Ever Yours

by Vincent Van Gogh

  In every life some rain must fall

  And days be dark and dreary

  that is true, it cannot be otherwise, yet I wonder if the number of dark and dreary days can’t sometimes get too great? Nevertheless, I’ve had a model again in the barn, but in very trying light. After all, I don’t refuse to do what can be done, but can I do what MUST be done in the circumstances? And this letter is a sigh for space, and if the winter has to be like these days, I would be in a bad way. It’s beautiful, though, indeed extremely beautiful in the rain, but how does one work, how when one lacks too much? Adieu, old chap, I wish everything would turn out all right, but we need more trust from other people, otherwise I fear it won’t work. I hope to hear from you soon. Did you receive studies?

  With a handshake.

  Ever yours,

  Vincent

  392 | Nieuw-Amsterdam, on or about Wednesday, 3 October 1883 | To Theo van Gogh (D)

  My dear Theo,

  This time I’m writing to you from the very back of beyond in Drenthe, where I arrived after an endless trip through the heath on the barge.

  I see no way of describing the countryside to you as it should be done, because words fail me. But imagine the banks of the canal as miles and miles of Michels or T. Rousseaus, say, Van Goyens or P. de Koninck.

  Flat planes or strips differing in colour, which grow narrower and narrower as they approach the horizon. Accentuated here and there by a sod hut or small farm or a few scrawny birches, poplars, oaks. Stacks of peat everywhere, and always barges sailing past with peat or bulrushes from the marshes. Here and there thin cows of a delicate colour, often sheep — pigs. The figures that now and then appear on the plain usually have great character, sometimes they’re really charming. I drew, among others, a woman in the barge with crepe around her cap brooches because she was in mourning, and later a mother with a small child — this one had a purple scarf around her head.

  There are a lot of Ostade types among them, physiognomies that remind one of pigs or crows, but every so often there’s a little figure that’s like a lily among the thorns. In short, I’m very pleased about this trip, for I’m full of what I’ve seen. The heath was extraordinarily beautiful this evening. There’s a Daubigny in one of the Albums Boetzel that expresses that effect precisely. The sky was an inexpressibly delicate lilac white — not fleecy clouds, because they were more joined together and covered the whole sky, but tufts in tints more or less of lilac — grey — white — a single small rent through which the blue gleamed. Then on the horizon a sparkling red streak — beneath it the surprisingly dark expanse of brown heath, and a multitude of low roofs of small huts standing out against the glowing red streak.

  In the evening this heath often has effects that the English would describe as weird and quaint. The spiky silhouettes of Don Quixote-like mills or strange hulks of drawbridges are profiled against the teeming evening sky. In the evening a village like that is sometimes really snug, with the light from the little windows reflected in the water or in mud and puddles.

  Before I left Hoogeveen I painted a few more studies there, among them a large farmhouse with a mossy roof. For I’d had paint sent from Furnée’s, because I thought the same about it as you say in your letter, that by making sure I become absorbed in the work and lose myself in it so to speak, my mood would change, and indeed it’s already a good deal better.

  But at times — like those moments when you think about going to America — I think about going to the East as a volunteer. But they’re those wretched, sombre moments when things overwhelm one, and I would wish that you might see the silent heath that I see through the window here, because such a thing soothes one and inspires more faith, resignation, calm work.

  I drew several studies in the barge, but I’m staying here to paint. I’m close to Zweeloo here, where Liebermann, among others, has been, and besides there’s an area here where there are large, very old sod huts where there isn’t even a partition between the barn and the living room. My plan for these first days is to visit that region.

  But what tranquillity, what breadth, what calm there is in nature here, one doesn’t feel it until one has miles and miles of Michels between oneself and the everyday.

  I can’t give you a definite address at the moment because I don’t know exactly where I’ll be for the next few days, but I’ll be in HOOGEVEEN on 12 October, and if you send your letter at the usual time to the same address I’ll find it there in Hoogeveen on the twelfth. The place where I am now is Nieuw-Amsterdam.

  I received a postal order for 10 guilders from Pa, which with what I got from you means that I can now do some painting. I’m thinking of returning to this inn where I am now for a long stay if I can reach the area with the large old sod huts easily from here, since I would have better light and space here. For as to that painting by that Englishman with the thin cat and the little coffin, although the idea first came to him in that dark room, he would have found it very difficult to paint in that same place, at least one usually works too light if one sits in a room that’s too dark, so that when one brings it into the light one sees that all the shadows are too weak. I experienced this only recently, when I painted an open door and the view through into the little garden from inside the barn.

  Well, I just wanted to tell you that I’ll also be able to overcome this drawback, because I could get a room here with good light and where a stove can stand in the winter. Now, old chap, if you think no more about America, and I no more about Harderwijk, then I hope things will work themselves out. I admit that your explanation of C.M.’s silence might be the case, but sometimes nonchalance can also be deliberate.

  You’ll find a few croquis on the back. I write in haste, or rather it’s already late.

  How I wish that we could walk together here and — paint together. I believe that the countryside would win you over and convince you. Adieu, I hope that you’re well and will have a bit of good fortune. I thought about you again and again on this trip. With a handshake.

