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“It did not seem to matter to them that he literally poured out his life in sacrifice and service on behalf of the diseased and destitute,” Havlicek laments. Sadly, a church committee overseeing Vincent thought he suffered from excessive zeal and fired him because he did not dress or preach eloquently. He would never recognise love that was not an action.” Van Gogh was also inspired by the writings of Charles Dickens in his compassionate response to human suffering. He understood that the unconditional love of God extended to unconditional love for others. “By such actions he won the admiration and respect of the workers, and was able to convert some of them,” Havlicek notes. To tend to their medical needs, he ripped up his own bed sheets for bandages, and slept on straw on the ground.
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In response to their plight, Vincent gave away everything he owned, including most of his clothing. Fighting for survival, they apparently had little interest in his evangelistic appeals. A mining explosion had left many in a horrible condition. He found miners who were sick and starving, living a bleak existence, without adequate food, water or warm clothing. Instead, he went off to serve as a missionary to coal miners in the Borinage district of Belgium. His father Theodorus, a Dutch Reformed minister, was not known as a compelling preacher, but a ‘welfare pastor’ who distributed food and clothing to the poor.Īs Vincent’s zeal for Christ grew in his early twenties, he wanted to study theology, but failed his entrance exam for seminary. Vincent’s father and grandfather were pastors and it seems many in the van Gogh family gravitated toward religion or art. “What emerges instead is a story of selfless loyalty, the epitome of the Gospel’s sacred counsel: “love one another.” Many of Vincent’s religious letters were held back and only released in the last five or six years.” “Vincent’s letters portray a very different story than the popular tale of the mad artist who cuts off his ear,” Havlicek notes. His revealing book dispels many of the myths that surround the painter’s tumultuous life. Havlicek spent fifteen years researching and studying more than 900 of van Gogh’s letters. “In Western art there has been a move toward secularisation through existential thinking,” he notes, which followed the disillusionment of many artists after two world wars. It was deliberately kept in the basement,” says Dr William Havlicek, author of ‘van Gogh’s Untold Journey’.
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“None of the religious imagery was in the show. What visitors did not see at that major exhibition were van Gogh’s Christian-themed paintings, which were left in the basement of the museum. A record 1.2 million visitors came to the giant retrospective of van Gogh’s work in Amsterdam in 1990, which coincided with the 100th anniversary of the Dutch post-Impressionist’s death.