II.

Early Years

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, Netherlands, the son of a Dutch Protestant pastor. Early in life he displayed a moody, restless temperament that was to thwart his every pursuit. By the age of 27 he had been in turn a salesman in an art gallery, a French tutor, a theological student, and an evangelist among the miners at Wasmes in Belgium. During the nearly two years he spent living among the miners and sharing their poverty, he lost his faith, but he found in art—through the charcoal drawings he made of the landscapes and people around him—the possibility of a new career. Van Gogh was mostly self-taught as an artist. He copied from prints, especially those of Jean François Millet, a popular French painter of rural life.

Van Gogh’s experiences as a preacher are reflected in his first paintings of peasants and potato diggers. Of these early works, the best known is the rough, earthy Potato Eaters (1885, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam), which depicts peasants at their meager evening meal. Dark and somber, sometimes crude, these early works demonstrate van Gogh’s sympathy for working people and his intense desire to express the misery and poverty of humanity as he saw them among the miners in Belgium.

From the early 1880s on, van Gogh was supported by his brother Théo van Gogh, an art dealer in Paris who provided encouragement as well as financial assistance. Van Gogh corresponded frequently with Théo for the rest of his life, describing in detail his daily life and the ideas for his works.