Sien (Van Gogh series)

Van Gogh made drawings and paintings of Sien and her daughter, baby and mother over that period, which reflected the domestic life and hardships of the working poor.

On 22 November 1904, aged 54, she threw herself into the Schelde river and drowned, fulfilling a prediction she had made to Van Gogh in 1883: "what the bad moods are is still more desperate ... 'it's bound to end up with me jumping into the water.

[11][12] Mauve was a successful and noted artist, a leading member of the Hague School and a master colorist whose paintings found a ready market both home and abroad.

[13][14] After a last, humiliating effort to win Kee over, an episode that severely rocked his religious faith, Van Gogh returned to his parents' home in Etten in late 1881.

[13][17][18] At the end of January 1882, Van Gogh met a homeless, pregnant prostitute named Clasina (Sien) Maria Hoornik who had been deserted by the father of the child she was carrying.

[18] It has also been suggested that the woman he "found" following his humiliating rejection by his cousin Kee Vos, as described in a letter to Theo around 23 December the preceding year and immediately before his final estrangement from his father that Christmas Day, was in fact Sien, although there is no direct evidence for the surmise.

[22] Sien was born in 1850, the eldest of ten children of Pieter Hoornik, a porter in the poor district of the Geest, and his wife.

For a time Sien and some of her siblings lived at a Catholic orphanage, relying on assistance from the public soup kitchen and church charities.

Sien experienced poor health due to the post-operative effects of earlier surgeries, illness, and venereal disease, which she seems to have passed to Van Gogh, who was hospitalized in June 1882 for gonorrhea.

Disobeying doctor's orders, he left the hospital July 1 to visit Sien in Leiden, where she had just given birth to a baby boy.

[25] His teacher and cousin-in-law, Anton Mauve, abruptly ceased his support and tutelage within a few weeks of Van Gogh first meeting Sien, although there were other factors involved as well, not least their mutual melancholy.

[28] Shortly after this, they fell out with each other over an issue involving drawing from plaster casts, which Mauve was anxious Van Gogh should undertake to perfect his technique.

Van Gogh, however, vehemently insisted on drawing from models, and in a fit of pique destroyed some plaster casts of hands and feet that Mauve had given him to make studies from.

Van Gogh frequently referred to them in his letters, and he had obtained a complete set of back numbers of The Graphic between 1870 and 1880, decorating his studio with his favorite prints.

In his moving letter of 16 May 1882, describing his final humiliation from the family of Kee Vos and how he had come to meet Sien and his relationship with her, he wrote:[15]I want to go through the domestic joys and sorrows myself so that I can draw them from experience.

At the same time, Van Gogh had discovered his orphan man, Adrianus Jacobus Zuyderland, who was to become his favourite and most patient model.

[46] Regarding Woman Seated, it is curious that he posed Sien in a dress identical to one worn by Kee Vos Stricker, as can be verified by the photograph of Kee Vos and her son catalogued in the Dutch national archive Geheugen van Nederland and held in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (reproduced top left).

[56] Van Gogh and his contemporary George Hendrik Breitner had sketched together at a soup kitchen in the Geest (it is not known which of the several possibilities it was).

After going to the trouble and expense of installing shutters in his windows to adjust the light and to recreate the scene itself in his studio, Van Gogh was able to study his models at leisure.

[57][58] In this way he was able to introduce more chiaroscuro (light and dark) in his drawing, which he executed with the natural ('mountain') chalk that Theo had sent him and whose properties he lauds in his letters.

[59] In 1956 biopic about Van Gogh, Lust for Life, Christina (played by Pamela Brown) is a poor single mother and occasional prostitute who lives with Vincent.