A 1) It begins here.

I take a photograph of the small gravestone: ‘Vincent van Gogh, 1852’. It is by the door of the Dutch Reform church in Groot-Zundert, a few hundred yards from the house where he was born. When the film is developed, this frame alone is blank, consumed in an explosion of light; the light bursts out of the frame, affecting the frames on either side. Never before or after do I have this problem with this camera. Nothing weird ever happens in The Netherlands. And already, on my first day, something has. Although I won’t know until two weeks after I return home, this being the time of roll film.

This is the graveyard where, at twenty-four, Vincent sat quietly waiting for the dawn, having walked  a dozen miles through the night, because “my heart was drawn so strongly toward Zundert that I felt the need to go there again … everything was so quiet … You know the story of the Resurrection – everything reminded me of it that morning in the quiet graveyard.”  A few months later, in a letter of condolence to a former colleague, he writes, “My father has also felt what you have been feeling these past few days. I recently stood early one morning in the cemetery at Zundert, next to the little grave on which is written, ‘suffer the little children to come unto Me for such is the kingdom of God’. More than twenty-five years have passed since he buried his first little boy there.”

For this isn’t the grave of the artist; it is the grave of his parents’ first-born, born dead. Vincent the artist was born on 30 March, 1853, his brother’s birth day, and death day. He was given his brother’s name, Vincent van Gogh. The name, his own name, on the gravestone he passes three times every Sunday, because it is the church where his father is pastor. And the day, 30 March, 1853, is the day his mother stops writing her diary, never to resume it. Something in the Van Gogh family happened that day.

Not that we are concerned with the Van Goghs. ‘I am not a Van Gogh,” he wrote to his brother – “I ask you point blank, are you a Van Gogh? I’ve always thought of you as Theo. If you become a Van Gogh I’ll have nothing to do with you.” And, “This is such a dear little Van-Goghish trick, such a nice piece of self-righteousness.” He only ever signed his pictures ‘Vincent’. I will call him Vincent. I would never call Rimbaud, Arthur. Just as Elvis is always Elvis, and Dylan is always Dylan. The parallels are not accidental.

The problem: Vincent is morbid and death-obsessed. The reason – as a child he walked past a grave with his name on it every time he went to church. Vincent is morose and uncommunicative. The reason – “replacement baby syndrome”. ‘replacing a deceased infant with another pregnancy and subsequent child … may suggest an unresolved grief for the parents as they appear not to be able to let go their deceased child … for the subsequent infant there is the risk of having complex relationships with emotionally unavailable parents, and risk of pathology in later life … and the child ‘not being oneself’ and experiencing development disturbances.’ [‘Replacement Child Syndrome’ in Enfance 3/3 2015.] So many problems! So many solutions! Are there problems? Is Vincent a problem? Maybe seeking the answer to that question is why I was there, beginning my journey where his began, forty years after deciding to make the journey.

2) It began with a book. I still have it. Van Gogh, Spring Art books, 1961. Fifteen shillings, a lot when a Penguin paperback was half-a-crown. The early days of full-colour printing in less expensive books. My own book.

I used to sit in the local Reference Library, a warm, quiet place to do schoolwork, bored, yielding to the temptation to lift down from the shelves the big, expensive art books, enter those other worlds. But that was out there, I was stepping out into that world. This owned book was in here. I brought him into my world. It was an object of private devotion, and a talisman.

No, before the book, there was painting. At my grammar school, art was like woodwork, or music, an unimportant add-on class to a rigidly intellectual curriculum in which, for light relief, everyone messed around. But not for me. A double period, ninety minutes. I begin painting the minute I walk in, don’t stop until the bell rings. I’m in the endless realm of imagination. ‘Imagination, the real & eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.'(William Blake.) Painting strange things. ‘Art does not represent the visible; rather it makes visible.’ (Paul Klee.) Leaving, I am walking out of a cathedral, a richly-wrought palace, a forest of the ever-changing, onto a construction site: the rest of the school is a place where ideas are blueprints, arguments are structural members, words are bricks, and we are learning how to build a world that we can control.

