Early in his life, van Gogh was a devout Christian and wanted to become involved in religion for his profession. He became a lay preacher and afterwards strived to become a painter of the working people. Capturing peasants’ everyday laboring in his paintings, he most famously did so in The Potato Eaters (1885). In a dark room lit only by a single candle hung above the table, the painting shows five peasants eating potatoes at the table. The overall darkness and dull green shades coloring the walls give off an impression of dirt and grime everywhere, and the shadows threaten that there are worse unseen areas in the room. The size of the people relative to the room and the low-hanging candle-lamp crowd the room to a stifling point, and the presence of only one community plate certainly is a statement of the family’s sanitary standards.
In A Pair of Boots (1887), van Gogh focuses on the rugged and worn-in character of the boots, such as how the leather is stretched in certain areas, the tongue of the boot is so broken-in that it flops over from its own weight, and the laces are twisted and mangled from having to hold the whole thing together the whole time.
The metal cleats give off a sense that the labor the owner of these boots does is strenuous and harsh, and symbolizes the toughness of the peasants in surviving through such harsh living conditions.
While van Gogh’s Christian affiliations resulted in his interest in the suffering of others, when he moved to Arles he ceased painting the poor peasants, and instead subjected himself to suffering under the undue strain of painting. Having known early in his life about the suffering many peasants undergo, it is no surprise that when he learned of Buddhism van Gogh would embrace its ideas of enlightenment through suffering as he did to Christianity.