Considering that Vincent van Gogh came from a long line of ministers and holy men, it is not surprising that he would find himself charitably serving the poor: Van Gogh’s father was a Dutch Reformed minister, and the town in which he grew up, Groot-Zundert in the Brabant region of Holland, was modest and significantly Calvinist (Barielle 16). The van Goghs were good people, and according to Chris Stolinjk in his book Vincent’s Choice, “Simplicity, benevolence, and hard work were of paramount importance….The imitation of Christ in humility, the practice of charity and support for the poor represented the road to heaven,” (Stolinjk 88). 
From being raised to feel such sympathy for others and help and give to others, it seems only natural that van Gogh would have lived his life in this manner, working among the poor. As an evangelist, van Gogh lived among the miners there, gave them his possessions, and preached the Gospel to them. Thus, van Gogh understood these people, and felt the toll that their hard lives took on the peasants both physically and emotionally. According to Jean-Francois Barrielle, “The Borinage was Vincent’s first real experience of misery and poverty, and it was there that he came into contact with the reality of his aspirations of goodness and justice through humility and devotion, previously only lived vicariously in the pages of the Bible” (Barrielle 28). As Barrielle notes, his decision to take his preaching to this level taught him so much about compassion and “humility,” that as he proceeded to the next chapter of his life as an artist, this knowledge allowed him to show their feelings on paper and canvas accurately and with emotion.
The opportunity for van Gogh to depict the harshness of these peasants’ lives came in 1876, when van Gogh was dismissed from his position for incompetence in preaching (Meissner 113), allowing him to fully pursue a career as an artist. During his stay with the miners, he had sketched them in their daily routines, primarily consisting of working and preparing the food they earned. His experience there was very moving and became almost obsessive for van Gogh. Van Gogh stated his desire to produce artworks of these people in a letter to his brother Theo:
Diggers, sowers, plowers, male and female, they are what I must draw continually. I have begun to observe and draw everything that belongs to country life - like many others have done before, and are doing now. I no longer stand helpless before nature, as I used to (qtd Meissner 151).Van Gogh felt that he truly understood the peasants. Since he had learned to relate to the people who worked in nature, he had thus learned to relate to nature itself, thereby he was able to look at the impact that nature had on the people closest to it. Here, he expressed his need to draw and paint these people and how he felt as though he was digging deeper into their lives and how much he felt the need to keep pursuing this venture. As a result, van Gogh completed an immense number of studies for five years, most of which contain the peasant figures, through which he aimed to depict their lives as difficult and unsmooth as he knew them to be.
Photo from http://sorrel.humboldt.edu/