Ever Yours
Page 33
For me, though, it’s the other way round: the illusion (ALTHOUGH I DON’T BELIEVE THAT WORD OR DEFINITION WAS APPROPRIATE OR ACCURATE, EITHER IN YOUR CASE OR MINE) was Kee Vos; the reality has become the woman of the people.
There’s a difference between your case and mine in several respects. Your failure was when you were twenty, mine last year. But although both you and I may have had an illusion, failure or whatever — I really don’t know what to call it — that doesn’t rule out something more real, either for you or for me. For I’m quite sure that neither of us is cut out to be celibate.
What I want to make clear is this: what there is between Sien and me is real; it’s not a dream, it is reality. I count it a great blessing that my thoughts and capacity for work have found a focus, a particular direction. While it may be that I felt more passion for Kee Vos, and that in some respects she was more charming than Sien, it is certainly not so that the love for Sien is therefore less sincere, for the circumstances are too grave, and it all comes down to taking action and being practical, and that has always been so since I first met her.
You can see what the result is … now if you come you won’t find me dejected or melancholy, but you’ll enter a setting with which I believe you’ll be satisfied, or at least like. A young studio, a still young, fully functioning household.
Not a mystical or mysterious studio, but one that has rooted itself in real life. A studio with a cradle and a close-stool. Where there’s no stagnation and everything prompts and urges and generates activity.
Now if someone or other comes to tell me that I’m a poor financier, I’ll show him my place here. I’ve done my best, brother, to ensure that you can see (and not just you, but everyone with eyes in his head) that I strive and sometimes manage to tackle things practically. HOW TO DO IT.
This winter we had the woman’s pregnancy and my expenses in getting settled. Now the woman has given birth, I’ve been ill for four weeks — and still not better — despite all that the place is clean and cheerful and bright and tidy, and I have a large part of my furniture, bedding and painting materials.
It has cost what it cost, to be sure I won’t underestimate it, but your money hasn’t gone down the drain. A young studio has come from it which can’t yet do without your help, but from which more and more drawings will gradually emerge and which requires only essential furniture and tools, which retain their value.
You see, old chap, if you come here now to a house full of life and activity, knowing that you are its founder — won’t that give you a proper sense of satisfaction, more so than if I were a celibate spending my life in bars? Would you have it otherwise??? You know that I wasn’t always happy, and sometimes truly wretched, and now through your help my youth is emerging, and my true development.
Now I just hope that you won’t lose sight of this great change, even when people think you’re mad to have helped or to help me. And that you’ll continue to see in the present drawings the seed of later ones. A little longer in the hospital and then I’ll go back to work, and the woman and child will pose.
It’s as clear as daylight to me that one must feel what one makes, that one must live in the reality of family life if one wants to portray family life intimately — a mother and child, a washerwoman, a seamstress, whatever. As a result of stubborn labour, the hand is gradually becoming obedient to that feeling. But if I were to snuff out this feeling, and the strength to have my own household, that would be suicide. That’s why I say — onward — despite dark shadows, cares and difficulties, also, alas, through people interfering and gossiping. Theo — make no mistake — although I, as you rightly say, stay out of it, it often pierces me to the soul. But do you know why I no longer argue with them and why I stay out of it? — because I must work and may not let myself be diverted from my path by the gossip and difficulties.
But I don’t stay out of it because I’m afraid of them or am at a loss for words. Also, I’ve often noticed that they say nothing in my presence, and even claim never to have said anything. As for you, knowing that I don’t get involved in order not to make myself nervous and because of my work, you’ll be able to understand my attitude and not think it cowardly of me, won’t you?
Don’t imagine that I think myself perfect — or that I believe it isn’t my fault that many people find me a disagreeable character. I’m often terribly and cantankerously melancholic, irritable — yearning for sympathy as if with a kind of hunger and thirst—I become indifferent, sharp, and sometimes even pour oil on the flames if I don’t get sympathy. I don’t enjoy company, and dealing with people, talking to them, is often painful and difficult for me. But do you know where a great deal if not all of this comes from? Simply from nervousness — I who am terribly sensitive, both physically and morally, only really acquired it in the years when I was deeply miserable. Ask a doctor and he’ll immediately understand entirely how it couldn’t be otherwise than that nights spent on the cold street or out of doors, the anxiety about coming by bread, constant tension because I didn’t really have a job, sorrow with friends and family were at least ¾ of the cause of some of my peculiarities of temperament — and whether the fact that I sometimes have disagreeable moods or periods of depression couldn’t be attributable to this?
But neither you nor anyone else who takes the trouble to think about it will, I hope, condemn me or find me unbearable because of that. I fight against it, but that doesn’t alter my temperament. And even if I consequently have a bad side, well damn it, I have my good side as well, and can’t they take that into consideration too?
