Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  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.”

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  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 pi
eces 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.