Explore the Anna van Gogh about the Father and mother of this artwork.
Anna Cornelia Carbentus was born 10 September 1819 at The Hague to Willem Carbentus, who was a royal bookbinder. Her younger sister Cornelia married Theodorus' brother, Vincent van Gogh, the art dealer, and her older sister married a clergyman named Stricker. Anna became a devout and helpful clergyman's wife, helping her husband in the parish. She enjoyed art and was artistically inclined, "filling notebooks with drawings of plants and flowers" and studied painting with Hendrik van de Sande Bakhuyzen.  She outlived her three grown sons and her husband, yet still retained "her energy and spirit and bore her sorrow with rare courage."Portrait of the Artist's Mother (Van Gogh) (F477) was based upon a black-and-white photograph of his mother. Vincent's mother appears to be a respectable middle class woman, attentive and proud, against a green background.
Van Gogh painted Memory of the Garden at Etten (F496) to hang in his bedroom. He envisioned the older woman was his mother and the younger in a plaid shawl his sister Wil.  To Wil he said he had "an impression of you like those in Dickens' novels."  Wil stands behind her mother in the painting.  Behind them is a woman bent over working the garden.  Mother and daughter fill the foreground of the left picture frame, seemingly walking out of the scene.  In a letter to his sister he described the painting: "The younger of the two ladies who are out for a walk is wearing a Scottish shawl with green and orange checks, and a red parasol. The old lady has a violet shawl, nearly black. But a bunch of dahlias, some of them citron yellow, the others pink and white mixed, are like an explosion of color on the somber figure. Behind them a few cedar shrubs and emerald-green cypresses. Behind the cypresses one sees a field of pale green and red cabbages, surrounded by a border of little white flowers. The sandy path is of a raw orange color; the foliage of the two beds of scarlet geraniums is very green. Finally, the interjacent plane, there is a maid-servant, dressed in blue, who is arranging a profusion of plants with white, pink, yellow and vermilion-red flowers."
"Here you are. I know this is hardly what one might call a likeness, but for me it renders the poetic character and the style of the garden as I feel it. All the same, let us suppose that the two ladies out for a walk are you and our mother; let us even suppose that there is not the least, absolutely not the least vulgar and fatuous resemblance – yet the deliberate choice of color, the somber violet with the blotch of violent citron yellow of the dahlias, suggests Mother's personality to me."
"The figure in the Scotch plaid with orange and green checks stands out against the somber green of the cypress, which contrast is further accentuated by the red parasol – this figure gives me an impression of you like those in Dickens's novels, a vaguely representative figure."
As he rose to the height of his career, Vincent enjoyed passing on prized paintings to his family.  "Great bouquets of flowers, violet-colored irises, great bouquets of roses," went to his mother.  Another example, "the most resolved and stylized of the three" paintings of women picking olives was made for his sister and mother.
Theo Portrait of the Artist's Mother (Van Gogh) bookbinder Memory of the Garden at Etten Dickens The Hague Hendrik van de Sande Bakhuyzen Portrait of the Artist's Mother plaid Vincent van Gogh F496 Wil left