A Widow's Resolve: The Societal Norms Jo Shattered to Make History

Glass ceilings be damned

Photo by Filip Strueven on Unsplash

Unexpected crossroads spring up in life.

Some happy, some tragically sad.

People like us know that while the crossroad-event can be a catalyst, in and of itself, what truly makes a difference is how we respond to it.

And sometimes, without us even knowing it, we find out we've been preparing for this moment, and a path has been laid out for us to follow.

As a result, impossible things become possible. Jo van Gogh’s example—who had a worldwide impact beyond her wildest dreams—lights a path for us to follow.

It’s because of this that in two weeks I’ll be acknowledging the hundredth anniversary of Jo’s death on September 2. In the century that’s followed Jo’s passing in 1925, the Van Gogh “worthless” inheritance she worked so hard to preserve has grown into a many-billions-of-dollars legacy.

Today’s post is the second* of four essays commemorating her centennial, especially the Victorian-era glass ceiling norms she had to crack, and then shatter.

A Widow's Legal Advantage, A Social Disadvantage

Jo’s “crossroad moment” came with the death of her art-dealer husband Theo (Vincent van Gogh’s brother).

At 27-years-old she was unexpectedly a widow and single parent. Married less than two years.

Yet, with the exception of her personal grief, becoming a widow would not be the challenging part.

Compared to their counterparts in many other nations, Dutch widows actually enjoyed a legal framework enabling them to continue their households, raise their children, and even

take over and run their husband's businesses.

Here’s a few highlights:

• Community of property: This default legal arrangement meant all assets and debts of both spouses, whether acquired before or during the marriage, were pooled into a single estate. This was a crucial point.

  
  

• Widow and children as equal heirs: Moms and kids were a single group of heirs, receiving an equal share of the deceased's half of the estate. So when Theo died his estate (which included Vincent’s art) was equally split between Jo and their one-year-old son (named Vincent after his artist uncle). Son Vincent would have to wait to age 25 to claim it.

  
  

• Enter into contracts: As a legal agent, a widow could sign contracts, take out mortgages, and conduct business in her own name.

  
  

• Continue her husband's business: It was a common practice for widows to take over and run their deceased husband's business, particularly in trades and small-scale industries. Readers of my book may recall that its climactic scene occurs at a Rotterdam art gallery owned by a widow.

  
  

But here’s the rub: Just because Jo had the legal right to conduct business by taking up her husband’s art-dealing, it didn’t mean a welcome mat was automatically laid out. At the turn of the century, Paris was the epicenter of the art world. Art dealing was a dogfight—a monster money-maker—all controlled by a few power brokers.

And they’d already proclaimed Van Gogh art dead.

She might own the artwork, but there’s no way she could call the shots. After all, even Theo had struggled to sell Vincent’s work, ultimately making only one sale before his death.

The societal tenet would be for Jo to step aside. Let Theo’s and Vincent’s friends do their best to try to scare up a few sales of Vincent’s art, even if only for a year or so.

The art world held a formidable bullet-proof glass ceiling over Jo’s head.

The Alluring Path of Family Expectations

Secondly, upon Theo’s death, Jo felt the yank of family pressure immediately.

Her workaholic father proudly supported a rising middle-class lifestyle. “Come back to Amsterdam,” he ordered Jo. “I’ll take care of you.”

How easy, right? I think crossroads can often offer a safe, “go back” option.

No one would have blamed Jo for obeying her father. As the fifth child of seven (and third daughter) she’d been indulged a bit. Plus her two older unmarried sisters gushed at the idea of helping to raise the baby.

Instead, Jo stiff-armed this social norm. She about-faced into becoming a small business owner by deciding to open a boarding house in the small Dutch town of Bussum instead. Yet, other than disappointing her family, it actually wasn’t a radical move.

Boarding houses were a common occupation for widows. Culturally endorsed.

After all, Victorian-era middle-class women belonged in the private sphere of running households and raising children, whether married or widowed. The public sphere—where men worked and ran politics—was an exclusive male domain. Jo would have grown up internalizing that gender division—her father in the world of work and industrialization, and her mother as queen of the domestic household.

