Cor, Vincent's other brother - three photographs of Cornelis van Gogh

 

Cornelis "Cor" van Gogh
(17 May 1867, Zundert, The Netherlands - 14 April 1900, Brandfort, now Winnie Mandela, South Africa), younger brother of Vincent van Gogh, and third son and youngest of his parent's six children. I've been able to find little about his earliest life, but he apprenticed at an engineering factory, and then worked manufacturing steam boilers and locomotives. In 1887 he traveled to Lincoln in England, where he spent two years at the same occupation. 

But in 1889 at the age of twenty-two, he travelled to South Africa to work in the gold-mining industry in the Transvaal Republic and to build locomotives and harvesters for the Netherlands-South African Locomotive Company. In 1899, he joined the Boer forces to fight the British. Six months into the Second Boer War, aka the Anglo-Boer War, he was wounded and, a few weeks later, died in a military hospital at the age of thirty-two. His grave is unmarked.

There are conflicting stories about his death. Some sources say he was killed in action, others claim that he was hospitalized with debilitating bouts of fever. And I've even read that, while in hospital, he took his own life, shooting himself.