Van Gogh Read Free Page B

full of troubles and worries [that] are inherent to it”; a place where “disappointments will never cease” and only the foolish “make heavy demands” on life. Instead, one must simply “learn to endure,” she said, “realize that no one is perfect,” that “there are always imperfections in the fulfillment of one’s wishes,” and that people must be loved “despite their
     shortcomings.” Human nature especially was too chaotic to be trusted, forever in danger of running amok. “If we could do whatever we wanted,” she warned her children, “unharmed, unseen, untroubled—wouldn’t we stray further and further from the right path?”
    Anna carried this dark vision into adulthood. Unremittingly humorless in her dealings with both family and friends, she grew melancholy easily and brooded ceaselessly over small matters, finding hazard or gloom at the end of every rainbow. Love was likely to disappear; loved ones to die. When left alone by her husband, even for short periods, she tormented herself with thoughts of his death. In Anna’s own account of her wedding celebrations, amid descriptions of
     flower arrangements and carriage rides in the woods, her thoughts return again and again to a sick relative who could not attend. “The wedding days,” she concluded, “were accompanied by a lot of sadness.”
    To hold the forces of darkness at bay, Anna kept herself frenetically busy. She learned to knit at an early age, and for the rest of her life, worked the needles with “terrifying speed,” according to the family chronicle. She was an “indefatigable” writer whose letters—filled with hastily jumbled syntax and multiple insertions—betray the same headlong rush to nowhere. She played the piano. She read because “it keeps you
     busy [and] turns the mind in a different direction,” she said. As a mother, she was obsessed with the benefits of preoccupation and urged it on her children at every opportunity. “Force your mind to keep itself occupied with other things,” she advised one of them as a cure for being “down-hearted.” (It was a lesson that her son Vincent, perhaps the most depressed and incandescently productive artist in history, learned almost too well.) When all
     else failed, Anna would clean furiously. “That dearest Ma is busycleaning,” her husband wrote, casting doubt on the effectiveness of all her strategies, “but thinks about and worries about all.”
    Anna’s busy hands also turned to art. Together with at least one of her sisters, Cornelia, she learned to draw and paint with watercolor, pastimes that had been taken up by the new bourgeois class as both a benefit and a badge of leisure. Her favorite subject was the common one for parlor artists at the time: flowers—nosegays of violets, pea blossoms, hyacinths, forget-me-nots. In this conventional pursuit, the Carbentus sisters may have been encouraged by
     their eccentric uncle, Hermanus, who, at one time at least, advertised himself as a painter. They also enjoyed the support and example of a very unconventional artistic family, the Bakhuyzens. Anna’s visits to the Bakhuyzen house were immersions in the world of art. Father Hendrik, a respected landscape painter, gave lessons not only to his own children (two of whom went on to become prominent artists), and perhaps to the Carbentus sisters, but also to a changing cast of
     students who later founded a new, emphatically Dutch art movement, the Hague School. Thirty-five years after Anna’s visits, the same movement would provide her son a port from which to launch his brief, tempest-tossed career as an artist.
    As a fearful child, Anna was drawn naturally to religion.
    Except for marriages and baptisms, religion makes a relatively late appearance in the Carbentus family record: When the French army arrived in The Hague in 1795, the chronicler blamed “God’s trying hand” for the depredations of billeted soldiers and confiscated coins. Two years later, when