In the context of this artwork, explore the Anna, Elizabeth, and Cornelius of the Family.
Vincent did not have a close relationship with Elizabeth (Lies) or Cornelius (Cor) his youngest brother.Anna lived with Vincent in London for a period in 1874-5. Their initially warm relationship became strained; in April 1875, Anna wrote about Vincent's behaviour to Theo: "I believe that he has illusions about people and judges people before he knows them, and then when he finds out what they're really like and they don't live up to the opinion he formed of them prematurely, he's so disappointed that he throws them away like a bouquet of wilted flowers, without looking to see whether or not there are some among those wilted flowers which, when handled with care, are not quite rubbish yet." She married Joan Marius van Houten in August 1878. Vincent attended the wedding, but relations with his sister remained cool; Anna complained about his aloofness and characterized him as a "wooden lion" After their father's death in 1885 the two became estranged.
The youngest Van Gogh sibling, Cor, left the Netherlands for South Africa during the Second Boer War (1899-1902). In Pretoria, he was employed to make technical drawings for the Netherlands-South African Railway Company (Nederlandsh-Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg Maatschappij).  In Pretoria he married Anna Eva Catherina Fuchs, a German-born Roman Catholic, in February 1898. His wife abandoned the marriage eight months later, taking their possessions.  Following that debacle, Cor joined a special "Foreigners Battalion" to fight the British. Cor and his fellow volunteers fared badly in combat. He was admitted to a Red Cross hospital with a fever. The ill-supplied hospital lacked Dutch physicians and nurses, who had just been evacuated. Cor was left in possession of his pistol when hospitalized.  On 12 April 1900 he shot himself in his hospital bed, perhaps accidentally. His mother was under the impression that he had died in combat.
Theo Pretoria Second Boer War London left Netherlands