But I was too easily flattered as to my usefulness, my validity, on the construction site, in the other classrooms of the school, to leave it, to re-enter and dwell in the forest, to stick with art. Even though it was the only thing I ever wanted to do. I kept it up for a while, at evening classes at the local art school (the smell of linseed oil, the beguiling black-clad slender girls, our small-town beatniks and Juliette Grecos), bought a splendid curved palette and painted in the bare attic. But, paralysed by the idea of ‘being an artist’, and overwhelmed with loneliness, I would too often and too quickly go down to the biscuit-and-tea darkness of television-watching, where I could sit side by side with my father in the blue-grey light, and perfect the glib art of ignorant criticism. And yet, looking at the few surviving pictures from that time, I see talent, flair, possibility.

While the book became, instead of a step into art, a step out, into art history; from me being a maker of art to a consumer, at best an interpreter, a critic of art. At the moment of transition from fifth to sixth form, insecure, I allowed myself to be beguiled by my success in passing exams, and to be drawn back onto the construction site.

With the art history came the biography. My interest, then, was in identification, looking for someone I was like, could be like. I was trying on personalities, natures, futures. A nice beginning was that we shared (within a day, anyway) birthdays. How one grasps at resemblances!

3) But the crucial work in this seeking of an identity was Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. I had identified with the stuck, teenage misfit Catcher in the Rye, the restless seeking misfit in On The Road. I was Neil Diamond’s ‘Solitary Man’, Paul Simon’s ‘I am a Rock’. Estranged from the banality of my home and family, but unable to identify, except intellectually, with the desiccating bourgeois intellectual world my education took me into. (Partly because part of me was still attached to the working-class world my brother inhabited, that my parents had striven to get out of, the world of Hollywood films and popular music.) I was lost. Until I came upon The Outsider. Where? I’ve no idea. The randomness of bookshop browsing, the book that falls into your hesitating hand.

A publishing sensation in 1956 (Wilson was 24, had left school at 16, and seemed, from the wide range of his references to have read everything in the British Museum Library, where he spent his days. And nights, according to legend, in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath), and as quickly dropped by the literary establishment, it was still a student staple into the Sixties.

Although subtitled, ‘An Inquiry into the Nature of the Sickness of Mankind in the Mid-twentieth Century’, it is in reality a book about misfits. It begins, ‘At first sight, the outsider is a social problem’ (p11), the problem of the maladjusted individual who has failed to find his place in society. By the last chapter he can say confidently that ‘other people are the problem’ (p248), and quote Traherne, ‘our misery proceeds ten times more from the outward bondage of opinion and custom than from the inward corruption of depravation of Nature’ (p249). In between is a gallery of vivid pen-portraits of misfits in life and literature that was to supply me with reading for years – Camus, Sartre, Hesse, Nietzsche, Rilke, Wells, Dostoyevsky, Blake, Van Gogh, Gurdjieff … Each the centre of an expanding circle of reading and cultural reference. How I revelled in the company of these Outsiders, my fellows!

Of Vincent he writes, ‘This is the essential Van Gogh; not a painter, but an Outsider, for whom life is an acute and painful question that demands solution before he begins living.’ (p89) And Vincent found the answer, however briefly, in Arles, where the universe suddenly, if intermittently, made sense, ‘not the warm, vague harmony of a sleeping baby, but a blazing of all the senses, and a realisation of a condition of consciousness unknown to the ordinary bourgeois.’ (p89)

Wilson sees three possible disciplines through which the Outsider may direct his will to self-realisation: the intellect, for which the type is T E Lawrence; the physical, the type being Nijinsky; and the emotions, exemplified by Van Gogh. I had already developed, too extremely as I believed, my intellect, in my education. And I was always intensely physical. But each had taken me further from my ‘self’, the intellect in one direction, the physical in another, leaving, in the middle a vast desert, the emptiness of my emotional life, of lack of emotional fulfilment. (I wrote portentously in my diary, ‘I have the intellect of an adult, the body of an athlete, but the emotions of a child.’ Vincent would be the example of how to find my way back to my centre, and to activate that centre through my emotions.

