Focus on this artwork and explore the Background.
Anna Carbentus van Gogh was an amateur artist who enjoyed making drawings of plants and flowers and was a "keen watercolorist". At the same time, it should be recognized that drawing and painting with watercolors was a common activity by the bourgeois strata at that time.  From a large family, one of six children, Anna raised six children: Vincent, Anna, Elizabeth, Theo, Wilhelmien and Cornelius.  Anna enjoyed sharing her love of art with her children.  Among Vincent's earliest drawings are copies of his mother's sketches of a bouquet of flowers and thistles.Anna's husband, Theodorus van Gogh, was a pastor, a long-standing family profession.  Theodorus, known for his good looks and long sermons, came from a family of seven children. Anna and Theodorus devotedly served the rural communities in which they were stationed; their actions modeled their religious beliefs. Both mother and father believed that God was omnipotent, continually watching over them.  They taught their children to look for God's presence in nature, such as the shape of the clouds or in the many colors in the sunsets. Theodorus van Gogh's favorite poet, Reverend Bernard ter Haar wrote in the poem "Song of Praise to Creation":
"I lose myself in you, Nature,
How my mental powers yield,
Around which the Universe turns,
Exclaim the glory of the centuries,
Proclaim!
Or — be quiet, my toy, be silent!
Hear what Creation
Is singing!
To fall silent is very meaningful here —
And might be called reverence."At the age of eleven Van Gogh was sent to boarding schools for training, which initiated his lifelong feelings of exile.  Van Gogh felt even more removed from the family after failing as an art dealer and in the ministry.  When he decided to become an artist, his family members suggested possible alternate, more lucrative vocations which widened the division between Vincent and his family.  Van Gogh's manner of dress, behavior and unusual love life was unsettling and embarrassing to the family.  Vincent too felt a division.  By 1881 Vincent had developed his personal view of the world and realized it was quite different than his parents.  To his brother, Theo he wrote "I can't settle into Father's and Mother's system, it is too stifling and would suffocate me." He continues, "I find Father and Mother's sermons and ideas about God, people, morality and virtue a lot of stuff and nonsense."When Vincent was hospitalized in Arles in 1888–1889, his mother wrote to Theo, "I believe he was always ill and his suffering and ours was a result of it.  Poor brother of Vincent, sweetest dearest Theo, you to have been very worried and troubled because of him."  She then said, "I would ask, 'Take him, Lord.'"As Vincent rose to the height of his career, he 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.
Wil Theo Arles