The weather was dire. The local paper reported “heavy rain accompanied by violent gusts”, then “two days of hurricanes” followed by “a truly horrifying night of furiously raging wind”. But this did not deter the dishevelled young man from getting off the train at Valenciennes with two francs in his pocket and walking the 50 kilometres to Courrières.Ostensibly the journey in early March 1880 was to look for work, though the 26-year-old Vincent van Gogh had another reason: Courrières was the home of the realist rural painter Jules Breton, whom he hero-worshipped. It turned out to be far from a rural idyll. Like the village of Cuesmes in the Belgian Borinage he had just come from, it had been taken over by coal mines. Even Breton’s stud