Contents

About the Book

On a dark night in Provence in December 1888 Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear. It is an act that has come to define him. Yet for more than a century biographers and historians seeking definitive facts about what happened that night have been left with more questions than answers.

In Van Gogh’s Ear Bernadette Murphy sets out to discover exactly what happened that night in Arles. Why would an artist at the height of his powers commit such a brutal act? Who was the mysterious ‘Rachel’ to whom he presented his macabre gift? Was it just his lobe, or did Van Gogh really cut off his entire ear? Her investigation takes us from major museums to the dusty contents of forgotten archives, vividly reconstructing the world in which Van Gogh moved – the madams and prostitutes, café patrons and police inspectors, his beloved brother Theo and his fellow artist and house-guest Paul Gauguin. With exclusive revelations and new research about the ear and about ‘Rachel’, Bernadette Murphy proposes a bold new hypothesis about what was occurring in Van Gogh’s heart and mind as he made a mysterious delivery to her doorstep that fateful night.

Van Gogh’s Ear is a compelling detective story and a journey of discovery. It is also a portrait of a painter creating his most iconic and revolutionary work, pushing himself ever closer to greatness even as he edged towards madness – and one fateful sweep of the blade that would resonate through the ages.

VAN GOGH’S EAR

The True Story

Bernadette Murphy

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Epub ISBN: 9781473523722
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VINTAGE
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Copyright © Bernadette Murphy 2016

Bernadette Murphy has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Chatto & Windus in 2016

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

1. Arles seen from the Wheatfields, July 1888

Illustrations

All drawings and paintings are by Vincent van Gogh unless otherwise stated.

Jacket

Jacket

Detail from Self-Portrait, Paris, March to June 1887 (© Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Black and white illustrations

Colour illustrations

Prologue

Le Petit Marseillais, Wednesday 26 December 1888:

It was still dark outside as Joseph d’Ornano, the chief of police, sat down to his first cup of coffee of the morning on Monday 24 December 1888. It was his favourite time of day. Already the station was alive with activity. From his window looking over the courtyard he watched the horseback patrol and the city police set off on their rounds.² The previous few days had been blighted by continuous rain and particularly quiet, but Monday dawned sunny and mild.³ In just a few hours they would all sit down to enjoy their communal feast. It was the perfect start to the Christmas holidays.

On the chief of police’s walnut desk the paperwork from the night before awaited his attention. Apart from the routine list of brawls and domestic disputes, one report stood out. Just before midnight on Sunday 23 December, something very strange had happened on the rue Bout d’Arles. This street was at the heart of the red-light district and almost every one of its twelve houses was either a working brothel or a lodging house for prostitutes.⁴ As he began reading, Joseph d’Ornano examined the small package, messily bundled in newspaper, that accompanied the report. What took place in Arles that night was so unusual, and so utterly bewildering, that everyone involved would recall it until the day they died.

At around 11.45 p.m. a local policeman doing his rounds had been called to one of the town’s official brothels, the House of Tolerance no. 1, situated just inside the walls of the city on the corner of rue des Glacières and rue Bout d’Arles. There had been a commotion involving a man, and a girl had fainted. The man lived just across the road from the police station, so the chief inspector asked his assistant to send someone over to the house. At around 7.15 a.m. a gendarme was dispatched.⁵

The side of the house on the main road faced east and this part of the building caught the very first rays of winter sunshine. There were no shutters on the windows at street level and, as dawn was breaking, the gendarme peered inside. No one appeared to be home. The ground-floor room was modestly furnished with a table, several chairs and a couple of easels. At first nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Yet slowly, as the morning light became stronger, the gendarme noticed a pile of soiled rags on the floor and dark spots and splashes splattered across the walls. He returned to his superior to report his findings.

