VINCENT'S WOMEN

Russo dramatizes the famous painter’s life, focusing on the women who knew him, in this historical novel.

Vincent van Gogh is one of the most studied painters in history—and one of the least understood. Though his letters to his brother, Theo, reveal one side of the man’s tortured soul, there were other Vincents, witnessed only by the women he knew in various periods of his life. His mother, Anna Carbentus van Gogh, names him for his dead brother but finds him impossible to love in the same way. Madame Estere Denis, the French baker whose husband hires Vincent to tutor their sons, sees the beginnings of the man’s “religious madness.” Sien Hoornik, a Dutch sex worker, lives with Van Gogh, who almost becomes a father to her children, and inspires a series of intense drawings. Sister Epiphany, a nun, supervises Van Gogh when he is placed in an asylum due to his delusions. There are also the many women who break his heart: Eugenie Loyer, the flirtatious daughter of his landlady in London; his cousin, the widowed Cornelia Stricker Vos; and his mother’s nurse, Margot Begemann, who proves almost as unstable as Vincent. These stories are framed by the woman who perhaps understood Vincent the best: his sister-in-law, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. Speaking on her deathbed, Johanna dramatically reveals a secret about Vincent’s fate that she has carried for years. Russo’s lilting prose perfectly captures both the period and van Gogh’s roiling energy, as here when he courts Margot Begemann: “They walked together more often after that. Still never leaving or returning together. Propriety required it. The fear of her sisters demanded it. Vincent was forever on the tips of their spiteful, wagging tongues.” Though Russo slips into hagiographic sentimentality toward the end of the book, the earlier, subtler vignettes—particularly the stories of Hoornik and Begemann—provide rich and psychologically complex windows into the lives of not only the famous artist but the just-as-interesting women whose histories he passed through.

A symphonic novel that sheds new light on an elusive genius.