BBC - Culture - Van Gogh and the Decsion That Changed Art History

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In the spring of 1878, Vincent van Gogh turned 25. As he looked back over

his short life, the Dutchman found little to celebrate among the meagre

endeavours of his faltering career. By conventional, middle-class standards,

he was a failure.

By Alastair Sooke27 January 2015

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A stint working for an art dealership first in The Hague then in London and

Paris hadnt worked out: shy and awkward, he didnt take to the profession,

and in 1876, he was fired. That was followed by a couple of dead-end

teaching jobs in England, as well as a short, forgettable spell working in a

bookshop in Dordrecht, before he moved to Amsterdam to become a minister

of religion, following in his fathers footsteps.

However, he didnt have the patience or rigour to master the necessary study,

so in 1878 a few months after his 25th birthday he left for Brussels, in

order to enrol in a swifter training school for evangelists. Even this, though,

was beyond him. After a three-month trial period in which his performance

was less than mediocre, he was told that he would not be admitted to the

course.

By now, Van Goghs family was beginning to despair. He had not curbed his

socially inept and awkward manner, which was exacerbated by an eccentric

tendency to dress in a deliberately unkempt fashion. How could an oddball

like Vincent ever hope to scrape a living? His father was beginning to wonder

whether his eldest son should be admitted to a mental hospital.

Van Gogh, though, was still fired with religious zeal and remained adamant

that he could find work as an evangelist. At the end of 1878, he set off for the

depressed coalmining district of the Borinage to the west of the city of Mons

in Belgium, determined to establish himself as a lay preacher to the working

class.


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The making of a master

As a new exhibition, Van Gogh in the Borinage, at BAM (Beaux-Arts Mons)

documents, he stayed in the region until October 1880, when he returned to

Brussels. (Mons is one of the European capitals of culture for 2015.)

Although ultimately his ambitions to become an evangelist would be thwarted

things got so bad that at one point his sister suggested that he should

re-train as a baker the Borinage was the making of Van Gogh in one

fundamental respect. It was here, encouraged by his gentle brother Theo,

that he decided to become an artist.

The startling thing is that his experiences in the Borinage seem to have set

the template for many subjects and motifs that would continue to fascinate

him as an artist over the next decade, until his death from a self-inflicted

gunshot wound to the chest in the summer of 1890.

True to form, life for Van Gogh in the Borinage was not straightforward. He

lived in a humble hut, gave away much of his money, and swapped his smart

clothes for the practical work-wear of the Borins. Unfortunately, he was not a

gifted orator, so his meetings were sparsely attended. His inability to connectwith the local coalminers was compounded by a practical, linguistic difficulty:

he couldnt make head or tail of their quick-fire patois known as Walloon

French, while they were mystified by his own attempts at French, which to

their ears sounded overly formal and fussy. In July 1879, only half a year after

he had arrived in the region, he received another setback: the authorities

terminated his trial appointment as an evangelist, precipitating a crisis of

Vincent van Gogh, Les bcheurs, 1889


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self-doubt.

Yet it was at this rock-bottom moment that Van Gogh, now 26, tentatively

started to draw. His religious zeal dissipated, and instead he focused ontraining as a draughtsman. I often feel homesick for the country of paintings,

he wrote to his brother Theo in the summer of 1880 suggesting, perhaps,

that he missed the day-to-day encounters with works of art that he had

enjoyed while working as an art dealer. That autumn, he left the Borinage for

good and headed for Brussels, to study life drawing at the Acadmie Royale

des Beaux-Arts.

Laying foundations

So what did Van Gogh encounter in the Borinage that inspired him to become

an artist? For one thing, he felt sympathy for the working-class miners. For

the first time in his life, middle-class Van Gogh was friends with poor,

working-class people, says Sjraar Van Heugten, who has curated Van Gogh

in the Borinage. The people were poor and illiterate, and their work was hard

Vincent van Gogh, La veille,1889


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and dangerous. Yet for Van Gogh, there was some kind of bigger truth in their

simple way of life. After he became an artist, he chose to find his subject

matter there. Like artists that he admired, such as Jean-Franois Millet, he

wanted to portray the life of working-class people, and he remained

interested in doing so certainly for the first half of his career. Really, it stayed

important to him forever.

In addition to this general concern for everyday reality and the rural poor,

particular motifs that Van Gogh encountered in the Borinage would later

feature prominently in his art. As he once put it in a letter: It was in the

Borinage that I began to work from nature for the first time.

The simple cottages that the miners lived in provide a good example,

explains Van Heugten. Two of his first drawings are of those cottages, and

that motif remained important to him throughout his career some of his last

paintings are of cottages, for instance. So there are quite a few echoes in his

oeuvre at the end that relate directly to the Borinage.

Vincent van Gogh, Rue Auvers-sur-Oise, 1890


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Another noticeable echo recalls the way that Van Gogh trained himself to

draw in the Borinage by copying black-and-white prints after famous works of

art. Then in 1889 in Saint-Rmy [in southern France where Van Gogh

institutionalised himself at the end of his life] he picks that up again except

this time producing colourful paintings. He was still going back to the origins

of his career.

Few works from Van Goghs Borinage period have survived, because the

artist destroyed most of them, as he revealed in a letter to a friend. Perhaps

he felt they were too clumsy or redolent of an uncertain time when he was

still developing his own style and artistic voice.

Yet for Van Heugten, the time that Van Gogh spent in the Borinage was

crucial for his development as an artist, because it laid foundations upon

which he could build as a painter: The remarkable thing about his early

career in the Borinage is that Van Gogh made choices that he would stick to

for the rest of his life. From the early beginnings until his last days, he

remained completely loyal to a basis of subject matter and this allowed him

to go very far in experimenting with style and colour, so that he could become

the modern artist we remember today.

Alastair Sooke is art critic of The Daily Telegraph

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on

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BBC - Culture - Van Gogh and the Decsion That Changed Art History