The chief of police had only recently taken up his post in Arles and the short, portly forty-five-year-old Corsican had quickly earned a reputation for being honest and fair.⁶ Joseph d’Ornano listened carefully to the young policeman, before dismissing him. Leaning back in his chair he glanced at the package wrapped in newspaper lying on his desk. This particular incident would warrant his own special attention. Donning his bowler hat and picking up his cane, the chief left the office and accompanied by two gendarmes crossed the road to 2, place Lamartine.

By the time he arrived on the scene, a small group of locals had gathered and the morning air was bristling with gossip and curiosity. The policemen opened the door. Inside it was eerily quiet. There was an acrid smell that struck them on entering – the unique combination of oil paint and turpentine. The room doubled as kitchen and painter’s studio: on one side were brightly coloured canvases stacked against the wall, brushes in jars, half-used tubes of oil paint, paint-smeared rags and a large mirror propped on one of the easels; on the other side was a burner with an enamel coffee pot, cheap earthenware crockery, a pipe and loose tobacco, and on the windowsill a spent oil lamp, as if someone had been expected back late.⁷ Although there was gas lighting in the house, it was turned off citywide at midnight. The place still held the gloom of night-time and the easels threw shadows across the red-tiled floor.

The room was in complete disarray. Rags were strewn all over the floor, blotted with dark-brown stains. More dark stains were on the terracotta tiles, and a trail of drops led to the blue wooden door that opened onto a hallway. The vestibule had a brown front door that led to a narrow staircase. Early in the morning only the barest sliver of light from the large upstairs window pierced the shutter and lit the stairwell. Holding onto the metal banister, Chief d’Ornano began to climb the stairs. There were rust-coloured stains mottling the wall, as if someone had accidentally dropped a loaded paintbrush to the floor. At the top of the landing there was a single entry to the right. The chief of police pulled the door towards him and entered a cramped, attic-like room, shrouded in darkness.⁸

He ordered a gendarme to open the shutters, and light from the street flooded into the bedroom. Behind the door there was a double bed made of cheap pine.⁹ In a corner a washbasin and jug stood on a table, with a small shaving mirror on the wall above. There were a few paintings on the walls: a couple of portraits and a landscape. Unlike the room downstairs, here there were no obvious signs of disorder. Half-hidden under the dishevelled bedding was the body of a man. His legs were drawn towards his chest and his head slumped to one side in a foetal position, his face shrouded by a pile of rags. The mattress was heavily stained and dark blooms of blood spread on the pillows next to the man’s head.¹⁰ The victim, as the local newspaper later put it, showed ‘no signs of life’.

Joseph d’Ornano walked across the room and opened the door into the adjoining guest bedroom. There was a large Gladstone bag half-open on a chair, as if the guest was on the point of leaving. On the walls hung several paintings in a brilliant yellow hue, which even in the depths of winter brightened the room.¹¹ The blue blanket, plump pillows and folded white sheets indicated that the bed had not been slept in overnight.¹² Signalling to his fellow policemen that he had seen enough, the chief pulled the door to and, walking past the body, made his way back downstairs. In the small, quiet town news of a crime started to spread.

Around 8 a.m. on that Christmas Eve morning, almost exactly the hour that Joseph d’Ornano was inspecting the guest bedroom in the Yellow House, an imposing middle-aged man was seen walking across the park. He wore a long woollen overcoat and had the bearing and elegance of a gentleman. As he strode past the porte de la Cavalerie and across the public gardens, he could hear the muted sounds of excited voices in the distance. The sounds got louder as he walked purposefully in their direction. When he reached place Lamartine and the little house he shared with his fellow painter, he saw a large crowd amassing in the street.

For the chief of police, it was an open-and-shut case. Faced with the scene – the bloody rags, blood-spattered walls, a body and a missing lodger – he could come to only one conclusion: the eccentric red-haired painter had been killed. Joseph d’Ornano didn’t have to look too far for the culprit because, as luck would have it, he was walking directly towards him across the square.

Upon reaching the Yellow House that bright Christmas Eve morning of 1888, the artist Paul Gauguin was arrested for the murder of Vincent van Gogh.¹³

CHAPTER 1

Reopening the Cold Case

The start of a new adventure is always the most enjoyable – not knowing where you are going, or what you might find; it can be very exciting. This particular adventure began seven years ago.

