If you love Vincent van Gogh’s art, you probably feel that most stories about this artist have been told already. But wait, there’s room for one more. Vincent and Sien is a fictional account of Vincent’s time with Sien Hoornik. It’s a historical fact that Sien was a pregnant prostitute in the Hague, with a six year-old daughter Maria, when Vincent took her into his home as a model and lover. At that time, he was at an early stage in his development as an artist and mostly did sketches of domestic life and the working poor and their hardships. He was dependent on monthly allowances from his brother Theo, an art dealer, who encouraged Vincent to further his career with lessons and connections with other artists. Theo did not approve of Vincent’s relationship with Sien and he was worried that the allowance would go to support this new family rather than Vincent’s artist career.
There are more than fifty drawings of Sien and her family. Many of them strong, unromantic sketches, conveying the hardships she’d endured. He rejects requests from the art world to add some beauty to the starkness of his subjects to make the paintings more commercial. Vincent and Sien are together for eighteen months and through Sien’s eyes Silvia Kwon has given us an insightful account of Vincent’s stubbornness and his frustration with anything that stands in the way of his vision of his art including other artists, debt collectors and Sien and her family.
I am grateful for the way the author has brought to life a period in Van Gogh’s life that I was unfamiliar with and uninterested in. She did what Tracy Chevalier did to Vermeer in her book Girl with a Pearl Earring. What puzzles me, however, is why the publishers have put the beautiful and well-known image of Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom on the cover. The publisher’s understandable choice of an attractive image, grates with the dark and stark art that reflects his time with Sien. Vincent would turn in his grave.
Wilma
