45 pages • 1-hour read
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
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Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Etten”
In 1881, Van Gogh moved back into the home of his parents. Relations with his father continued to deteriorate, and he became increasingly reliant on his relationships with other artists, including Anton Mauve (a cousin through marriage) and Théophile de Bock.
That summer of 1881, Kee Vos, a widowed cousin, came to visit Van Gogh’s parents and Van Gogh became deeply infatuated with her. Although Kee rejected him in the strongest terms possible, Van Gogh’s letters to Theo reveal that he did not fully accept this rejection, and was convinced that if he continued pursuing her, they would eventually be together. He chafed at family members, especially of the older generation, who scorned him for his obsessive behavior towards Kee.
Ultimately, the Kee Vos affair led to an estrangement with his parents. Van Gogh left Etten and moved in with Mauve in The Hague, where he would begin receiving painting lessons from his cousin. Unable to repress his infatuation, however, he showed up unexpectedly at Kee’s home in Amsterdam, and was dismayed to learn from her parents that she had left as soon as she knew he was at the house. After this embarrassing incident, he gave up hope for a life with Kee, and he gave up religion.
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Hague”
Back in The Hague with Mauve, Van Gogh received a letter from Theo that made it clear his brother did not approve of his behavior towards their parents. Theo also accused him of being overly attached to Mauve’s opinions, writing, “It is Mauve who attracts you at the moment, & carried away as usual, you find anyone who is not like him objectionable, because you look for the same qualities in everybody” (201). Van Gogh defended himself bitterly against Theo’s charges, arguing that their Father was incredibly difficult to get along with, and that he had spent far too much time appeasing him. Meanwhile, he threw himself into the study of painting with Mauve, and found amongst his cousin’s compatriots in The Hague School a group of early supporters.
Attempts to sell his work continued to fail, but Van Gogh was adamant that to create art only for the purposes of commercial success would be an untenable compromise of his artistic values. This conviction lead to tension with Hermanus Tersteeg, the new head of Goupil & Cie’s branch in The Hague, whom Van Gogh had remained in touch with throughout the years.
During this time, Van Gogh began pursuing another woman who was sure to scandalize his family, Sien Hoornik, a destitute sex worker. Van Gogh had taken pity on Hoornik and her young daughter, and was using them as models. He eventually had them move in with him. Both Tersteeg and Mauve found the affair unacceptable, and shortly thereafter Van Gogh was estranged from both of them. Theo also expressed concerns about the new relationship, but Van Gogh argued that, as a lowly painter, Sien was a perfectly suitable partner for him. This tension led Van Gogh to fear, however, that he might lose his brother’s financial support.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Hague, Drenthe and Nuenen”
Although Van Gogh was convinced that partnership with Sien was having a positive effect on his life and painting, his family relations continued to deteriorate over the matter, and he became worried that his father would have him committed to a mental asylum, or place him under legal guardianship. He wrote to Theo, telling his brother that it would be legally impossible for his father to take such a step, and emphasizing that he intended to marry Sien. In the summer of 1882, Van Gogh was admitted to a hospital for venereal disease, and Sien gave birth to her son. Although the child was not his biologically, Van Gogh treated the birth as the beginning of his life as a father. He rented a house large enough to house the whole family, and covered the walls in art.
During this period, Van Gogh grew increasingly fond of painting, but remained uncertain as to whether it was a good idea to spend more time on it than drawing. Painting supplies cost far more than drawing supplies, and he wasn’t sure whether his paintings would be more likely to sell than his drawings. He wrote to Theo to ask what his brother thought would be a wise course of action (at this point, Van Gogh would begin seeking his brother’s artistic advice more and more frequently). He also began to articulate more fully formed artistic credos in his letters: He was irritated by overconcern with trends amongst his colleagues in The Hague School; he was increasingly convinced that he wanted to be a painter of peasant life; and he grew more insistent that he should strive for a compelling body of work, rather than one or two definitive masterpieces.
His relationship with Sien was beginning to deteriorate, and Van Gogh moved to Drenthe on his own, despite a sense of guilt that he was abandoning his family. Although he was only there for a few months, his time in Drenthe solidified his desire to become a great painter of peasant life, and he described the rural scenery enthusiastically to Theo.
