the way he talks that makes people either love him or hate him, he tried to explain. He spares nothing and no one. Long after others had put away the breathless manias of youth, Vincent still lived by their unsparing rules. Titanic, unappeasable passions swept through his life. I am a fanatic! Vincent declared in 1881. I feel a power within me … a fire that I may not quench, but must keep ablaze. Whether catching beetles on the Zundert creekbank, collecting and cataloguing prints, preaching the Christian gospel, consuming Shakespeare or Balzac in great fevers of reading, or mastering the interactions of color, he did everything with the urgent, blinding single-mindedness of a child. He even read the newspaper in a fury.

These storms of zeal had transformed a boy of inexplicable fierceness into a wayward, battered soul: a stranger in the world, an exile in his own family, and an enemy to himself. No one knew better than Theo—who had followed his brother’s tortured path through almost a thousand letters—the unbending demands that Vincent placed on himself, and others, and the unending problems he reaped as a consequence. No one understood better the price Vincent paid in loneliness and disappointment for his self-defeating, take-no-prisoners assaults on life; and no one knew better the futility of warning him against himself. I get very cross when people tell me that it is dangerous to put out to sea, Vincent told Theo once when he tried to intervene. There is safety in the very heart of danger.

How could anybody be surprised that such a fanatic heart produced such a fanatic art? Theo had heard the whispers and rumors about his brother. C’est un fou, they said. Even before the events in Arles eighteen months earlier, before the stints in hospitals and asylums, people dismissed Vincent’s art as the work of a madman. One critic described its distorted forms and shocking colors as the product of a sick mind. Theo himself had spent years trying, unsuccessfully, to tame the excesses of his brother’s brush. If only he would use less paint—not slather it on so thickly. If only he would slow down—not slash out so many works so quickly. (I have sometimes worked excessively fast, Vincent countered defiantly. Is it a fault? I can’t help it.) Collectors wanted care and finish, Theo told him again and again, not endless, furious, convulsive studies—what Vincent called pictures full of painting.

With every lurch of the train that bore him to the scene of the latest catastrophe, Theo could hear the years of scorn and ridicule. For a long time, out of family pride or fraternal affection, Theo had resisted the accusations of madness. Vincent was merely an exceptional person—a Quixote-like tilter at windmills—a noble eccentric, perhaps—not a madman. But the events in Arles had changed all that. Many painters have gone insane yet nevertheless started to produce true art, Theo wrote afterward. Genius roams along such mysterious paths.

And no one had roamed a more mysterious path than Vincent: a brief, failed start as an art dealer, a misbegotten attempt to enter the clergy, a wandering evangelical mission, a foray into magazine illustration, and, finally, a blazingly short career as a painter. Nowhere did Vincent’s volcanic, defiant temperament show itself more spectacularly than in the sheer number of images that continued to pour forth from his ragged existence even as they piled up, hardly seen, in the closets, attics, and spare rooms of family, friends, and creditors.

Garden of a Bathhouse, PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, AUGUST 1888, 23⅞ × 19¼ IN.(Illustration credit prl.1)

Only by tracing this temperament and the trail of tears it left, Theo believed, could anyone truly understand his brother’s stubbornly inner-driven art. This was his answer to all those who dismissed Vincent’s paintings—or his letters—as the rantings of the wretched, as most still did. Only by knowing Vincent from the inside, he insisted, could anyone hope to see his art as Vincent saw it, or feel it as Vincent felt it. Just a few months before his fateful train trip, Theo had sent a grateful note to the first critic who dared to praise his brother’s work: You have read these pictures, and by doing so you very clearly saw the man.

Like Theo, the art world of the late nineteenth century was preoccupied with the role of biography in art. Émile Zola had opened the gates with his call for an art of flesh and blood, in which painting and painter merged. What I look for in a picture before anything else, Zola wrote, is the man. No one believed in the importance of biography more fervently than Vincent van Gogh. [Zola] says something beautiful about art, he wrote in 1885:  ‘In the picture (the work of art), I look for, I love the man—the artist.’  No one collected artists’ biographies more avidly than Vincent—everything from voluminous texts to legends and chats and scraps of rumor. Taking Zola at his word, he culled every painting for signs of "what kind of man stands behind the canvas. At the dawn of his career as an artist, in 1881, he told a friend: In general, and more especially with artists, I pay as much attention to the man who does the work as to the work itself."

To Vincent, his art was a record of his life more true, more revealing (how deep—how infinitely deep) even than the storm of letters that always accompanied it. Every wave of serenity and happiness, as well as every shudder of pain and despair, he believed, found its way into paint; every heartbreak into heartbreaking imagery; every picture into self-portraiture. I want to paint what I feel, he said, and feel what I paint.

It was a conviction that guided him until his death—only hours after Theo arrived in Auvers. No one could truly see his paintings without knowing his story. As my work is, he declared, so am I.

VINCENT VAN GOGH, AGE 13 (Illustration credit col1.1)

CHAPTER 1

Dams and Dikes

OF THE THOUSANDS OF STORIES THAT VINCENT VAN GOGH CONSUMED in a lifetime of voracious reading, one stood out in his imagination: Hans Christian Andersen’s The Story of a Mother. Whenever he found himself with children, he told and retold Andersen’s dark tale of a loving mother who chooses to let her child die rather than expose him to the risk of an unhappy life. Vincent knew the story by heart and could tell it in several languages, including a heavily accented English. For him, whose own life was filled with unhappiness, and who forever sought himself in literature and art, Andersen’s tale of maternal love gone awry possessed a unique power, and his obsessive retellings protested both a unique longing and a unique injury.

Vincent’s own mother, Anna, never understood her eldest son. His eccentricities, even from an early age, challenged her deeply conventional world-view. His roving intellect defied her limited range of insight and inquiry. He seemed to her filled with strange and starry-eyed notions; she seemed to him narrow-minded and unsympathetic. As time passed, she liked him less and less. Incomprehension gave way to impatience, impatience to shame, and shame to anger. By the time he was an adult, she had all but given up hope for him. She dismissed his religious and artistic ambitions as futureless wanderings and compared his errant life to a death in the family. She accused him of intentionally inflicting pain and misery on his parents. She systematically discarded any paintings and drawings that he left at home as if disposing of rubbish (she had already thrown out virtually all his childhood memorabilia), and treated works that he subsequently gave her with little regard.

