Vincent van Gogh. Victoria Charles
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then there is this improvement, that in clothes you see combinations of very pretty light colours; if you could make the people you are walking past pose and do their portraits, it would be as pretty as any period whatever in the past, and I even think that often in nature there is actually all the grace of a picture by Puvis, between art and nature. For instance, yesterday I saw two figures: the mother in a gown of deep carmine, the daughter in pale pink with a yellow hat without any ornament, very healthy country faces, browned by fresh air, burned by the sun; the mother especially had a very, very red face and black hair and two diamonds in her ears. And I thought again of that canvas by Delacroix, “L’Éducation Maternelle.” For in the expression of the faces there was really everything that there was in the head of George Sand. Do you know that there is a portrait – “Bust of George Sand” – by Delacroix, there is a wood engraving of it in L’Illustration, with short hair.
A good handshake in thought for you and Jo and good luck with the little one.
Ever yours, Vincent
[The original letter is missing; the text here is from a copy of the letter in Johanna’s handwriting. The sketch Vincent drew of Mlle. Gachet at the piano, F 2049, is recorded, but its location (presumably with the rest of the original letter) is unknown. Jo’s copy has just a blank rectangle in its place.]
Peasant Woman with a White Bonnet, Nuenen, February-March 1885.
Oil on canvas, 37 x 45 cm.
Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal.
Holland, England and Belgium 1853–1886
On March 30th, 1852, a stillborn son was born at the vicarage of Zundert, but a year later, on the same date, Anna van Gogh gave birth to a healthy boy.[10] Pastor Theodorus van Gogh gave his second-born son the same name as the first: Vincent. When the second Vincent walked to his father’s church to attend services, he passed by the grave where ‘his’ name was written on a tombstone. In the last months of his life, van Gogh reminisced about the places of his childhood and often wistfully mentioned the graveyard of Zundert.
Very little is known about van Gogh as a child. A neighbour’s daughter described him as “kind-hearted, friendly, good, pitiful,”[11] while a former servant girl of the family reported that “Vincent had ‘oarige’ (funny, meaning unpleasantly eccentric) manners, and that he was often punished accordingly.”[12] Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who met her brother-in-law only a few times near the end of his life, also described him as a difficult, naughty, and obstinate child who had been spoiled by overindulgent parents.[13]
Similar inconsistencies appear in descriptions of van Gogh as an adult. Most of the descriptions were collected at the beginning of the twentieth century by van Gogh-Bonger, who took charge of van Gogh’s assets after Theo’s death in 1891. These accounts are somewhat dubious not only because of the distance of time, but also because the dead painter was by then already a figure of legend.
In general, van Gogh was kind and compassionate toward the poor or sick, and also to children. Another important trait that emerged early on, according to the artist’s sister Elisabeth Huberta, was his close relation to nature:
He knew the places where the rarest flowers bloomed […] as regards birds, he knew exactly where each nested or lived, and if he saw a pair of larks descend in the rye field, he knew how to approach their nest without snapping the surrounding blades or harming the birds in the least.[14]
Potato Planting, Nuenen, September 1884.
Oil on canvas, 70.5 x 170 cm.
Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal.
In his last years, van Gogh returned to the landscapes of his childhood through painting. “The whole south, everything became Holland for him,”[15] said Paul Gauguin of the paintings van Gogh made in Arles. In a letter to Emile Bernard, van Gogh compared the heath and flat landscape of the Camargue with Holland. While in the mental hospital of Saint-Rémy he wrote to Theo:
During my illness I saw again every room in the house at Zundert, every path, every plant in the garden, the views of the fields outside, the neighbours, the graveyard, the church, our kitchen garden at the back – down to a magpie’s nest in a tall acacia in the graveyard.[16]
The references to nests made by both Elisabeth Huberta and by van Gogh himself suggests the extent of the importance of this image for the painter. The nest is a symbol of safety, which may explain why he called houses “human nests.”[17]
Van Gogh had to leave his first nest – his parents’ home – at the age of eleven. It is not clear why the elder van Gogh decided to send his son to a boarding school in Zevenbergen, some thirty kilometres from Zundert. Perhaps there was no Protestant school nearby; the neighbourhood of Zundert was almost entirely Catholic. Or perhaps the parents’ nest had simply become too small with the arrival of four more children.
It was an autumn day when I stood on the steps before Mr. Provily’s school, watching the carriage in which Pa and Ma were driving home. One could see the little yellow carriage far down the road – wet with rain and with spare trees on either side – running through the meadows.[18]
A few weeks before his death, van Gogh painted his memory of this farewell: a two-wheel carriage rolling through fields on a narrow path.
At the age of thirteen, Vincent went to high school in Tilburg, where the landscape painter Constantijn C. Huysmans taught him drawing. Only one of van Gogh’s works from school has been preserved: Two Sketches of a Man Leaning on His Spade. In all, about a dozen of van Gogh’s childhood drawings and paintings have survived. On one occasion, according to van Gogh-Bonger, the eight-year-old “had modeled a little clay elephant that drew his parents’ attention, but he destroyed it at once when, according to his notion, such a fuss was made about it.”[19]
During his stay in Tilburg the first of two known photographs of young van Gogh was taken. It shows a soft, boyish face with very light eyes. The second portrait shows van Gogh as an earnest 19-year-old. By then, he had already been at work for three years in The Hague, at the gallery of Goupil & Co, where one of van Gogh’s uncles was a partner. Vincent reports that of the three-and-a-half years he spent in The Hague, “The first two were rather unpleasant, but the last one was much happier.”[20] Van Gogh’s master at Goupil’s was the 24-year-old Hermanus Gijsbertus Tersteeg, of whom the artist wrote:
I knew him during a very peculiar period of his life, when he had just ‘worked his way up,’ as the saying goes, and was newly married besides. He made a very strong impression on me then – he was a practical man, extremely clever and cheerful, energetic in both small and big undertakings; besides, there was real poetry, of the true unsentimental kind, in him. I felt such respect for him then that I always kept at a distance, and considered him a being of a higher order than myself.[21]
Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, Arles, 1888.
Oil on canvas, 40.6 x 32.4 cm.
Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena.
Peasant Women in a Field, Nieuw-Amsterdam, October 1883.
Oil on canvas, 27 x 35.5 cm.
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
“Memoir of Vincent van Gogh” by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, in: The complete letters…, I: XIX.
Van Gogh, Vincent: Sämtliche Briefe in sechs Bänden, edited by Fritz Erpel: Berlin 1968, vol. 6: Dokumente und Zeugnisse, p. 93; My own translation.
The complete letters…, III: 594.
Memoir…, p. XX.
Huberta du Quense-van Gogh: Vincent van Gogh (1910), in: Van Gogh. A retrospective, p. 32.
Van Gogh: Sämtliche…, 5: 257; My own translation.
L 573, in: The complete letters…, III: 128.
L 418, in: The complete letters…, II: 397.
L 82 a, in: The complete letters…, I: 78.
Memoir…, p. XX.
L 266, in: The complete letters…, I: 539.
L 182, in: The complete letters…, I: 327.