And Wilson guided me to his letters: ‘Of all painters, Van Gogh is perhaps the greatest letter-writer; it would not be an exaggeration to say that he owes his universal acclaim since his death to his letters.’ (p85) By a nice coincidence Mark Roskill’s selection of the letters had just appeared in paperback. It was a book I kept returning to, until I finally approached the complete letters. (Where I discovered that, as with so much about Vincent, the selection had emphasised the heroic romanticism that was already a given in Lust for Life and other popular accounts. But that’s for later.)

I had the book. I had my hero. I was a serious cyclist, wanting a plan for my first cycling trip abroad. And there it was: to follow Vincent’s life journey, from the Netherlands to the south of France by bicycle. (I knew he had died at Auvers, which I thought was in the Midi. In fact it is near Paris. Where had I got the idea? Years later I returned to The Outsider, and found this on page 85, ‘… and died at Auvers in Provence, in August, 1889.’) It was only in the long vacation of my second year at university that I had the money and the time (and perhaps the nerve) to begin. I would begin in Provence.

4) I set out with an old school friend. We would cycle to Paris, take a train to Lyon, and cycle south from there. By the end of the first day, at Matlock Bath youth hostel, it was clear that he was unwell (in fact it was glandular fever) and had to return. It is hard to imagine how it would have been with someone else. Since, I’ve only cycled alone. Maybe his role was to get me started on the road, and far enough for me to continue alone.

I cycled on down the A6, 140 miles. I was amazed to see the lights of London illuminating the sky dozens of miles away, as if the city was on fire. I was amazed at how far it was from the first suburbs on the edge of London to the centre of London. I was amazed at the height of the buildings, the busyness of the traffic, the brightness of the lights, that even at eleven o’clock the streets bustled with activity. I was glad I was passing through.

I slept on a bench at Victoria station, woken by police very two hours to check I wasn’t a vagrant, showed them my early-morning train ticket and they let me stay.

On the train I was fine. Although surprised that the Channel wasn’t there when we emerged from every tunnel. But on the boat, as the last rope dropped into the dirty water, and the space between boat and quay grew, I felt, not liberation, that I was leaving, setting out on an adventure, but that the land, England, was moving away from me, leaving me, turning its back, getting on with its life. Family in the house, friends in café and pub (how vividly I remembered the detail of the New Inn and Ed’s!) saying, whatever happened to whatshisname? no idea. Where’s the party tonight …? I felt very small.

And Calais, instead of looking romantically foreign, was like Dover, only greyer (all the concrete) and scruffier.

But Paris was the big shock. I had the address of where Vincent had lived in Paris, and of a youth hostel. But where were they? I soon found that no one spoke the French I spoke. I was cycling on wet, slippery pavé, on the wrong side of the road, in a cacophony of car horns all aimed at me. I cycled around the Place de l’Étoile at rush hour, twelve roads pouring rear-engined cars, unheard behind me except for their insane honking, onto the roundabout, and circulating widdershins, me slithering among screeching brakes, and still wonder that I survived.

I ended up, as so many have, sliding down to the river’s edge, the water inexorably flowing (no back and forth tides, as with the Thames and the Lune) inches below my feet, its certainty, like a fixed law of nature (how quickly this thinking inhabited me, my first time in France, Cartesian logic, Enlightenment certainty, the phrase mais oui, upwardly inflected, but of course, isn’t it obvious, even to you …?), drawing me into thinking how sensible it would be, what a relief, to slip in, to drift silently away, disappear invisibly, be quietly swallowed up. I was not significant enough for the drama of a leap from a bridge, the demonstrative splash. Already in Paris I had seen in two hours more ragged down-and-outs slumped in doorways and lying mid-pavement on the metro grills, to be stepped over, than in my whole life in England. That, here, poverty and, I assumed, death would be someone else’s misfortune, any dramatic end shrugged off, tant pis, another very French phrase.