After her death, only a few of the letters and works of art Vincent had sent her were found in her possession. In the final years of his life (she outlived him by seventeen years), she wrote to him less and less often, and, when he was hospitalized toward the end, she never came to visit, despite frequent travels to see other family members. Even after his death, when fame belatedly found him, she never regretted or amended her verdict that his art was ridiculous.

Vincent never understood his mother’s rejection. At times, he lashed out angrily against it, calling her a hard-hearted woman of a soured love. At times, he blamed himself for being a half-strange, half-tiresome person … who brings only sorrow and loss. But he never stopped bidding for her approval. At the end of his life, he painted her portrait (from a photograph) and appended a poem with the plaintive question: Who is the maid my spirits seek / Through cold reproof and slanders blight?

ANNA CARBENTUS (Illustration credit 1.1)

ANNA CORNELIA CARBENTUS married the Reverend Theodorus van Gogh on a cloudless day in May 1851 in The Hague, home of the Dutch monarchy and, by one account, the most pleasant place in the world. Reclaimed from sea-bottom mud containing the perfect mix of sand and clay for growing flowers, The Hague in May was a veritable Eden: flowers bloomed in unrivaled abundance on roadsides and canal banks, in parks and gardens, on balconies and verandas, in window boxes and doorstep pots, even on the barges that glided by. Perpetual moisture from tree-shaded ponds and canals seemed every morning to paint with a newer and more intense green, wrote one enchanted visitor.

On the wedding day, Anna’s family sprinkled flower petals in the newlyweds’ path and festooned every stop on their route with garlands of greenery and blossoms. The bride made her way from the Carbentus house on Prinsengracht to the Kloosterkerk, a fifteenth-century jewel box on an avenue lined with linden trees and surrounded by magnificent townhouses in the royal heart of the city. Her carriage passed through streets that were the envy of a filthy continent: every windowpane freshly cleaned, every door recently painted or varnished, every copper pot on every stoop buffed, every lance on every bell tower newly gilded. The roofs themselves seem to be washed each day, marveled one foreigner, and the streets were clean as any chamber floor. Such a place, wrote another visitor, may make all men envy the happiness of those who live in it.

Gratitude for idyllic days like these, in idyllic places like this—and the fear that they could all be lost in a moment—shaped Anna Carbentus’s life. She knew that it had not always been this way, either for her family or for her country.

In 1697, the fate of the Carbentus clan hung by a single thread: Gerrit Carbentus, the only member of the family to come through the wars, floods, fires, and plagues of the previous hundred and fifty years alive. Gerrit’s predecessors had been swept up in the panoramic bloodletting of the Eighty Years’ War, a revolt by the Seventeen Provinces of the Low Countries against their brutal Spanish rulers. It began, according to one account, in 1568 when Protestant citizens in towns like The Hague rebelled in a cataclysm of hysterical rage and destruction. Victims were tied together and heaved from high windows, drowned, decapitated, and burned. The Spanish Inquisition responded by condemning every man, woman, and child in the Netherlands, all three million of them, to death as heretics.

For eighty years, back and forth across the placid Dutch landscape, army fought army, religion fought religion, class fought class, militia fought militia, neighbor fought neighbor, idea fought idea. A visitor to Haarlem saw many people hanging from trees, gallows and other horizontal beams in various places. Houses everywhere were burned to the ground, whole families burned at the stake, and the roads strewn with corpses.

Now and then the chaos subsided (as when the Dutch provinces declared their independence from the Spanish king in 1648 and the war was declared over), but soon enough a new wave of violence would wash over the land. In 1672, the so-called Rampjaar (Year of Catastrophe), little more than a generation after the end of the Eighty Years’ War, another fury boiled up from the tranquil and impeccable streets of The Hague as crowds swept into the city center, hunted down the country’s former leaders, and butchered them to pieces in the shadow of the same Kloosterkerk where Anna Carbentus would later celebrate her marriage.

But neither war nor these paroxysms of communal rage posed the greatest danger to the Carbentus family. Like many of his countrymen, Gerrit Carbentus lived his entire life on the edge of extinction by flood. It had been that way since the end of the Ice Age, when the lagoon at the mouth of the Rhine began to fill up with rich, silty soil that proved irresistible to the first settlers. Gradually, the settlers built dikes to keep the sea at bay and dug canals to drain the bogs behind the dikes. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the invention of the windmill made it possible to drain vast areas, truly large-scale land reclamation began. Between 1590 and 1740, even as Dutch merchants conquered the world of commerce and established rich colonies in distant hemispheres, even as Dutch artists and scientists created a Golden Age to rival the Italian Renaissance, more than three hundred thousand acres were added to the Netherlands, increasing its arable landmass by almost a third.

But nothing stopped the sea. Despite a thousand years of stupendous effort—and in some cases because of it—floods remained as inevitable as death. With terrifying unpredictability, the waves would top the dikes or the dikes would crumble beneath the waves, or both, and the water would rush far inland across the flat countryside. Sometimes the sea would simply open up and take back the land. On a single night in 1530, twenty villages sank into the abyss, leaving only the tips of church spires and the carcasses of livestock visible on the surface of the water.

It was a precarious life, and Gerrit Carbentus, like all his countrymen, inherited an acute sense, a sailor’s sense, of the imminence of disaster. Among the thousands who died in the battle with the sea in the last quarter of the seventeenth century was Gerrit Carbentus’s uncle, who drowned in the River Lek. He joined Gerrit’s father, mother, siblings, nieces, nephews, and first wife and her family, all of whom perished before Gerrit turned thirty.

Gerrit Carbentus had been born at the end of one cataclysmic upheaval; his grandson, also named Gerrit, arrived at the beginning of another. Starting in the middle of the eighteenth century, across the Continent, revolutionary demands for free elections, an expanded franchise, and the abolition of unfair taxes merged with the utopian spirit of the Enlightenment to create a force as unstoppable as war or wave.