I live in the south of France about 50 miles from the town of Arles, famed for its Roman ruins and for being the home of Vincent van Gogh in the late 1880s. It was in Arles where Van Gogh famously cut off his ear. I’m a frequent visitor to the city with friends or family and around every other corner there is a tour guide peddling the legend of the crazy Dutch artist to hordes of spellbound tourists. The strange tale never fails to excite. From my experience, few of the locals seem to know Van Gogh’s life story in depth, details have been embroidered and exaggerated, others have become pure invention. As his fame has grown so have the opportunities. A local bar had for more than sixty years a prominent sign that proudly proclaimed it was ‘the café painted by Van Gogh’. The oldest woman in the world, a native of Arles, made the end of her life more interesting when she declared that she was the last person to have ‘known Vincent van Gogh’. Even the ear part of the story has a particularly local twist: Van Gogh gave his ear to a girl because that’s what the matador does at the end of a bullfight – one of many theories that have created the myth. It is arguably the most famous anecdote about any artist and has come to define his character and his art for generations. We cannot see a Van Gogh painting without interpreting his brushstrokes in the light of his much-documented breakdown. Yet it is a story swathed in myth.

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the world’s centre of expertise in all things Van Gogh, describes what happened: ‘On the evening of 23 December 1888, Van Gogh suffered an acute mental breakdown. As a result he cut off part of his left ear and took it to a prostitute. The police found him at home the following day and had him admitted to hospital.’¹

Something happened to Vincent van Gogh in Arles, something had made his painting reach its greatest expression and yet had also pushed him to utter despair. One day, I thought, I would try to better understand what had taken place that December night in 1888.

I came to live in Provence more than thirty years ago, by chance. I was visiting an older brother and I ended up staying. With practically no knowledge of French I stumbled from job to job, gradually improving my language skills. For a long time, I struggled to make a living and it was more than ten years before I managed to get regular work. Slowly, I began to build my life; I moved to a little village and in time bought a house. One day I realised that I had spent more time in France than I had in the country of my birth. Despite this stability, I was restless. The challenge – and excitement – of working and living in a new environment had long gone. As the years passed, I felt underwhelmed by what life seemed to be offering me. Then fate intervened. My oldest sister died and around the same time I had health problems of my own. Off work recuperating, I had plenty of time on my hands. Ever since I was a child I have enjoyed unravelling puzzles. The thought of investigating Van Gogh’s story and really understanding what happened on that fateful day in December 1888, suddenly seemed the perfect way to spend my time.

Stuck at home with no access to a library or archives, I used the art books I had on my shelves and did some research online to begin with. I went back to the Van Gogh Museum’s summary and immediately had questions.² ‘Cut off part of his left ear’ – only part? Like most people, I had always believed that he had cut off his whole ear. Where had this assumption come from? And who was this prostitute? Why would Van Gogh take her such a gory gift? And how did Van Gogh arrive in Arles in February 1888 with such excitement and promise, only to kill himself less than two and a half years later?

Before long I had set out a timeline of Van Gogh’s life in Arles. Yet the more I learned, the more I questioned. At first these were small issues; just points that I felt had been misunderstood or were illogical to someone who lived locally. But the more I delved, the more these inconsistencies began to niggle me. For example, apparently Van Gogh caught a train from Paris to the south that dropped him in a town a full 10 miles from his destination – why would he do that, if he was weighed down with luggage and painting paraphernalia? Generations of experts and scholars had looked at every aspect of the artist’s life and I found it hard to believe that I was the first person to notice some of these discrepancies. Perhaps they were small inconsequential details that hadn’t bothered others or hadn’t been followed up, but I began to wonder – if these points had been misunderstood, what else might be wrong. The greatest number of my questions concerned the infamous ear story.

