For those parishioners who lived on isolated farms and in tiny hamlets spread throughout the vast township, Dorus played an even more critical role. Forbidden by custom to interact with their Catholic neighbors, these religious pioneers relied on the pastor’s weekly visits for reassurance of God’s favor, but also for something even more important: money. Successive waves of crop failure and blight had devastated the area’s rural families. Farmers already living at subsistence level were thrown onto the church dole. As dispenser of these scarce funds, Dorus van Gogh held the power of life and death over his far-flung flock. When Vincent accompanied his father on trips into the countryside, he saw him greeted not just with reverence, but with kneeling gratitude.
With survival itself at stake, Dorus largely ignored the finer points of religious doctrine. Especially in an outpost like Zundert, what mattered was a man’s mettle and a woman’s fertility, not doctrinal purity. “We know that talking about religion and morality is of minor importance,” Anna van Gogh wrote. The parsonage membership roll, which included Lutherans, Mennonites, and Remonstrants, testified to the parson’s pragmatic ecumenism. But while dogma mattered little to Dorus, discipline meant everything. An unexplained absence from Sunday service invariably brought an angry visit from the parson that very week. He dealt with errant parishioners severely—“a real little Protestant Pope,” one witness called him—and lashed out at those “scum” who challenged his authority. He hotly defended the prerogatives of his position, complaining bitterly to his church superiors when his meager salary made it difficult for him “to support his family in accordance with his rank.”
Within the walls of the parsonage, Dorus’s role as spiritual leader merged seamlessly with that of father. For the Van Goghs, the Sunday service never really ended; it just moved to the front parlor, where the cupboards were filled with communion plates and chalices, Bibles, hymnals, and psalm books. A statue of Christ stood on top of the chest, and a cross with twining roses hung in the hall. All week long, the Van Gogh children heard their father’s distinctive church voice—preaching, praising, Bible reading—echoing from the parlor sanctuary throughout the narrow parsonage. And every night at the dinner table they heard the same voice praying: “Bind us, O Lord, closely to one another, and let our love for Thee strengthen these bonds ever more.”
When not preaching or praying, Dorus remained aloof from his growing family. Moody and reclusive, he spent long hours in his attic study, reading and preparing his sermons, with only his cat for company. His indulgences complemented his solitude: he smoked pipes and cigars, and nipped a wide variety of alcohols. His hours of seclusion were punctuated by “brisk, stimulating walks,” which he considered “nourishment for the mind.” When sick, which he often was, he grew even moodier and withdrew even further into seclusion, believing that “by making myself scarce it will end sooner.” During these self-imposed confinements, he became “bored and cranky,” and rejected all food, convinced that fasting would hasten his recovery.
Like most fathers of his generation, Dorus saw himself as “the delegate of God [who] exercised power akin to God” within the home. In his view, neither his outpost nor his family could brook “dissension,” and he enforced unity in his family, just as he enforced it in his congregation, with uncompromising vehemence. He flew into “violent passions” of self-righteous anger when his authority—God’s authority—was challenged. Vincent learned early that to disappoint his father was to disappoint God. “The love that honors the father,” Dorus insisted, was the same love “that blesses the world.” Offending one love offended the other; rejecting one rejected both. Later in life, when Vincent sought absolution for his sins, he hopelessly confused “father” and “Father,” and found forgiveness in neither.
But there was another Dorus van Gogh. Rather than invoking “papal” authority, this Dorus used gentle persuasion and kind entreaties to keep his children on the straight and narrow. This Dorus did not “suspect” or “judge” them, he merely “provided support” and “encouraged them.” This Dorus apologized when he hurt their feelings and rushed to their bedsides when they fell sick. This Dorus declared it his “goal in life … to live with and for our children.”
Vincent had two fathers because, at the time, fatherhood itself was in crisis. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the French Revolution’s challenge to all authority, both spiritual and temporal, had penetrated to the heart of the social contract: the family. The traditional patriarchal father figure who ruled his family “like the gods on Mount Olympus” had become just another relic of the ancien régime, according to the era’s most popular instructional book on fathering. The modern family, like the modern state, should embrace “Democracy,” it said, and be based on “respect for the other,” not hierarchy and fear. Fathers should come down from their “thrones”—and pulpits—and get “more involved in their children’s lives,” it advised, “listen more to their opinions.” In short, “a father must be a friend to his son.”