It was only a matter of time before the revolutionary fervor hit the Carbentus family. When troops of the new French Republic entered Holland in 1795, they came as liberators. But they stayed as conquerors. Soldiers were billeted in every household (including the Carbentuses’); goods and capital (such as the family’s gold and silver coins) were confiscated; trade withered; profits disappeared; businesses closed; prices soared. Gerrit Carbentus, a leatherworker and father of three, lost his livelihood. But worse was yet to come. On the morning of January 23, 1797, Gerrit left his house in The Hague for work in a nearby town. At seven that evening he was found lying on the side of the road to Rijswijk, robbed, beaten, and dying. By the time he was carried home, he was dead. His mother insanely hugged the lifeless body and let a stream of tears flow over him, according to the Carbentus family chronicle, a clan diary kept by generations of chroniclers. This was the end of our dear son, who was a miracle in his own right.

Gerrit Carbentus left behind a pregnant wife and three small children. One of these was five-year-old Willem, grandfather of the painter Vincent Willem van Gogh.

In the first decades of the 1800s, as the Napoleonic tide receded, the Dutch emerged to repair the dikes of statehood. So widely shared was the fear of slipping back into the maelstrom that moderation became the rule of the day: in politics, in religion, in science, and in the arts. Fear of revolution gave rise to growing reactionary sentiments, wrote one chronicler, and self-satisfaction and national conceit became the defining characteristics of the era.

Just as his country was emerging from the shadow of rebellion and upheaval, Willem Carbentus was rebuilding his life from the wreckage of personal tragedy. He married at twenty-three and fathered nine children over the next twelve years—amazingly, without a stillborn among them. Political stability and national conceit had other benefits as well. A sudden wave of interest in all things Dutch created a booming demand for books. From Amsterdam to the smallest village, groups were formed to promote the reading of everything from classics to instruction manuals. Seizing the opportunity, Willem turned his leatherworking skills to the art of binding books and opened a shop on the Spuistraat, in The Hague’s main shopping district. Over the next three decades, he built the shop into a flourishing business, raising his large family in the rooms overhead. In 1840, when the government sought a binder for the latest version of the long-disputed constitution, it turned to Willem Carbentus, who thereafter advertised himself as Royal Bookbinder.

Recovery through moderation and conformity worked for the country and for Willem, but not for everybody. Of Willem’s children, the second, Clara, was considered epileptic at a time when that word was used to cover a dark universe of mental and emotional afflictions. Never married, she lived in the limbo of denial mandated by family dignity, her illness acknowledged only much later by her nephew, the painter Vincent van Gogh. Willem’s son, Johannus, did not follow the common road in life, his sister wrote cryptically, and later committed suicide. In the end, even Willem himself, despite his success, succumbed. In 1845, at the age of fifty-three, he died of a mental disease, says the family chronicle in a rare acknowledgment. The official record lists the cause of death more circumspectly as catarrhal fever, a bovine plague that periodically affected livestock in rural areas but never spread to humans. Its symptoms, perhaps the basis for the official diagnosis, were overexcitement, followed by spasms, foaming at the mouth, and death.

Surrounded by lessons like these, Willem’s middle daughter Anna grew up with a dark and fearful view of life. Everywhere forces threatened to cast the family back into the chaos from which it had just recently emerged, as suddenly and finally as the sea swallowing up a village. The result was a childhood hedged by fear and fatalism: by a sense that both life and happiness were precarious, and therefore could not be trusted. By her own telling, Anna’s world was a place full of troubles and worries [that] are inherent to it; a place where disappointments will never cease and only the foolish make heavy demands on life. Instead, one must simply learn to endure, she said, realize that no one is perfect, that there are always imperfections in the fulfillment of one’s wishes, and that people must be loved despite their shortcomings. Human nature especially was too chaotic to be trusted, forever in danger of running amok. If we could do whatever we wanted, she warned her children, unharmed, unseen, untroubled—wouldn’t we stray further and further from the right path?

Anna carried this dark vision into adulthood. Unremittingly humorless in her dealings with both family and friends, she grew melancholy easily and brooded ceaselessly over small matters, finding hazard or gloom at the end of every rainbow. Love was likely to disappear; loved ones to die. When left alone by her husband, even for short periods, she tormented herself with thoughts of his death. In Anna’s own account of her wedding celebrations, amid descriptions of flower arrangements and carriage rides in the woods, her thoughts return again and again to a sick relative who could not attend. The wedding days, she concluded, were accompanied by a lot of sadness.

To hold the forces of darkness at bay, Anna kept herself frenetically busy. She learned to knit at an early age, and for the rest of her life, worked the needles with terrifying speed, according to the family chronicle. She was an indefatigable writer whose letters—filled with hastily jumbled syntax and multiple insertions—betray the same headlong rush to nowhere. She played the piano. She read because it keeps you busy [and] turns the mind in a different direction, she said. As a mother, she was obsessed with the benefits of preoccupation and urged it on her children at every opportunity. Force your mind to keep itself occupied with other things, she advised one of them as a cure for being down-hearted. (It was a lesson that her son Vincent, perhaps the most depressed and incandescently productive artist in history, learned almost too well.) When all else failed, Anna would clean furiously. That dearest Ma is busy cleaning, her husband wrote, casting doubt on the effectiveness of all her strategies, but thinks about and worries about all.

Anna’s busy hands also turned to art. Together with at least one of her sisters, Cornelia, she learned to draw and paint with watercolor, pastimes that had been taken up by the new bourgeois class as both a benefit and a badge of leisure. Her favorite subject was the common one for parlor artists at the time: flowers—nosegays of violets, pea blossoms, hyacinths, forget-me-nots. In this conventional pursuit, the Carbentus sisters may have been encouraged by their eccentric uncle, Hermanus, who, at one time at least, advertised himself as a painter. They also enjoyed the support and example of a very unconventional artistic family, the Bakhuyzens. Anna’s visits to the Bakhuyzen house were immersions in the world of art. Father Hendrik, a respected landscape painter, gave lessons not only to his own children (two of whom went on to become prominent artists), and perhaps to the Carbentus sisters, but also to a changing cast of students who later founded a new, emphatically Dutch art movement, the Hague School. Thirty-five years after Anna’s visits, the same movement would provide her son a port from which to launch his brief, tempest-tossed career as an artist.