  Ever yours,

  Vincent

  [Sketches 392A–F]

  392A–F (left to right, top to bottom). Farm; Rider by a waterway; Woman and child; Head of a woman; Woman working; Country road with cottages

  394 | Hoogeveen, Friday, 12 October 1883 | To Theo van Gogh (D)

  Dear brother,

  I just received your letter. I read and re-read it with interest, and something that I’ve already thought about sometimes, without knowing what to do about it, is becoming clear to me. It’s that you and I have in common a time of quietly drawing impossible windmills &c., where the drawings are in a singular rapport with the storm of thoughts and aspirations — in vain, because no one who can shed light is concerned about them (only a painter would then be able to help one along the right path, and their thoughts are elsewhere). This is a great inner struggle, and it ends in discouragement or in throwing those thoughts overboard as impractical, and precisely when one is 20 or so, one is passionate to do that. Whatever the truth of the matter that I said something then that unwittingly contributed to throwing those things overboard; at that moment my thoughts were perhaps the same as yours, that’s to say that I saw it as something impossible, but as regards that desperate struggle without seeing any light, I know it too, how awful it is. With all one’s energy one can do nothing and thinks oneself mad, and I don’t know what else. When I was in London, how often I would stand on the Thames Embankment and draw as I made my way home from Southampton Street in the evening, and it looked terrible. If only there had been someone then who had told me what perspective was, how much misery I would have been spared, how much further along I would be now. Well, fait accompli is fait accompli. It didn’t happen then — I did talk to Thijs Maris occasionally (I didn’t dare speak to Boughton, because I felt such great respect in his presence) but I didn’t find it there either, that helping me with the first things, with the ABC.

  Let me now repeat that I believe in you as an artist, and that you ca
n still become one, indeed that you should very soon think calmly about whether you are one or not, whether you would be able to produce something or not if you learned to spell the aforementioned ABC, and then also spent some time walking through the wheatfield and the heath, in order to renew once more what you yourself say, ‘I used to be part of that nature, now I don’t feel that any more’. Let me tell you, brother, that I myself have felt so deeply, deeply that which you say there. That I’ve had a time of nervous, barren stress when I had days when I couldn’t find the most beautiful countryside beautiful, precisely because I didn’t feel myself part of it. That’s what pavements and the office — and care — and nerves — do.

  Don’t take it amiss if I say now that your soul is sick at this moment — it really is — it isn’t good that you aren’t part of nature — and I think that No. 1 now is for you to make that normal again. I think it’s very good that you yourself feel the difference between your state of mind now and in other years. And don’t doubt that you will agree with me that you must work on it to put it right.

  I now have to look back into my own past to see what the matter was, spending years in that stony, barren state of mind and trying to emerge from it, and yet it got worse and worse instead of better.

  Not only did I feel indifferent instead of responsive to nature but also, which was much worse, I felt exactly the same about people.

  People said that I was going mad; I myself felt that I wasn’t, if only because I felt my own malady very deep inside myself and tried to get over it again. I made all sorts of forlorn attempts that led to nothing, so be it, but because of that idée fixe of getting back to a normal position I never confused my own desperate doings, scrambling and squirmings with I myself. At least I always felt ‘let me just do something, be somewhere, it must get better, I’ll get over it, let me have the patience to recover’.

  I don’t believe that someone like Boks, for instance, who really turned out to be mad, thought like that — so I say again, I’ve thought about it a lot since, about my years of all sorts of scrambling, and I don’t see that, given my circumstances, I could be other than I have been.

  Here is the ground that sank beneath my feet — here is the ground which, if it sinks, must make a person miserable, whoever he may be. I was with G&Cie for 6 years — I had put down roots in G&Cie and I thought that, although I left, I could look back on 6 years of good work, and that if I presented myself somewhere I could refer to my past with equanimity.

  But by no means; things are done so hurriedly that little consideration is given, little is questioned or reasoned. People act on the most random, most superficial impressions. And once one is out of G&Cie no one knows who G&Cie is. It’s a name like X&Co., without meaning — and so one is simply ‘a person without a situation’. All at once — suddenly — fatally — everywhere — there you have it. Of course, precisely because one has a certain respectability one doesn’t say I’m so-and-so, I’m this or that. One presents oneself for a new situation serious in all respects, without saying much, with a view to putting one’s hand to the plough. Very well, but then, that ‘person without a situation’, the man from anywhere, gradually becomes suspect.

  Suppose that your new employer is a man whose affairs are very mysterious, and suppose that he has just one goal, ‘money’. With all your energy, can you really immediately, at once, help him a very great deal in that? Perhaps not, eh? And yet he wants money, money come what may; you want to know something more about the business, and what you see or hear is pretty disgusting.

  And soon it’s: ‘someone without a situation’, I don’t need you any more. See, now that’s what you increasingly become: someone without a situation. Go to England, go to America, it doesn’t help at all, you’re an uprooted tree everywhere. G&Cie, where your roots are from an early age — G&Cie, although indirectly they cause you this misery because in your youth you regarded them as the finest, the best, the biggest in the world — G&Cie, were you to return to them — I didn’t do that then — I couldn’t — my heart was too full, much too full — G&Cie, they’d give you the cold shoulder, say it was no longer their concern or something. With all this one has been uprooted, and the world turns it around and says that you’ve uprooted yourself. Fact — your place no longer acknowledges you. I felt too melancholy to do anything about it — and I don’t remember ever having been in the mood to talk to someone about it as I’m talking to you now. Because, and actually to my surprise, for I thought that even if they did it to me they would, however, certainly not have dared to do it to you, I read in your letter the words ‘when I spoke to them this week the gentlemen made it almost impossible for me’. Old chap, you know how it is with me, but if you’re miserable about one thing and another, do not feel you are ALONE. It’s too much to bear alone, and to some extent I can sympathize with you the way it is. Now, stand your ground and don’t let your pain throw you off balance — if the gentlemen behave like this, stand on your dignity and don’t accept your dismissal except on terms that guarantee you’ll get a new situation. They aren’t worth your losing your temper, don’t do that, even if they provoke you. I lost my temper and walked straight out. Now in my position it was different again from yours; I was one of the least, you are one of the first, but what I say about being uprooted, I’m afraid that you would feel the same if you were out of it, so look at that, too, cold-bloodedly, stand up to them and don’t let them push you out without being a little prepared for that difficult situation of beginning again. And know this — given an uprooting, given not making headway again, don’t despair.

  Then, in the worst case, do NOT go to America, because it’s exactly the same there as in Paris. No, beware of reaching that point where one says: I’ll make myself scarce; I had that myself, I hope that you won’t have it. If you had it, I say again, beware of it, resist it with great coolness, say to yourself, this point proves to me that I’m running into a brick wall. This is a wall for bulls to run into; I am a bull too, but an intelligent one, I am a bull about becoming an artist. Anyway, get out before you smash your head to pieces, that’s all. I’m not saying that that’s what will happen; I hope that there will be no question whatever of running into a wall. But suppose after all that there was a whirlpool with accompanying sharp-edged rocky promontories, well, I would just think that you might avoid it, wouldn’t you? Perhaps you’ll admit that those rocks might be there, since you yourself pulled me out of that whirlpool when I had no more hope of getting out of it and was powerless to fight against it any more.

  I mean, give those waters a very wide berth. They’re beginning to drag you down in that one thing — I say no more nor less than I’m sure of — that you aren’t part of nature. Do you think it strange of me that I dare to say as much as this: now, at the very beginning, change course now and no later than now in so far as you work at restoring the bond between yourself and nature? The more you remain in the frame of mind of not being part of nature, the more you play into the hands of your eternal enemy (and mine too), Nerves. I have more experience than you of the sort of tricks they could play on you. You’re now beginning to enter waters that are throwing you off balance, inasmuch as the rapport with nature seems to be broken. Take that very coolly as a sign of aberration; say, oh no, not that way if you please. Seek a new passion, an interest in something; think, for example, after all perspective must fundamentally be the simplest of all things and chiaroscuro a simple, not a complicated matter. It must be something that speaks for itself, otherwise I don’t much care for it. Try to get back to nature in this way.

  Will you now, old chap, simply take it from me when I say that as I write to you I’ve got something back of what I had years ago. That I’m again taking pleasure in windmills, for example, that particularly here in Drenthe I feel much as I did then, at the time when I first began to see the beauty in art. You’d be prepared to call that a normal mood, wouldn’t you? — finding the outdoor things beautiful, being calm enough to draw them, to paint them.
And suppose you were to come up against a brick wall somewhere, wouldn’t you find someone in my present mood composed enough to want to take a little walk with him, precisely in order to have a distraction from thoughts if, through nervousness, these thoughts start to acquire a certain despairing element? You are yourself and not fundamentally changed, but your nerves are beginning to be unstrung by strain. Now, look after your nerves, and don’t take them lightly, because they cause quick-tempered manoeuvres — well, you know a thing or two about that yourself.

  Make no mistake, Theo, at this moment Pa, Ma, Wil, Marie, and I above all, are supported by you; it seems to you that you have to go on for our sakes, and believe me I fully understand that, or at least can understand it to a very great extent. Just think about this for a moment. What is your goal and Pa’s, Ma’s, Wil’s, Marie’s and mine? What do we all want? We want, acting decently, to keep our heads above water, we all want to arrive at a clear position, not a false position, don’t we? This is what we all want, unanimously and sincerely, however much we differ or don’t differ among ourselves. What are we all prepared to do against fate? All, all of us without exception to work quietly, calmness. Am I wrong in regarding the general situation in this way? Very well, what are we facing now? We’re confronting a calamity which, touching you, touches us all. Fine. A storm is brewing. We see it brewing. That lightning might well strike us. Fine. What do we do now? Do we reach our wit’s end? I don’t think that we’re inclined that way — even if certain nerves that we all have in our bodies, even if certain fibres of the heart, finer than nerves, are shocked or experience pain.