The image of van Gogh as a disturbed and forsaken artist is so strong that one easily reads it back into his childhood and adolescence. But if van Gogh had died at age of twenty, no one would have connected him with failure or mental illness. Instead he would have been remembered by those close to him as a competent and dutiful son with a promising career in the family art-detailing business. He was, in fact, poised to surpass his father and to come closer to living up to the much-esteemed van Gogh name . The van Goghs were an old and distinguished Dutch family who could trace their lineage in Holland back to the sixteenth century. Among Vincent’s five uncles, one reached the highest rank of vice-admiral in the Navy and three others prospered as successful art dealers. Van Gogh’s grandfather. also named Vincent, had attained an equally illustrious status as an intellectually accomplished Protestant minister. The comparatively modest achievements of the artist’s father, Theodorus, proved the exception, not the rule. Although Theodorus was the only one of grandfather Vincent’s six sons to follow him into the ministry, he faltered as a preacher and could obtain only modest positions in provincial churches.