As a fearful child, Anna was drawn naturally to religion.

Except for marriages and baptisms, religion makes a relatively late appearance in the Carbentus family record: When the French army arrived in The Hague in 1795, the chronicler blamed God’s trying hand for the depredations of billeted soldiers and confiscated coins. Two years later, when the fury loose in the land found Gerrit Carbentus alone on the Rijswijk road, the chronicle suddenly erupts in plaintive piety: May God grant us mercy to accept His decisions with an obedient heart. This was the essence of the religious sentiment that emerged from the years of turmoil—both in the Carbentus family and in the country: a trembling recognition of the consequences of chaos. Bloodied and exhausted, people turned from a religion that rallied the faithful to one that reassured the fearful. Anna herself summarized the milder goals of the new faith: to preserve, support, and comfort.

Later in life, as the storms grew and multiplied, Anna sought refuge in religion with increasing desperation. The slightest sign of disruption in her own life, or errant behavior in her children’s, triggered a rush of pieties. From school exams to job applications, every crisis prompted a sermon invoking His beneficence or His forbearance. May the good God help you remain honest, she wrote her son Theo on the occasion of a promotion. She invoked God to shield her children against everything from sexual temptation to bad weather, insomnia, and creditors. But most of all, she invoked Him to shield herself from the dark forces within. Her relentless nostrums—so much like her son Vincent’s more manic variations on both secular and religious themes—suggest a need for reassurance that could never be satisfied. Despite repeated claims for the consoling power of her beliefs, these insistent incantations were clearly as close as Anna—or Vincent—ever came to being truly comforted by religion.

In every aspect of her life, not just religion, Anna sought the safe ground. Learn the normal life more and more, she advised her children. Make your paths in life even and straight. In a postrevolutionary, post-traumatic society—a society that always prized and often enforced conformity—it was an ideal to which virtually everyone aspired. Normality was the duty of every young Dutch woman, and none was more dutiful than Anna Carbentus.

Thus it was no surprise that when Anna turned thirty in 1849 and was still unmarried, she felt an urgent need to find a husband. All of her siblings, except for the epileptic Clara, the troubled Johannus, and her youngest sister, Cornelia, were already wed. Only a single cousin had waited longer than Anna—until she was thirty-one—and she ended up marrying a widower, a common fate for women who waited too long. Earnest, humorless, plain, redheaded, and thirty, Anna seemed destined for an even worse fate: spinsterhood.

The crushing blow came in March 1850 when Cornelia, ten years Anna’s junior, announced her engagement to a prosperous print dealer in The Hague named Van Gogh. He lived over his gallery on the Spuistraat, not far from the Carbentus shop, and, like Cornelia, he had a sibling who was tardy in marriage: a twenty-eight-year-old brother named Theodorus, a preacher.¹ Three months later, a meeting was arranged between Theodorus and Anna. Theodorus (the family called him Dorus) was slight and handsome, with finely chiseled features and sandy-colored hair already starting to gray. He was quiet and hesitant, unlike his gregarious brother. He lived in Groot Zundert, a small village near the Belgian border, far from the royal sophistication of The Hague. But none of that mattered. The family was acceptable; the alternatives unthinkable. He seemed as eager as she to consummate an arrangement. Almost immediately after they met, an engagement was announced.

On May 21, 1851, Theodorus van Gogh and Anna Carbentus were married in the Kloosterkerk. After the ceremony, the newlyweds left for Groot Zundert in the Catholic south. Anna later recalled her feelings on the eve of her wedding: The bride to be was not without worry about the future home.

¹ Dorus’s character and family line are discussed in chapter 4, God and Money.

CHAPTER 2

An Outpost on the Heath

TO THE EYE OF A NEWCOMER, ESPECIALLY ONE FROM SO PRINCELY A CITY as The Hague, the township of Zundert must have looked a wasteland. And, indeed, most of it was. More than half of the township—which stretched for miles in every direction from the small cluster of buildings that was the town of Groot Zundert (Big Zundert, to distinguish it from nearby Klein Zundert, Little Zundert)—consisted of swamp and heath: windswept, virtually treeless expanses of wild grass and scrub untouched by tilling or tending hand. Except for an occasional shepherd driving a flock of sheep, or peasants cutting peat or gathering heather for brushes, nothing broke the enormous silence that hung over the empty horizon. Contemporary chroniclers referred to the region as the untouched territory.

Only the great highway built by Napoleon, the Napoleonsweg, tethered the town of Groot Zundert to the outside world. With its parade-straight double row of oak and beech trees leading to infinity, the road brought all the overland trade from Belgium and points south through the dusty little village. Inns, taverns, stables, and tradesmen’s shops lined the famous road (the emperor himself had passed this way), almost outnumbering the 126 houses that sheltered the town’s twelve hundred inhabitants.

The mêlée of commerce made Zundert a disproportionately dirty, disorderly place. Especially at festival time, when the newlywed Van Goghs arrived, the many inns and taverns around the town square, the Markt, were filled with raucous young men drinking, singing, dancing, and often brawling. Brueghelesque public debaucheries were common at these fun fairs (Brueghel had been born nearby), where alcoholic license, boorishness, and especially disregard of social rank and sexual mores, confirmed all the low stereotypes of the rustic Dutch character that polite society in urbane centers like Amsterdam and The Hague abhorred.

