The story of Vincent van Gogh’s love life is mainly one of setbacks. Vincent was deeply in love with a number of women, and some of them loved him back. But he was never really lucky in love. How come it never worked out?
‘For my part, I still continually have the most impossible and highly unsuitable love affairs from which, as a rule, I emerge only with shame and disgrace’. Vincent to his sister Willemien, from Paris, end of October 1887
Two types of women
It’s difficult to say why things didn’t work out for Vincent. What we do know is that his perception of women helped determine the course of his love life. In Vincent’s eyes, there were
These two types of women are a recurring theme in Vincent’s love life. He often idealised the women who he fell in love with. Or his love grew from a sense of pity, and from wanting to help a woman.
Who did Vincent fall in love with? And why did this love always come to nothing? Read on to find out more about Vincent’s four most important loves.
Kee Vos-Stricker with her son Jan, 1879-1880
1. Kee Vos-Stricker
In the summer of 1881, when Vincent was 28, he fell head over heels in love with his cousin Kee Vos-Stricker. The one-sided love affair started when Vincent was staying with his parents in Etten. Kee was also staying there, after recently becoming a widow. Vincent’s feelings ran away with him. He wrote to his brother Theo: ‘I wanted to tell you that this summer I’ve come to love Kee Vos so much that I could find no other words for it than ‘it’s just as if Kee Vos were the closest person to me and I the closest person to Kee Vos’. And – I said these words to her’. Kee did not see her cousin as husband material, however, answering ‘No, nay, never’ to his repeated proposals.
Vincent ignored this blunt answer, and went looking for Kee at her home in Amsterdam later that year. It didn’t help; his cousin didn’t want to see him. Vincent’s parents and the rest of the family thought that his feelings for Kee were inappropriate. Perhaps they were right, but Vincent was terribly upset about the situation.
Years later, Vincent wrote to Theo about Kee: ‘it is and will remain a wound which I live above but which is there deep down and cannot heal’.
2. Sien Hoornik
A year later, Vincent got to know Sien Hoornik on the streets of The Hague. Sien worked as a prostitute, was pregnant and already had a young daughter. Vincent wanted to take care of them, and moved them into the little studio where he was living. His intense longing for a family seemed to be taking shape. Vincent, Sien and the children lived together happily for a while. But this love was unfortunately also doomed. This may have had something to do with the fact that Vincent’s feelings for Sien were not as strong as they were for Kee.
Vincent wrote to Theo: ‘My feelings for her are less passionate than my feelings last year for Kee Vos, but a love like mine for Sien is the only kind I’m capable of. She and I are two unfortunates who keep each other company and bear the burden together, and it’s in that way that unhappiness is turned into happiness and the unbearable is made bearable’. Vincent’s family pressured him to end the relationship. Both his parents and Theo disapproved of the couple living together without being married, especially because Sien was a woman from a lower social class, who had previously worked as a prostitute.
Vincent also started to have his doubts. Sien stayed close with her mother and brother, exactly the people who had brought her into prostitution. Vincent was concerned that she would return to her old ways if she didn’t cut ties with her family.
In the eighteen months that they were together, Vincent made a number of drawings of Sien and her children.
Vincent van Gogh, Head of a Woman, 1883. Presumably a portrait of Sien Hoornik
Vincent van Gogh, Woman Sewing, with a Girl, 1883. Presumably Sien Hoornik and her daughter
Vincent van Gogh, Baby, 1883. Drawing inspired by Willem, the son of Sien Hoornik
Margot Begemann (1841-1907)
3. Margot Begemann
Vincent’s mother and pastor father worried intensely about their son’s troubled love life. They were uncomfortable with Kee being family, and they were appalled by Vincent’s plan to marry Sien. When that was all over, Vincent fell for another woman who those around him considered a dubious choice. In 1884, the 30-year-old Vincent moved back in with his parents in Nuenen. He got involved with his neighbour, Margot Begemann, who was mentally unstable. This was another love that largely grew out of sympathy. Vincent wrote to his brother: ‘Theo, I feel such damned pity for this woman’. Vincent wanted to marry Margot, but her sisters and his parents opposed the union. They didn’t think that the couple were a good match. The affair ended dramatically. When Margot heard that her family were against the relationship with Vincent, she tried to kill herself. Margot survived, but the relationship was beyond saving.
4. Agostina Segatori
Vincent had difficulty being alone. He often longed for a wife and a family, but he remained single. His unlucky love streak continued in Paris, to where he moved at the age of 32 (in 1886). In the City of Love, Vincent met Agostina Segatori. She was the Italian owner of the restaurant Le Tambourin, on the Boulevard de Clichy. The two had a relationship, and according to Vincent’s friend Paul Gauguin, he was deeply in love with her.
On the portrait that Vincent painted of Agostina, she is sitting on a stool at a table shaped like a tambourine. There is a glass of beer on the table, and Agostina holds a lit cigarette. The saucers under the glass on the table betray the fact that she is on her second beer. The café was popular among artists, who often exhibited their work there. Vincent also exhibited his paintings in the café.
We don’t know exactly how the relationship ended, but it didn’t last longer than a few months. Vincent wrote:
‘As far as Miss Segatori is concerned, that’s another matter altogether. I still feel affection for her and I hope she still feels some for me. But now she’s in an awkward position’.
Vincent must have been very fond of Agostina. In the period that they were seeing each other, he made several paintings of courting couples. The most famous of these is Garden with Courting Couples, a romantic vision of the little park at Square Saint-Pierre. Could it be that Vincent painted himself here – in a blue smock and straw hat – next to the woman with the parasol?
Vincent van Gogh, In the Café: Agostina Segatori in Le Tambourin, 1887
Vincent van Gogh, Garden with Courting Couples: Square Saint-Pierre, 1887
Acceptance
After so many failed relationships and attempts, Vincent eventually came to accept that being lucky in love was perhaps not written in his stars, even though – like many of us – he wanted to love, and be loved. Years earlier, he wrote: ‘If you wake up in the morning and you’re not alone and you see in the twilight a fellow human being, it makes the world so much more agreeable’.
We’ll never really know why Vincent was so unlucky in love. He may have been difficult to get along with. And it probably didn’t help that he fell for women who he thought needed ‘saving’. But these aren’t real answers. It sometimes simply doesn’t work out, and that is sad.
‘I still love art and life very much, but as to ever having a wife of my own I don’t believe in it very strongly’.
A new life in the South of France
Vincent ultimately gave up hope of ever finding love, which brought him peace. He moved to the South of France and found comfort in his ‘requited loves’: art, nature and his brother Theo. What he didn’t know at the time was that this would become one of his most productive periods as an artist.
