SAVING VINCENT

Fernandez’s historical novel chronicles the life of Vincent van Gogh’s sister-in-law, whose passion and tireless efforts brought recognition and fame to the prolific artist’s work.

Jo van Gogh has been married to Vincent’s brother Theo for just 22 months. After suffering a mental breakdown, Theo has been in an institution for the past three months, and Jo awaits his return. She opens the door to her brother Dries, expecting to see her husband standing with him. Instead, Dries tells her that Theo has died, leaving Jo to raise their infant son alone and bequeathing her Vincent’s works (this occurs barely half a year after the painter’s suicide). Theo was the manager of a prestigious gallery in Paris’ artsy Montmartre district, and he was his brother’s enthusiastic representative. But Vincent’s bold impressionist paintings are treated with disdain by Paris’ elite traditionalist art purveyors, and they are the ones who control the market. A distraught Jo faces a decision—her father wants her to leave Paris and move back to her family home in Holland with the baby Vincentje, but she refuses to live under his rule again. Instead, she rents a boarding house in the small Dutch town of Bussum and turns it into a guesthouse. She brings with her Vincent’s extensive collection of original paintings and drawings, which she intends to exhibit and begin selling. With Theo’s devotion to his brother and her own passion for her brother-in-law’s paintings and drawings as her inspirations, Jo enters a battle fraught with danger, working determinedly to combat her own insecurities (“She’d always doubted herself, always assumed others knew best”) and the scorn of family, friends, and Vincent’s enemies. Through prodigious research, which involved combing through Vincent’s letters to Theo and their fragile sister, Fernandez crafts a compelling narrative that depicts Vincent’s internal struggles as well as the cutthroat business side of the art world and the societal changes roiling the turn of the century. Despite occasionally repetitive descriptions of the paintings, readers are likely to find themselves searching out images of the works Fernandez portrays so lovingly.

An intriguing art- and history-filled tribute to an oft-overlooked dynamic woman.