Vincent van Gogh was a dedicated correspondent, and most of what we know about his life outside the paintings comes from his own pen, yet he never referred directly to the drama in his letters. The facts surrounding the night of 23 December 1888 are decidedly murky. The one person who could have answered these questions, and whose first-hand testimony should have been trustworthy, was the French artist Paul Gauguin, who was staying with Van Gogh at the time. But Gauguin in fact added to the confusion by leaving two differing accounts of the drama, one given shortly after the event, and one many years later. It soon became clear: there is very little actual proof of what happened that night. Our principal knowledge of the drama rests on two self-portraits and a single newspaper article:

2. Le Forum Républicain, 30 December 1888

It was astonishing there was not more coverage. Nineteenth-century newspapers are full of the minutiae of life from ordinary people: a lost purse, linens stolen from washing lines, an earring found, locals arrested for drunkenness. Even if Vincent was still a relatively unknown painter in 1888, I wondered why the other newspapers in Arles had never bothered to report this strange incident.

The timing of my project was fortuitous. It coincided with a new publication of Van Gogh’s letters, which were also made available online. Some of the less palatable aspects of his life – his patronage of brothels, for example – had been glossed over in earlier editions, particularly in translated versions of the correspondence. To date, almost 800 letters have been published, which provide invaluable insights into the life and creativity of this extraordinary man. The largest number, and the most intensely personal of the letters, were those Van Gogh sent to his younger brother, Theo. Many of these were written while the brothers were living apart, especially after Van Gogh moved to Arles in February 1888. They provide a unique snapshot of his arrival in the city and the friends he made there. Reading his letters, I entered his world, shared his enthusiasm and disappointment and watched over his shoulder as he painted his greatest artworks. As the months went by, if I was ever in doubt, I would return to read Vincent’s own words.

For my investigation I decided I would start from scratch. It feels odd to re-examine the work of those who have spent years on the study of Van Gogh and his work; what could I possibly bring that hadn’t already been discovered or rejected? At this stage, I had no idea. But I wanted to find out for myself. If I was to find anything new, I would have to look in places that others perhaps hadn’t. I decided to use primary sources as much as possible in my research. I hoped to build up a picture of Vincent and his life in Arles that was entirely my own. This would be my adventure and my discovery, and perhaps all the more fun for it.

I understand the region and its idiosyncrasies well. Like Van Gogh, I come from northern Europe and moved south. I, too, am the outsider, and I have had to confront confusion, prejudice and presumption – many of the issues he faced in the 1880s – and such intimate local knowledge has proved vital to my investigation and afforded me many invaluable insights. France is a regional country: each area has a particular way of life, cuisine, landscape, language and culture that has formed over centuries. Provence has its own distinct personality. That a person from Paris is completely different to a person from Arles is as true now as it was at the end of the nineteenth century. Parisians are famous in France for being self-contained and snooty; whereas Provençal people are considered exuberant and, superficially at least, are friendly. In my experience, once you are accepted, local people will help you in any way they can, though this acceptance might well take many years. Above all, the people of southern France are clannish, inherently wary of what they call estrangers. This Provençal term signifies much more than its literal meaning of ‘foreigner’. It is used to refer to anyone who is not from your family, religion or immediate environment. In a wider sense, calling someone an estranger implies that the person is not completely trustworthy; true today, but even more so a hundred years ago.

From the outset my plan was to undertake a forensic investigation into what happened on 23 December 1888. It seemed logical to put myself in the shoes of Joseph d’Ornano, the chief of police in Arles at the time. He would be my guide. There was common ground: the chief had arrived in the city at the beginning of 1888 and would have had to learn about the people, the geography, the customs, in exactly the same way I would to understand Van Gogh’s time there.⁴ Arles was the most appropriate place to start, so I wrote to the town archives to make an appointment to visit. One sparkling winter day I set off on the first of what would turn out to be more than a hundred trips to the city.

