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 directio
n 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 unaccomp
anied, 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.
Van Gogh Page 3