I sat under a bridge, desolate, homesick, staring at the rain-pocked and light-rippling water, biting on armoured bread, while my French was corrected with sneering hauteur by a ragged tramp who refused my offer of bread with a dismissive, pas de saucisson?

Behind me was ‘Shakespeare & Co’, the American bookshop that had first published ‘Ulysses’, where young people who passed some mysterious test were invited upstairs, to the private library, with sagging sofas and sometimes a bed for the night. But I knew nothing of it. And anyway I had my bike. And anyway I was on a mission, and must not be diverted. I gave up on Paris, got myself to Gare St-Lazare, and the night train to Lyon.

5) For a week I cycled down the Rhone, past fields of vines that surprised me by being short and stubby, rather than the long snakes I’d seen in English hothouses, and unfenced. Why weren’t they pilfered? Why were the markets full of grapes people willingly paid for? Was it Revolutionary egalitarianism, the equivalent of English fair play? All the time the string attaching me to home was stretching; I was becoming more and more homesick, the elastic pulling me back ever harder. Until one day, it snapped.

I’d had a good morning on the bike, I was becoming cycling-fit, sun-browned, I was catching the rhythm of the empty roads (away from R7) along the valley, getting used to the youth hostels, and to feeding myself, at least a little, à la Français (meat, except dried sausage, prohibitively expensive. No meat and two veg.)
I stopped for a drink, allowing my self to catch up with the momentum of movement, to resolve back into myself. I looked around where I stood. No traffic. Everything suddenly quiet. On one side a violet tree by a narrow white road that led, I knew, to a quiet place where a girl who lived dauntlessly alone indicated, without looking at me, the vacant chair at the plain table laid for lunch. On the other side an expanse of green vines on red earth, stretching to the coffee-coloured river, with above it the pink and cream edge of the Massif, a place of secret valleys, ancient caves, of towns where one could make one’s home. Ahead of me the road I was travelling that would bring me to a place of arrival, however brief. Behind me the ridge of hills I had crossed, with my home just the other side of it. I was at the centre of a compass rose of possibilities. The elastic snapped, wrapped itself protectively around me, established in me a new autonomy, a sense of my independent self, home a thousand miles or just over that ridge it didn’t matter. I got back on my bike and cycled on.

Valence, Orange, Avignon, olives, red roofs, the Midi, Arles. But no Vincent. Not even the cypresses, that were in every cemetery, looked like his. He’d made it up! His paintings were manifestations of a style, or expressions of a personality, not visions of a place.

And there was nothing of him in Arles, the Yellow House long gone. Or in St-Remy, where the asylum, still run by nuns, had a single reference to him, a note on a downstairs door saying it was Vincent’s room – except the paintings from his room were clearly views from the first floor. And where was Auvers? I felt unmoored. I had come for the artist who was, I’d been told, the South!

Only at Aix did I find the artist of the South, of Provence. In the town, in the country around, in his studio up the hill with his sturdy cape and hat, in the trees and rocks, the brushstrokes, the colours, the shapes, the structure, the mood, the feel. And at last in front of the mountain. So vast that as I approached, it swallowed me up. Cézanne.

