One evening a young miner’s wife brings him soup that steams with the smell of onions, cheap fat and the faint iron tang of well-water. She lingers in the doorway, watching the charcoal move across the grain of the paper. The light from the window falls across her bent neck and the worn cloth of her sleeve.

“You draw us as if we were saints,” she says quietly. Her voice carries the soft grit of the coal-fields and the tired patience of women who rise before light.

“I draw you as you are,” Vincent answers. “That is harder.”