What Jo Kept

In October 1890, not three months after Vincent's funeral, Theo collapsed, in body and mind, and in November he was admitted to a clinic for the mentally ill at Utrecht. His doctors there recorded dementia paralytica, a late stage of syphilis. He died on the twenty-fifth of January 1891, six months after his brother. He was thirty-three.

Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, whom everyone called Jo, was twenty-eight; they had been married twenty-one months, and their son Vincent Willem was six days short of his first birthday. She had the boy, some furniture, and the pictures. An inventory drawn up in those days listed two hundred paintings by Vincent van Gogh, and valued them at two thousand guilders. From various quarters, her son wrote, she was advised to "clear off" the pictures. She did not.

Nor did she go back to her parents' house. In the spring she took a big house called Villa Helma at Bussum, in the Gooi, then a small quiet village fifteen miles from Amsterdam, and opened it to boarders. She had read English, made a special study of Shelley, worked in the library of the British Museum and taught at girls' schools; she had not kept a house. Her diary, abandoned while she was married, begins again that year, and in November she wrote the arrangement down plainly: "In order to give him healthy fresh air I went to live at Bussum — to earn a living for both of us I am taking boarders." Theo, she went on, had left her another task besides the child: "Vincent's work — to show it and to let it be appreciated as much as possible."

Three days later she added that for the first half-year it had cost her such an immense effort learning the most ordinary household duties that she could think of nothing else.

In a Dutch house of that sort the living room and the dining room are one room, and at Villa Helma it was not a large one. Over the mantelpiece hung The Potato Eaters. Over the cupboard on the opposite wall hung The Harvest, and over the door the Boulevard de Clichy. Beside the mantelpiece was a bunch of his flowers in a violet vase. Over the piano were four pictures by Monticelli, and from the rim of the white porcelain shade of the paraffin lamp above the table a few Japanese prints hung down like a fringe.

That was the room the house ate its dinners in. The description is her son's, written long afterwards, of a room he knew when he was very small.

There was a carpenter in Bussum who had been taught by a painter how to pack pictures. His name was Verkouteren, and when he gave it up a man the household called Janus took over, and for years the packing was done in the house itself, the cases often built there too, with all the dust and hammering and sweeping up that goes with it; and Jo's son, Vincent Willem, remembered that, and remembered being taken down with his mother to the goods shed at the railway station, to send cases off and to fetch back the ones that had been away.

The cases held Vincent's pictures, going out to exhibitions and coming home again.

People came out to see the pictures, and the pictures went out to be seen. In February 1892 two young painters, one of them Jan Verkade, came to the house, and she wrote that it was a treat to speak French again, and that people in Holland were not generous with appreciation when it concerned Vincent's work. That winter she had ten paintings with one dealer in Amsterdam and twenty with another in Rotterdam. On the twenty-fifth of February there was an evening of his drawings at Arti, the artists' society in Amsterdam, and it was crowded; Breitner came, and Israëls, and Jan Veth, and she wrote that people liked them.

The letters were the other work. Theo had kept them, hundreds of them, in Vincent's small quick hand, from London and the Borinage and The Hague and Nuenen and Arles and Saint-Rémy, and many of them bore no date, so that the order had to be worked out from what was in them — a canvas begun, a debt owing, a change in the weather, the price of a model — and set straight one sheet at a time, by a woman who had a house full of boarders to feed and a small boy to bring up. She had been reading them, she told a friend, since the beginning of Theo's illness. On the first lonely evening at home she had taken up the package of letters, and it had gone on evening after evening: "It was not Vincent whom I was seeking but Theo." Her son printed the passage without the friend's name or the date.

In March 1892 she was making a regular task of it — every free hour, she wrote, working steadily on until it was finished, but not as she had in the first days, when she was at it until deep into the night: "such extravagances I must not permit myself."

In April Theo's mother came to stay. In the afternoons the two women sat together in the glass veranda and talked about the family and the past, and Jo wrote that she must get to know a lot of things about Vincent, and then she was going to write it all down.

In May there was an exhibition in The Hague. It was not beautiful, she wrote, because not enough care had been spent on it, but there was space and light to see the pictures. Old Jozef Israëls was there, and said that some of them were very fine, but that there were bounds between what can be painted and what cannot, and that Vincent had often wanted to paint things that were impossible, for instance the sun.

She wrote that down too.

In the autumn of 1892, because she needed to earn a little more, she began translating short stories from French and English for a weekly paper to run as serials, and she kept that up for years.

In 1901 she married again: Johan Cohen Gosschalk, a painter and a writer on art, a good deal younger than she was, whose health was poor and who died in 1912. In 1903 they moved to a flat in Amsterdam and the pictures went up on the walls there in the same arrangement as before. She had joined the young socialist party, and she went on packing cases. There were exhibitions in Germany now, several of them at Cassirer's gallery in Berlin, and the Folkwang Museum at Hagen in Westphalia became the first museum to have his pictures in its collection. She sold pictures as well, to private collectors and later to museums, and in that way, as her biographer Hans Luijten has shown, she shaped how he came to be seen.

In the summer of 1905 she hired the galleries of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and filled them with his work. In two months, two thousand people came to look at it. At about the same time the Rijksmuseum declined the loan of any painting by Vincent at all, and let it be known that it would exhibit two drawings if they were given to it. In 1907 Vincent's mother died, nearly seventeen years after him.

The letters came out in 1914, in three volumes, as Brieven aan zijn broeder, Letters to His Brother. At the front of the first volume she put a memoir of his life, signed and dated December 1913. It says where its knowledge came from: from Theo himself, and from the parents' letters to Theo, which had been kept in full, most of Vincent's letters to his parents having been, in her words, unfortunately destroyed. Where she could not find a thing out, she said so. Of a poor painter who had given him lessons in perspective at one franc fifty for two hours, she wrote: "it has not been possible to ascertain the name of the painter, but it may have been Madiol." It is a family account, written by his brother's widow, with a family's loyalties in it; it is also the most careful thing anyone in that family ever wrote about him.

In the same year she had Theo taken up from his grave at Utrecht and carried to Auvers, and he was buried beside his brother in the cemetery above the village.

In 1915 she went to New York and began putting the letters into English, and she went on with it after she came home in 1919. She died on the second of September 1925, aged sixty-two. She had got as far as letter 526.

Her son kept the collection together and lent it, and in 1962 placed it in a foundation set up for the purpose; the museum in Amsterdam built to hold it opened in 1973.

Almond Blossom had been sent north from Saint-Rémy at the end of April 1890. At Bussum, by her son's account, it hung upstairs in the bedroom, with three of his orchards in flower.

In the cemetery above Auvers, the two stones stand side by side.

The end