Improving reading matter filled the parsonage. The Bible held supremacy, but so much in modern writing seemed to complement it. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol urged those huddled together at the fireside to feel how desolate life could become without mutual compassion. Johann David Wyss told the tale of The Swiss Family Robinson, in which the close-knit members, shipwrecked on a tropical beach, take on the wilds of nature and master them. Here was an imaginative overlay on Vincent’s forays to the heath and the stream, to complement the species identifications that natural history volumes could offer him. Equally, the boy’s feel for the life of small things found a voice in the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, which lent quirky, tremulous personalities to saplings, flowers and shoes.

Dickens, Wyss and Andersen steered their readers towards kindly social responsibility, and this chimed with Dorus’s preferred line in contemporary Dutch Protestantism. The Groningen school of theology proposed that God speaks to each of us through our hearts; that our experience of the natural world is one of the languages He employs; and that the church’s role was less to instil than to nurture and facilitate this moral education. It was a temperately progressive position in an era resounding with the Romantic writings of the early nineteenth century and with the aftershocks of the French Revolution and its radical sacrilege. Dorus’s own remit, however, was not so much to move things forwards as to stand firm, upholding his own denominational “pillar of society” (as Dutch phraseology expressed it) — one component of the stout edifice that was the nineteenth-century Kingdom of the Netherlands. One hand he outstretched to help the needy — such Protestant peasants of the parish as were ailing or down on their luck — while the other saluted the fortunate, the respectable. The rector’s ambitions were as modest as his physical stature; his whole working life would pass this way, uncomplainingly spent in the backwoods of Brabant.

Dorus had followed his own father’s footsteps into the church, taking up the Zundert post in 1849. Nonetheless, the Van Goghs had long considered themselves somebodies — persons with “honorable positions in the world,” as Johanna “Jo” Bonger, Vincent’s sister-in-law, would express it in a memoir. Among them, as in the Dutch state more generally, pious duty walked shoulder to shoulder with worldly success. Two of Dorus’s older brothers had gone into the military — one, Jan, to end up an admiral — while another three started businesses. Hendrik “Hein” van Gogh with his bookshop in Rotterdam and Cornelis “Cor” van Gogh with another in Amsterdam were both outshone by the spectacular good fortunes of Vincent “Cent” van Gogh, for whom Hein would end up working.

“Uncle Cent” rode the midcentury European economic boom by selling pictures. Reproductions — steel engravings, and then photogravures, showing historical or religious scenes, faraway places, cute children and animals and whatever else would grace a respectable home — were the mainstay of his emporium in The Hague. With numerous local picture makers to draw on from a Dutch tradition of fijnschilderij (meticulous naturalistic painting) that had on some level survived since the nation’s artistic “golden age” two centuries before, Cent also brought in lines of imagery from salons and academies abroad. His flair for the picture business caught the eye of a yet larger player in that field, Adolphe Goupil in Paris, who invited him to join forces. From 1861 onwards, after Cent became junior partner in Goupil & Cie, he inhabited a lofty financial and social plateau, with one mansion in Paris and another custom-built outside Breda, the town in Brabant where his father had preached.

Cent and the slightly younger Dorus — the debonair cosmopolitan and the earnest rural parson, the man of a thousand pictures and the man of the true Word — made unlikely brothers, yet marriage interlinked them. Anna Carbentus, Dorus’s wife from 1851, was the older sister of Cornelia, whom Cent had wed the year before. It helped the matchmaking that the women were on a social level with the men: Their father, Willem, ran a prominent bookbinding business in The Hague. The Carbentuses were pious, sturdy hard workers, Anna, in particular, being credited by Jo Bonger with an “unbroken strength of will.” They were also, it appears, cursed with psychochemical ill luck. One of Anna and Cornelia’s seven siblings was classified “epileptic”; another died, in obscure circumstances, by his own hand; and Willem himself would succumb in his fifties to some form of “mental disease.”

Cent and Cornelia’s marriage produced no children. Dorus and Anna began their family with a son named Vincent . . . began it this way, in fact, twice over. The first recipient of the name was stillborn, and his headstone to this day confuses visitors to the Zundert Dutch Reformed Church. The other, born exactly a year onwards on March 30, 1853, would be buried in France thirty-seven years later.

2

There were beetles, birds and their nests, and the words in the books that identified them. There were garden games in which to organize the little ones — Anna, Theo and Lies, to be joined by Wilhelmina, or “Wil,” when Vincent was nine years old, and Cornelius, or “Cor,” five years later. Beyond one another’s birthdays, there was the deeper thrill of Christmas, hallowed each year by fir trees and Dickens readings. There was the making of family presents, which might well be drawings done from observation, since their mother had introduced all her children to this standard accomplishment of the educated classes.