Digging to find artistic career
Print Edition
IT is fitting tribute to the role the Belgian coalfield around Mons played in Van Gogh’s emergence as an artist that the city has made a rare show of his early works a focus of its year as European Capital of Culture.
From the clumsy sketches with which the 25-year-old Dutch lay preacher began to drawings flowing with the energy that marked his later painting, “Van Gogh in the Borinage: Birth of an Artist” at Beaux Arts Mons is a treat for the academic and casually curious alike. It ought, too, to inspire perseverance in any would-be creator — even Van Gogh started out with dross.
“I can see it is not any good yet,” Vincent wrote to his art dealer elder brother Theo Van Gogh in a letter accompanying two small pencil drawings showing the weary lives of the miners of the Borinage coalfield among whom he lived from 1878 to 1880. “But,” he added, “It is starting to come.”
Alongside letters scratched out from the colliers’ cottages where the well-born Van Gogh lodged, the show traces progression in technique, in pencil and paint. Largely early work, it does culminate in the sumptuous, sunlit Impressionism of “Street in Auvers-sur-Oise,” painted in the weeks before his death aged 37.
Around Mons, Van Gogh drew the pitheads, the homes, the miners’ potato patches, even, after an underground visit, the coalface itself.
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