And then the South made sense. The still, expansive, gold-lit mornings, the midday silence that buzzed with energy, the shock in the afternoon of dangerous heat, hammer-blows to white-hot metal on the anvil earth, the relaxation and expansion as evening approached. And, as the light faded into evening, softening to the texture of pastel, instead of the familiar Northern bedding-down under the night, the earth became weightless and rose and united with the starlit sky. The warm enclosing nights that never cooled. The scents of pine and herbs, the contrasting sounds of crickets and cicadas, the bleached red roofs and ochre walls with fading painted advertisements, shallow green rivers trickling through expanses of white stones, rivers that would in winter be raging torrents, the tree-shaded bathing places, the taste of mountain snow in the water …

6) One evening I had an experience at Mont-St-Victoire. I had cycled around the mountain all day, widdershins, with it always on my left, close. Sometimes looking at its changing shape, its facets, and the colours changing as the day progressed. Sometimes just aware of it, as I looked at the trees and shrubs and houses and lane ends (where to …?), the stories I was cycling through. I was idling along, aware of my bodily contentment. The light was pink with the approaching evening. The air had stilled. I stopped, got off my bike, looked at the mountain, its vast, pink shape set against the palest blue. Stillness. And the stillness expanding all around me. I expected to see birds stopped in their flight. Everything had significance, from the smallest leaf to the whole of creation. And all that was outside me, in this moment, was expanding inside me. I saw, for a moment, the world turn on its axis. And in the moment of awareness, it was gone. The birds flew on. But I had experienced it. It (‘It!‘, as I read later in Vincent’s letters) had happened. It had happened to me. I could truthfully say that I had experienced Wilson’s “blazing of the senses, and a realisation of consciousness unknown to the ordinary bourgeois”. And having happened, it was always happening, inside me. As I cycled back towards the comfort of the youth hostel, relaxed and yet wound tight as a spring, with the experience inside me, like a spark nestling in moss, I realised I had begun to live.

Lunches en pleine aire of baguette, goat’s cheese and wine. Snoozing under fragrant pines, with drowsy expectations of nymphs and fauns. (Music at a youth hostel, ‘what’s that?’ ‘L’apres-midi d’un faun.’ Exactly. And reading Mallarmé’s ‘Inert, everything burns in the tawny hour’, and ‘no water flows except through my flute, sprinkling the grove with melodies’. ) In youth hostels cooking my own food of rice, onions, enormous shapeless tomatoes and melted cheese, meals all new. The hostels were often run by groups of students from Paris, music always playing, that I’d hear again and only identify years later, freewheeling but functioning, as if rehearsing for ’68. Sitting surrounded by talk I did not understand, experiencing without participating. Complete in myself. In my diary, ‘I am surrounded by strangeness and activity, and I am at its still centre. In but not of. I am alone and unafraid. I am free.’ On my return I gave the red espadrilles to the girl I’d bought them for, and broke off our relationship. Three years later, when those students were on the barricades in Paris, I was in Leeds, nursing a broken heart. Nursing? Living with a heart torn open, in a chest torn open, like a martyrdom from the paintings I’d seen in Belgian churches and art galleries. And having a new reason to identify with Vincent. And about to give up the life I had so painfully cultivated, the self-transformation, through school and university. Because I wanted me-myself-I, back. 

B 1) Zundert Protestant church is small, with a small graveyard, within a tight circuit of high iron railings. It feels fenced in rather than fenced around. Which indeed it was in 1850, when Theodorus van Gogh arrived as the minister with his new wife. There were 102 Protestants (half of them church members), in a township of 3,997. The church had been built in 1802, the parsonage bought in 1822 for the first minister. Protestants were being settled or ‘planted’ in this historically Catholic area, on land bought, often in secret, by groups associated with the Dutch Reform Church, most recently by the Society for Prosperity, founded in 1822 and run by Theodorus’ father. The aim was to extend Protestantism into the Catholic south not by mission, but by presence. The quality required of the pastor was not zeal but stubbornness. The land was administered by the church, that is Theodorus, who would advise tenants, but if necessary (the land had to yield a return), evict them. He would also pressure them to go to church, have children, and uphold Protestant moral values. For the church, the tenants weren’t there because of their beliefs but because of their affiliation. For the tenants, it was a way to get land, and a living.