Write to me to say whether you approve of my little plan for telling Pa and Ma and establishing better relations. I don’t feel in the least like just writing about it or going to discuss it, and would probably then make my usual mistake of putting it in such a way that they take offence at some expression or other. There you are. I think when the woman is back with her child, I fully recovered and back from the hospital, the studio working, then I would like to say to Pa: come and resume your visit and stay with me for a few days to talk things over. And then send the travel expenses as a courtesy. I can’t think of a better plan. Adieu, thank you for everything, and a handshake, and believe me
Ever yours,
Vincent
249 | The Hague, on or about Friday, 21 July 1882 | To Theo van Gogh (D)
Dear Brother,
It’s already late, but I wanted to write to you again. You aren’t here, yet I’m in need of you, and it seems to me as if we aren’t far apart sometimes.
Today I made an agreement with myself, which was to regard my illness, or rather what’s left of it, as non-existent. Enough time has been lost, the work must be carried on.
So, well or not well, I’m going to draw again regularly from morning till evening. I don’t want anyone else to be able to say, ‘Oh, those are only old drawings.’
I’ve drawn a study of the cradle today with touches of colour in it.
I’m also working on a ditto like the meadows I recently sent you.
My hands have become rather whiter than I care for, but what can I do about it? I’ll also go outdoors again. It matters less to me that it may strike me down than that I’m kept longer from my work. Art is jealous; she won’t allow illness to be placed above her. So I’ll let her have her way. I hope, therefore, that you’ll soon have a few reasonable ones.
People like me aren’t really allowed to be ill. You must really understand how I regard art. One must work long and hard to arrive at the truthful. What I want and set as my goal is damned difficult, and yet I don’t believe I’m aiming too high. I want to make drawings that move some people. Sorrow is a small beginning — perhaps small landscapes like the Laan van Meerdervoort, the Rijswijk meadows and the Fish-drying barn are also small beginnings. At least they contain something straight from my own feelings.
Whether in figures or in landscapes, I would like to express not something sentimentally melancholic but deep sorrow.
In
short, I want to reach the point where people say of my work, that man feels deeply and that man feels subtly. Despite my so-called coarseness — you understand — perhaps precisely because of it. It seems pretentious to talk like this now, but that’s why I want to push on.
What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest.
Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody.
This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.
Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation.
By persistent I mean in the first place continued labour, but also not abandoning your approach because of what someone else says. I have hopes, brother, that in a few years, and even now already, you’ll gradually see things by me that will give you some recompense for your sacrifices.
I’ve had very little conversation with painters lately. I felt none the worse for that. It isn’t the language of painters one ought to listen to but the language of nature. I can now understand, better than six months ago or more, why Mauve said: don’t talk to me about Dupré, talk to me instead about the side of that ditch, or something like that. It sounds crude and yet it’s perfectly correct. Feeling things themselves, reality, is more important than feeling paintings, at least more productive and life-giving.
Because I now have such a broad, such a large sense of art and of life itself, of which art is the essence, it sounds to me so shrill and false when there are people like Tersteeg who are always on the hunt.
For my part I find a peculiar charm in many modern paintings that the old ones don’t have. For me one of the highest and noblest expressions of art is always that of the English, for instance Millais and Herkomer and Frank Holl. What I mean to say as regards the difference between old and contemporary art is: perhaps the new artists are deeper thinkers.
There’s another great difference: in sentiment, between Chill October by Millais and the Overveen bleaching grounds by Ruisdael, for example. And equally between the Irish emigrants by Holl and the women reading the Bible by Rembrandt.
Rembrandt and Ruisdael are sublime, for us as much as for their contemporaries, but there’s something in the moderns that strikes us as more personally intimate.
That’s how it is with the woodcuts by Swain, and those by the old German masters too.
So it was a mistake a few years ago when there was a vogue among the moderns for imitating the old masters.
This is why I think what père Millet says is so right: I think it absurd that people want to appear to be something other than they are. That seems to be an unremarkable observation and yet it’s as unfathomably deep as the ocean, and I for one think it advisable to take it to heart in all things.
I just wanted to tell you that regular work will and must be resumed, come what may — and I want to add that I’m longing so much for a letter from you, and also to wish you good-night.
Adieu, with a handshake.
Ever yours,
Vincent
Please remember the thick Ingres if you can, a sample is enclosed. I still have enough of the thin. I can wash in watercolour on the thick Ingres; on the sans fin, for example, it always gets muddy without it being entirely my fault.
I’ll draw the cradle, I hope, a hundred times apart from the one today. With persistence.
250 | The Hague, Sunday, 23 July 1882 | To Theo van Gogh (D)
Sunday morning
My dear Theo,
I received your letter and the 50-franc note enclosed. I thank you right heartily for both, and I’m delighted that you gave me some details about your visit.
Do you think we could agree that while you’re here we’ll spend the time together that’s left after your business and visits and then do our best, on both sides, to be in the same sort of mood as in the past at the Rijswijk mill?