Women have smaller brains, Jo would have learned. Incapable of understanding business. And females were physically much weaker than males, she would have internalized. Impossible that she could take the strain of commerce, much less have the resiliency to handle Industrial Age wrangling.

And it was her duty to obey ironclad gender separation for society’s sake. During my research, I came across a French newspaper headline with this sentiment. After its series of deadly conflicts earlier in the mid-1800’s, Paris’ population was decimated. Women had a patriotic obligation to have more children, it declared.

Stay in your lane.

Another glass ceiling for Jo, this one clouded by the threat of being a social pariah.

Yet, unimpressed, what did she do? Even in the throes of grief, she decided to have all the art in their Paris apartment (estimated to be 400 Van Gogh’s) shipped to the boarding house. Stored in the attic. Removing it from the epicenter of art.

Consolidating the collection would be the first step to prepare for outreach to Dutch galleries and dealers to show Vincent’s work.

Uh-oh. A merger of public and private spheres under the same (literally) roof!

Colossal societal faux-pas!

Surely, she’s just veered down the wrong path from the crossroads brought about by Theo’s death.

She would pay.

The Vicious Backlash of the Art World

The pushback to Jo’s promotion of Vincent’s art was vicious.

The most prominent example is the influential German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe. He reflects a strong sense of a male-dominated, intellectual art world grappling with the rise of Van Gogh, and a clear dismissal of Jo's role.

The general sentiment of the criticism was that Jo was an emotional and uneducated woman whose promotion of Vincent's art was a naive, even manipulative, act based on sentimental love rather than a true understanding of art. They believed:

• She was not a professional: As a woman with no formal art education or a professional background as a dealer or critic, her efforts were seen as amateurish and presumptuous.

  
  

• Her motives were sentimental, not artistic: They dismissed her efforts as the actions of a grieving widow clinging to a personal, familial connection rather than a genuine appreciation for the artist's work.

  
  

• The work itself was "ugly" or "mad": Many critics in the 1890s and early 1900s still saw Vincent's work as the product of a disturbed mind, not as the work of a genius. They believed a professional art dealer would never have promoted it as she did.

  
  

Her advocacy? Met by a blunt condescending, patriarchal dismissal. Her actions? "The pious cult of the dead brother." Instead of being a legitimate professional effort to secure an artist's legacy, her work was diminished as a limp, religious-like devotion to a family member.

Taking that particular path from the crossroads brought Jo ridicule. Looks like a painful mistake. And a glass ceiling with embedded barbed wire.

So, why did she continue?

An Unconventional Path to Unwavering Conviction

While writing my book, I asked myself this question a lot: What gave Jo the conviction to keep going, especially in the beginning?

Here are a few ideas:

Theo broke the public/private sphere barrier by sharing his work with Jo. Prior to being married, they wrote about one hundred letters as fiancés describing what they looked for in a marriage. Theo yearns for a partner he can share the stresses of the art dealing profession. And so, Jo asks him questions about his world: How do you know when art is good? What do you look for? It would be the beginning of an unusual partnership. AndI believe, for Jo, it would act as an informal apprenticeship.

And a year after Theo’s death, Jo would discover and begin to read the enormous cache of Vincent’s letters to his brother. Through that correspondence, her elusive brother-in-law and his passion and uniqueness would come to life. Not only did she carry Theo’s faith in Vincent’s talents, but now she held her own.

Jo would initially focus on outreach to Dutch art dealers and galleries. By leaning in to their shared nationality with Vincent, Jo created a connection and space for them to consider their deceased Dutch countryman’s work. I imagine that their openness to Vincent gave Jo a much-needed nod of encouragement.

And so, step by step, the path toward Vincent’s acceptance would begin to unfold.

The objections and pushback were far from over, but as Jo sold paintings and raised their prices, the art establishment began to come around. The crossroads of Theo's death was not a dead end but an opportunity.

She had refused to get trapped beneath society’s many glass ceilings.

I believe Jo's story is a powerful testament to Viktor Frankl’s insight: “It is not life's events, but how one reacts to them…which determine whether the events have a positive or negative effect on one's life, whether they are experienced as opportunity or stress.”

What happens when we turn tragedy into a springboard?

Possibilities.

When you face an unconventional path at a crossroads, what gives you the conviction to

keep going?

Warmly,