Your art history post for today: by Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), Women Carrying Sacks of Coal in the Snow, chalk, brush in ink, and opaque and transparent watercolor on wove paper, 12.5x19.6 inches (32x50 cm), Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands. #arthistory #painting #oilpainting #labor

Most people don’t know that before he became an artist, Vincent was a missionary to a coal mining region of Belgium. The story of his time there breaks my heart.

From Judith Moore, “Late nights with Van Gogh,” San Diego Reader, November 18th, 2004:

‘Van Gogh headed as a missionary to the Belgian mining district of Borinage.

What Van Gogh found in Borinage horrified him more than London’s slums. Sweetman: “There were sights to pierce the heart: stables 2000 feet underground where ponies broken with toil spent their wretched lives; worse still, children, girls as well as boys, some only eight years old, filthy and in rags, pulled sledges of coal through tunnels too small for the animals. And hanging over all this was the constant fear of accidents.”

Van Gogh responded by giving away his clothing, food, bed, and finally, he moved out of his comfortable room to live with the miners to whom he ministered. When Esther, Van Gogh’s former land-lady, asked him why he behaved as he did, literally handing out the shirts off his back to be torn into bandages, Van Gogh replied: “Esther, one should do like the good God; from time to time one should go and live His own.” His superiors disapproved Van Gogh’s charities; they chastised him for overzealousness and after six months as a missionary, then-26-year-old Van Gogh was fired.

What a terrible moment! The occasion of his firing feels heartbreaking to the reader. How must it have felt to Van Gogh, who had set such hopes on being permitted to bring the remedy of God’s love to the miners? Sweetman guesses: “He was utterly cast down...he had done everything for God and God had surely rejected him.”

… During the months before he was fired, Van Gogh had been sketching miners and their families. (“I should be happy if some day I could draw then,” he wrote, “so that these unknown types would be brought before the eyes of the people.”) After his dismissal Van Gogh stayed on in the Borinage. He acquired a primer that taught drawing — “clear black-and-white studies of faces,” writes Sweetman, “with anatomical outlines that the learner was encouraged to copy as faithfully as possible” — and gradually, laboriously, Van Gogh taught himself to draw and paint.’