Off the main road, however, Groot Zundert remained virtually untouched by the comings and goings of commerce. When Anna arrived in 1851, almost four decades after Waterloo, the Napoleonsweg was still the town’s only paved road, and tiny, home-based breweries and tanneries still its only industries. Most farmers still produced barely enough food to feed their own families—potatoes, mostly—and still used bullocks to pull their plows. Zundert’s most profitable crop was still the fine white sand that was scooped from its infertile fields and used all over Holland to sand furniture and floors to a milky smoothness. Most families still shared their one-room houses with their livestock and dressed in the same clothes year-round. Only a tiny percentage of Zundert’s citizens were rich enough to pay the poll tax and vote, while a quarter of its schoolchildren were poor enough to receive free education. In general, people from the rich cities of the north, like The Hague, came to Zundert only to exploit its most plentiful resource other than sand: cheap labor.

To proper Dutch townsfolk like Anna van Gogh, Zundert wasn’t just a coarse, impoverished country village; it wasn’t really Dutch. For centuries, Zundert and all of the townships around it had looked not north to the city-states of the Dutch Republic, but south—to Brussels and Rome—for leadership and identity. Together with most of northern Belgium, the townships of southern Holland belonged to Brabant, a medieval duchy that had enjoyed its own brief golden age in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries before its power waned and its borders were submerged in the shifting empires of its neighbors. By 1581, when the Dutch declared their independence from Spanish rule, Brabant found itself separated from its northern neighbor by an economic, political, and, especially, religious gulf that would never be bridged. Overwhelmingly Catholic and monarchical, it remained on the opposite side of that gulf through all the bloody formative events of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Even after Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1815 and all of Belgium was joined with the old Dutch provinces to form the Kingdom of the United Netherlands, animosities festered. Brabanters resented the political and economic hegemony of the north and resisted its cultural dominance, even its language; northerners looked down on the Brabanters as stupid, superstitious, and untrustworthy. In 1830, when the Belgians broke with the United Netherlands and declared Belgium an independent country, these mutual enmities boiled into the open. Brabanters on the Dutch side of the border allied with those on the Belgian side, and for almost a decade, it seemed to many in Holland that the whole lower third of the country might slide into rebellion.

A treaty in 1839 that split Brabant down the middle had devastating effects in border areas like Zundert. Farms and families were divided, roads were closed, congregations cut off from their churches. The Dutch government in The Hague treated Zundert and its fellow townships along the new border like occupied enemy territory. A single crossing point served the whole trackless sweep of wasteland around the town. Farmers had to travel for miles to bring peat, their only source of fuel, home from the heath, and border guards imposed crushing tolls on all goods crossing the line. Military police monitored the new border and roamed the roads to prevent illegal migration. The Brabanters responded with a campaign of audacious smuggling greatly abetted by the wild landscape and desperate poverty.

The Belgian revolt and occupation that followed only deepened the bitter split between Catholics and Protestants. For two centuries, armies had swept back and forth over the sandy heaths of Zundert, installing one religion and chasing away the other. When Catholic forces approached from the south, or Protestant from the north, whole congregations would pull up stakes and flee. Churches were vandalized and appropriated. Then the political winds would shift: new authorities marched in, and old churches were reclaimed, scores settled, and new oppressive measures imposed on the unbelievers.

In the latest round, during the Belgian Revolt, after Catholics smashed the windows of the little church in Groot Zundert, Protestants had been slow to return. When the Van Goghs arrived twenty years later, the congregation stood at only fifty-six, a mere handful of families, outnumbered thirty to one in an outpost of true faith on the papist heath. Protestants nursed dark suspicions of Catholic intentions and trod lightly to avoid conflicts with Catholic authorities. Catholics boycotted Protestant businesses and cursed Protestantism as the faith of the invader.

THE MARKT IN ZUNDERT; THE PARSONAGE WHERE VINCENT WAS BORN IS AT CENTER (Illustration credit 2.1)

Anna’s new home, the Zundert parsonage, sat facing the Markt, right in the middle of this threatening frontier.

Virtually everything that happened in Zundert happened on the Markt: servants jostled and gossiped at the town water well, officials conducted public business surrounded by rowdy crowds, the stagecoaches and mail wagons rode in and changed teams at the big stables nearby. On Sundays, the news was read out in a booming voice from the steps of the town hall directly opposite the parsonage. So many carts or wagons passed through the Markt that residents had to keep their windows closed against the clouds of dust they kicked up. When it rained, unpaved sections of the square turned into impassable quagmires.

Spare and inconspicuous, the parsonage dated back to the early 1600s. In the two and a half centuries since, it had seen a long line of parsons’ families and a few enlargements, but hardly any improvements. Hemmed in by larger neighbors on both sides, only its narrow brick façade enjoyed a view of the square. The door opened into a long, dark, narrow hall connecting a formal room at the front, used for church functions, to a single dark room at the back where the family actually lived. The hall ended at a small kitchen. Beyond that lay a washroom and a barn—all in one continuous, virtually lightless progression. The sole privy could be found behind a door in the corner of the barn. Unlike most people in Zundert, Anna did not have to venture outdoors to use the loo.

Putting the best face on the sudden change in her circumstances, Anna described the parsonage to her family back in The Hague as a country place where one could enjoy the pastoral simplicity of rural life. But pleasantries could not disguise the truth: After a prolonged maidenhood in the fine and proper world of The Hague, she had landed in a beleaguered religious outpost, in a wild and unfamiliar land, surrounded by townspeople who mostly resented her presence, whom she mostly distrusted, and whose dialect she could hardly understand. There was no disguising her loneliness, either. Unable to walk the streets of town unaccompanied, she hosted a succession of family visitors, and then, at the end of the summer, returned to The Hague for an extended stay.

As all the other distinctions of Anna’s previous life fell away, one became increasingly important to her: respectability. She had always lived her life by the rules of convention. But now, under the battlefield discipline imposed by isolation and hostility, those rules took on a new significance. First and foremost, the rules demanded that parsons’ wives, all wives, produce children—lots of children. Families of ten or more were not uncommon. It was a strategic and religious imperative to ensure the outpost’s survival into the next generation—and Anna van Gogh was starting late. When she returned to The Hague at the end of the summer, she proudly announced the future arrival of a little addition to the family, for which God had given us hope.

