Van Gogh (4 page)

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.
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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.”