Dorus van Gogh absorbed these lessons. “You know that you have a father who also wants to be like a brother to you,” he wrote to his nineteen-year-old son, Theo.
Torn between the patriarchal father that the Zundert outpost demanded and the modern father that his social class expected, Dorus zigzagged his way through the successive crises of Vincent’s childhood. Fierce criticisms were followed by protestations of love (“We can not breathe freely if there is a somber cloud over the face of one of our children”); thundering condemnations, by elaborate claims of good intent (“I just point out things that you have to work out for yourself … It would be disloyal if we suppressed thoughts or held back remarks”). He professed deference to his sons’ “freedom” but besieged them relentlessly with accusations of “making messes” and “bringing worry and sadness” into their parents’ lives.
To a lonely, needful child, it was an irresistible trap. Vincent couldn’t help but emulate the remote figure that ascended into the pulpit every Sunday. He adopted the same circuitous way of talking and metaphorical way of seeing. He developed the same emotional diffidence in public, and dissected his feelings with the same misguided rationalism in private. He approached the outside world with the same defensive suspiciousness. He treated those who challenged him with the same self-righteous inflexibility and reacted to perceived slights with the same paranoid anger. The son’s introversion mirrored the father’s reclusiveness; the son’s brooding, his father’s melancholy. Like his father, Vincent fasted to expiate his failings. In his collecting, and later his painting, Vincent mimicked Dorus’s long hours of solitary activity in his attic study. The sight of his father helping the needy and consoling the grief-stricken—being welcomed and loved for the comfort he brought—became the central image of Vincent’s adulthood, the image that drove all his subsequent ambitions in life and art. “How glorious it must be to have a life behind one like Pa’s,” he once said.
But at the end of all of Vincent’s bids to win his father’s blessing lay the other, inflexibly judgmental Dorus. For a man who considered cheerfulness “the fruit of a childlike faith,” a gloomy son like Vincent must have seemed beyond the reach of God’s favor. For a man who believed that “one becomes a person by meeting people,” Vincent’s introversion marked him indelibly as an outcast. For a father who urged his children to “work more and more for togetherness with each other,” Vincent’s contrariness was a continuing insult to family unity. For a man who exhorted his children to “always take an interest in life,” Vincent’s stubborn isolation at school and even within the parsonage must have seemed like a rejection of life itself.
In the end, no matter what the books told him, no matter how sincerely he wanted to help his son, Dorus could never bring himself to accept Vincent on his own terms. Despite his repeated promises to do so, he could never refrain from judging—and condemning—his willful, obdurate, eccentric son. These broken promises only drove father and son deeper into a spiral of provocation, rejection,
and self-reproach from which Vincent, despite repeated attempts, could never escape.
IN A CHILDHOOD defined almost exclusively by family, only one other figure competed for Vincent’s emulation: his uncle the art dealer Vincent van Gogh. Other relatives visited more often or led more colorful lives (his uncle Jan had sailed the globe and fought in the East Indies). But “Oom [Uncle] Cent” had a double claim to his special place in Vincent’s world. First, he had married Anna Carbentus’s youngest sister, Cornelia, compounding the family ties between the Van Goghs and the Carbentuses. Second, for reasons that remained a mystery, he and his wife could not have children. The combination made Cent almost an alternate father to his brother’s family—and it made young Vincent, the bearer of his name, as close to a son (and heir) as Cent would ever have.
UNCLE CENT VAN GOGH (Illustration credit 4.2)
During Vincent’s early years, Uncle Cent lived in The Hague and visited Zundert with some frequency. Separated by only two years, the two brothers, Cent and Dorus, looked alike (the same slight build, the same salt-and-cinnamon hair). But the similarities ended there. Father Dorus was stern and humorless, Uncle Cent lighthearted and entertaining. Dorus quoted Bible verses, Cent told tales. They had chosen for wives two sisters as different as they were. Mother Anna frowned and admonished, while Aunt Cornelia lavished on her sister’s children the spoiled and spoiling attention of a woman who had been the baby of her family but had no prospects of a baby of her own.
