Van Gogh

Vincent never understood his mother’s rejection. At times, he lashed out angrily against it, calling her a “hard-hearted” woman “of a soured love.” At times, he blamed himself for being a “half-strange, half-tiresome person … who brings only sorrow and loss.”

OF THE THOUSANDS OF STORIES THAT VINCENT VAN GOGH CONSUMED in a lifetime of voracious reading, one stood out in his imagination: Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Story of a Mother.” Whenever he found himself with children, he told and retold Andersen’s dark tale of a loving mother who chooses to let her child die rather than expose him to the risk of an unhappy life. Vincent knew the story by heart and could tell it in several languages, including a heavily accented English. For him, whose own life was filled with unhappiness, and who forever sought himself in literature and art, Andersen’s tale of maternal love gone awry possessed a unique power, and his obsessive retellings protested both a unique longing and a unique injury

Only by knowing Vincent “from the inside,” he insisted, could anyone hope to see his art as Vincent saw it, or feel it as Vincent felt it

“I get very cross when people tell me that it is dangerous to put out to sea,” Vincent told Theo once when he tried to intervene. “There is safety in the very heart of danger.”

These storms of zeal had transformed a boy of inexplicable fierceness into a wayward, battered soul: a stranger in the world, an exile in his own family, and an enemy to himself