Van Gogh (12 page)

IN A CHILDHOOD
defined almost exclusively by family, only one other figure competed for Vincent’s emulation: his uncle the art dealer Vincent van Gogh.
Other relatives visited more often or led more colorful lives (his uncle Jan had sailed the globe and fought in the East Indies). But
“Oom
[Uncle] Cent” had a double claim to his special place in Vincent’s world. First, he had married Anna Carbentus’s youngest sister, Cornelia, compounding the family ties between the Van Goghs and the Carbentuses. Second, for reasons that remained a mystery, he and his wife could not have children. The combination made Cent almost an alternate father to his brother’s family—and it made young Vincent, the bearer of his name, as close to a son (and heir) as Cent would ever have.

U
NCLE
C
ENT VAN
G
OGH
(
Illustration credit 4.2
)

During Vincent’s early years, Uncle Cent lived in The Hague and visited Zundert with some frequency. Separated by only two years, the two brothers, Cent and Dorus, looked alike (the same slight build, the same salt-and-cinnamon hair). But the similarities ended there. Father Dorus was stern and humorless, Uncle Cent lighthearted and entertaining. Dorus quoted Bible verses, Cent told tales. They had chosen for wives two sisters as different as they were. Mother Anna frowned and admonished, while Aunt Cornelia lavished on her sister’s
children the spoiled and spoiling attention of a woman who had been the baby of her family but had no prospects of a baby of her own.

The biggest difference, of course—the one that permeated every encounter—was money. Uncle Cent was rich. He dressed impeccably, as did his wife. His stories were peopled by kings and queens and barons of commerce, not farmers and tradesmen. He lived in a big gilded townhouse in The Hague, not in a narrow country parsonage. When Vincent was nine, Cent moved to Paris and occupied a succession of grand apartments and villas about which the family bragged tirelessly. Whereas his father seemed hardly ever to leave the barren isle of Zundert, Uncle Cent ranged the world. Through letters that his parents proudly read aloud, Vincent followed his uncle’s trips to the ancient cities of Italy, the mountains of Switzerland (Vincent grew up longing to see mountains), and the beaches of southern France. Cent spent his winters on the Riviera and, every Christmas, sent greetings to the frosty parsonage from a “lovely” land where exotic fruits, grown only in greenhouses in Holland, “grow in the open here.”

How could his look-alike uncle and father have ended up living such different lives, Vincent must have wondered; how could the same family have produced such different men?

THE CONTRADICTION RAN DEEP
in Van Gogh family history. The first natives of the little Westphalian village of Goch who ventured out of the Rhine valley in the fifteenth century were drawn to God’s work. Van Gochs and Van Goghs fanned out to monasteries across the Low Countries. A century later, some were preaching so militantly that they “gave offense,” according to the family history—a serious charge in a century racked by religious wars.

These early missionaries encountered a society that was itself deeply conflicted about the roles of God and money. The newly arrived Calvinists’ denunciations of “filthy lucre” sat uneasily in a land-poor country where money was the only way to keep score in the chief enterprise, trade. As always, the Dutch proved wondrously inventive in reconciling their acquisitive instincts with their spiritual aspirations: the rich were suitably “embarrassed” by their riches while simultaneously claiming them as a sign of divine grace; business failure and bankruptcy continued to rank high on the list of mortal sins.

By the time the Van Goghs showed up in The Hague in the seventeenth century, they, too, had caught the Dutch mercantile bug. First setting themselves up as tailors, they applied their skills to the burgeoning demand for luxury goods. In a race to show off their fabulous wealth while maintaining puritan modesty, the burghers of the Golden Age had turned to their tailors. The solemn black of Dutch propriety sprang to light with threads of silver and gold. By midcentury,
the Van Goghs were working precious metals instead of molding men’s souls. Master tailors like Gerrit van Gogh were prized for the miles of spun gold they embroidered into waistcoats, capes, and jackets that sagged from the weight. By the time David van Gogh was born in 1697 (the same year as Gerrit Carbentus), the Van Goghs had made gold their sole business: they manufactured the gold wire that by now threaded its way into every corner of haut-bourgeois Dutch culture, from uniforms to draperies.

