The Borinage, Belgium

I began my journey not in van Gogh’s birthplace, but in the location where van Gogh the artist came to life: in the gritty, drab eastern coal-mining region of Belgium called the Borinage, where van Gogh at age 25 went to minister to the destitute, soot-blackened workers of the coal pits. Because this is where he was rejected from the priesthood and began his artistic career, the city of Mons has declared this the “birthplace of the artist,” with a host of events and an exhibition of his early work at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Mons, which ended in May. (Van Gogh’s birthplace was in Zundert, the Netherlands.)

Van Gogh lived in a few locations in Mons; but he found himself ashamed to be living so well while the people to whom he ministered lived in overcrowded huts, and so he jettisoned his middle-class possessions and moved into smaller and simpler homes. He had started out in a large home up the hill from the local mine, in a red brick house he rented from a landlord named Jean-Baptiste Denis.

Everyone I spoke to told me that Maison Denis was only about a 15-minute drive outside Mons, but it took me an hour of driving in circles. It’s not on any map and I got there by chance: I asked directions from a man who happened to be a private van Gogh tour guide in the area. Finally, there it was: At the bitter end of a seemingly endless stretch of ramshackle rowhouses at 221, rue Wilson was a square red brick house with a red tile roof, only a bit larger than the houses that surrounded it.

The home was one of the sites that Mr. van den Eijnden of the Van Gogh Europe Foundation had told me was nearly dilapidated, but thanks to fund-raising by a local foundation for Van Gogh Year, renovation of the house was underway. The house was still shuttered and there was a large fence around the property, but I walked to the edge of the backyard, where it bordered a grassy field blanketed in wildflowers that followed all the way down the hill to where I could see the colliery of the Marcasse mine, now closed. The refurbished house has since opened as Maison Van Gogh in Colfontaine, and can be visited on weekends from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The attraction’s previously poor state was in sharp contrast to the other landmark van Gogh home in the Borinage, in the village of Cuesmes, Maison Van Gogh, a quaint cottage on a plot of grass at the end of a gravel road where van Gogh lived in 1879 and 1880. This was the location where he regrouped after he was told to abandon his ministry because he had disgraced the church, and where he wrote a letter to his brother, Theo, telling him he would like to try his hand at art. “Try to understand the last word of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces; there will be God in it,” he wrote. “Someone has written or said it in a book, someone in a painting.”

Inside this tourist site (which has an admission fee of 4 euros, or about $4.25 at $1.06 to the euro) I was one of only a few visitors, and watched a short biographical video, looked at some of van Gogh’s early, clumsy sketches displayed in a glass vitrine and spent a few minutes among his spartan furnishings — a small wooden writing table, a chair and a wood-burning stove.