On March 30, 1852, Anna gave birth to a stillborn son. Levenloos—lifeless—the town registrar noted in the margin of his book next to the nameless birth entry, No. 29. Hardly a family in Zundert—or anywhere in Holland—rich or poor, was untouched by this most mysterious of all God’s workings. The Carbentus family was typical, its chronicle littered with infant deaths and nameless stillborns.

In previous generations, the death of a child often passed without a funeral; the birth of a stillborn, without any mention at all. For the new bourgeoisie, however, no opportunity for self-affirmation and display went unseized. Mourning for an innocent child, in particular, caught the public imagination. One Dutch writer dubbed it the most violent and profound of all sorrows. Sales of poetry albums devoted exclusively to the subject soared. Novels like Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, with its deathbed scene of Little Nell, transfixed a generation. When it came time for Anna to bury her son, she demanded all the trappings of the new fashion. A grave was dug in Zundert’s little Protestant cemetery next to the church (the first for a stillborn) and covered with a handsome stone marker large enough for a biblical inscription, a favorite of the era’s poetry albums: Suffer little children to come unto me … The marker bore only the year, 1852; and instead of the bereaved parents, it named the stillborn: Vincent van Gogh.

For Anna, naming children was only remotely a matter of personal preference. Like everything else in her life, it was governed by rules. Thus it was predetermined, when Anna gave birth to another son on March 30, 1853, exactly one year after the death of her first, that he would take the names of his grandfathers: Vincent and Willem.

The coincidence that Vincent Willem van Gogh was born a year to the day after the stillborn buried under a marker inscribed Vincent van Gogh would prove of far greater interest to later commentators than to the Van Goghs. Anna proceeded to produce a large family with clockwork discipline. In 1855, almost exactly two years after Vincent Willem’s birth, a girl was born, Anna Cornelia. Two years after that (1857), another son, Theodorus. Two years after that (1859), another daughter, Elisabeth. In 1862, a third daughter, Willemina. Finally, five years later (1867), at forty-seven, Anna bore her last child, another son, Cornelis Vincent. So tightly did Anna control the process that six of her seven children had birthdays between mid-March and mid-May; three were born in May, and two were born one day apart (in addition to the two Vincents born on the same date).

This was Anna van Gogh’s family. For the rest of the twenty years she lived in Zundert, Anna would pour most of her energy and all of her manic orderliness and fearful conformity into raising these six children. We are shaped first by family, she wrote, then by the world.

In concentrating so single-mindedly on home life, Anna not only fulfilled her duty as a wife and a Protestant, she upheld the conventions of her class. What historians would call the era of the triumphant family had dawned. Children were no longer just adults-in-waiting. Childhood had become a distinct and precious state of being—holy youth, it was called—and parenthood a sacred calling. One must make sure that [youth] shares as little as possible in the disasters of society, warned one of the most popular parenting instruction books of the era. An entire following life cannot make up for a repressed youth. Hundreds of such books, and even more novels, embraced and instructed the new middle-class obsession. The message of such books was all too familiar to Anna: the outside world was a turbulent and dangerous place; family, the ultimate refuge.

VINCENT’S SISTERS AND BROTHERS (CLOCKWISE FROM UPPER LEFT): ANNA, THEO, LIES, COR, AND WIL (Illustration credit 2.2)

Anna stamped this fearful, insular view on all her children. Neither physical nor affectionate by nature, she waged instead a relentless campaign of words: affirmations of family ties, invocations of filial duty, professions of parental love, and reminders of parental sacrifice, endlessly knitted into the fabric of everyday life. Not only was their family uniquely happy, she maintained, but a happy home life was essential to any happiness. Without it, the future could only be lonely and uncertain. Her campaign echoed the mandate of family unity—what one historian called family totalitarianism—that filled the literature of the day, in which tender expressions of family devotion accompanied by uncontrollable sobbing were de rigueur. We can’t live without each other, Anna wrote to her seventeen-year-old son Theo. We love each other too dearly to be separated or to refuse to open our hearts to one another.

In the claustrophobic emotional environment of the parsonage (a strange, sensitive atmosphere, according to one account), Anna’s campaign succeeded only too well. Her children grew up clinging to family like shipwreck survivors to a raft. Oh! I cannot imagine what it would be like if one of us had to leave, wrote Elisabeth, her sixteen-year-old daughter, whom the family called Lies. I feel that we all belong together, that we are one.… If there would be one missing now, I would feel as if this unity did not exist anymore. Separation from any member, emotional or physical, was painful for all. Reunions were greeted with joyful tears and invested with the power even to cure illness.

In later years, when separation became unavoidable, all of Anna’s children suffered the pain of withdrawal. Letters (not just Vincent’s) poured back and forth between them in an extraordinary effort to sustain the family bond. Gripped by spells of inexpressible homesickness throughout their adult lives, according to one in-law, they remained wary of the outside world, preferring the safe, vicarious life they found in books to the reality around them. For all of them, one of life’s greatest joys would remain the family together in the shiplike parsonage; and one of life’s greatest fears, being shut out of that joy. The family feeling and our love for each other is so strong, Vincent wrote years later, "that the heart is uplifted and the eye turns to God and prays, ‘Do not let me stray too far from them, not too long, O Lord.’ "

Not surprisingly, one of the most important books the young Vincent van Gogh was given to read was Der schweizerische Robinson (The Swiss Family Robinson), the story of a parson’s family shipwrecked on an uninhabited tropical island and forced to rely entirely on each other to survive in a hostile world.

ANNA VAN GOGH responded to the ordeal of her new life on the heath by imposing on her family, as zealously as on herself, the rigors of normality.

Every day, mother, father, children, and governess walked for an hour in and around the town, an area that included gardens and fields as well as the dusty streetscape. Anna believed these walks not only improved her family’s health (their color and brightness), but also rejuvenated their spirits. The daily ritual both displayed the family’s bourgeois status—working people could never take an hour off in the daylight—and stamped the family unit with the imprimatur of glorious Nature.

