land of desire,” they called it.
Vincent followed the path that led through the meadows to a sandy streambed, the Grote Beek, where the water ran cool even on the hottest summer day, and his feet left imprints in the fine, wet sand. His parents occasionally came this far on the family’s daily walks—although the children were forbidden to go near the water. But Vincent went farther. He walked west and south to where the cultivated fields dissolved into wilderness: mile after mile of sandy moors carpeted in heather and gorse, marshy lowlands bristling with rushes, and stands of pine.
It may have been on these walks on the broad, deserted moors that Vincent discovered the special light and sky of his native country: the unique combination of sea moisture and morphing clouds that had transfixed artists for centuries. “The most harmonious of all countries,” an American painter described Holland in 1887, “a sky of the purest turquoise [and] a soft sun throwing over everything a yellow saffroned light.”
In addition to sky and light, the Dutch had long been famous for their curiosity and close looking (Dutchmen invented both the telescope and the microscope). The windy moors of Zundert provided endless scope for all of Vincent’s powers of observation. The meticulous attention he had developed in copying his mother’s drawings now focused on God’s designs. He peered deeply into the fleeting vignettes of life on the heath: the blooming of a wildflower, the laboringof an insect, the nesting of a bird. His days were spent “watching and studying the life of the underbrush,” sister Lies recalled. He sat on the sandy banks of the Grote Beek for hours observing the transits of water bugs. He followed the flights of larks from church tower to corn sheaf to nests hidden in the rye. He could pick his way through the high grain “without even breaking one fine stalk,” Lies said, and would perch beside the nest for hours, just watching. “His mind was given to watching and thinking.” Years later, Vincent wrote Theo: “We share a liking for peering behind the scenes.… Perhaps we owe that to our boyhood in Brabant.”
Even in these solitary sojourns, however, Vincent found means to defy and provoke his parents.
Anna and Dorus van Gogh loved nature, too—in the comfortable, consoling way typical of the nineteenth-century leisure class. “You will find in [nature] a very agreeable and conversable friend,” promised one of their favorite books, “if you will cultivate her intimacy.” They had spent their honeymoon in the Haarlemmerhout, a fifteen-hundred-year-old forest filled with birds and wildflowers and healing springs. In Zundert, they walked the meadow paths and pointed out picturesque tableaux to each other: a cloud formation, a reflection of trees in a pond, the play of light on water. They paused in their daily lives to enjoy sunsets, and occasionally went out in search of vistas from which to appreciate them more fully. They embraced the mystical union of nature and religion: the popular Victorian belief that beauty in nature sounded the “higher tones” of the eternal, and that appreciating nature’s beauty qualified as “worship.”
But none of that explained or justified Vincent’s long, unaccompanied disappearances—in all seasons, in all weathers. To his parents’ distress, he seemed especially to love walking in storms and at night. Nor did he stick to the meadow trails or the little garden byways in the village. Instead, he wandered far from the beaten path, into untracked regions where no decent person would dare to venture—godforsaken places where one would encounter only poor peasants cutting peat and gathering heather, or shepherds pasturing their flocks. Even the prospect of such contacts had to alarm Anna and Dorus. Once, he ended up near Kalmthout, a town six miles away on the Belgian side of the border—a route that only smugglers took—returning home late at night with his
Vincent followed the path that led through the meadows to a sandy streambed, the Grote Beek, where the water ran cool even on the hottest summer day, and his feet left imprints in the fine, wet sand. His parents occasionally came this far on the family’s daily walks—although the children were forbidden to go near the water. But Vincent went farther. He walked west and south to where the cultivated fields dissolved into wilderness: mile after mile of sandy moors carpeted in heather and gorse, marshy lowlands bristling with rushes, and stands of pine.
It may have been on these walks on the broad, deserted moors that Vincent discovered the special light and sky of his native country: the unique combination of sea moisture and morphing clouds that had transfixed artists for centuries. “The most harmonious of all countries,” an American painter described Holland in 1887, “a sky of the purest turquoise [and] a soft sun throwing over everything a yellow saffroned light.”
In addition to sky and light, the Dutch had long been famous for their curiosity and close looking (Dutchmen invented both the telescope and the microscope). The windy moors of Zundert provided endless scope for all of Vincent’s powers of observation. The meticulous attention he had developed in copying his mother’s drawings now focused on God’s designs. He peered deeply into the fleeting vignettes of life on the heath: the blooming of a wildflower, the laboringof an insect, the nesting of a bird. His days were spent “watching and studying the life of the underbrush,” sister Lies recalled. He sat on the sandy banks of the Grote Beek for hours observing the transits of water bugs. He followed the flights of larks from church tower to corn sheaf to nests hidden in the rye. He could pick his way through the high grain “without even breaking one fine stalk,” Lies said, and would perch beside the nest for hours, just watching. “His mind was given to watching and thinking.” Years later, Vincent wrote Theo: “We share a liking for peering behind the scenes.… Perhaps we owe that to our boyhood in Brabant.”
Even in these solitary sojourns, however, Vincent found means to defy and provoke his parents.
Anna and Dorus van Gogh loved nature, too—in the comfortable, consoling way typical of the nineteenth-century leisure class. “You will find in [nature] a very agreeable and conversable friend,” promised one of their favorite books, “if you will cultivate her intimacy.” They had spent their honeymoon in the Haarlemmerhout, a fifteen-hundred-year-old forest filled with birds and wildflowers and healing springs. In Zundert, they walked the meadow paths and pointed out picturesque tableaux to each other: a cloud formation, a reflection of trees in a pond, the play of light on water. They paused in their daily lives to enjoy sunsets, and occasionally went out in search of vistas from which to appreciate them more fully. They embraced the mystical union of nature and religion: the popular Victorian belief that beauty in nature sounded the “higher tones” of the eternal, and that appreciating nature’s beauty qualified as “worship.”
But none of that explained or justified Vincent’s long, unaccompanied disappearances—in all seasons, in all weathers. To his parents’ distress, he seemed especially to love walking in storms and at night. Nor did he stick to the meadow trails or the little garden byways in the village. Instead, he wandered far from the beaten path, into untracked regions where no decent person would dare to venture—godforsaken places where one would encounter only poor peasants cutting peat and gathering heather, or shepherds pasturing their flocks. Even the prospect of such contacts had to alarm Anna and Dorus. Once, he ended up near Kalmthout, a town six miles away on the Belgian side of the border—a route that only smugglers took—returning home late at night with his
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