Follow in Van Gogh’s footsteps on an off-the-beaten-track Netherlands tour

If cemeteries are travel’s greatest source of stories, real or imagined, I’m saying that nowhere is this truer than in the shade of a modest Dutch Reformed church in the south of the Netherlands. Because among the headstones lying as flat as the country itself, is one that marks the final resting place of Vincent van Gogh.

Or so it might seem to anyone but the eagle-eyed historian, who’d know that Painter Vincent wasn’t actually born in 1852, or the linguist, who’d know that ‘kinder’ means child. Both are clues that this isn’t in fact the burial site of The Vincent, but of a namesake: his stillborn brother, born one year previous, to the very day.

I’m in Zundert, an unassuming village in the province of Brabant, where iconic Vincent was born 170 years ago. Lesser known than Arles in Provence where he painted Sunflowers and famously did away with his ear, and perhaps than Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris where he painted Wheatfield with Crows and tragically took his own life, his hometown is the bedrock backstory crucial to our understanding of the young and rebellious yet passionate and optimistic Van Gogh, and of his perpetual die-hard mission to be closer to love, purpose and nature.

Just as I’m contemplating the conflicting emotions both Vincents’ mother must have had on the day her second son was born, I’m enlightened on another brother, Theo, as I stand beneath his wall-spanning photographic portrait on the site of the childhood home next door to the churchyard.

Among carefully curated quotes, tokens from nature (the boy Vincent rarely returned home post-ramble without a spider, nest or plant), and contemporary artistic interpretations, our guide casually mentions something I’ve never heard before: a suggestion that, in later life, art dealer Theo was kind enough to let Vincent think his paintings were successfully selling. It’s a twist in the sale tale given the commonly held theory that only one ever sold in his lifetime.

Read more on Netherlands travel:

As if this sibling spin doesn’t tell me everything I need to know about Theo – poster boy for “Be Kind” – a sculpture outside affirms it. Bronze and entwined, two figures huddle in a space where their conjoined heart would be. It’s unclear to me which is Theo and which Vincent,…