As for me, old chap — although the mill has gone and with it the years and my past youth, just as irrevocably — what has reawakened deep inside me is the belief that there’s something good and that it’s worthwhile making an effort and doing one’s best to take life seriously. This is now perhaps, or rather certainly, more firmly rooted in me than in the past, when I had experienced less. For me the point now is to express the poetry of those days in drawings.
Your letter to me crossed mine, in which I told you I’d decided to carry on working regularly, well or not well.
Well, that’s what I’ve done and I feel fine, though I have to take more to keep it up. But the work itself makes me much more clear-headed, of course — towards the end I couldn’t bear not being able to draw. I’ll have a couple of watercolours for you when you come, brother. By Jove, the studio works so nicely. You remember, last winter I said: in a year you’ll have watercolours.
These ones are simply intended to show you that if I work at drawing, the correctness of perspective and proportion, it also benefits the watercolouring.
And for myself I did them to test whether now, after doing nothing but drawing for a time (around six months), I found watercolours easier, and secondly to see where I still need to do more work on the foundation or basic drawing on which everything depends.
They’re landscapes, very difficult in their delineation, with complicated perspective — but precisely because of that there’s a true Dutch character and sentiment to them. They look like the last ones I sent, and are no less conscientiously delineated, only now there’s also: colour — the gentle green of the meadow contrasting with the red tiled roof, the light in the sky set off by the matt tones of the foreground, a yard with earth and damp wood.
In judging me and my behaviour, Tersteeg always starts from the premise that I’m incapable of anything and am good for nothing. He told me that himself … ‘Oh, it will be the same with that painting of yours as with all the other things you’ve started — it won’t come to anything.’
That’s how he talked last winter, that’s how he talks now — whereupon I told him that it would please me not to visit him or see him here for the next six months. Since that sort of talk only impedes and upsets me.
You must understand this, as a result I couldn’t care less about him and I’m quite content for him finally to understand now, clearly and plainly, that I’ve taken a thorough dislike to him in recent months, and would rather not have anything to do with him.
I carry on working quietly, and he can say, to his heart’s content, all the absurd things about me that pop into his head.
As long as he doesn’t impede me in my work, I’ll forget all about him.
It was different when he said last winter that he would intervene to see that I didn’t get any more money from you. Then I immediately wrote to you about it.
But I won’t write to you about him any more until something similar happens again. I would think myself foolish if I were to chase after him and say: Mr T, Mr T, I’m a true painter like other painters, despite all your arguments.
No, it seems to me more self-restrained, precisely because it (the artistic) is in fact in my very marrow, to go on bivouacking with my things in meadows or dunes very calmly, or to work in the studio with a model without taking the slightest notice of him.
But what I find rather pleasing is that you too have read Le ventre de Paris recently. I’ve also read Nana. Listen, Zola is actually Balzac II.
Balzac I portrays the society of 1815–1848, Zola begins
where Balzac leaves off and goes on to Sedan or rather to the present day.
I think it’s absolutely superb. Now I must ask you what you think of Mme François, who picks up poor Florent as he lies unconscious in the middle of the road where the vegetable carts are passing, and lets him ride with her. Although the other vegetable sellers shout: ‘Leave him lying there, the drunk! We’ve no time to pick up men lying in the gutter,’ &c. The figure of Mme François stands against the background of the Halles throughout the book, contrasting with the brutal egoism of the other women, so calm and so dignified and so sympathetic.
You see, Theo, I believe Mme François’ act showed true humanity, and in relation to Sien I have done and will continue to do what I believe someone like Mme François would have done for Florent if he hadn’t cared more about politics than about her. So there you have it, and that humanity is the salt of life, without that I wouldn’t care about life. Enough.
I care as little about what Tersteeg says as Mme François cared about what the other vegetable sellers and women shouted: leave him alone — we’ve no time. In short, the whole commotion and racket. Besides, it won’t be long before Sien is supporting herself entirely through posing. She posed for my very best drawing, Sorrow, at least I think it’s the best thing I’ve done, and in less than a year there’ll be regular drawings of figures as well, that I promise you. For make no mistake — much as I love landscape, I love figures even more. Still, it’s the hardest part, and of course takes me a great deal of study and work, and time too. But don’t let them fool you into thinking that she’s keeping me from the work; you’ll see for yourself in the studio. If it were so that I was working less because of her, I would agree with you, but now the absolute opposite is true, really. Well, we’ll gradually reach agreement on that, I hope, not so much through words as through drawings. I’m coming to hate words — but anyway.
But I’m so delighted you’re coming, old chap. Shall we actually go into the meadows again together? — with nothing before us except that still, gentle, delicate green and such a light sky. Excellent! And the sea! And the beach! And the OLD out-of-the-way Scheveningen. Marvellous.