Vincent Van Gogh painted many pictures of a woman named Clasina Maria Hoornik, better known as Sien. Sien was a pregnant prostitute who he used as a model for his work. Vincent and Sien eventually were in a relationship but after Sien had her second child she was told by her mother to go back to being a prostitute, as she would make more money than she did as a model for Van Gogh. All the paintings of her are domestic and sorrowful. She's shown old, aged, and worn out. It seems to me that the two of them had a complicated relaitionship, or that she was unhappy. You would think that Sien didn't actually love him from these pictures, but that is not the case. She loved him so much that when she had to leave him she led a life filled with tradegy and profound unhappiness.
Sien seems to be the only woman to have ever truly loved Vincent. After she left him, she went on to live a miserable life. She had to give custody of her children to her siblings and married a man, Arnoldos Franciscus van Wijk, for convience. She had once told Vincent, "Yes, I am a whore...it's bound to end up with me jumping in the water" which she later fulfilled that in 1904 by drowning herself in the Schelde River. Van Gogh then wrote, in Letter 216, "As long as I drown at the same time, I don't care. But we felt distinctly enough that her life and my life are as one . . . .". The two of them loved eachother very much, which is not what I would of thought after seeing all the sorrowful and pained images of her.
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