New sculpture of Van Gogh by Morecambe artist to be unveiled

A new memorial marking Vincent Van Gogh's missionary connection to the working class is to be unveiled on Thursday.

A commemoration ceremony for the many miners who died at the Agrappe mine (the most lethal of the Borinage) and the Fief de Lambrechies (double explosion in May 1934) will be held, followed by the unveiling of the sculpture, in the new Parc de l’Agrappe, Frameries.

Anthony, who is a representative of the TUC affiliated Artists Union England, said: "My thanks go to Filip Depuydt for making this possible. Van Gogh's grounding in the Borinage is so important, his concern for working people should be held dear by those who cherish his work. Vincent's concern for the miners and their families was integral to his work and life."

Van Gogh was born 1853 and died in 1890. In his working life Van Gogh began as an art dealer in London, and then became a teacher in Ramsgate.

At 25 he volunteered to become pastor to a poor mining village in the Borinage, southwestern Belgium.

This thriving coal mining district was also one of the most impoverished regions of Europe. Van Gogh lived among the miners and witnessed their everyday struggles.

As a young pastor he gave up his entitlements and assumed the way of life in the Borinage. He found that he wanted to artistically express their resilience and the harsh realities of their existence.

He left two years later as an aspiring artist whose focus of the lives of ordinary working people that continued until his death.

In 1879, van Gogh finally gave up preaching and made up his mind to become an artist. After a brief visit to his parents in the Dutch town of Etten, van Gogh returned to the Borinage in 1880 as an artist.

Van Gogh felt a strong connection to peasants and other working class people, a feeling that grew from his own struggles and his admiration for artists like Jean-François Millet who also depicted peasant life

His later painting of the Potato Eaters is This painting, created in 1885, is a prime example of Van Gogh's interest in portraying the harsh realities of rural life and the working class.

He chose a difficult composition to demonstrate his skill as a figure painter and to show the peasants with coarse faces and bony hands, reflecting their hard labour.

Anthony Padgett is an award winning artist, writer and dance teacher.

His sculptures of artists Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Kurt Schwitters are sited internationally.

In March, a sculpture he made of Picasso was unveiled in Sheffield.

He has previously had work unveiled in the Morecambe area including the Praying Shell at Bolton-le-Sands in 2013, a limestone sculpture which looks over the site where 23 Chinese cockle pickers died in 2004.

In 2022 he installed an old kitchen sink on Morecambe beach, and has also created a tribute to Morecambe boxer Tyson Fury out of old pipes.