Ultimately, van Gogh was upset at the fact that his attempts to create the images of peasants at work were not well received. Nonetheless, he understood that his figures were not realistic looking. He explained to his brother Theo what his goal as a painter was: “What I try to acquire…is not to draw a hand, but the gesture, not a mathematically correct head, but the general expression. For instance, when a digger looks up and sniffs the wind or speaks. In short, life” (qtd Ives 8). These words show how he wanted to express the harsh lives of the peasants. He conveyed the physical and mental wear and tear on the peasants in his paintings through slightly contorted anatomy: their strangely bent over bodies show the work load that was pressed upon them and thus weighed down their lives literally and figuratively. The figures certainly look distorted, but this was not a lack of skill or artistic training on van Gogh’s part, as Sjraar van Heugten mentioned also. van Heugten noted that many of his studies do not show the figure head on, and they are quite “bony” and “wooden”, but is that not what their lives were? Showing them full-faced would have not shown them in their everyday state of non-stop movement. They had no time to simply pose for paintings. These were not people who ate heavy meals and sat around while others cooked and cleaned for them. The miners that van Gogh lived with earned every ounce of food they ate through working from dusk until dawn. This work load took physical as well as emotional tolls on the peasants, which van Gogh learned through his days of living among them. Yes, van Gogh knew very well what he was doing in his awkwardly positioned sketches and paintings of them, and their rise throughout time. He purposely gave his characters those features to make viewers pay attention to the sad way of life for his poor friends, the peasants.