The self-portrait with his ear cut off, the lack of success in selling his paintings and a death by gunshot with several hypotheses. The posthumous fascination with Vincent Van Gogh owes much to the dramatic elements that surrounded his life. Some particularities that were not exclusive to him in his family, marked by premature deaths, mental illnesses that led them to the asylum, active participation in the first Dutch feminist wave by two of the three sisters and Protestant pastor parents who preached in a predominantly Catholic area. The Van Goghs are not only the basis of the Vincent myth, but each of their stories is a tale of tragedy and intense life.
Art historian Willem-Jan Verlinden reconstructs almost 100 years of the family in The Van Gogh Sisters (Cátedra, 2024). From the marriage of the parents, Theodorus Van Gogh and Anna Carbentus, in 1851, until the death of their daughter Willemien Van Gogh (the penultimate of six children), in 1941. “The story was never told from a female perspective, it was always “He did it from Vincent’s side or from his relationship with his brother Theo, who was also his best friend and who took care of him,” the author says via video call. The tool that allowed him to delve into the intimacy of the Van Goghs was the massive correspondence they maintained between them: hundreds of unpublished letters from institutions such as the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and private archives.
Verlinden also relied on educational records, certificates, photographs and the paintings and drawings of Vincent, who portrayed his family members, often from memory or with just a photograph. “If the sisters’ lives were even half as well documented as Vincent’s, then there should be many sources of information about them with the potential for a book. When I finished writing, I realized that I had not only a text about the sisters, but also about the family,” says the art historian about his text, originally published in the Netherlands in 2016. The letters, with a “care style”, as the book describes, show a clear turning point that led the family to a decline: the death of the father.
Anna, the toughest
Before that, the Van Goghs were a peaceful upper-middle class family. They lived in different small towns in North Brabant, such as Zundert, Nuenen, Helvoirt and Etten, towns in the south of the Netherlands to which the Reverend Theodorus Van Gogh was sent to convert the predominantly Catholic population into Protestants, as was happening in the north of the country. . However, Verlinden notes that he was not only committed to his Protestant parishioners, but also served the most disadvantaged Catholics. “When you were a Protestant child and you wanted to play with a child on the street, you couldn’t because he was Catholic. So they mainly played among the brothers in the garden of the house, and that explains the strong connection that existed between them.”
It is true that Theodorus’ death in 1885 destabilized the family’s happiness, but Vincent’s character was another reason. The older sister, Anna Van Gogh — of whom the painter wrote years before, when he lived in London: “I have news for you, it is possible that our Anna is coming. You can imagine how wonderful it would be for me, but it seems too good to believe”—he reproached him for still staying in his parents’ house at 32 years old. Because of his eccentric habits and occasional outbursts of aggression, she considered him a threat not only to his mother’s well-being, but also to the family’s name in the village. That confrontation caused the artist to leave his house and never see his mother or sisters again.
“It is not well seen that, at the age of 30, he moved back in with his parents. He was in constant conflict with his father. When he dies, the family agrees that Vincent’s behavior influenced his father’s health,” the researcher tells this medium. Anna based her fury on the author’s refusal to The starry night from attending church the previous Christmas, thus undermining Theodorus’s authority as pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church. “For his part, Vincent felt that his father did not take his ambitions seriously. First, that of becoming a pastor or missionary, and then, that of being a renowned artist,” reads The Van Gogh Sisters.
The truth is that the artist had missed several work opportunities. First, at the age of 16 as an employee at the Goupil & Co. art gallery in The Hague; later in the same company, but at the London headquarters. He then moved to Amsterdam to train as a reverend, but failed the exam, and eventually took an unpaid position as a teacher’s assistant at a boys’ school. His parents worry about his physical and mental health. After the death of the father, the mother Anna had to move to the city of Breda because she could no longer be in the parsonage.
It would be the lesser of two evils because the family would face, in the first instance, the death of Vincent in 1890, when he was 37 years old; the following year, Theo’s due to syphilis, when he was 31; in 1900, the death of the last of the brothers, Cor, when he was 32 years old, in the second Boer War; and the younger sister, Willemien, was placed in a sanatorium two years later, where she would remain for almost 39 years, until her death in 1941.
Lies, writer and would answer
The only Van Goghs who met the standards of the time — with children and family — were Anna (1819-1907) and Elizabeth or Lies (1859-1936). The latter was ambitious, she wanted to be a writer and published up to twelve books, although she did not obtain many financial benefits or recognition from them. Like her other sisters, she was condemned to jobs relegated to middle-class women of the time: education, care or nursing. The middle Van Gogh reveals in her letters an annoyance with the limited employment options for girls and her aversion to domestic chores. In a letter to her brother Theo she wrote: “Do you want to know what I find most outrageous about us women? May we only be teachers and governesses.”
The youngest sister, Willemien, or Wil, as was her nickname in the family, also renounced the spaces prohibited to her gender, but her commitment was greater and she became actively involved in the first wave of Dutch feminism at the end of the 19th century. She was the one who got along best with Vincent and with whom she exchanged the most letters about her mental health and freedom. It focused on achieving legal emancipation, women’s suffrage and access to university education. She participated in the transformation of a more egalitarian society through the Ladies’ Museum-Library in The Hague or the National Exhibition of Women’s Work in 1898, which highlighted the role and contributions of women in various work and cultural areas.
“With the money raised at the exhibition, the first feminist organization in the Netherlands got funding and an office. So Willemien was at a crucial point in the movement and, if she had stayed healthy, so to speak, she would have had a great future ahead of her, but she was hit with mental problems,” says Verlinden. To draw up the profile of the youngest Van Gogh, he was helped by the 48 letters she exchanged with her friend and fellow fighter Margaretha Miejboon. The openness of their feelings between them was so great that the historian believes that Will discovered that she was a lesbian. “Margaretha is also the daughter of a pastor, they have the same origin and a brother who also has mental problems. There is a very strong connection, and perhaps today one would say that she was his girlfriend.”
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