Notes

In her 1935 account, Vincent's sister Lies, attempted to defend her mother from charges of negligence towards Vincent's art, and in doing so, verified them: "My mother has been accused of letting the drawings and studies left in Nuenen get lost. But this was totally incorrect: nobody assigned any value to the chests with drawings and sketches, which could not be taken along to the upper-level quarters of the house in Breda where Mother went to live after leaving the parsonage" (Lies van Gogh, quoted in Stokvis, p. 4). As for Vincent's letters, Lies not only confirms that the family did not "assign any value" to them, but also reports that it "regretted terribly" that his letters to Theo ("so filled with intimacies") had been published at all (ibid.). Regarding his earliest work -- from childhood, for example -- Lies admitted that Anna had saved absolutely nothing -- "Not one little pencil sketch or scribble" (Lies van Gogh, quoted in Kools, p. 106). She adds intriguingly that H.G. Tersteeg, Vincent’s boss at Goupil in The Hague, "had a chiffonière with drawers filled with letters from Vincent, which were also destroyed at the time" (ibid.). The disappearance of his old works and letters did not go unregistered by Vincent. In the last months of his life, he wrote his mother asking plaintively: "Do you still happen to have any of my old studies and drawings? ... But it's not important enough for you to spend a long time looking for them" (JLB 864, 4/9/1890).

As far as we know, Anna did not send him anything in response to this request, nor explain why she didn't. Around the same time, Meyers reports, Anna received a letter from an old Nuenen neighbor informing her of the discovery of a painting of Vincent's -- "a large painting of ploughing oxen left behind" (Anna van Gogh, quoted in Meyers, p. 52). "He wondered what should be done with it. 'For God's sake, keep it for yourself,' she replied, as if she was being offered something repulsive." (ibid.) Anna did, apparently, start saving Vincent's letters at the very end of his life, after articles about his work began to appear in papers and magazines (see b2850 V/1982, "Gogh-Carbentus, Anna C. van" to "Gogh, Theo en Jo van", 9/12/1890). And, as his celebrity grew in the years between his death in 1890 and hers in 1907, she began to regret her cavalier treatment of his work (see n. 1-15), although, according to one source,“[Anna] never went to see one of the exhibitions Jo had arranged after Vincent's death; [and] after her own death none of the pictures Vincent had sent to her were found in her possession.” ("Psychological Study of Vincent van Gogh,” document in the “Medical File” in the Vincent Van Gogh Foundation Archives," p. 5).

Context:
BVG 161, 11/23/1881: "There really are no more unbelieving and hard-hearted and worldly people than clergymen and especially clergymen's wives."
JLB 187, 11/19/1881: "There are (a rule with exceptions) no more faithless and hardened and worldly people than clergymen and, above all, clergymen's wives, but even clergymen sometimes have a human heart beneath their armour of triple bronze."

Context:
BVG 187, 4/15/1882: "Now I have become little more than a half strange, half tiresome person to Father and Mother; and for my part, when I'm at home, I also have a lonesome, empty feeling."
JLB 217, 4/14/1882: "As it is now, I'm half a stranger and half a tiresome person and precious little else to Pa and Ma, and for my part I have an empty, lonely feeling at home" (emphasis in original).

Context:
JLB 832, 12/23/1889:

The evidence for the Germanic roots of the "van Teekelenberg" family is the name, which is closely related to a town in western Germany, Tecklenburg, not far from the Dutch-German border (near Munster), and the record of a family "van Teckelenburch" in Delft in the same time period which included Johann and Maria Prins and their three daughters: Catharina (christened May 13, 1685), Marya (December 26, 1686) and Cornelia (December 5, 1687); and a "Hermanus van Tegelenburg" who witnessed a baptism in Delft in 1683. The Carbentus family genealogy spells the name two ways: "Teekelenberg" and "Tekeelenburg." The differences in spelling of the last name are insignificant for the period. Also, most of these names are Germanic in form: Johann, Maria, Catharina, Cornelia, Hermanus. Interestingly, the only daughter of Gerrit Carbentus (Karbentus) and his first wife was also Katarina, suggesting that the Carbentus family may also have had German origins and may have known the Teekelenbergs in Delft, or before, prior to being decimated ("Genealogy, hobby of Cees and Ingrid Tinbergen").

The first decades of the eighteenth century provided a rare island of calm in which Gerrit raised a (relatively small) family of three sons.   But by the time his second son, Hermanus, reached his teenage years, the storm clouds were re-forming.   Cattle plague and catastrophic inundations (see Schama, pp. 607-608), war fears, and political turmoil combined to create yet another tidal wave of anxiety and rage (see Mak, p. 65).   In 1747, it washed over the "quiet land" again.   In Amsterdam, crowds swept through the city "like wildfire" according to Mak, plundering and destroying indiscriminately in "a second iconoclastic fury … Everything was hacked to pieces" (ibid.). Even pillows were cut open and thrown into the street "giving the effect of heavy snowfall.  The entire contents of buildings were emptied into the canals, paintings "as beautiful as one might ever hope to see" were cut to shreds in an "orgy of destruction."   One eyewitness compared the raging mob to a "beast" possessed by a "madness" ( ibid.). When the perpetrators were hanged, people started rioting again and the madness claimed another hundred lives.

When the French army entered seven years later, it was the patriots' turn to celebrate; they stood on the barricades wearing red-white-and-blue cockades to welcome the hussars and within a few weeks every city council in the country was replaced with a Comité R évolutionnaire.   Now it was the Orangists's turn to prepare for the worst.   "Every day we feared the fate of domestic disturbances," an Orangist in The Hague wrote, "and every day we were alarmed by the many terrifying messages" (b4509 V/1962, Carbentus Genealogy, n.p.).   The Orangist partisan who wrote that journal entry was Hermanus Carbentus, son of Gerrit Carbentus and father of Gerrit Carbentus, Vincent's great-grandfather.   By the time he was twenty-five, Hermanus had earned enough to buy a solid bourgeois house on St. Jacobstraat, across from the baroque Nieuwe Kerk where his two stillborn children were buried and, on November 19, 1786, his son Gerrit married Willemina Hennevelt, the daughter of a successful "cobbler" ("Biographical Lexicon of the History of Dutch Protestantism," p. 8).  

Only a few days after Gerrit's wife gave birth to their third child, Hermanus noted the arrival of "the enemy" in the family chronicle, and left no doubt about who he blamed for this latest catastrophe to befall the land: "this was the fate of a war that was fueled by the partisanship of those who established their greatness on the fall of the Prince" (b4509 V/1962, Carbentus Genealogy, n.p.).   The "terrifying messages" Hermanus spoke of brought news that Prince William of Orange had fled the country by boat ahead of the French advance.   Soon afterward came the order to all citizens of The Hague to billet French troops (two stayed with the Carbentuses), then the order to turn over all gold and silver coins (ibid.).   What "hit" Hermanus especially hard, though, was the report that "the French took the Prince's valuable Cabinet of Natural rarities to France."   Ruminating on the birth of his grandchild at such an inauspicious time, Hermanus summed up the fears of many: "my granddaughter can truly say: 'With crying eyes I have sucked the first food out of my mother's breast during a most peculiar year'" (ibid.).  

The next year, a constitution was also written to limit the new monarch's powers and codify some (but not all [see Lubin, pp. 50-51]) of the gains made by the patriots in the previous two decades: separation of church and state (see Schuchart, p. 35), freedom of press and assembly, equality of all citizens.