The biggest difference, of course—the one that permeated every encounter—was money. Uncle Cent was rich. He dressed impeccably, as did his wife. His stories were peopled by kings and queens and barons of commerce, not farmers and tradesmen. He lived in a big gilded townhouse in The Hague, not in a narrow country parsonage. When Vincent was nine, Cent moved to Paris and occupied a succession of grand apartments and villas about which the family bragged tirelessly. Whereas his father seemed hardly ever to leave the barren isle of Zundert, Uncle Cent ranged the world. Through letters that his parents proudly read aloud, Vincent followed his uncle’s trips to the ancient cities of Italy, the mountains of Switzerland (Vincent grew up longing to see mountains), and the beaches of southern France. Cent spent his winters on the Riviera and, every Christmas, sent greetings to the frosty parsonage from a “lovely” land where exotic fruits, grown only in greenhouses in Holland, “grow in the open here.”
How could his look-alike uncle and father have ended up living such different lives, Vincent must have wondered; how could the same family have produced such different men?
THE CONTRADICTION RAN DEEP in Van Gogh family history. The first natives of the little Westphalian village of Goch who ventured out of the Rhine valley in the fifteenth century were drawn to God’s work. Van Gochs and Van Goghs fanned out to monasteries across the Low Countries. A century later, some were preaching so militantly that they “gave offense,” according to the family history—a serious charge in a century racked by religious wars.
These early missionaries encountered a society that was itself deeply conflicted about the roles of God and money. The newly arrived Calvinists’ denunciations of “filthy lucre” sat uneasily in a land-poor country where money was the only way to keep score in the chief enterprise, trade. As always, the Dutch proved wondrously inventive in reconciling their acquisitive instincts with their spiritual aspirations: the rich were suitably “embarrassed” by their riches while simultaneously claiming them as a sign of divine grace; business failure and bankruptcy continued to rank high on the list of mortal sins.
By the time the Van Goghs showed up in The Hague in the seventeenth century, they, too, had caught the Dutch mercantile bug. First setting themselves up as tailors, they applied their skills to the burgeoning demand for luxury goods. In a race to show off their fabulous wealth while maintaining puritan modesty, the burghers of the Golden Age had turned to their tailors. The solemn black of Dutch propriety sprang to light with threads of silver and gold. By midcentury, the Van Goghs were working precious metals instead of molding men’s souls. Master tailors like Gerrit van Gogh were prized for the miles of spun gold they embroidered into waistcoats, capes, and jackets that sagged from the weight. By the time David van Gogh was born in 1697 (the same year as Gerrit Carbentus), the Van Goghs had made gold their sole business: they manufactured the gold wire that by now threaded its way into every corner of haut-bourgeois Dutch culture, from uniforms to draperies.
Some Van Goghs merged their spiritual and temporal ambitions: one served as a lawyer to monasteries and convents; another combined the callings of doctor and clergyman, healing both body and soul. More often, families split the duties between sons. David van Gogh’s younger son Jan continued the family gold business; but his older son, Vincent, became an artist. Parisians probably first mangled the name “Van Gogh” when this Vincent arrived in the French capital sometime in the 1740s. Like his famous namesake, the painter, this Vincent van Gogh (there was one or more in every generation) led an incoherent, unconventional life. After wandering the Continent as a soldier-adventurer, he declared himself a sculptor. He married four times but died childless. His brother Jan’s son Johannes inherited the family’s lucrative gold wire business, but eventually he quit the trade and devoted himself exclusively to preaching the Gospel—bringing the family full circle back to its roots in Reformationist mission.
Johannes gave his only son the name of his childless artist-uncle: Vincent. Sixty-four years later, that Vincent would give the same name to his grandson, the painter Vincent van Gogh.
