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conceits, Anna used the garden to school her children in the “meanings” of nature. Not only did the cycle of seasons recapitulate the cycle of life, but that cycle could be marked out in the blooming and fading of certain plants: violets represented the courage of both spring and youth; ivy, the promise of life to come in both winter and death. Hope could rise from despair “even as the blossom falls from the tree and vigorous new life shoots up,” Vincent later wrote. Trees—especially tree roots—affirmed the promise of life after death. (Karr claimed that certain trees, like the cypress, “grow in cemeteries more beautifully and vigorously than elsewhere.”) In Anna’s garden, the sun was the “Sweet Lord” whose light gave life to plants just as God gave “peace to our hearts”; and stars were the sun’s promise to return in the morning to “make light out of darkness.”
    All the lessons in symbolism that Vincent eventually transformed into paint—from Christian mythology, from art and literature—all first took root in his mother’s garden.
    The Van Gogh family ate where they lived, in the back room of the parsonage. Like everything in Anna’s life, food was subject to conventions. Modest and regular eating was considered crucial to both good health and moral wholeness. But with two cooks in the tiny kitchen, Anna could indulge her middle-class aspirations to larger, more elaborate repasts, especially on Sundays. If evening meals were the daily worship service of the “cult of the family,” Sunday dinner was its high mass. These quiet extravagances of four- and five-course dinners left a deep impression on all her children, especially Vincent, whose lifelong obsession with food and sporadic attempts at self-starvation mirrored his turbulent family relations.
    After dinner, everyone gathered around the stove for another ritual: instruction in family history. Father Dorus, who was “well informed on such matters” according to his daughter Lies, told tales of illustrious ancestors who had served their country through its many trials. These stories of past distinction consoled Anna’s isolation on the heath by reconnecting her to the culture and class she had left behind. Like virtually everyone in their generation, Anna and Dorus van Gogh felt a profound nostalgia for their country’s past—especiallyits seventeenth-century “Golden Age” when the coastal city-states ruled the world’s oceans, nurtured an empire, and mentored Western civilization in science and art. The stoveside lessons transmitted to their family not just a fascination with history, but also a vague longing for this lost Eden.
    All of Anna and Dorus’s children inherited their nostalgia for the past, both their country’s and their family’s. But none felt the bittersweet tug as sharply as their eldest son, Vincent, who later described himself as “enchanted by snatches of the past.” As an adult, he would devour histories and novels set in previous eras—eras he always imagined as better, purer than his own. In everything from architecture to literature, he lamented the lost virtues of earlier times (“the difficult but noble days”) and the inadequacies of the dull and “unfeeling” present. For Vincent, civilization would forever be “in decline,” and society invariably “corrupt.” “I feel more and more a kind of void,” he later said, “which I cannot fill with the things of today.”
    In art, Vincent would cast himself repeatedly as the champion of neglected artists, archaic subject matter, and bygone movements. His commentaries on the art and artists of his own day would be filled with jeremiads, reactionary outbursts, and melancholy paeans to artistic Edens come and gone. Like his mother, he keenly felt the elusiveness and evanescence of happiness—“the desperately swift passing away of things in modern life”—and trusted only memory to capture and hold it. Throughout his life, his thoughts