Van Gogh by Steven Naifeh Read Free Book Online

tutelage, all the Van Gogh children mastered the parlor arts of collage, sketching, and painting, in order to decorate and personalize the gifts and notes they relentlessly exchanged. A simple box might come adorned with a bouquet of painted flowers; a transcribed poem, with a cutout wreath. They illustrated favorite stories, marrying words to images in the manner of the emblem books widely used to teach children moral lessons. Although prints and other store-bought goods would eventually replace collage and embroidery at Van Gogh celebrations, handmade gifts would always be honored as the most authentic offering on the altar of family.
    TO SURVIVE THE RIGORS of outpost life, Anna’s children had to be as disciplined as frontier soldiers. All eyes were on them, both friendly and unfriendly. Behavior in the parsonage was governed by a single word: duty. “Duty above all other things,” Anna declared.
    Such exhortations carried the weight of centuries of both Calvinist doctrine and Dutch necessity. Calvin’s cry, “Whatever is not a duty is a sin,” had a particular resonance for inhabitants of a flood-threatened land. In the early days, if the seawalls were breached, everyone’s duty was clear enough: they rushed to the break with spade in hand. Feuds were suspended, a “dike peace” was declared. Doubters and shirkers were driven into exile; violators, put to death. If a house caught fire, the owner had a duty to pull it down immediately to prevent the flames from spreading to his neighbors. The duty of cleanliness protected all from the spread of contagion. By the time of Anna’s generation, duty had achieved the status of a religion, and Dutch families like the Van Goghs worshipped a domestic “holy trinity” of Duty, Decency, and Solidity.
    First and foremost, duty meant upholding the family’s position in society.
    When Anna Carbentus traded her upper-middle-class maidenhood in The Hague for life as a parson’s wife in Zundert, there was, according to a prominent historian of the period, “no country in Europe … where people [were] more class-conscious as to their manner of living, the circles to which they belong[ed] and the social category in which they [were] placed” than Holland. Upward mobility was virtually impossible—and viewed with deep disapproval. Downward mobility was the terror of all but those at the bottom. And at a time when deepclass divisions ran between city and country, a permanent move to a rural area like Zundert threatened just such a slide.
    The parson and his wife stood at the apex of Zundert’s tiny elite. For centuries, clergymen like Dorus van Gogh had been setting the country’s moral and intellectual agenda, and entering the ministry was still one of only two ways to rise up the social ladder (going to sea was the other). Dorus earned only a modest salary, but the church provided the family with the perquisites of status—a house, a maid, two cooks, a gardener, a carriage, and a horse—that made them feel and appear richer than they were. The family’s midday strolls enhanced the illusion: Dorus in his top hat and the children with their governess. Such emblems of status cushioned the fall from social grace that Zundert represented to Anna, and she clung to them with more than the usual worried tenacity. “We have no money,” she summed up, “but we still have a good name.”
    To protect that good name, Anna instilled in her children a duty to associate only in “civilized good circles.” Virtually all success and happiness in life, she believed, flowed from mixing in good company; all failure and sin, from falling into bad company. Throughout their lives, she relentlessly encouraged them to “mingle with the well-to-do” and warned them against the dangers of associating with those “not of our own class.” She clucked with pleasure whenever one of them was invited to the home of a “distinguished family” and issued detailed instructions on cultivating