The Borinage is an area in the Walloon province of Hainaut. 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 for 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.

Vincent Willem van Gogh (UK  /ˌvæn ˈɡɒx/, US /ˌvæn ˈɡoʊ/;Dutch: [vɑŋ ˈɣɔχ] ( listen); 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work, notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty, and bold color, had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. After years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness, he died at the age of 37 from a gunshot wound, generally accepted to be self-inflicted (although no gun was ever found). His work was then known to only a handful of people and appreciated by fewer still.

Van Gogh began to draw as a child, and he continued to draw throughout the years that led up to his decision to become an artist. He did not begin painting until his late twenties, completing many of his best-known works during the last two years of his life. In just over a decade, he produced more than 2,100 artworks, consisting of 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings, sketches and prints. His work included self portraits, landscapes, still lifes of flowers, portraits and paintings of cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers.