Van Gogh (8 page)

With nightmares like these in their thoughts, Anna and Dorus raised their children in an atmosphere of constant jeopardy and contingent love. A single wrong step could put one on “the slippery path,” as Dorus called it, with devastating consequences for all. Inevitably, the Van Gogh children grew up deeply afraid of “falling short.” The fear of failure “hung over [them] like a cloud,” according to one account, instilling in all a sense of anticipatory self-reproach that would linger long after they left the parsonage. “How much do we have to love Pa and Ma?” one of them wrote another plaintively. “I am not nearly good enough for them.”

Every New Year’s Eve the Van Gogh children gathered and prayed together: “Preserve us from too much self-reproach.” None prayed more fervently than the eldest, Vincent.

A
VISITOR APPROACHING THE ZUNDERT PARSONAGE IN THE 1850S
might have seen a small face in one of the second-story windows, eyeing the activity in the Markt. It would have been hard to miss the hair—a head full of thick, curly red locks. The face was odd: oblong, with a high brow and prominent chin, puffy cheeks, shallow-set eyes, and a wide nose. The lower lip protruded in a perpetual pout. Most visitors, if they saw him at all, would only have caught this fleeting glimpse of the parson’s reclusive son Vincent.

Those who met him noticed immediately how much he favored his mother: the same red hair, the same broad features, the same compact frame. He had dense freckles, and small eyes of a pale, changeable blue-green color. They could seem piercing one minute, vacant the next. In meeting strangers, he was reticent and self-conscious. He tended to hang his head and shift in nervous unease. As his mother bustled about the visitor with tea and cookies and talk of the latest royal doings in The Hague, Vincent would slip awkwardly out of the room to return to his post at the attic window or resume some other solitary activity. The impression he left in many visitors’ minds was
“een oarige”
—a strange boy.

Those who looked more closely, or knew them better, might have noticed other similarities between the proper mother and the strange son—similarities that ran deeper than red hair or blue eyes. He shared her fretful view of life, as well as her suspicious gaze. He shared her taste for creature comforts and the finer things—in flower arrangements, fabrics, and home décor (and, later in life, in brushes, pens, paper, and paint). He absorbed her obsession with the prerogatives of rank and status as well as her rigid expectations, of herself and of others, based on stereotypes of class and origin. Despite his restless, antisocial ways, he was as capable of pleasantries and indirections as she; and, already, a
bit of a snob. Like her, he often felt lonely and worried relentlessly, which made him a serious and anxious child—hardly a child at all.

He shared his mother’s need for frantic, forward motion. From the time she taught him to write, his hands, like hers, never stopped. He learned to move a pencil over paper long before he understood the marks he was copying. For him, writing never lost that pure, calligraphic joy. Like his mother, he wrote with feverish speed—as if the greatest enemy was idleness (“Doing nothing is doing wrong,” he warned), and the greatest fear, emptiness. What could be more “miserable” than “a life of inactivity?” he demanded. “Do a great deal or drop dead.”

His busy hands followed hers into art. Anna wanted her children to have the same refined upbringing she did—a challenge in an outpost like Zundert. An indispensible part of that upbringing was exposure to the fine arts. Her daughters learned to play the piano, just as she had. Everyone took singing lessons. And, starting with Vincent, Anna introduced them all to drawing—not as a childhood craft, but as an artistic endeavor. For a while, she may have kept up her own amateur artwork, setting an example for her son as well as instructing him. At some point, the two Bakhuyzen sisters, Anna’s artist friends from The Hague, visited Zundert, and the three went sketching in the town together.

Barn and Farmhouse
, F
EBRUARY
1864,
PENCIL ON PAPER
, 7⅞ × 10
⅝ IN
. (
Illustration credit 3.1
)

Vincent may or may not have tagged along that day, but in every other way he followed in his mother’s artistic footsteps. As with poetry, he started by copying.
Using instructional drawing books and prints, he painstakingly created his first images, including a farm scene that he made for his father’s birthday in February 1864. Anna gave Vincent her own works to trace and color: flowers, mostly, in the decorative nosegays she favored. On a few occasions, he took pencil and sketchpad outside and attempted to render his own world. One of his earliest models was the family’s black cat, which he drew scurrying up a leafless apple tree. But he turned out to be such a poor draftsman that he destroyed the sketch in frustration soon after making it, and, according to his mother, never made another freehand sketch as long as he lived at the parsonage. Later, Vincent would dismiss all of his childhood work with two words—“little scratches”—and argued, “It is really and truly not until later that the artistic sensibility develops and ripens.”

Vincent’s attachment to his mother was profound. Later in life, the sight of any mother and child could cause his eyes to “grow moist” and his “heart to melt,” he confessed. Activities and imagery that he associated with motherhood—arranging flowers, sewing, rocking a cradle, even just sitting by the fire—preoccupied him both in life and in art. He clung to a childlike maternal affection, and its tokens, well into his twenties. He was periodically overtaken (stricken, really) by the need to win, or win back, his mother’s favor. He felt intense affection for maternal figures and an equally intense desire to play a maternal role in others’ lives. Two years before he died, when he painted a portrait of his mother “as I see her in my memory,” he simultaneously painted a portrait of himself using exactly the same palette of colors.

Despite this special attachment, or perhaps because of its inevitable disappointment, Vincent hardened into an obstreperous, ill-tempered child. The process began early with fits of anger so remarkable that they merited a special mention in the family history. Driven to distraction by one such “insufferable” outburst, Vincent’s paternal grandmother (who had raised eleven children of her own) summarily boxed his ears and threw him out of the room. Years later, Anna herself complained: “I never was busier than when we only had Vincent.” A barrage of similar criticism found its way into family recollections that are otherwise bastions of circumspection. They call him “obstinate,” “unruly,” “self-willed,” and “hard to deal with”; “a queer one” with “strange manners” and “a difficult temper.” Sixty years later, even the family maid recalled vividly how “troublesome” and “contrary” Vincent had been, and branded him “the least pleasant” of the Van Gogh children.

He was noisy and quarrelsome and “never took the slightest notice of what the world calls ‘form,’ ” one family member complained. He often skipped the outings his mother organized (to visit distinguished families in the area), while spending inordinate amounts of time with the family maids (with whom he shared the parsonage attic). In fact, much of Vincent’s misbehavior seemed
aimed directly at his class-conscious, order-loving mother. When she praised a little clay elephant that he had made, Vincent smashed it to the ground. Anna and Dorus tried punishing their son—indeed, all the family chroniclers agree that Vincent was punished more often and more severely than any of his siblings. But to no apparent effect. “It is as if he purposely chooses the ways that lead to difficulties,” Dorus lamented. “It is a vexation of our souls.”

On his side, Vincent felt increasingly thwarted, alienated, and rejected—a knot of feelings that characterized his later life just as pious resignation characterized his parents’. “Family,” he complained years after leaving Zundert, “is a fatal combination of persons with contrary interests, each of whom is opposed to the rest, and two or more are of the same opinion only when it is a question of combining together to obstruct another member.”

Although he continued to embrace his family and its rituals with teary-eyed fervor, Vincent increasingly sought escape from it. Nature beckoned. Compared to the physical and emotional claustrophobia of the parsonage, the surrounding fields and heaths exerted an irresistible pull. Starting at an early age, Vincent began to wander out past the barn, past the rainwater well, down the hill, past the bleaching field where the family’s linen was hung to dry, through the garden gate, and into the fields beyond. Most of Zundert’s farms were relatively small, but to the Van Gogh children, penned in the narrow garden, the patchwork sea of rye and corn that surrounded the town looked immense: “the land of desire,” they called it.

Vincent followed the path that led through the meadows to a sandy streambed, the Grote Beek, where the water ran cool even on the hottest summer day, and his feet left imprints in the fine, wet sand. His parents occasionally came this far on the family’s daily walks—although the children were forbidden to go near the water. But Vincent went farther. He walked west and south to where the cultivated fields dissolved into wilderness: mile after mile of sandy moors carpeted in heather and gorse, marshy lowlands bristling with rushes, and stands of pine.

It may have been on these walks on the broad, deserted moors that Vincent discovered the special light and sky of his native country: the unique combination of sea moisture and morphing clouds that had transfixed artists for centuries. “The most harmonious of all countries,” an American painter described Holland in 1887, “a sky of the purest turquoise [and] a soft sun throwing over everything a yellow saffroned light.”

In addition to sky and light, the Dutch had long been famous for their curiosity and close looking (Dutchmen invented both the telescope and the microscope). The windy moors of Zundert provided endless scope for all of Vincent’s powers of observation. The meticulous attention he had developed in copying his mother’s drawings now focused on God’s designs. He peered deeply into the fleeting vignettes of life on the heath: the blooming of a wildflower, the laboring
of an insect, the nesting of a bird. His days were spent “watching and studying the life of the underbrush,” sister Lies recalled. He sat on the sandy banks of the Grote Beek for hours observing the transits of water bugs. He followed the flights of larks from church tower to corn sheaf to nests hidden in the rye. He could pick his way through the high grain “without even breaking one fine stalk,” Lies said, and would perch beside the nest for hours, just watching. “His mind was given to watching and thinking.” Years later, Vincent wrote Theo: “We share a liking for peering behind the scenes.… Perhaps we owe that to our boyhood in Brabant.”

Even in these solitary sojourns, however, Vincent found means to defy and provoke his parents.

Anna and Dorus van Gogh loved nature, too—in the comfortable, consoling way typical of the nineteenth-century leisure class. “You will find in [nature] a very agreeable and conversable friend,” promised one of their favorite books, “if you will cultivate her intimacy.” They had spent their honeymoon in the Haarlemmerhout, a fifteen-hundred-year-old forest filled with birds and wildflowers and healing springs. In Zundert, they walked the meadow paths and pointed out picturesque tableaux to each other: a cloud formation, a reflection of trees in a pond, the play of light on water. They paused in their daily lives to enjoy sunsets, and occasionally went out in search of vistas from which to appreciate them more fully. They embraced the mystical union of nature and religion: the popular Victorian belief that beauty in nature sounded the “higher tones” of the eternal, and that appreciating nature’s beauty qualified as “worship.”

But none of that explained or justified Vincent’s long, unaccompanied disappearances—in all seasons, in all weathers. To his parents’ distress, he seemed especially to love walking in storms and at night. Nor did he stick to the meadow trails or the little garden byways in the village. Instead, he wandered far from the beaten path, into untracked regions where no decent person would dare to venture—godforsaken places where one would encounter only poor peasants cutting peat and gathering heather, or shepherds pasturing their flocks. Even the prospect of such contacts had to alarm Anna and Dorus. Once, he ended up near Kalmthout, a town six miles away on the Belgian side of the border—a route that only smugglers took—returning home late at night with his clothes dirty, his shoes muddy and battered.