Vincent’s Shoes

“Shoes,” by Vincent Van Gogh hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The picture is less than arms length long--only 20 x 17 inches—but it evokes a huge image of who could have worn the dark leather shoes.

I sat in front of the small painting last summer for two hours and watched the painting change as people walked by. I began to imagine that a hard working Dutch wore them clean through on the under soles, but every observer thought differently. One child saw them as childrens’ shoes, perhaps belonging to a small boy who walked through muddy streets selling bread. A man said they looked like his uncle’s ankle high shoes that he always left on the back porch after watering.

They sit askew on worn tiles, in a veranda perhaps, and the laces are rough cut leather strips of rawhide. There is a motion to them that is unseen, but surely felt because of the intricacies of the brush strokes. They must have danced and walked miles, and surely were scraped clean many times on the grass growing by the imaginary veranda.

Although they were stopped in time on the canvas, I watched as they grew older and more worn by the minute. And the more I looked, the more they intrigued me, and made me think about wearing things out. Sometimes things just need to be replaced even if they hold a personality--their practical usefulness fades. Shoes are like that.

You can be assured that the shoes you bought a child last year are very worn by now and warming a soul year after year certainly warms cold toes as well as your generous heart.