It is now that Vincent van Gogh begins to draw seriously, thereby discovering in 1880 his true vocation as an artist.
Van Gogh decides that his mission from now on will be to bring consolation to humanity through art.
“I want to give the wretched a brotherly message,” he explained to his brother Theo. “When I sign [my paintings] 'Vincent,' it is as one of them.”
This realization of his creative powers restores his self-confidence, and he goes to study drawing at the Brussels Academy.
Born and reared in a small village in the Brabant region of the southern Netherlands, Vincent van Gogh, had been a quiet, self-contained youth, spending his free time wandering the countryside to observe nature.
At sixteen, he was apprenticed to The Hague branch of the art dealers Goupil and Co., of which his uncle was a partner.
Van Gogh had worked for Goupil in London from 1873 to May 1875 and in Paris from that date until April 1876.
Daily contact with works of art had aroused his artistic sensibility, and he had soon formed a taste for Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and other Dutch masters, although his preference is for two contemporary French painters, Jean-François Millet and Camille Corot (whose influence is to last throughout his life.)
Van Gogh disliked art dealing.
Moreover, his approach to life had darkened when a London girl rejected his love in 1874.
His burning desire for human affection thwarted, he has become increasingly solitary.
He had worked as a language teacher and lay preacher in England and, in 1877, worked for a bookseller in Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
Impelled by a longing to serve humanity, he envisaged entering the ministry and took up theology; however, he abandoned this project in 1878 for short-term training as an evangelist in Brussels.
A conflict with authority had ensued when he disputed the orthodox doctrinal approach.
Failing to get an appointment after three months, he left to do missionary work among the impoverished population of the Borinage, a coal-mining region in southwestern Belgium.
There, in the winter of 1879-80, he had experience the first great spiritual crisis of his life.
Living among the poor, he had given away all his worldly goods in an impassioned moment, and was thereupon dismissed by church authorities for a too-literal interpretation of Christian teaching.
Penniless and feeling that his faith had been destroyed, he had sunk into despair and withdrawn from everyone.
“They think I'm a madman,” he tells an acquaintance, “because I wanted to be a true Christian. They turned me out like a dog, saying that I was causing a scandal.”
