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a large family with clockwork discipline. In 1855, almost exactly two years after Vincent Willem’s birth, a girl was born, Anna Cornelia. Two years after that (1857), another son, Theodorus. Two years after that (1859), another daughter, Elisabeth. In 1862, a third daughter, Willemina. Finally, five years later (1867), at forty-seven, Anna bore her last child, another son, Cornelis Vincent. So tightly did Anna control the process that six of her seven children had birthdays between mid-March and mid-May; three were born in May, and two were born one day apart (in addition to the two Vincents born on the same date).
    This was Anna van Gogh’s family. For the rest of the twenty years she lived in Zundert, Anna would pour most of her energy and all of her manic orderliness and fearful conformity into raising these six children. “We are shaped first by family,” she wrote, “then by the world.”
    In concentrating so single-mindedly on home life, Anna not only fulfilledher duty as a wife and a Protestant, she upheld the conventions of her class. What historians would call “the era of the triumphant family” had dawned. Children were no longer just adults-in-waiting. Childhood had become a distinct and precious state of being—“holy youth,” it was called—and parenthood a sacred calling. “One must make sure that [youth] shares as little as possible in the disasters of society,” warned one of the most popular parenting instruction books of the era. “An entire following life cannot make up for a repressed youth.” Hundreds of such books, and even more novels, embraced and instructed the new middle-class obsession. The message of such books was all too familiar to Anna: the outside world was a turbulent and dangerous place; family, the ultimate refuge.

    V INCENT’S SISTERS AND BROTHERS (CLOCKWISE FROM UPPER LEFT): A NNA , T HEO , L IES , C OR, AND W IL ( Illustration credit 2.2 )
    Anna stamped this fearful, insular view on all her children. Neither physical nor affectionate by nature, she waged instead a relentless campaign of words: affirmations of family ties, invocations of filial duty, professions of parental love, and reminders of parental sacrifice, endlessly knitted into the fabric of everyday life. Not only was their family uniquely happy, she maintained, but a “happy home life” was essential to any happiness. Without it, the future could only be “lonely and uncertain.” Her campaign echoed the mandate of family unity—what one historian called “family totalitarianism”—that filled the literature of the day, in which tender expressions of family devotion accompanied by uncontrollable sobbing were de rigueur. “We can’t live without each other,” Anna wrote to her seventeen-year-old son Theo. “We love each other too dearly to be separated or to refuse to open our hearts to one another.”
    In the claustrophobic emotional environment of the parsonage (a “strange, sensitive atmosphere,” according to one account), Anna’s campaign succeeded only too well. Her children grew up clinging to family like shipwreck survivors to a raft. “Oh! I cannot imagine what it would be like if one of us had to leave,” wrote Elisabeth, her sixteen-year-old daughter, whom the family called Lies. “I feel that we all belong together, that we are one.… If there would be one missing now, I would feel as if this unity did not exist anymore.” Separation from any member, emotional or physical, was painful for all. Reunions were greeted with joyful tears and invested with the power even to cure illness.
    In later years, when separation became unavoidable, all of Anna’s children suffered the pain of withdrawal. Letters (not just Vincent’s) poured back and forth between them in an extraordinary effort to sustain the family bond. Gripped by spells of “inexpressible homesickness” throughout their adult lives, according to one in-law, they remained wary of the outside world, preferring the safe,