Anna planted a garden. Family gardens had been a Dutch institution for centuries, thanks both to the fecundity of the soil and the exemption from feudal taxes that the products of these gardens enjoyed. For the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, who lived far beyond subsistence, flower gardens became a mark of leisure and plenty. The rich built country houses, the middle class lavished attention on tiny city plots, the poor planted window boxes and pots. In 1845, Alphonse Karr’s A Tour Round My Garden touched the Dutch love affair with gardens to the heartstrings of Victorian sentimentality and instantly became a favorite of families like the Carbentuses and the Van Goghs. (Love among flowers is not selfish, Karr instructed; they are happy in loving and blooming.) For the rest of her life, Anna believed that working in the garden and seeing the flowers grow was essential to both health and happiness.

The garden in Zundert, which lay behind the barn, was large by Anna’s city standards. Long and narrow, like the parsonage, it was neatly enclosed by a beech hedge and sloped gently downhill toward the fields of rye and wheat beyond. She carefully divided it into sections, putting flowers nearest the house. Eventually, flowers crowded out the more proletarian vegetables, which were banished to a plot adjacent to the nearby cemetery, where the parsonage grew crops, mowed hay, and cultivated trees for market. True to Victorian taste, Anna preferred delicate, small-bloomed flowers—marigolds, mignonettes, geraniums, golden rain—arranged in multicolored profusion. She maintained that scent was more important than color, but favored red and yellow. Beyond the flowerbeds lay rows of blackberry and raspberry bushes and fruit trees—apple, pear, plum, and peach—that dotted the garden with color in spring.

Cramped in the dark parsonage throughout the long winter, Anna’s young family monitored every nuance of season and celebrated spring’s first starling or daisy like freed prisoners. From that moment on, the family’s center of gravity moved to the garden. Dorus studied and wrote sermons there. Anna read under a shade awning. The children played games in the harvested crops and built castles in the paths of fine Zundert sand. Every member of the Van Gogh family shared responsibility for the garden’s cultivation. Dorus tended the trees and vines (grape and ivy); Anna, the flowers; and each child was given his or her own small plot to plant and harvest.

Inspired by Karr’s elaborate plant and insect conceits, Anna used the garden to school her children in the meanings of nature. Not only did the cycle of seasons recapitulate the cycle of life, but that cycle could be marked out in the blooming and fading of certain plants: violets represented the courage of both spring and youth; ivy, the promise of life to come in both winter and death. Hope could rise from despair even as the blossom falls from the tree and vigorous new life shoots up, Vincent later wrote. Trees—especially tree roots—affirmed the promise of life after death. (Karr claimed that certain trees, like the cypress, grow in cemeteries more beautifully and vigorously than elsewhere.) In Anna’s garden, the sun was the Sweet Lord whose light gave life to plants just as God gave peace to our hearts; and stars were the sun’s promise to return in the morning to make light out of darkness.

All the lessons in symbolism that Vincent eventually transformed into paint—from Christian mythology, from art and literature—all first took root in his mother’s garden.

The Van Gogh family ate where they lived, in the back room of the parsonage. Like everything in Anna’s life, food was subject to conventions. Modest and regular eating was considered crucial to both good health and moral wholeness. But with two cooks in the tiny kitchen, Anna could indulge her middle-class aspirations to larger, more elaborate repasts, especially on Sundays. If evening meals were the daily worship service of the cult of the family, Sunday dinner was its high mass. These quiet extravagances of four- and five-course dinners left a deep impression on all her children, especially Vincent, whose lifelong obsession with food and sporadic attempts at self-starvation mirrored his turbulent family relations.

After dinner, everyone gathered around the stove for another ritual: instruction in family history. Father Dorus, who was well informed on such matters according to his daughter Lies, told tales of illustrious ancestors who had served their country through its many trials. These stories of past distinction consoled Anna’s isolation on the heath by reconnecting her to the culture and class she had left behind. Like virtually everyone in their generation, Anna and Dorus van Gogh felt a profound nostalgia for their country’s past—especially its seventeenth-century Golden Age when the coastal city-states ruled the world’s oceans, nurtured an empire, and mentored Western civilization in science and art. The stoveside lessons transmitted to their family not just a fascination with history, but also a vague longing for this lost Eden.

All of Anna and Dorus’s children inherited their nostalgia for the past, both their country’s and their family’s. But none felt the bittersweet tug as sharply as their eldest son, Vincent, who later described himself as enchanted by snatches of the past. As an adult, he would devour histories and novels set in previous eras—eras he always imagined as better, purer than his own. In everything from architecture to literature, he lamented the lost virtues of earlier times (the difficult but noble days) and the inadequacies of the dull and unfeeling present. For Vincent, civilization would forever be in decline, and society invariably corrupt. I feel more and more a kind of void, he later said, which I cannot fill with the things of today.

In art, Vincent would cast himself repeatedly as the champion of neglected artists, archaic subject matter, and bygone movements. His commentaries on the art and artists of his own day would be filled with jeremiads, reactionary outbursts, and melancholy paeans to artistic Edens come and gone. Like his mother, he keenly felt the elusiveness and evanescence of happiness—the desperately swift passing away of things in modern life—and trusted only memory to capture and hold it. Throughout his life, his thoughts returned again and again to the places and events of his own past, and he rehearsed their lost joys with delusional intensity. He suffered fits of nostalgia that sometimes paralyzed him for weeks, and invested in certain memories the talismanic power of myth. There are moments in life when everything, within us too, is full of peace, he later wrote, and our whole life seems to be a path through the heath; but it is not always so.

EVERY EVENING AT THE parsonage ended the same way: with a book. Far from being a solitary, solipsistic exercise, reading aloud bound the family together and set them apart from the sea of rural Catholic illiteracy that surrounded them. Anna and Dorus read to each other and to their children; the older children read to the younger; and, later in life, the children read to their parents. Reading aloud was used to console the sick and distract the worried, as well as to educate and entertain. Whether in the shade of the garden awning or by the light of an oil lamp, reading was (and would always remain) the comforting voice of family unity. Long after the children had dispersed, they avidly exchanged books and reading recommendations as if no book was truly read until all had read it.