The town archives are housed in the chapel of the former public hospital – the only remaining building in Arles still standing where Vincent van Gogh spent time. There is a garden in a central courtyard; these days it is constantly planted and replanted to resemble the scene Van Gogh described as being ‘all full of flowers and springtime greenery’.⁵ Walking through the austere stone gateway into the abundance of flowers and shrubs is truly enchanting. The early-morning walk along the first-floor terrace, facing due south, towards the heavy walnut door of the Municipal Archives is now very familiar. It is a peaceful moment, when there is hope and anticipation of what I might find that day. As the beautiful wrought-iron handle is turned, the old door makes a loud click, announcing the arrival of a new visitor. Few people look up. Each person is hunched over a table, absorbed in his or her work. Inside, the room is very quiet, with just the gentle rustle of dusty sheets of paper being turned.

Although I was welcomed and helped by the kind staff at the archives, my first visit was disappointing. I was shown everything the city had on Van Gogh. I had imagined I would have stacks of boxes to rummage through; yet all I was given were a few sheets of paper dating from early 1889. It felt almost as if Van Gogh had never lived in Arles. There are no police reports of the ear-drama, no witness statements and no patient records from the hospital. There are no hotel registers that list his name and no trace of any house rented by Van Gogh. And no one who knew him in Arles ever wrote down their recollections of the artist. This lack of background detail was even more surprising because the story unfolded in a country that, certainly from my experience, is steeped in bureaucracy and red tape. It was bewildering.

Founded by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago, Arles is one of the oldest cities in France. Its archive is monumental for such a relatively small place, with documents dating from the twelfth century; Van Gogh is only a tiny part of its long history. The archive is so vast that it hasn’t yet been digitally catalogued, so I spent that first day flicking through the old-fashioned card index and familiarising myself with the system. Given the lack of ready information, I would have to go deeper, I reasoned, and try to find information through a circuitous route. Van Gogh lived in Arles between 20 February 1888 and 8 May 1889 so I requested the census records closest to that date, to see if I could find anything. Censuses were taken in 1886 and 1891, but only the 1886 census was available. I asked where I could consult the missing census and was told by Sylvie Rebuttini, the chief archivist, that she had never seen a copy in Arles. I found all sorts of information that day, though how relevant it was going to be later, I could only guess at. With so little to go on, anything could be important. Scrolling through the names, I found details concerning the prostitutes working in the city in the 1880s, listed as being ‘FS’, meaning fille soumise, literally a ‘girl under the thumb’. Given that a prostitute called Rachel featured in Van Gogh’s story, I thought this research might provide some useful information. I started a small list of these working girls and the brothel owners, described as limonadiers (lemonade-sellers) on the census returns. The quaint terms tickled me.

No matter how delighted I was by these details, a much bigger problem was becoming increasingly apparent. I had no idea what Arles looked like in 1888. Not only did the part of town that Van Gogh lived in bear little relation to the modern-day city, but new street names and an extensive post-war building programme had made it even more confusing and unrecognisable. I wasn’t the only researcher who had encountered this problem. A two-dimensional map of Van Gogh’s part of town had been drawn in 2001, but it lacked detail.⁶ If I was to build up a picture of what Arles was like in the 1880s when Van Gogh first stepped off the train, I needed to know more. The first task was to understand exactly why and how the city had changed so dramatically.

On 25 June 1944 the 455th Bomb Group of the US Air Force took off at 5.20 a.m. from San Giovanni airfield near Foggia in the south of Italy. The mission of these thirty-eight B-24s was to disable the bridges along the Rhône to prepare the terrain for the Allied landings. This expedition would be part of the first phase of the Liberation. For the 455th Bomb Group it was a particularly long-haul flight – a 1,770-kilometre (1,100-mile) round trip. This was its sixty-seventh mission, and one of the targets was the railway bridge in Arles.⁷

By late June 1944 air-raid sirens had been going off for months, but Arles had never yet suffered a direct hit. The frequency of these air-raid warnings quickly followed by an ‘all clear’ led the people of Arles to become a little complacent.

