Van Gogh belongs, in most minds, to sunflowers and the hard summer light of Provence. The cold followed him all the same, through his whole working life: from the mining country where he decided to become an artist to the asylum where, in his last year, he painted from memory the frozen fields of the North he had left behind.
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The Cold Behind the Sunflowers
He painted frost and ice far more often than his reputation suggests. Before he went south, he spent nearly all his painting years in Belgium and Holland, where the cold lasts for months, and those months gave him some of his first real subjects.
For a painter who wanted to show work and poverty, the cold did half the job. It stripped the trees, emptied the fields and set every figure dark against the white: a miner on his way to the pit, a woman bent under a load.
The order climbs toward his best-known picture of the cold, and the choice covers his career from start to finish. Eight come from the North, before his move to Paris, and four from the South. His last two pictures of the cold were painted indoors, from memory or from a print, while illness kept him inside.
12. Miners in the Snow (1880)
The figures in Miners in the Snow are little more than dark shapes, shoulders hunched, strung out along a hedge on white ground. They are the men and women of the Belgian coal country, walking at first light toward the shaft where they will spend the day underground.
The man who drew them had come to the region as a preacher, not as an artist. Van Gogh arrived in the Borinage, the coal basin around Mons, in December 1878, and he gave away his belongings to live as poorly as the miners did. After about six months he was dismissed.
Instead of leaving, he stayed, and that decision shaped the rest of his life. For about a year and a half he taught himself to draw, working alone through anatomy and perspective. In August 1880 he wrote to his brother Theo about the sketches he had made of miners going to the shaft in the morning "through the snow, by a path along a thorn hedge: passing shadows, dimly visible in the twilight."
The finished sheet, in pencil, chalk and watercolor, followed the next month. A few weeks later he wrote about the people in it: "The man from the depths, from the abyss, de profundis, that is the miner." He added that he would count himself fortunate if he could draw them one day, as though this sheet did not count yet.
He later destroyed nearly everything he made in the Borinage. This drawing is one of the few that survived.
At a Glance
Artist: Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890)
Made: September 1880, Cuesmes, Belgium
Medium: Pencil, colored chalk and transparent watercolor on wove paper
Size: Not published
Where to see it: Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands
11. Women Carrying Sacks of Coal in the Snow (1882)
Black sacks of coal weigh on the backs of the women in Women Carrying Sacks of Coal in the Snow, who walk bent almost double across white ground. Van Gogh made the sheet in November 1882 in The Hague, a city without a single mine, two years after he had left the Belgian coal country. He was drawing a place he had not seen since.