While the Bible was always considered the best book, the parsonage bookcases bowed with edifying classics: German Romantics like Schiller, Goethe, Uhland, and Heine; Shakespeare (in Dutch translation); and even a few French works by authors like Molière and Dumas. Excluded were books considered excessive or disturbing, like Goethe’s Faust, as well as more modern works by Balzac, Byron, Sand, and, later, Zola, which Anna dismissed as products of great minds but impure souls. The greatest Dutch book of the era, Max Havelaar (written by Eduard Dekker under the pseudonym Multatuli), was deplored for its blistering attack on the Dutch colonial presence in Indonesia and the hypocritical goodness and self-glorification of the Dutch middle class. More popular forms of children’s entertainments, especially the cowboy-and-Indian stories coming out of America, were deemed too rousing for a proper upbringing.

Like most literate families across Victorian Europe, the Van Goghs reserved a special place in their heart for sentimental stories. Everyone clamored for the latest book by Dickens, or by his fellow Englishman Edward Bulwer-Lytton (who first wrote It was a dark and stormy night …). The Dutch translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin arrived in Zundert just about the time Vincent was born, only a year after the final installment appeared in America, and was received in the parsonage with the same fervid acclaim it met everywhere else.

The Van Gogh children entered the world of approved literature through two doors: poetry and fairy tales. Poetry, memorized and recited, was the preferred method for teaching children to be virtuous and devout and to listen to their parents. Fairy tales meant only one thing in the parsonage: Hans Christian Andersen. Stories like The Ugly Duckling, The Princess and the Pea, The Emperor’s New Clothes, and The Little Mermaid had achieved worldwide acclaim by the time Anna started her family. Neither explicitly Christian nor bluntly didactic, Andersen’s tales captured the new, more whimsical view of childhood that Victorian leisure had fostered. The subtle seditiousness of stories that highlighted human frailties and often lacked happy endings escaped the parsonage censors.

Vincent’s reading would eventually range far beyond the books approved by his parents. But these early exposures set the trajectory. He read with demonic speed, consuming books at a breakneck pace that hardly let up until the day he died. He would start with one book by an author and then devour the entire oeuvre in a few weeks. He must have loved his early training in poetry, for he went on to commit volumes of it to memory, sprinkled it throughout his letters, and spent days transcribing it into neat, error-free albums. He kept his love of Hans Christian Andersen, too. Andersen’s vividly imagined world of anthropomorphic plants and personified abstractions, of exaggerated sentiment and epigrammatic imagery, left a clear watermark on Vincent’s imagination. Decades later, he called Andersen’s tales glorious … so beautiful and real.

—

HOLIDAYS AT THE PARSONAGE offered a special opportunity to display family solidarity in the face of isolation and adversity. Celebrations crowded the calendar of Zundert’s model Protestant household: church holidays, national holidays, birthdays (including those of aunts, uncles, and servants), anniversaries, and name days (days set aside to celebrate common first names). Anna, who organized all the festivities at the parsonage, lavished all her nervous energy and anticipatory nostalgia on these set pieces of family unity. Ropes of greenery, flags, and bouquets of seasonal flowers festooned the dark rooms. Special cakes and cookies were laid out on a table decorated with bunches of fruits and branches of flowers. In later years, Anna’s children would brave the hardships of travel, sometimes coming great distances, to attend these celebrations. When they couldn’t, letters would fly to everyone, not just the honoree, congratulating all on the happy occasion—a Dutch custom that turned every holiday into a celebration of family.

In the long calendar of celebrations, nothing compared to Christmas. From Saint Nicholas Eve, December 5, when a visiting uncle dressed as Sinterklaas distributed candy and presents, to Boxing Day on the twenty-sixth, the Van Goghs celebrated the mystical union of the Holy Family and their family. For weeks, the front room of the parsonage rang with Bible readings, carols, and the clatter of coffee cups as the members of the tiny congregation gathered around the garlanded fireplace. Under Anna’s direction, her children decorated a huge Christmas tree with gold and silver paper cutouts, balloons, fruit, nuts, candy, and dozens of candles. Presents for all the parsonage children, not just the parson’s, were piled around the tree. Christmas is the most beautiful time at home, Anna decreed. On Christmas Day, Dorus took Vincent and his brothers on holiday visits to sick congregants—to bring St. Nicholas to them.

Every Christmas, by the warmth of the back-room stove, the family concluded the annual reading of one of Dickens’s five Christmas books. Two of them stayed in Vincent’s imagination for the rest of his life: A Christmas Carol and The Haunted Man. Almost every year, he reread these stories, with their vivid images of Faustian visitations, children in jeopardy, and the magical reparative power of domesticity and the Christmas spirit. They are new to me again every time, he said. By the end of his life, Dickens’s tale of a man hounded by memories and an alien from his mother’s heart would unsettle Vincent in ways he could never have imagined as a boy by the stove in Zundert. What he did feel then, and would feel more and more acutely in the years to come, was the indissoluble union of Christmas and family. It seems to me, says Redlaw, the tormented Scrooge of The Haunted Man, as if the birth-time of our Lord was the birth-time of all I have ever had affection for, or mourned for, or delighted in.

No celebration was complete without gift giving. From the earliest age, the Van Gogh children were expected to find or make their own presents for birthdays and anniversaries. All learned how to arrange bouquets of flowers and baskets of food. Eventually, every one of Anna’s children developed a repertoire of crafts to satisfy the demand for holiday tokens. The girls learned embroidery, crochet, macramé, and knitting; the boys learned pottery and woodworking.

And everybody learned to draw. Under their mother’s tutelage, all the Van Gogh children mastered the parlor arts of collage, sketching, and painting, in order to decorate and personalize the gifts and notes they relentlessly exchanged. A simple box might come adorned with a bouquet of painted flowers; a transcribed poem, with a cutout wreath. They illustrated favorite stories, marrying words to images in the manner of the emblem books widely used to teach children moral lessons. Although prints and other store-bought goods would eventually replace collage and embroidery at Van Gogh celebrations, handmade gifts would always be honored as the most authentic offering on the altar of family.

TO SURVIVE THE RIGORS of outpost life, Anna’s children had to be as disciplined as frontier soldiers.