On 30 March 1852 Anna van Gogh bore a stillborn son and he was buried in the churchyard at Zundert under the name Vincent Willem. On 30 March 1853, a year to the day, she bore another son and he was given the same name. The living Vincent grew up walking past his own name on a gravestone. Genograms have a long-standing interest in this configuration — a child named for a dead sibling, arriving on the anniversary, is the textbook replacement child — and the pattern is normally something a clinician has to infer. Here the family handed it over intact, which is the first reason this tree is worth drawing.
Theodorus van Gogh was a Dutch Reformed pastor in Zundert and later Nuenen, one of eleven children and the only one of six brothers to follow his father into the ministry. He married Anna Cornelia Carbentus, a bookseller's daughter from The Hague and an amateur watercolourist — the household's first painter. Their surviving children were Vincent (1853), Anna Cornelia (1855), Theo (1857), Elisabeth "Lies" (1859), Willemina "Wil" (1862) and Cornelius "Cor" (1867). The diagram also carries Theodorus's brother Vincent, "Uncle Cent", a dealer of real standing at Goupil & Cie who married Anna's sister Cornelia — so two brothers married two sisters, and it was Uncle Cent who placed his sixteen-year-old namesake in the Goupil branch at The Hague. Both Vincent and Theo entered the art trade through that one lateral tie.
The centre of the tree is a sibling bond drawn as fusion rather than closeness, which is a deliberate choice. For ten years Theo sent his brother money and paint and argued with him about painting across some six hundred surviving letters; Vincent, who failed as a dealer, a teacher, a bookseller and a lay preacher, painted for a decade and sold almost nothing. Neither functioned independently of the other by the end. Vincent died of a gunshot wound at Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890, aged 37. Theo collapsed within months and died at Utrecht in January 1891, aged 33. Six months separate them, and no reading of this diagram survives ignoring that.
The other lines are quieter and mostly unhappy. Vincent quarrelled with his father about what a life is for until Theodorus died suddenly in 1885 with nothing settled, and he quarrelled with his sister Anna at Etten badly enough that they never recovered it. His mother, by most accounts, thought little of the work. Wil was his favourite sister and his most candid correspondent after Theo — he wrote to her about painting as work rather than as news — and she was committed to an asylum in 1902 and remained institutionalised for the last thirty-nine years of her life. Cor emigrated to South Africa and died there in 1900 during the Second Boer War, aged 32, in circumstances widely thought to have been suicide.
The person who changes the outcome met him only a handful of times. Johanna "Jo" Bonger married Theo in 1889 and was widowed in 1891, at 28, with an infant son, a debt, and several hundred unsold canvases. She spent the rest of her life placing the paintings in exhibitions and collections and editing the brothers' correspondence, which she published in 1914. Her son Vincent Willem — the third of that name in this diagram, and the only one to have a long life — founded the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and put the family collection in it. The tie with the largest consequence on this chart is also the one with the least contact.
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