Van Gogh Sketches a Soup Kitchen

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam makes a treasure trove of material available online, and they post fascinating bits of Van Gogh information on Facebook. Recently, they posted this sketch and quote from a letter Van Gogh wrote:

"Yesterday I did a drawing ... women and children at a hatch at the public kitchen
where soup is sold." -- Letter to Anthon van Rappard. The Hague,
on or about Monday, 5 March 1883

Artists like Van Gogh who were interested in common people and their ordinary food are fascinating. And of course Van Gogh's images of peasants eating potatoes are very famous, though the details of his social activism before he chose a career as an artist are little known.

The contents of this letter mostly concern technical details of Van Gogh's art: scrapers, painting stones, chalk (with which he mentions drawing this sketch), paper, and other art supplies. He also describes an art journal and works by a number of other artists, and mentions that he's rereading works by Dickens. All very fascinating details about the life of Van Gogh.