Matthew Gann
Boehner now finds himself boxed in… And because he’s fixing his legislation after the CBO score, he has a harder argument to make that Reid and the Dems are on board with his plan… Desperately searching for an acceptable trigger… Due to all of this chaos and confusion, the odds of a short-term extension (like 10 days) are more likely… The WSJ: Debt-ceiling debate is creating business uncertainty… Is Mitt Romney counting his chickens before they hatch?... On the trail: Pawlenty and Santorum are in Iowa, Romney’s in Ohio, and Gingrich is in Georgia.
Van Gogh returned to England for unpaid work as a supply teacher in a small boarding school overlooking the harbor in Ramsgate, where he made sketches of the view. When the proprietor of the school relocated toIsleworth, Middlesex, van Gogh moved with him, taking the train to Richmond and the remainder of the journey on foot.[20] The arrangement did not work out and he left to became a Methodist minister's assistant, following his wish to "preach the gospel everywhere."[21] At Christmas, he returned home and found work in a bookshop in Dordrecht for six months. He was not happy in this new position and spent much of his time either doodling or translating passages from the Bible into English, French and German.[22] His roommate at the time, a young teacher named Görlitz, recalled that van Gogh ate frugally, and preferred not to eat meat.[23][note 3]
Van Gogh's religious zeal grew until he felt he had found his true vocation. To support his effort to become a pastor his family sent him to Amsterdam to study theology in May 1877, where he stayed with his uncle Jan van Gogh, a naval Vice Admiral.[24][25] Vincent prepared for the entrance exam with his uncle Johannes Stricker; a respected theologian who published the first "Life of Jesus" in the Netherlands. Van Gogh failed the exam, and left his uncle Jan's house in July 1878. He then undertook, but failed, a three-month course at the Vlaamsche Opleidingsschool, a Protestant missionary school in Laeken, near Brussels.
In January 1879, he took a temporary post as a missionary in the village of Petit Wasmes[note 4] in the coal-mining district of Borinage in Belgium. Taking Christianity to what he saw as its logical conclusion, van Gogh lived like those he preached to, sleeping on straw in a small hut at the back of the baker's house where he was staying. The baker's wife reported hearing van Gogh sobbing at night in the hut. His choice of squalid living conditions did not endear him to the appalled church authorities, who dismissed him for "undermining the dignity of the priesthood." He then walked to Brussels,[27]returned briefly to the village of Cuesmes in the Borinage but gave in to pressure from his parents to return home to Etten. He stayed there until around March the following year,[note 5] a cause of increasing concern and frustration for his parents. There was particular conflict between Vincent and his father; Theodorus made inquiries about having his son committed to the lunatic asylum at Geel.[28][note 6]
He returned to Cuesmes where he lodged with a miner named Charles Decrucq until October.[29] Increasingly interested in the people and scenes around him, van Gogh recorded his time there in his drawings and followed Theo's suggestion that he should take up art in earnest. He traveled to Brussels that autumn intending to follow Theo's recommendation to study with the prominent Dutch artistWillem Roelofs, who persuaded him, in spite of his aversion to formal schools of art, to attend the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where he registered on November 15, 1880. At the Académie , he studied anatomy and the standard rules of modeling and perspective, about which he said, "...you have to know just to be able to draw the least thing."[30] Van Gogh aspired to become an artist in God's service, stating: "...to try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another in a picture."
