Vincent Van Gogh (Continued)

By the age of 27, Vincent 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.

His 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). Dark and somber, sometimes crude, these early works evidence van Gogh's intense desire to express the misery and poverty of humanity as he saw it among the miners in Belgium.

The fact is, Vincent was fired from his jobs as art salesman and minister.  He would not sell the piesces his boss wanted him to sell: he thought they were too trite.  Likewise, he was asked to leave his ministry.  He was too enthusiastic.  People began to worry about his over-zealousness.  He was a dis-appointment to his father, who had come from a long line of ministers.  Later, in his life an artist, he transferred the same sort of zeal into his work.  His work, in a sense, became his religion.

He wrote this to his Brother Theo about The Potato Eaters:

What I have tried hard to convey is the sense that these people sitting in the lamplight, picking up their potatoes from the dish and eating them with their hands, have actually worked the land, so that my picture gives dignity to manual labor and to the food they have won for themselves by honest toil.  I’ve tried to make it expressive of a way of life quite different from that of cultivated people like ourselves.  So I don’t at all expect people to like it.

The figure of a laborer…[is] a serious subject, so serious, so difficult, but at the same time so beautiful, that it is indeed worthwhile to devote one’s life to the task of expressing the poetry hidden in them.