In 1815 the Catholic southern Netherlands had been combined with the north to create the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. In 1830 the south, as Belgium (a name plucked from antiquity), seceded. Brabant, overwhelmingly Catholic, was fought over. Zundert Protestant church was attacked. In 1839, the two states, as Belgium and the Netherlands, were ratified, with the boundary splitting Brabant, and just two miles south of Zundert. This was a frontier zone, with strict border controls, much resented by the Catholic majority who had traditionally worshipped, had family ties, and did business to the south, now a foreign country.

For several years Zundert benefited from being a transit and customs village on the important Napoleonweg linking Paris and Amsterdam. Even this was lost with the opening of the Antwerp –Roosendaal railway in 1855. By 1867 the Protestant population was down to sixty-four.

Theodorus and Anna were the failures of their respective bourgeois Protestant families. Anna had eventually been matched, at thirty-two, with the brother of her younger sister’s husband, Vincent (known as Cent), a wordly and prosperous seller of fine art prints. Theodorus’ father was a successful pastor in Breda, and the influential administrator of the Society for Prosperity. His ambition was for a son to follow him into the church. His first five sons declined this path, becoming art dealer, art dealer, bookshop owner, admiral and civil servant. The lot fell to the last-born, the sickly Theodorus. But instead of a rich parish, he was packed off to the frontier region of poverty-stricken Brabant, pastor of a settler minority.

They were always poor, always beholden to their more successful relatives. Theodorus’ relations with his wealthiest brother, Cent, were especially cringingly servile as he sought advancement for his sons in the art business. Such delight and gratitude Anna expresses when she receives a parcel of second-hand clothes from her sister!

The family was isolated. Both in Zundert, with no bourgeois Protestants, and unable to mix with the Catholic bourgeoisie. And from their families, by poverty and lack of success that, with Calvinist logic, was accepted as their destiny. ‘Opportunity’ might be offered, but not ‘help’ – that would be charity, and no respectable Calvinist would give or accept charity. The visits of the cheaply-clad family to Uncle Cent’s opulent summer mansion at Prinsenhage (he lived in Paris) must have been especially excruciating.

So, Dorus arrives at his first posting, with his new wife. It is a shock, this desolate, poverty-stricken place, with the suspicious ground-down looks of the Catholic peasants, and the false respect of the Protestant peasants. But he is here to do God’s work, and with his father’s power in the church, surely this is a stepping stone to better things. While his wife, fresh from the busy social round of cosmopolitan Hague, is ready for this life of self-sacrifice.

Of course the prime necessity is to procreate, to increase and multiply. Perhaps there is unease, for her sister, ten years younger has failed to conceive in two years of marriage, and Anna is thirty-two. But, praise the Lord, within two months she is pregnant. Imagine her thanksgiving, and perhaps a little smug satisfaction at her success where her sister has failed. She makes her calm preparations through that first winter. She writes her diary assiduously. Everything has been done. The day, 30 March, arrives. The baby is born. A boy. Born dead. The diary stops, never resumed.

There is something about a new marriage, in a new place, blessed with a wished-for first pregnancy. Everything is new, the future is open and fresh and full of possibility. The seasons, summer, autumn, winter unfold in their due order. And then the first breaths of spring, the first warm days, the first flowers. And Anna loves flowers, her garden.

And then the future stops. The couple, married hardly a year, in the alien, gossipy village, suddenly strangers in their own house, the baby clothes, the prepared nursery, the cradle that never rocks, a mother’s milk dripping. Instead of rolling out like a carpet in front of them, they must now cobble together a life, make of it what they can. Is it the Carbentus curse? God’s will? They name the child after uncle Cent, bury him by the church door, inscribe the headstone ‘suffer the little children to come unto me.’ And within three months Anna is pregnant again. The year repeated. With who knows what trepidation, that it might happen again? How can one love wholeheartedly in this situation? Whatever, the child is born, on the same day. Not the docile child that all his siblings prove to be, but an ugly, red-haired, noisy stranger. Where did he come from? (My mother once said, we never knew where you came from.) A handful – Anna saying later, ‘I was never busier than when we only had Vincent’. A relief when Anna was born two years later, quiet and delicate, like all the children after Vincent. And she settled into a routine of a child every two years until Cor was born when she was 48. But instead of a tender plant nurtured in the rich soil of home and family, a soft, amenable child to be moulded, they got for their first child a meteorite, hard, metallic, radioactive and alien.

