Van Gogh Read Free Page A

gold and silver coins) were confiscated; trade withered; profits disappeared; businesses closed; prices soared. Gerrit
     Carbentus, a leatherworker and father of three, lost his livelihood. But worse was yet to come. On the morning of January 23, 1797, Gerrit left his house in The Hague for work in a nearby town. At seven that evening he was found lying on the side of the road to Rijswijk, robbed, beaten, and dying. By the time he was carried home, he was dead. His mother “insanely hugged the lifeless body and let a stream of tears flow over him,” according to the Carbentus family
     chronicle, a clan diary kept by generations of chroniclers. “This was the end of our dear son, who was a miracle in his own right.”
    Gerrit Carbentus left behind a pregnant wife and three small children. One of these was five-year-old Willem, grandfather of the painter Vincent Willem van Gogh.
    In the first decades of the 1800s, as the Napoleonic tide receded, the Dutch emerged to repair the dikes of statehood. So widely shared was the fear of slipping back into the maelstrom that moderation became the rule of the day: in politics, in religion, in science, and in the arts. “Fear of revolution gave rise to growing reactionary sentiments,” wrote one chronicler, and “self-satisfaction and national conceit” became the defining
     characteristics of the era.
    Just as his country was emerging from the shadow of rebellion and upheaval, Willem Carbentus was rebuilding his life from the wreckage of personal tragedy. He married at twenty-three and fathered nine children over the next twelve years—amazingly, without a stillborn among them. Political stability and “national conceit” had other benefits as well. A sudden wave of interest in all things Dutch created a booming demand for books. From Amsterdam to
     the smallest village, groups were formed to promote the reading of everything from classics to instruction manuals. Seizing the opportunity, Willem turned his leatherworking skills to the art of binding books and opened a shop on the Spuistraat, in The Hague’s main shopping district. Over the next three decades, he built the shop into a flourishing business, raising his large family in the rooms overhead. In 1840, when the government sought a binder for the latest version of
     the long-disputed constitution, it turned to Willem Carbentus, who thereafter advertised himself as “Royal Bookbinder.”
    Recovery through moderation and conformity worked for the country and for Willem, but not for everybody. Of Willem’s children, the second, Clara, was considered “epileptic” at a time when that word was used to cover a dark universe of mental and emotional afflictions. Never married, she lived in the limbo of denial mandated by family dignity, her illness acknowledged only much later by her nephew, the painter Vincent van Gogh. Willem’s son,
     Johannus, “did not follow the common road in life,” his sister wrote cryptically, and later committed suicide. In the end, even Willem himself, despite his success, succumbed.In 1845, at the age of fifty-three, he died “of a mental disease,” says the family chronicle in a rare acknowledgment. The official record lists the cause of death more circumspectly as “catarrhal fever,” a bovine plague that periodically affected
     livestock in rural areas but never spread to humans. Its symptoms, perhaps the basis for the official diagnosis, were overexcitement, followed by spasms, foaming at the mouth, and death.
    Surrounded by lessons like these, Willem’s middle daughter Anna grew up with a dark and fearful view of life. Everywhere forces threatened to cast the family back into the chaos from which it had just recently emerged, as suddenly and finally as the sea swallowing up a village. The result was a childhood hedged by fear and fatalism: by a sense that both life and happiness were precarious, and therefore could not be trusted. By her own telling, Anna’s world
     was “a place