Van Gogh: modesty and miners

By Robert Butler

“Blessed is he who has found his work”, wrote the Victorian moralist Thomas Carlyle. At 25, Van Gogh had lost his job at an art dealers, given up teaching, given up working in a bookshop and given up theological studies. Added to that, he had been turned down for one job preaching to miners in Britain and another job preaching to miners in Belgium. Nevertheless, in 1878 he went to the Belgian coal mines.

“Van Gogh in the Borinage: The Birth of an Artist”, which opens this week at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Mons, takes this decisive moment in the artist's life to launch Mons as the 2015 European Capital of Culture. It’s a smart piece of programming—a study of the artist and the region—which has only one drawback: there are very few examples of the early work, because Van Gogh destroyed most of what he did. The curator Sjraar van Heugten writes, in a magisterial catalogue, that an exhibition of Van Gogh’s drawings from this period would be “a meagre offering indeed”.