It was a beautiful clear Sunday morning and most of the city was returning from Mass. The shelters were located close to one another in the centre of town, in the only places considered strong enough to withstand aerial bombing – under the Roman amphitheatre and forum. As the first air-raid siren sounded at 9.25 a.m., people in the city centre rushed to the designated shelters.⁸

The bombardment came at 9.55. Within ten minutes the aircraft had dropped 112 tonnes (110 tons) of bombs from a height of 14,500 feet, over the marshalling yards and warehouses on both sides of the river.⁹ From such a height it was impossible to bomb accurately, and no direct hits were observed on the bridge itself. As the aircraft made its way back to base, the crew’s report noted that fires could be seen near the target.

3. American bombing raid of Arles, 09.55 hours, 25 June 1944

On the ground there was pandemonium. The ‘all clear’ siren wasn’t working, so no one dared leave the shelters. Only the emergency services ventured out to see what had happened, rushing nervously to the ruins to help dig out the wounded and excavate bodies from the rubble. On that midsummer morning forty-three people lost their lives. The devastation to the city was such that some of the victims were only discovered a month later.¹⁰

The area that had received the worst of the bombing was north of the city, close to the station. It was a section of town outside the walls, called La Cavalerie, named after the old city gate, which was still standing. In 1888 this area had been the home of Vincent van Gogh. Within minutes on 25 June 1944 the city Van Gogh knew – the cafés he frequented, the first hotel he stayed in, the brothels he visited and even his home, the Yellow House – was wiped completely off the map.

4. The Yellow House, 2, place Lamartine, Arles, in 1944

While looking into the bombing, I came across this previously unpublished photo of the Yellow House. Although plans of the house had been drawn up in 1922, for the first time I got a glimpse inside.¹¹ Then, quite by chance, many months later, I came across two incredible aerial photographs of Arles taken in 1919. They made a huge difference to my understanding of the geography. I could finally see what Arles looked like thirty years after Van Gogh had lived there.

5. Arles, 1919

By working with an architect, using old maps, plans of the public gardens, land registries and these rare early photographs, I have been able to re-map the city, as well as the complete interior of Vincent’s Yellow House.¹² This painstaking groundwork has been enormously useful, and has proved vitally important for me: this part of Arles is not only the place where most of the protagonists lived and worked, but it is also the scene of the crime.

Doing research is like doing a huge crossword puzzle. After the initial euphoria of discovery, the excitement wears off and the puzzle is all that remains. There is rarely one eureka moment; instead, it’s a long, slow process, with some clues falling into place only much later. I work in a circular fashion on several things at once, the problem I’m trying to solve ticking over at the back of my brain. To an outsider, it might look as if I’m all over the place; but out of the chaos comes order!

My love for research has always been part of who I am. Like many people, I began to look into my family history after the death of my parents. I had great difficulty tracing my Irish ancestors before 1864, when civil registration began. Eventually I mapped out my Irish family tree by pursuing other avenues: checking tax records and land transactions, legal documents and newspapers. From this arduous process I learned much about how rural communities work: they help each other out. This network was how they found jobs and spouses. Those who migrated were sponsored by relatives, and their social life in the New World centred around people they would have known from home. In order to understand these relationships, I put together a database of the entire parish in Ireland where my family came from.

The experience taught me that seemingly unimportant groundwork is invaluable. So early on in my Van Gogh research, and somewhat foolhardily, I decided to create a database of the people who lived in Arles in 1888. My reasoning was that even if it was mind-numbingly dull to compile a file on each individual – café owner, butcher, postman, doctor – I needed to amass a cache of verified information on Van Gogh’s contemporaries and neighbours if I were ever to understand his life in Arles. I assumed at first I’d need files on perhaps 700–1,000 people; now, seven years later I hold records on more than 15,000 individuals. Each time a new detail on someone comes to light, I add it to the database. Over time these figures have become rich, real people to me, almost like characters in a long nineteenth-century novel. Through this I have got to know a man and a place. Like Van Gogh’s letters, the details in my database take me into his day-to-day existence and, with his paintings, form a unique diary of his time in the city. I can identify and flesh out the lives of the people Vincent painted. I feel I know them, their habits, their children, and I can spot small details in paintings that give signs of their life or their identity. They are no longer simply faces on canvas as they once were to me, but Vincent’s friends, the workers and locals he saw every day and the people who played a significant part in his life.

