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.
But most worrisome of all was that he went alone. Anna, in particular, was deeply distrustful of solitude in all its forms. A popular parents’ handbook of the time warned sternly that all “country outings” had to be closely supervised, otherwise “the young man disappears into the woods and finds … all that is capable of intoxicating his imagination.” Vincent spent more and more of his time on these solitary cross-country treks, and less and less time “visiting” or playing with others. His schoolmates recalled him as “aloof” and “withdrawn”: a boy who “had little to do with other children.” “Vincent went off on his own for most of the time,” one of them said, “and wandered for hours … quite a long way from [town].”
His isolation extended even into the crowded parsonage.
Judging by his lifelong affection for babies and small children, Vincent must have found some pleasures at home during his time in Zundert—in the beginning, at least, when the parsonage was filled with both. He shared the attic rooms with them, played games with them, read to them, and undoubtedly played the parent to them in other ways, even as his own parental relationships deteriorated. As each grew up and began to assume an adult personality, however, the warm feelings faded. Anna, his oldest sister, looked and acted increasingly like their mother: humorless, judgmental, and cold (one brother described her as “a bit like the North Pole”). Sister Lies was six years younger and just developing into a poetic, fragile girl when Vincent’s adolescent angst began to disrupt the household peace. A lover of music and nature whose moody letters were filled with plaintive “oh!”s and weeping appreciations of family unity, Lies never fully forgave Vincent for threatening that unity. The last of the sisters, Willemina (called Wil), was born when Vincent was nine, during the tensest years in the parsonage. Unknown to Vincent at the time, the little girl running around under his feet was the only kindred spirit among his “siskins.” Dutiful and serious as a child, Wil later developed an intellectual and artistic ambition that made her the only one of Vincent’s sisters who ever appreciated his art.
Vincent’s inevitable companion in his early years was his brother Theo. Born in 1857, a month after Vincent turned four, Theo arrived at exactly the right moment. He was the first sibling toward whom Vincent could feel a truly parental devotion. The pair played together inseparably. Vincent taught Theo boys’ skills like shooting marbles and building sandcastles. In the winter, they skated, sledded, and played board games by the fire. In
summer, they played “Jump the Ditch” and other “fun little games” that Vincent invented for his brother’s delight.
In a family that otherwise strictly rationed displays of parental affection, Theo repaid Vincent’s lavish attention with an attachment tantamount to “worship,” according to sister Lies. He considered Vincent “more than just a normal human being.” Writing decades later, Theo recalled, “I adored him more than anything imaginable.” Starting very early, the two brothers shared a tiny second-floor bedroom, and probably a bed. In the privacy of this attic redoubt, covered in a blue wallpaper that he would remember vividly for the rest of his life, Vincent practiced his ripening skills as a talker—a fast and furious talker—on his adoring brother.
But no matter how hard he tried, Vincent could not make Theo into the same person. They looked less and less alike as the years went by. Theo had his father’s slight build and delicate features, while Vincent’s body and face only thickened with age. Theo had blond hair to Vincent’s fiery red. They shared the same pale eyes, but in Theo’s refined face, they looked dreamy, not piercing. Theo did not share his older brother’s iron constitution. From an early age, like all the Van Gogh children except Vincent, he frequently fell ill, suffered terribly from the cold, and was plagued by chronic ailments.
THEO VAN GOGH, AGE 13 (Illustration credit 3.2)
But nowhere did the two brothers differ more than in disposition. While Vincent was dark and suspicious, Theo was bright and gregarious. While Vincent was shy, Theo was “warmhearted,” like his father, according to Lies, “a friendly soul from the moment he was born.” While Vincent brooded, Theo was ever “cheerful and pleased,” even in adversity, according to his father—so cheerful that when he heard birds sing, he was “inclined to whistle along with them.” With his good looks and sunny disposition, Theo fell naturally into company. The same schoolmates who remembered Vincent as moody and aloof remembered his younger brother (Ted, they called him) as playful and garrulous. Vincent was “strange,” recalled the Van Gogh family maid; Theo was “normal.”
At home, in sharp contrast to his brother, Theo embraced the call to Duty. He quickly became his mother’s special helper, whose “faithful hands” assisted both in the kitchen and in the garden. Anna referred to him as “my angelic Theo.” Extraordinarily empathetic and sensitive to the good opinion of others, he played family peacemaker decades before Vincent tested the limits of that role. (“Don’t you agree that we should [try] to please everyone?” said Theo—expressing a most un-Vincent-like sentiment.) Dorus, too, recognized the unique qualities in his namesake and undertook a lavish campaign of instruction that would continue until his death. He would later call Theo “our pride and joy,” and would write to him fondly, “You have been like a spring flower to us.”
The brothers’ special relationship could not survive the contrast. Even as Vincent withdrew further and further into sullen isolation, Theo’s star rose higher and higher within the family. (“Dear Theo,” his mother later wrote, “just know that you are our most prized possession.”) As he felt his brother slipping away, Vincent tried to draw him back into a conspiracy of disaffection against their parents—something he would do repeatedly in the years ahead. But to no avail. They bickered bitterly, setting schoolyard standards for debate that would color all their future arguments. (“I’m not conceited, you’re conceited!” “Take it back!”) The rising discord between them caught the attention of their father, who scoldingly compared them to Jacob and Esau, invoking the biblical story of a young brother who usurped his older brother’s birthright.