Johannes’s son Vincent followed his father into the ministry. But he still could not escape the curse of ambivalence that had dogged his family for two centuries. Like his father, Vincent married a wealthy woman and applied for positions only in the richest congregations. In Breda, the ancient seat of the House of Nassau situated on the northern edge of Catholic Brabant, he found the ideal post for an up-and-coming clergyman with a taste for the material life. He installed his huge family (eventually thirteen) in a grand house on Catharinastraat, the town’s main thoroughfare.
From this comfortable berth, he quickly rose to leadership in the “Society for Prosperity,” the church’s missionary initiative in the Catholic south. Far from a traditional charity, the Society saw its mission as investment. Secretly—to avoid conflict with Catholic authorities—it purchased farms and homesteads in Catholic areas and then relocated needy Protestants to work them. Like any investor, the Society expected a return on its money—both in lease payments and in large families to bolster Brabant’s struggling Protestant congregations. For forty-two years, Vincent served as the Society’s “cashier,” recruiting hundreds of farmers with the Society’s dual promise of financial reward and spiritual salvation.
Reverend van Gogh encouraged his children to a serious life of “work and prayer,” but he also instilled in them his own bourgeois aspirations. His family record is filled with loving descriptions of china, silver, furniture, and carpets; detailed reports of salary increases and prices paid; lamentations over missed promotions and squandered inheritances; and tributes to the advantages of owning over renting.
Thus, it was hardly surprising that none of the Reverend’s six sons showed any interest in following him into the ministry. One by one, they embarked instead on socially and financially ambitious careers. The eldest, Hendrik (called Hein), saw opportunities in the book business and opened his own store in Rotterdam by the time he turned twenty-one. He, too, married a rich man’s daughter. The second son, Johannes (called Jan), sought his fortune in the Dutch navy. The third son, Willem, joined the officer corps. The youngest, Cornelis (called Cor), entered the civil service.
The Reverend’s hopes for a spiritual heir settled on his namesake, Vincent (called Cent). But Cent was soon struck down by scarlet fever and emerged too frail for the intense study required by the ministry. Or so he claimed. Whether because of his “terrible headaches,” or because, like his brothers, he had no interest in his father’s
religious ambitions, he soon quit studying altogether. After a brief apprenticeship with brother Hein in Rotterdam, he moved to The Hague, where he worked in a paint store and lived a bachelor life of fencing, socializing, and womanizing.
That left only Theodorus.
IN FORTY YEARS of sermons, Dorus van Gogh preached thousands of images, verses, and parables. But one had special meaning for him: the sower. “For whatsoever a man soweth,” Paul wrote to the Galatians, “that shall he also reap.” To Dorus, Paul’s words meant much more than a call to seek spiritual rewards rather than earthly pleasures. As he told the story to the farmers of Zundert working their sandy fields, the sower became a paragon of persistence in the face of adversity. His Sisyphean labors, like theirs, affirmed the power of perseverance to overcome any obstacle, triumph over any setback. “Think of all the fields that were turned down by shortsighted people,” Dorus preached, “but through the sower’s hard work finally produced good fruit.”
If the story of the persistent sower had special meaning for Dorus van Gogh, it was because he had lived it.
Dorus’s entire childhood had been a struggle. Declared by the family chronicler, his sister Mietje, “a very weak baby” from the moment of his birth in 1822, Dorus never fully recovered his health or his strength. He didn’t learn to walk until he was well past two. He kept the short, slight body of a boy throughout his life. As the seventh of eleven children, the fifth of six sons, he barely knew his parents. He inherited his father’s “fine, delicate appearance” but not his easy intelligence. His modest academic success was the product of application, not aptitude. He was known for being “tidy” and diligent—“a good worker” who began his studies every morning at five.
Perhaps because illness was such a constant in his childhood, Dorus wanted to be a doctor. In 1840, medicine was an ideal career for a serious-minded, upwardly mobile parson’s son with an appetite for hard work and a vague urge to do good while doing well. He even considered signing up to serve in the East Indies (where his brother Jan was stationed at the time), which would have made him eligible for free medical training. But when his father’s disappointed ambitions belatedly fell on him, he could not refuse.
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