A train stops at Hoogeveen station. As the chimney belches out clouds of smoke, a door opens. It is September 11, 1883. A remarkable man steps out, an artist. Depressed, but also filled with hope. It is perhaps the most famous person to ever get off the bus in Hoogeveen. Vincent van Gogh.
There’s a good chance he looked around in some amazement. Several hours earlier he had boarded a train in The Hague, which takes him to Drenthe. The province of Drenthe, the place where the German landscape painter Max Liebermann travels every year. Brother Theo pointed this out to Vincent after he saw Liebermann’s art a year earlier. And his friend Anthon van Rappard also thinks it would be a good idea for Van Gogh to go to Drenthe.
“Van Rappard advised Van Gogh to seek peace in the countryside,” says 80-year-old Brabant Van Gogh expert Ton de Brouwer. Because Van Gogh had a hard time in that period. “He had been apprenticed as a painter to Anton Mauve, a cousin by marriage. At the same time he had a relationship with Sien Hoornik, a prostitute. He wanted a family with her, but that went wrong.”
Van Gogh leaves Sien. Destitute. With money from his brother, he takes the train to Hoogeveen. The artist was 30 years old at the time and was at the beginning of his career as a painter. But he is also a man who has had a whole life behind him. He lived in London and Paris and was in the art trade. But depression is already playing tricks on him. A life as a lay preacher is also not for the Brabant son of a preacher. His happiness may lie in the peace and quiet of the countryside.
Van Gogh starts his period in Drenthe with good courage. He will stay in Hoogeveen for about three weeks, after which he will travel to New Amsterdam by barge.
According to De Brouwer, the aspiring artist is very impressed by Drenthe’s nature. “In letters he describes it as ‘superb’, amazing. But it is the beginning of autumn. Then the heather is no longer in bloom and everything becomes barren.” He paints some paintings and makes drawings. Not much, for a painter who produced a lot more in the years that followed. “Van Gogh was here to develop as a painter,” said the Brabant expert.
The painter likes the Drenthe nature, but he remains an outsider in Protestant Drenthe. “You have to see it in the spirit of the times,” De Brouwer thinks. “Such a strange guy as an artist stands out. Artists did not belong there, they belonged in Amsterdam. He was probably given the cold shoulder. Moreover, he also asked women if he could draw and paint them. That was not the intention at that time. And possibly stories were also trumpeted that he had hooked up with a whore in The Hague. Then people keep their distance.”