After his time in Drenthe, Van Gogh moved back in with his parents in Nuenen, even though he was highly conscientious of his poor standing in their eyes. During this time, he also became keenly aware of the control Theo exerted over his life as his primary financial supporter. Surrounded by family tension, Van Gogh relied on his correspondence with his friend and colleague, Anthon van Rappard, for positivity.
In 1884, he finally convinced Theo to sign a contract that would formalize their relationship as artist and dealer: The payments that Theo sent would be in exchange for Van Gogh’s works, which would become Theo’s property upon their arrival in his hands. Van Gogh left his parents’ house and rented a room in a nearby Catholic presbytery. From Paris, Theo wrote to him about the newest art trends, including Impressionism, which Van Gogh could not fully understand.
In 1885, he began working on what would come to be recognized as his first bona fide masterpiece, The Potato Eaters. He sent Theo sketches of the painting, and expressed his confidence that it would be a great work. Despite this great artistic progress, Van Gogh was soon run out of town by the Catholic clergy, who spread a rumor that Van Gogh was responsible for the pregnancy of an unmarried woman, Gordina de Groot, who had posed as a model for him.
Chapters 6-8 Analysis
Van Gogh’s earliest years as an artist were also marked by his struggles against what he perceived as oppressive familial expectations, invoking Tension Between Personal Ambition and Familial Duty. His letters from Etten and The Hague (1881-1883) are rife with evidence of this conflict. The impression that clearly emerges during these passages is a Van Gogh who is furiously forging a new identity distinct from his childhood identity in the austerely religious family home.
Part of Van Gogh’s identity overhaul, in addition to his selection of a new career, was the adoption of a new social class. He expressed the conviction that he no longer belonged to the well-off intelligentsia through his selection of Sien Hoornik as a domestic partner, as he explained to Theo: “The difference between your case & mine is that… your future and mine are different, that is, I for my part ply a humble trade and you hold a position which of necessity requires you to keep up a certain style” (236). While his family, Theo included, viewed this downward social mobility with disdain (at least, according to Van Gogh’s portrayal of events), Van Gogh viewed himself as having attained a new level of honorable humility.
Despite his romanticization of a poor life, Van Gogh could not reject the need for money altogether because painting was expensive. Thus, his relationship with Theo took on the added facet of financial dependence, engendering new tensions between the brothers. The conflict over his relationship with Sien, therefore, was not just of ideological importance, but of financial importance as well. In Nuenen, he accused Theo of abusing his financial power, “if I keep company with a woman of whom you […] do not approve, perhaps rightly, though sometimes I don’t give a damn about that, there is a small tug at the purse strings to make me feel that it is ‘in my own interests’ to defer to your opinion” (370). Financial dependence on his brother, therefore, was another barrier to Van Gogh’s ambitions of achieving a completely new identity, a core aspect of the interpersonal and private tensions that would continue to define the course of his artistic career.
These letters also introduce Van Gogh’s Relationship with the Arts as he began to develop his own artistic direction and sensibility. He romanticized peasant life, and wanted to fully embrace his new existence within the lower classes, telling Theo, “one must paint peasants as if one were one of them, as if one felt and thought as they do… I very often think that peasants are a world apart, in many respects one so much better than the civilized world” (405). This aspiration towards immersion in the lifestyle of his artistic subjects was, however, rooted in his higher class background, since he was modeling himself after artists like Millet and De Groux, whom he encountered through his youth in the art trade.
Indeed, despite his deep desire to forge a new identity, the letters from this period reveal that Van Gogh could never fully let go of his roots in intellectual, moneyed circles. He quickly followed up the previous quote, for example, with the caveat, “Not in all respects, for what do they [the peasants] know of art and many other things?” (405). As suggested here, his love of art and literature would remain key tethers to Van Gogh’s class of origin, even as he learned to live on meager resources. His home with Sien, as he described it in the letters, was a manifestation of his hybrid class identity:
[A] man is gripped by a strong and powerful emotion when he sits down next to the woman he loves with a baby in the cradle beside them…it is always that eternal poetry of Christmas night with the infant in the stable, as the old Dutch painters conceived it […] so I hung the large etching after Rembrandt over it [the cradle], the two women by the cradle, one of them reading from the Bible by candlelight, while the great shadows cast a deep chiaroscuro over the whole room (256).
Here, amidst his self-imposed poverty, Van Gogh surrounds himself with the erudite influences that informed his art practice. This seeming self-contradiction between a peasant lifestyle with academic underpinnings is emblematic of the limbo inherent to Van Gogh’s social position in the world.
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