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The Crisis that Made Van Gogh an Artist
He went to preach. He stayed to paint. What happened?
At the age of 25, Vincent Van Gogh went to the Borinage, a coal-mining region in west Belgium.
He went to preach and his duties there included Bible readings, teaching and visiting the sick.
Coal mining had taken place in the Borinage for 500 years, but the industry had expanded dramatically in the mid-1700s with the introduction of the Newcomen machine which made much deeper shafts possible.
By the early-1800s, the mines in this part of Belgium were producing the highest volumes of coal in Europe.
But the boom didn’t last. In the 1860s, exports to France had gone into serious decline as the mines in the Borinage faced tough competition from mines in Britain and France and – after the Franco-Prussian war – from Germany.
The price of coal kept dropping. When Van Gogh arrived, the economic situation was dire: low wages, long hours for men, women and children, and very dangerous working conditions.
It was a long way from Van Gogh’s own middle-class upbringing in the Netherlands.
Four months after arriving, Van Gogh made a six-hour trip down a mine. He wrote to his brother Theo about this “very interesting excursion”.
He explained that this was “one of the oldest and most dangerous mines”. Many miners had died either going down or coming up. Many others had died when gas exploded or old passageways caved in.
Van Gogh went down 700 metres “in a kind of basket or cage like a bucket in a well”.
The men that Van Gogh saw down the mine were “emaciated and pale” and “exhausted and haggard”. The women were “sallow and withered”.
His guide took him to one of the cells where the miners worked. Van Gogh described the scene to his brother with a painter’s eye.
In each of the cells is a worker in a coarse linen suit, dingy and soiled as a chimney sweep, chipping away at the coal by the dim light of a small lamp… The arrangement is more or less like the cells in a beehive
In some, water leaks in everywhere and the light of the miner’s lamp creates a peculiar…