By the time Vincent reached adolescence, he had begun his solitary trips into the countryside and the relationship between the brothers had changed. Now, whenever Vincent slipped out the garden gate on one of these expeditions, he passed his siblings “without a greeting,” one of them recalled, and not even Theo asked, “May I come, too?” “His brother and sisters were strangers to him,” said Lies. “[He was] a stranger to himself.”
Loneliness defined Vincent van Gogh’s childhood. “My youth was gloomy and cold and sterile,” he later wrote. Increasingly alienated from his parents, his sisters, his schoolmates, and even Theo, he more and more sought the balm of nature, proclaiming by his absences what he would later proclaim in words: “I am going to refresh, to rejuvenate myself in nature.” In this recourse, he found confirmation (as he always did) in literature. He began reading Romantic writers such as Heinrich Heine, Johann Uhland, and especially the Belgian Henri Conscience. “I fell in the abyss of the most bitter discouragement,” wrote Conscience, in a passage that became one of Vincent’s favorites, so “I spent three months on the moors … where the soul in the presence of God’s immaculate creation throws off the yoke of conventions, forgets society, and loosens its bonds, with the strength of renewed youth.”
Like the Romantics he admired, however, Vincent found danger as well as comfort in the immense impassivity of nature. One could both lose oneself in the immensity and feel oneself diminished; be both inspired and overwhelmed. For Vincent, nature would always have this double edge: it both consoled him in his loneliness and reminded him of his alienation from the world—especially a world where nature and family were so intimately intertwined. Was he alone with God’s creation, or just abandoned? Periodically throughout his life, he would seek comfort in his troubles by lurching into the wilderness, only to find more loneliness there and end up returning to the world in search of the human companionship that always eluded him, even in childhood, even in his own family.
To fill the emptiness, Vincent began to collect—an activity that would follow him, incongruously, throughout a vagabond life. As if trying to capture and bring home the companionship he found in nature, he began collecting and categorizing the wildflowers that grew along the creekbank and in the meadows. He used his knowledge of the fugitive birds to start a collection of their eggs. Then, when the birds flew south, he collected their nests. Beetles became his all-consuming passion—the first of many. He skimmed them off the creek and flushed them out of the bushes with a fishnet, then stored them in a bottle to take back to the parsonage, where his sisters squealed in horror at his trophies.
A lifetime of lonely, obsessive activity began in Vincent’s attic room, where he spent evening after evening studying and categorizing his collections: identifying varieties of wildflowers and recording where the rarest ones grew; examining the differences between the nests of thrushes and blackbirds, finches and wrens (“Truly birds such as the wren and the golden oriole rank among artists, too,” he concluded). He made little boxes to display his bug collection, carefully lining each box with paper, pinning the specimens inside, then neatly labeling each with its proper Latin name—“such horribly long names,” Lies recalled, “yet [Vincent] knew them all.”
On a rainy day in October 1864, Dorus and Anna van Gogh bundled their angry, alienated son into the family’s yellow carriage and drove him thirteen miles north to the town of Zevenbergen. There, on the steps of a boarding school, they said good-bye to eleven-year-old Vincent and drove away.
ANNA AND DORUS’S EFFORTS to educate their eldest son in Zundert had ended in frustration and failure. When Vincent was seven, they had marched him off to the new public school just across the Markt from the parsonage. Prior to the building of the new school, the state of education in Zundert, as in all of Brabant, had been “not worth a button,” according to one angry parent. Most local families did not even bother to send their children to school (illiteracy was rampant); or, if they did, sent them to one of the many illegal schools run out of private homes where instruction was dominated by Catholic teachings and schedules more accommodating of chores and harvest times.
But Anna saw education as yet another privilege and duty of class—like promenading and dressing up—a display of status as well as a preparation for moving successfully in the right circles. Anna and Dorus had reason to believe that Vincent would succeed at school. He was smart and well prepared (he c
ould probably read and write by the age of seven). But Vincent’s obstreperousness soon ran afoul of the disciplinarian schoolmaster Jan Dirks, who had a reputation for “boxing the ears” of recalcitrant students. A classmate remembered that Vincent “got into mischief” and was “beaten from time to time,” a development that undoubtedly contributed to his chronic truancy.
Anna and Dorus tried everything to salvage their son’s foundering education: private tutorials, evening classes, even summer sessions. But nothing worked. At the end of October 1861—only four months into Vincent’s second year of schooling—they withdrew him from the Zundert public school. Instead of providing structure and discipline, the classroom experience had only exacerbated his errant ways. He emerged from his brief exposure, if anything, even more insular and unruly than before. Anna blamed the school: “Intercourse with the peasant boys,” she later insisted, had “coarsened” her son. The lower-class Catholic boys and the Catholic schoolmaster Dirks—all that “bad company,” she concluded, was responsible for Vincent’s increasingly rebellious behavior.
For the next three years, Vincent’s frustrated parents tried homeschooling him. Despite the expense, they hired a governess and installed her on the second floor. Dorus, who taught daily religion classes for all the local Protestant children (and had himself been homeschooled), set the curriculum. Vincent spent a part of each day in his father’s attic study learning gray lessons from the minister-poets (beloved of Dorus) who were fast losing their grip on Dutch education everywhere else. But even the all-suffering pastor could not cope with his troublesome son for long. In 1864, it was decided that Vincent would have to go to boarding school.
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