Van Gogh by Steven Naifeh Read Free Book Online Page A

such connections.
    In Zundert, the “good circle” included only a few distinguished families who summered in the area and a handful of Protestant professionals. Beyond or beneath that tiny circle, Anna did not let her children venture. Beyond lay only Catholic families; beneath lay the working people of Zundert—those who filled the Markt (and the dreaded festivals) and whose company, Protestant or Catholic, Anna considered an invitation to every form of base behavior. “It is better to be around upper-class people,” she advised, “for one is more easily exposed to temptations when dealing with the lower classes.”
    Even farther outside the circle, and absolutely untouchable, lay the unwashed mass of faceless, nameless, landless laborers and peasants that drifted by at the very periphery of polite consciousness. These were the cattle of humanity in the eyes of Anna’s class, not only obstinately ignorant and immoral, but lacking the “heart’s luxuries” (sensitivity and imagination), and indifferent to death. “[They] love and sorrow like people who are exhausted and live only on potatoes,” instructed a parenting handbook that the Van Goghs read. “Their hearts are like their intellects; they have not progressed beyond primary school.”
    To ensure that they did not violate these social boundaries, the Van Gogh children were forbidden to play in the street. As a result, they spent most of their time isolated inside the parsonage or in the garden, as if on an island, with only each other for company.
    To move in any good circle, even one as small and remote as Zundert’s, one had to dress properly, of course. “To present [one]self pleasantly,” Anna instructed, “is also a duty.” Clothes had long been a peculiar obsession of the Dutch and a stage for the subtle class distinctions that preoccupied them. Gentlemen, like Dorus, wore hats; workers (and children) wore caps. Gentlemen wore long formal coats; workers wore smocks. Only a woman of leisure could be bothered with the awkward crinoline hooped skirts that Anna wore. Clothes, like the daily walks that displayed them to the community, marked Anna’s family as members of the upper middle class.
    Inevitably, clothes acquired talismanic significance among the Van Gogh children, the conferring of the first store-bought cap or grown-up suit or overcoat treated as milestones of family status and pride. In later years, both parents rained questions and advisories on their children in endless variation on the lesson of the midday walks in Zundert: “Always make sure that people see a gentleman when they look at you.” Indeed, good clothes and a neat appearance signaled something even more important than class status: they signaled inner order. “What one wears on the outside,” Anna and Dorus taught, reflects “what goes on in the heart.” A stain on one’s clothing was like a stain on one’s soul; and an expensive hat could ensure that one “made a good impression by his exterior as well as his interior self.”
    This was the other lesson of the family walks in Zundert: clothes were a public covenant of good behavior and moral uprightness. For the rest of their lives, the Van Gogh children would view any walk in public as a kind of fashion parade for the soul. Years later, Anna told her son Theo that a stroll in a smart suit “will show people that you are the son of Reverend van Gogh.” Twenty years after he left home, Vincent emerged from the hospital in Arles (where he had been confined for mental instability after cutting off part of his ear) with one overriding concern: “I have to have something new to go out in the street in.”
    In the Zundert parsonage, even the heart had its duty. The Dutch called it
degelijkheid
. Anna called it “the basis and source of a happy life.” The last of the holy trinity of social deities,
degelijkheid
(often rendered inadequately in English as “solidity”) summoned the Dutch heart to protect itself