I began this project with a vague idea: how did a single event that took place in a Provençal backwater 125 years ago come to define the painter Vincent van Gogh? I had no idea of the thousands of hours I would spend trying to unravel the whole story, or of the false leads, the disappointments and the exhilarating highs I would encounter.

The ear was simply the beginning.

CHAPTER 2

Distressing Darkness

In late February 1886 Vincent van Gogh arrived in Paris, attracted by the vibrant modern art scene in the city, to live with his younger brother, Theo, an art dealer. Turning up with no prior warning, Vincent sent a note to Theo’s office that began with the words, ‘Don’t be cross with me that I’ve come all of a sudden.’² Van Gogh’s move to the centre of the contemporary art world was an inevitable step on a journey that had begun six years earlier, when he had decided to devote his life to art.³

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853, to Reverend Theodorus van Gogh and his wife Anna Cornelia van Gogh (née Carbentus) at their parsonage in Zundert in the Netherlands. This new baby arrived exactly a year to the day after a stillborn male child, also called Vincent Willem.⁴ Both boys were named after the Reverend Van Gogh’s father.⁵ The pastor had followed his father’s calling, but art was the family profession – three of Van Gogh’s uncles were art dealers. There was a constant round of social visits between the relatives, but the six Van Gogh children lived considerably more modestly than their cousins. Obliged to make sacrifices to ensure that his children received the best possible education, Reverend Van Gogh left the family home in 1871 to take up a better living in another village. Life in Zundert had been a calm, idyllic time for all the family. While recovering from his first breakdown many years later, Vincent’s thoughts turned back to this childhood home: ‘I again saw each room in the house at Zundert, each path, each plant in the garden, the views round about.’⁶

Through their close-knit family network, the children met suitors and found work. The family were close to their Uncle ’Cent (Vincent), who, with no children of his own, had always taken a particular interest in his nieces and nephews. He was a partner in the Goupil & Cie. gallery – one of the most prominent international art dealers in Paris – which catered to the emerging upper middle class and specialised in modern works by painters such as Corot and others of the Barbizon School. He arranged that sixteen-year-old Vincent should start as an apprentice in The Hague branch of the firm, and within four years he was promoted to the London office. That same year, 1873, Van Gogh’s younger brother, Theo, joined Goupil in Brussels. The brothers were extremely close and shared a passion for art. At the start of their working lives, it seemed as if both men were destined to be art dealers; but where Theo thrived, rising to become manager of one of the prestigious Paris branches, Vincent was not remotely suited to the convention and rigour of the business world.

6. Vincent van Gogh, aged eighteen

Described by his contemporaries as intense, peevish and quick to anger, Vincent was often the subject of his friends’ jokes: ‘Van Gogh provoked laughter repeatedly by his attitude and behaviour – for everything he did and thought and felt … when he laughed, he did so heartily and with gusto, and his whole face brightened.’⁷ Vincent was unfailingly generous, profoundly kind to others and inspired great loyalty; but he was also a man of extremes. While working at Goupil’s in London, he had become increasingly involved in an evangelical form of Protestantism. This interest soon became an all-consuming passion, and after transferring to Goupil’s Parisian office in 1875, he was dismissed in April 1876. Vincent explained the situation to Theo:

He returned to London to work as an assistant schoolmaster and began lay preaching at weekends. Over the Christmas holidays he told his parents he wished to become a pastor, insisting that the Church was his true calling. However, his family persuaded Vincent to return for good and found him a job in a bookshop in Holland. As Vincent hadn’t finished his schooling, this new plan would mean at least seven long years of study. But even this could not dissuade him. In May 1877 he moved to Amsterdam where he began the preparation for his theological studies, but he didn’t stay long. During the summer of the following year he started training as an evangelist in Belgium, but disappointingly was not offered a job at the end of the three-month trial period. Finally in January 1879, thanks to family connections, Vincent obtained a post as a trainee pastor. He would begin his first post as a lay minister amongst the working-class miners of the Borinage, in Belgium.

