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front, used for church functions, to a single dark room at the back where the family actually lived. The hall ended at a small kitchen. Beyond that lay a washroom and a barn—all in one continuous, virtually lightless progression. The sole privy could be found behind a door in the corner of the barn. Unlike most people in Zundert, Anna did not have to venture outdoors to use the loo.
    Putting the best face on the sudden change in her circumstances, Anna described the parsonage to her family back in The Hague as a “country place” where one could enjoy the pastoral simplicity of rural life. But pleasantries could not disguise the truth: After a prolonged maidenhood in the fine and proper world of The Hague, she had landed in a beleaguered religious outpost, in a wild and unfamiliar land, surrounded by townspeople who mostly resented her presence, whom she mostly distrusted, and whose dialect she could hardly understand. There was no disguising her loneliness, either. Unable to walk the streets of town unaccompanied, she hosted a succession of family visitors, and then, at the end of the summer, returned to The Hague for an extended stay.
    As all the other distinctions of Anna’s previous life fell away, one became increasingly important to her: respectability. She had always lived her life by the rules of convention. But now, under the battlefield discipline imposed by isolation and hostility, those rules took on a new significance. First and foremost, the rules demanded that parsons’ wives, all wives, produce children—lots of children. Families of ten or more were not uncommon. It was a strategic and religious imperative to ensure the outpost’s survival into the next generation—and Anna van Gogh was starting late. When she returned to The Hague at the end of the summer, she proudly announced “the future arrival of a little addition to the family, for which God had given us hope.”
    On March 30, 1852, Anna gave birth to a stillborn son.
“Levenloos”—
lifeless—the town registrar noted in the margin of his book next to the nameless birth entry, “No. 29.” Hardly a family in Zundert—or anywhere in Holland—rich or poor, was untouched by this most mysterious of all God’s workings. The Carbentus family was typical, its chronicle littered with infant deaths and nameless stillborns.
    In previous generations, the death of a child often passed without a funeral; the “birth” of a stillborn, without any mention at all. For the new bourgeoisie, however, no opportunity for self-affirmation and display went unseized. Mourning for an innocent child, in particular, caught the public imagination. One Dutch writer dubbed it “the most violent and profound of all sorrows.” Sales of poetry albums devoted exclusively to the subject soared. Novels like Dickens’s
The Old Curiosity Shop
, with its deathbed scene of Little Nell, transfixed a generation. When it came time for Anna to bury her son, she demanded all the trappings of the new fashion. A grave was dug in Zundert’s little Protestant cemetery next to the church (the first for a stillborn) and covered with a handsome stone marker large enough for a biblical inscription, a favorite of the era’s poetry albums: “Suffer little children to come unto me …” The marker bore only the year, 1852; and instead of the bereaved parents, it named the stillborn: Vincent van Gogh.
    For Anna, naming children was only remotely a matter of personal preference. Like everything else in her life, it was governed by rules. Thus it was predetermined, when Anna gave birth to another son on March 30, 1853, exactly one year after the death of her first, that he would take the names of his grandfathers: Vincent and Willem.
    The coincidence that Vincent Willem van Gogh was born a year to the day after the stillborn buried under a marker inscribed “Vincent van Gogh” would prove of far greater interest to later commentators than to the Van Goghs. Anna proceeded to produce