Some Van Goghs merged their spiritual and temporal ambitions: one served as a lawyer to monasteries and convents; another combined the callings of doctor and clergyman, healing both body and soul. More often, families split the duties between sons. David van Gogh’s younger son Jan continued the family gold business; but his older son, Vincent, became an artist. Parisians probably first mangled the name “Van Gogh” when this Vincent arrived in the French capital sometime in the 1740s. Like his famous namesake, the painter, this Vincent van Gogh (there was one or more in every generation) led an incoherent, unconventional life. After wandering the Continent as a soldier-adventurer, he declared himself a sculptor. He married four times but died childless. His brother Jan’s son Johannes inherited the family’s lucrative gold wire business, but eventually he quit the trade and devoted himself exclusively to preaching the Gospel—bringing the family full circle back to its roots in Reformationist mission.

Johannes gave his only son the name of his childless artist-uncle: Vincent. Sixty-four years later, that Vincent would give the same name to his grandson, the painter Vincent van Gogh.

Johannes’s son Vincent followed his father into the ministry. But he still could not escape the curse of ambivalence that had dogged his family for two centuries. Like his father, Vincent married a wealthy woman and applied for positions only in the richest congregations. In Breda, the ancient seat of the House of Nassau situated on the northern edge of Catholic Brabant, he found the ideal post for an up-and-coming clergyman with a taste for the material life. He installed his huge family (eventually thirteen) in a grand house on Catharinastraat, the town’s main thoroughfare.

From this comfortable berth, he quickly rose to leadership in the “Society for Prosperity,” the church’s missionary initiative in the Catholic south. Far from a traditional charity, the Society saw its mission as investment. Secretly—to avoid conflict with Catholic authorities—it purchased farms and homesteads in Catholic areas and then relocated needy Protestants to work them. Like any investor, the Society expected a return on its money—both in lease payments and in large families to bolster Brabant’s struggling Protestant congregations. For forty-two years, Vincent served as the Society’s “cashier,” recruiting hundreds of farmers with the Society’s dual promise of financial reward and spiritual salvation.

Reverend van Gogh encouraged his children to a serious life of “work and
prayer,” but he also instilled in them his own bourgeois aspirations. His family record is filled with loving descriptions of china, silver, furniture, and carpets; detailed reports of salary increases and prices paid; lamentations over missed promotions and squandered inheritances; and tributes to the advantages of owning over renting.

Thus, it was hardly surprising that none of the Reverend’s six sons showed any interest in following him into the ministry. One by one, they embarked instead on socially and financially ambitious careers. The eldest, Hendrik (called Hein), saw opportunities in the book business and opened his own store in Rotterdam by the time he turned twenty-one. He, too, married a rich man’s daughter. The second son, Johannes (called Jan), sought his fortune in the Dutch navy. The third son, Willem, joined the officer corps. The youngest, Cornelis (called Cor), entered the civil service.

The Reverend’s hopes for a spiritual heir settled on his namesake, Vincent (called Cent). But Cent was soon struck down by scarlet fever and emerged too frail for the intense study required by the ministry. Or so he claimed. Whether because of his “terrible headaches,” or because, like his brothers, he had no interest in his father’s religious ambitions, he soon quit studying altogether. After a brief apprenticeship with brother Hein in Rotterdam, he moved to The Hague, where he worked in a paint store and lived a bachelor life of fencing, socializing, and womanizing.

That left only Theodorus.

