Free Van Gogh by Steven Naifeh Page A

eleven, was the youngest student in the school. As the little redheaded newcomer with a country accent, short temper, and strange manners, Vincent withdrew deeper into his shell of preadolescent melancholy. At the end of his life, he compared his days at the Provily School to being locked in an insane asylum: “I feel every bit as out of place now,” he wrote from the asylum at Saint-Rémy, “as I did when I was a twelve-year-old boy at boarding school.”
    Vincent waged a fierce campaign—as he would so often in the future—to reverse his exile. Within a few weeks, Dorus returned to the school to console and calm his unhappy son. “I flung my arms around Father’s neck,” Vincent later wrote of their tearful reunion. “It was a moment in which we both felt we had a Father in heaven.” But Dorus did not take his son back to Zundert with him. Vincent had to wait until Christmas to see his family again. His jubilationat returning to the parsonage for the holidays was recalled vividly by his sister Lies more than a decade later. “Do you remember how Vincent came home from Zevenbergen?” she wrote Theo in 1875. “What beautiful days those were.… we never thereafter had so much fun or spent such happy days together.”
    But eventually Vincent was forced to return to the stone lions on the Zandweg. Over the next two years, Dorus paid other visits and Vincent made the round-trip to Zundert for other family celebrations. Finally, in the summer of 1866, responding to what must have been a hail of homesick letters into which Vincent poured all his manic energy and injured loneliness (setting a pattern for the future), his parents relented. He could leave his palatial prison in Zevenbergen at last.
    But not to come home.
    IT IS NOT CLEAR why Anna and Dorus decided to move their forlorn son from the Provily School to the Rijksschool Willem II in Tilburg, even farther from home. As in Zevenbergen, Dorus probably found his way to the Tilburg School through family connections. Money appears to have been a factor as well. Unlike Provily’s, Tilburg enjoyed the privileges of a Hogere Burgerschool (Higher Bourgeois School)—HBS for short—a state-supported school created under the mandate of a new law that encouraged public education as a way of spreading secular, bourgeois values.
    Despite being cheaper, the Tilburg School was even more impressive than Mr. Provily’s mansion on the Zandweg. In 1864, the Dutch king had donated the royal palace and gardens in the town center for use as a secondary school. The building itself was the stuff of schoolboy nightmares. A strange, squat, forbidding structure with corner towers and crenellated ramparts, it looked more like a prison than a palace. As a new HBS school, Tilburg had attracted a large and distinguished faculty. Because most members taught on a part-time basis, the curriculum offered a rich variety of courses—everything from astronomy to zoology—and drew on the talents of scholars and pedagogues from as far away as Leiden, Utrecht, and Amsterdam.
    But all such distinctions were lost on Vincent. Zevenbergen or Tilburg, both were just extensions of his exile. If anything, he withdrew further into his protective shell and redirected the fire of bitterness into his schoolwork (as he would later direct it into his art). Despite his protest that he “learned absolutely nothing” at Provily’s, he was admitted to Tilburg’s first class without having to attend the preparatory program required of most applicants. Once classes began on September 3, 1866, the school’s intensive curriculum absorbed all of his fanatic energy with long hours of instruction in Dutch, German, English, French, algebra, history, geography, botany, zoology, geometry, and gymnastics. Thelast, taught by an infantry sergeant, included close-order drill and “instruction in the use of arms.” But even as he marched on the Willemsplein in front of the castellated school shouldering his