Van Gogh threw himself into this new world with total conviction. He took his pastoral duties very seriously, tending to the sick and destitute parishioners personally. Wishing to better experience the life of the poor and emulate a Christ-like existence, Vincent gave away all his unnecessary possessions and clothes, refused to sleep in a bed, and spent hours working hard on his sermons. Scared by this eccentric and extreme behaviour, the parish elders decided Van Gogh was not suited to the life of a pastor and by July he had been dismissed, barely managing to complete the six-month probationary period.

If his professional life was fraught, his love life was possibly worse still. He had a series of relationships, each more disastrous than the last. With no sense of restraint, Van Gogh would pursue the object of his affections relentlessly, with an unequal passionate intensity, completely unaware that his feelings were not reciprocated, nor even welcome.

In 1881 Van Gogh decided he was in love with his recently widowed first cousin, Kee Vos, and proposed marriage. In addition to the manifest unsuitability of marrying such a close relative, Kee was not in love with him and had no wish to remarry. In an effort to win her over he turned up at his uncle and aunt’s house in Amsterdam one night while they were having dinner, demanding to see her. When he was refused entry, he thrust his hand over a lamp, and refused to remove it from the open flame, begging her dumbfounded parents to let him see her even if it was only for as long as he could hold his hand over the flame. Melodramatics aside, this sort of behaviour underscored the impression the wider Van Gogh family held of him – Vincent was more than odd, he was mad.

During Vincent’s early adulthood, his mental health was a constant source of anguish to his parents and was evoked frequently in their correspondence. As he moved into his twenties, his family did what they could to help him find his path in life, but his eccentricities only became more entrenched. His father wrote to his favourite son in 1880: ‘Vincent is still here. But oh, it is a struggle and nothing else … Oh, Theo, if only some light would shine on that distressing darkness of Vincent.’⁹

In the late nineteenth century the study of the mind was still in its infancy. Private institutions to house the mentally ill did exist, but were more akin to holding pens.¹⁰ For anyone with an emotionally disturbed child, the only option was a state lunatic asylum, and few people survived many years in one of those. In 1880, after a series of particularly distressing events, Reverend Van Gogh and his wife took steps to place twenty-seven-year-old Vincent in an institution in Belgium, but the family, with strong objections from Vincent, was unable, or unwilling, to force the issue and he was never committed.¹¹ Van Gogh recalled this period in a letter to Theo the following year: ‘It causes me much sorrow and grief but I refuse to accept that a father is right who curses his son and (think of last year) wants to send him to a madhouse (which I naturally opposed with all my might).’¹² After the drama in Arles in December 1888, recalling the professional appraisal of her son given eight years earlier, Anna van Gogh wrote to Theo, ‘there is something missing or wrong with that little brain … Poor thing, I believe he’s always been ill.’¹³ There were many signs that Van Gogh had psychiatric problems. Alas, in the family these were not confined exclusively to Vincent. It is impossible to know whether he had a hereditary disorder, but there are indications that there was a family history of mental illness, which Vincent later mentioned to one of his doctors.¹⁴ Of the six children born to the Reverend Van Gogh and his wife, two would commit suicide and two would die in asylums, though Theo was diagnosed with syphilis of the brain.¹⁵

Throughout his life, Van Gogh was attracted to the destitute, the suffering, those in desperate need, certain he was the only person who could save them. In January 1882 he met Sien Hoornik, an ex-prostitute, pregnant with another man’s child and three years older than Van Gogh.¹⁶hadanything¹⁷