IN FORTY YEARS
of sermons, Dorus van Gogh preached thousands of images, verses, and parables. But one had special meaning for him: the sower. “For whatsoever a man soweth,” Paul wrote to the Galatians, “that shall he also reap.” To Dorus, Paul’s words meant much more than a call to seek spiritual rewards rather than earthly pleasures. As he told the story to the farmers of Zundert working their sandy fields, the sower became a paragon of persistence in the face of adversity. His Sisyphean labors, like theirs, affirmed the power of perseverance to overcome any obstacle, triumph over any setback. “Think of all the fields that were turned down by shortsighted people,” Dorus preached, “but through the sower’s hard work finally produced good fruit.”

If the story of the persistent sower had special meaning for Dorus van Gogh, it was because he had lived it.

Dorus’s entire childhood had been a struggle. Declared by the family chronicler, his sister Mietje, “a very weak baby” from the moment of his birth in 1822, Dorus never fully recovered his health or his strength. He didn’t learn to walk until he was well past two. He kept the short, slight body of a boy throughout his life. As the seventh of eleven children, the fifth of six sons, he barely knew
his parents. He inherited his father’s “fine, delicate appearance” but not his easy intelligence. His modest academic success was the product of application, not aptitude. He was known for being “tidy” and diligent—“a good worker” who began his studies every morning at five.

Perhaps because illness was such a constant in his childhood, Dorus wanted to be a doctor. In 1840, medicine was an ideal career for a serious-minded, upwardly mobile parson’s son with an appetite for hard work and a vague urge to do good while doing well. He even considered signing up to serve in the East Indies (where his brother Jan was stationed at the time), which would have made him eligible for free medical training. But when his father’s disappointed ambitions belatedly fell on him, he could not refuse.

The ministry was by no means an obvious choice. Like his brother Cent, Dorus enjoyed the temporal pleasures that Paul had warned the Galatians against. Quoting a favorite poet, Dorus later referred to his youth in unmistakably lusty terms, comparing it to “a wheat field, delightful and beautiful for the eyes; howling, churning, and swelling in the early morning wind.” By his own admission, his student years were filled with “intimate interactions” and “crazy things.” Years later, when his own sons began to yield to the temptations of the flesh, Dorus admitted, “at your age I went through the same.”

He found university life in Utrecht lonely and strange. But this was the field that fate had given him, and he was determined to make it bear fruit, no matter how barren and unpromising it seemed. “I am happy I have chosen to become a minister,” he wrote soon after his arrival. “I find it to be a beautiful profession.” He worked so hard at his studies that he repeatedly fell sick. One year, he almost died.

In Holland in the mid-nineteenth century, only someone with blind resolve could see the ministry as a “beautiful profession.” In fact, by 1840, the Dutch Reformed Church was in upheaval. The simultaneous storms of revolution and science had loosened theology from its moorings in revealed truth. Only five years earlier, a German theologian had placed a bomb under Western Christianity with the publication of
Das Leben Jesu
(
The Life of Jesus
), a book that analyzed the Bible as history and Christ as a mortal man.

As Dorus began his studies, the clergy’s long monopoly over Dutch thought was collapsing around him. The powerful new bourgeois classes were demanding a less punitive, more accommodating religion—a
modern
religion that would permit them to enjoy both God’s favor and their newfound prosperity. In response, a new kind of Dutch Protestantism had emerged. Calling itself the Groningen Movement (after the university in northern Holland where most of its proponents taught), and claiming the biblical humanism of Erasmus as a model, it rejected not only the old dogmas, but the whole notion of dogma. Instead, it embraced a new idea of Christ that included both the historical Jesus
(“as He lived on earth 1800 years ago”) and the spiritual Jesus who came “to make humanity ever more conformed to the likeness of God.” As a retort to
Das Leben Jesu
’s debunking of the Christ myth, the Groningers revived the Jesus of Thomas à Kempis’s
Imitatio Christi
(
The Imitation of Christ
), a fifteenth-century vade mecum filled with down-to-earth guidance on living a Christlike life. “Make use of temporal things, but desire eternal things,” Jesus advises in
Imitatio
, confirming that even a rich man could be blessed so long as he achieved a “union with Christ” in his heart.