The Van Gogh Sisters by Willem-Jan Verlinden

Author:Willem-Jan Verlinden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Jo van Gogh-Bonger and Vincent Willem van Gogh, 1890. Photographed by Raoul Saisset.

CHAPTER 12

Dear Sister, Dear Vincent

Paris, Leiden, 1888–1890

‘My dear sister, Thank you very much for your letter, which I had been looking forward to. I’m reluctant to give in to my inclination to write to you often or inveigle you to do so. All this correspondence doesn’t always help to buttress those of us of a nervous disposition when we are immersed in the kind of melancholy you were referring to in your letter and which I too experience now and again.’1 Vincent composed this letter to Willemien over the course of four days in Arles in June 1888.

Although it is known that Vincent kept up a keen, if sporadic, correspondence with his sisters, especially Anna and Lies, few of the letters they exchanged have survived. Some years earlier, in 1881, a flurry of letters had passed between him and his youngest sister. In October of that year, Vincent told Theo he was ‘in constant correspondence with our sister Willemien.’ They had another spell of intense contact in the autumn of 1887, but only a few of these letters, from Vincent to Wil, have been preserved, along with twenty-two letters he wrote to her between 1887 and 1890, one of which was never sent. Three further letters addressed to Wil and his mother jointly were written at this time. The only surviving letter from Wil to Vincent (and Theo) is one she had sent while visiting Anna in England in 1875 at the age of thirteen. There is a note Anna sent from Welwyn, and two drawings that Vincent may have sent her at that time.2 No letters from Vincent to Lies exist. We know only that he enclosed a note for Anna and Lies in a letter to Theo on 4 September 1877. He asked his brother to ‘add a few words and send it in time for Moe’s birthday.’3 Though he never wrote directly to his mother after the death of his father and his own departure from Nuenen, he assumed she would read some of his letters to Wil and communicated with her in this manner. Presumably in response to Vincent’s note, Lies wrote to Theo, ‘But I sometimes feel decidedly alienated from Vincent. I have so little inclination to write to him and so little affinity with the spirit in which he typically writes letters.’4

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