Free Van Gogh by Steven Naifeh

summer sessions. But nothing worked. At the end of October 1861—only four months into Vincent’s second year of schooling—they withdrew him from the Zundert public school. Instead of providing structure and discipline, the classroom experience had only exacerbated his errant ways. He emerged from his brief exposure, if anything, even more insular and unruly than before. Anna blamed the school: “Intercourse with the peasant boys,” she later insisted, had “coarsened” her son. The lower-class Catholic boys and the Catholic schoolmaster Dirks—all that “bad company,” she concluded, was responsible for Vincent’s increasingly rebellious behavior.
    For the next three years, Vincent’s frustrated parents tried homeschooling him. Despite the expense, they hired a governess and installed her on the second floor. Dorus, who taught daily religion classes for all the local Protestant children (and had himself been homeschooled), set the curriculum. Vincent spent a part of each day in his father’s attic study learning gray lessons from the minister-poets (beloved of Dorus) who were fast losing their grip on Dutch education everywhere else. But even the all-suffering pastor could not cope with his troublesome son for long. In 1864, it was decided that Vincent would have to go to boarding school.
    The Provily School commanded the narrow street that ran between the town hall and the Protestant church in Zevenbergen. The Zandweg was lined with mansions far finer than anything in Zundert, but none finer than number A40. Elaborate stained-glass panels crowned the front door and the lofty first-floor windows. Stone—a rare building material in Zundert—studded the brick façade: stone quoins, stone pilasters, stone garlands, stone fruit, a stone balcony. Six stone lion’s heads peered down from a deep stone cornice. WhenAnna and Dorus left their son in the school’s grand parlor, they surely believed they were setting him on the right path at last.
    Inside Vincent’s palatial new home, a large staff tended to the needs of a relative handful of students: twenty-one boys and thirteen girls, sons and daughters of prominent Protestants from throughout Brabant—high government officials, gentlemen farmers, and prosperous local merchants and mill owners. In addition to the sixty-four-year-old founder, Jan Provily, his wife Christina, and his son Pieter, the faculty included two head teachers, four assistant teachers, and a governess imported from London. The school offered a formidable array of courses at both primary and secondary levels. All of this came at a price, of course. As a clergyman, Dorus may have received special consideration, but every guilder spent on Vincent’s tuition represented a sacrifice for a parson with a growing family and an impoverished congregation.
    But Vincent felt only abandonment. From the moment his parents drove away in their carriage, loneliness overwhelmed him. For the rest of his life, he would return to the memory of their good-bye at the school door as an emotional touchstone—a paradigm of tearful leave-taking. “I stood on the steps before Mr. Provily’s school,” he wrote Theo twelve years later. “One could see the little yellow carriage far down the road—wet with rain and with spare trees on either side—running through the meadows.” At the time, however, no sentimental gloss could distract him from the obvious conclusion. After eleven years of relentless exhortations to family unity, he had been cast off the island parsonage, set adrift. Years later, he would compare his plight in Zevenbergen to that of the forsaken Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, crying out for his father to rescue him.
    The next two years at the Provily School only confirmed his darkest fears. Nothing could have been more paralyzing for a sensitive boy with habits of sullenness in public and temperament in private than the emotional exposure of boarding school. It didn’t help that Vincent, at