Borinage

The Borinage is an area in the Walloon province of Hainaut in Belgium. The provincial capital Mons is located in the east of the Borinage. In French the inhabitants are called Borains, but there was a great sociological difference between Mons and the Borains of all the villages around Mons.

Charles White wrote, when describing the Belgian revolution, "The Borains, like the dark spirits of the melo-drame, rose from their mines, and helter-skelter pushed upon the capital", but he was using this name for all the inhabitants in the Province of Hainaut, which is an error.

"From the 18th century to 1850, the economy of thirty municipalities in the Borinage was founded on coal mining. Between 1822 and 1829, production more than doubled in that region i.e. from 602,000 to 1,260,000 tons. That was more than the total production of France and Germany at the time! The Borinage exported its coal mostly to France and Flanders."

In 1957, out of 64,800 people recorded as being in employment in the Borinage, 23,000 worked in the coal industry. Only 7,000 people in services, although in Belgium as a whole, 49 percent of employment was in the tertiary sector.

In the 1960s, because of the end of the collieries, Ladrière, Meynaud and Perin wrote that the Borinage died in the ideological and economical sense.

In his mid-twenties, the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh spent several years living there, ca. 1878–1880. First, he preached to and lived with the coal miners. Then, he had a breakdown and decided to become an artist, while living there. His first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters (Oil on Canvas, 1885), of Dutch land peasants, was indirectly inspired by the bad conditions of miners and their families in the Borinage but was not painted there.

Dutch-born Belgian painter Henry Luyten resided in the Borinage during 1886 and 1887. He witnessed the great strike and its bloody suppression. In response, he painted the triptych "The Strike" on which he worked until 1893. The painting (international title: "Struggle for Life") measures 3 to 5 meters. The painting on the right-hand panel (3 by 2 ½ meters) is called "After the uprising" and the left-hand panel is called "Misery".

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Wikipedia