Vincent and Theo: Threshold–Gallery One

He’s dying to tell Vincent to move out, but he knows if he does, Vincent will just be more determined to stay.
Dogged. Contrary. Stubborn. Vincent.

Theo loves his brother’s brilliant mind, his gregariousness, even his fiery temperament.

Vincent can be a good antidote to Theo’s own inwardness and tendency to melancholy.

“He loses no opportunity to let me see that he despises me and I inspire aversion in him,” Theo tells Wil.

Thanks to Theo’s influence, to the artists he’s met, and to his own tenacious work, Vincent’s paintings are better than ever: they are imbued with color and light and Vincent’s own particular style.

Thanks to Theo’s influence, to the artists he’s met, and to his own tenacious work, Vincent’s paintings are better than ever: they are imbued with color and light and Vincent’s own particular style.

Sometimes Vincent is ebulliently happy and kind, sometimes furiously angry and difficult.

He is sometimes delirious. It is not certain he will live.
Theo is bereft. He lays his head next to his brothers on the pillow.

They were determined to insulate them from what they thought of as the rougher and wilder Catholic community.

And they raised all their children not only to help those in need but also to revere culture, society, reputation, and all the niceties that came with it.

And they raised all their children not only to help those in need but also to revere culture, society, reputation, and all the niceties that came with it.

Aside from the public part of the house, the only other luxury was the privy in a shed attached to the house; the Van Goghs didn’t have to walk outside to use the bathroom.

Lying wounded and sick in that hospital bed in Arles years later, Vincent could see the parsonage vividly, the details of his childhood home indelibly etched in his mind’s eye, a particularly rendered painting, staying the same always.

Lying wounded and sick in that hospital bed in Arles years later, Vincent could see the parsonage vividly, the details of his childhood home indelibly etched in his mind’s eye, a particularly rendered painting, staying the same always.

“I again saw each room in the house at Zundert,” he wrote to Theo, “each path, each plant in the garden, the views round about, the fields, the neighbours, the cemetery, the church, our kitchen garden behind—right up to the magpies’ nest in a tall acacia in the cemetery.”

The second floor, essentially an attic, was even narrower than the first, the house tapering under a slanted roof.

By the time Vincent's name was entered into the ledger in the town hall, his existence recorded and announced, a railroad had diverted some of the traffic away from Zundert.

And yet Vincent and Theo always thought of themselves as country boys because the back of the house was on the edge of town, and Zundert was surrounded by, as Vincent later wrote, “black fields with the young green wheat,” fields of rye and corn, and heath-covered moors.

A boy could walk out through the garden gate and straight into the rye, and beyond that into meadows strewn with wildflowers to pick, pine forests to ramble in, and streams to follow.

He often left home with a fishnet and a bottle, and came back with treasures from nature: a birds nest or an egg, stones, and unusual wildflowers that he had a knack for finding when no one else in the family could.

Question: did everyone who saw them—heath, grassland, fields, woods—also love them, and the snow and the rain and the storm?

But those walks were disciplined; they were not meanders of discovery like Vincent’s on the heath.

Dorus did not have a penchant for extremes, though, either in action or in nature.

Sometimes the elders of the church council thought he was too generous with the church’s money, but his big heart meant that he was loved not only by his parish but also by the Catholics in Zundert and the country surrounding it.

It is better to be fervent in spirit, even if one accordingly makes more mistakes, than narrow-minded and overly cautious.

Who a person becomes later in life, how he lives, how he dies, clouds people’s memories of him, spinning and skewing—distorting—their portraits of him as a child.

On rainy days, the room smelled musty and dank from all the coats hanging in the back, soaking wet from their owners having walked miles in the rain to get there.

In the foreground is an open barn shed with a farm wagon inside.

Artists often use croquis for subjects who won’t or can’t stay still—like a feral cat or a small child, someone whose whole being cannot be captured on paper in one steady view.

But sometimes a person who seems easy is one whose calm outside belies a troubled and turbulent inside.

So while Theo is playing contentedly in the garden with his sisters, we draw a tinge of melancholy into his countenance, a slight frown, a worried brow.

In the crepuscular light, he is connected again, bound to his father and, through him, to all the family back in Zundert.

He is on his own journey, one that will be arduous and long, filled with missteps and stumbles.

The newly opened King Willem II is a secular high school housed in a palace built by the Dutch royal family.

There are no drawings extant from this time.

When the Honcoop boy relays the conversation to his parents, “Everyone must carry his own parcel” becomes a saying in the Honcoop family and within the Protestant community in Zundert, an adage extolling strength and self-reliance.

When the Honcoop boy relays the conversation to his parents, “Everyone must carry his own parcel” becomes a saying in the Honcoop family and within the Protestant community in Zundert, an adage extolling strength and self-reliance.

Heavy draperies with brocade and tassels hang on the windows and separate the rooms; paintings in gilded frames hang close together on the walls.

Heavy draperies with brocade and tassels hang on the windows and separate the rooms; paintings in gilded frames hang close together on the walls.

They will always remember this day. Theo will use the walk in arguments. So will Vincent. The brothers will come back to it again and again. It is an anchor, a promise of the future, a touchstone.