I walk to the old parsonage. It is in the middle of a row, on the main street, now an estate agent’s office. It is where all the children were born, and Vincent lived until he was eighteen. A narrow-fronted house, on the Napoleonweg, opposite the Markt, where the noisy and boisterous trading and socialising of the Catholic peasants would have taken place, and their notoriously wild annual festivals. (Brueghel and Hieronymus Bosch were born in Brabant.) A street directly outside the front door that would be a morass in winter, a dust cloud in summer. (I can remember my reluctance to open our shop door directly onto the street, naked before the staring eyes of the town.) No wonder the Van Gogh family conducted their lives behind closed doors, in their small garden.

An exhibition in the Tourist Office highlights the social distance of the Van Goghs and the Catholic peasants. On the same day Vincent’s birth was registered, witnessed by the doctor and a customs official, Jan Arnout’s was witnessed by the policeman and a shopkeeper. His illiterate father makes his mark. Jan was baptised in Belgium. He was never at the village school – either never schooled, or more likely he went to one of the illegal schools which provided religious instruction in defiance of the Dutch state, which was beginning to impose universal education. Ernest Legouvé, in the parenting handbook used by the Van Goghs, writes of uneducated peasants as ignorant, immoral, ‘rough, uncivilised, sensual, churlish and aggressive,’ without sensitivity or imagination, animal-like. ‘They love and sorrow like people who are exhausted and live only on potatoes. Their hearts are like their intellects; they have not progressed beyond primary school.’ This vision of an underclass, beneath consideration and yet dangerous in a vague, worrying way, was a given for the Van Goghs. And the Van Goghs have no family or friends to share their anxieties, experience solidarity with, if only over a Sunday afternoon cup of tea. They are isolated and embattled.

It was a close family, living behind the door and in the small garden, that read, did crafts, and gardened. Vincent was withdrawn from the local school after a year because was adopting rough ways, and thereafter educated at home, and with less than successful stays at boarding schools. The six children were well brought up. And yet called the world beyond the garden, ‘the land of desire’. They were raised in the mould of duty, decency and reliability. And yet the life of each was a disaster: two sons killed themselves, one died of syphilis; one girl had an illegitimate child, one was called by the family ‘The Iceberg’, and one spent her adult life in an insane asylum. Vincent called a family ‘that ill-fated combination of persons of conflicting interests each one at odds with the rest and two or more of the same opinion only when it is a question of joining forces to obstruct another member.’ (Letter 221) Artaud called Vincent, ‘the artist suicided by society’. His parents had a hand in that suiciding.

For their closed world was run by an overbearing father, and a timid and fearful mother. Dorus, stuck in the Brabant mud and sidelined by his influential family, pontificates and domineers over those he can, parishioners and family. A self-righteous man with a volatile temper, he exercises power self-importantly over those he can control, and with angry self-justification when questioned. Sanctimonious, he did not ‘blame’ for ‘misdeeds’, but ‘opened eyes’ to ‘shortcomings’. He justified harsh accusations with protestations of his own piety. He held himself in high esteem, and expected others to. He took slights, even abstract ones, personally (a misdelivered letter produces a formal complaint). While at the same time living in his own self-important world, where he indulges himself with fine cigars and excellent drink, and luxuriates in long hours of seclusion in his office. While Anna, timid and forever fretting, was infecting her children with her anxious and fearful nature.

Vincent was the only one who stood up to his father. But even he could only finally break away when his father died. He could paint ‘The Potato Eaters’, emerge from the Brabant mud, and leave the Netherlands, never to return. And, via Paris, head for the South, and the three years of his maturity as an artist.