You’ve learned to see art over the years — now you go on, already knowing what you want to make. Don’t think that this is a little thing.
You can be decisive, you know what you want.
There’s a saying of Gustave Doré’s that I’ve always found exceedingly beautiful — I have the patience of an ox — right away I see something good in it, a certain resolute honesty; in short there’s a lot in that saying, it’s a real artist’s saying. When one thinks about people from whose mind something like this springs, it seems to me that the sort of arguments one all too often hears in the art trade about ‘gift’ is such a hideous croaking of ravens. ‘I have the patience’, how calm that is, how dignified that is. They wouldn’t even say that if it weren’t precisely because of all that croaking of ravens. I’m not an artist — how coarse that is — even to think it of oneself — should one not have patience, not learn patience from nature, learn patience from seeing the wheat slowly come up, the growing of things — should one think oneself such a hugely dead thing that one believed one wouldn’t grow? Should one deliberately discourage one’s development? I say this to show why I find it so silly to talk about gifts and no gifts.
But if one wants to grow, one must fall into the earth. So I say to you, plant yourself in the soil of Drenthe — you will sprout there. Don’t shrivel up on the pavement. You’ll say that there are city plants — well yes, but you are wheat and belong in the wheatfield.
Well, I too foresee that, perhaps for financial reasons, now cannot be the moment, but at the same time that perhaps the circumstances would just make it possible. And if there were only half a possibility, it’s my opinion that you would do well to risk it. I don’t believe that you would ever regret it. You would develop the best that is in you, have a more peaceful life. Neither of us would be alone, our work would flow together. We might have frightening moments at the outset, we’d prepare ourselves for them and arrange things in such a way that we had to withstand them, couldn’t turn back. Not look behind us nor be able to look behind us, actually force ourselves to look forward. But it’s precisely then that we’re far away from all friends and acquaintances, we fight the fight without anyone seeing us, and that’s best, other people can only hinder us. We see victory ahead — we feel it in us. We’ll be so busy working that we won’t be able to do anything but think positively about the work.
I don’t suppose in the least that I’m telling you anything new, I just ask, don’t go against your own best thoughts. Think about that idea of looking at things with a certain cool, good heart rather than with gloominess. I see that even in Millet; he couldn’t help being of good heart, precisely because he was so serious. This is something specific, not to all schools of painting, but to the school of Millet, Israëls, Breton, Boughton, Herkomer, several others. In short, those who seek the really simple are themselves so simple, and their view of life is so full of good will and good heart, even in misfortune.
Think about these things, write about these things. It must be a revolution that is, because it’s necessary that it should be — the most self-evident thing in the world for you and for me, so I write about it calmly and I have no doubt you’ll also think about it calmly. With a handshake.
Ever yours,
Vincent
402 | Nieuw-Amsterdam, Friday, 2 November 1883 | To Theo van Gogh (D)
Dear brother,
Just wanted to tell you about a trip to Zweeloo, the village where Liebermann stayed for a long time and made studies for his painting of the washerwomen at the last Salon.
Where Ter Meulen and Jules Bakhuyzen also spent some time.
Imagine a trip across the heath at 3 o’clock in the morning in an open cart (I went with the man where I lodge, who had to go to the market in Assen). Along a road, or ‘diek’ as they say here, which they’d put mud on to raise it instead of sand. It was much nicer even than the barge. When it was only just starting to get a little lighter and the cocks were crowing everywhere by the huts scattered over the heath, the few cottages we passed — surrounded by slender poplars whose yellow leaves one could hear falling — an old squat tower in a little churchyard with earth bank and beech hedge,the flat landscapes of heath or wheatfields, everything, everything became just exactly like the most beautiful Corots. A silence, a mystery, a peace as only he has painted.
It was still very dark, though, when we got to Zweeloo at 6 o’clock in the morning — I saw the real Corots even earlier in the morning. The ride into the village was really so beautiful. Huge mossy roofs on houses, barns, sheepfolds, sheds. The dwellings here are very wide, among oak trees of a superb bronze. Tones of golden green in the moss, of reddish or bluish or yellowish dark lilac greys in the soil, tones of inexpressible purity in the green of the little wheatfields. Tones of black in the wet trunks, standing out against golden showers of whirling, swirling autumn leaves, which still hang in loose tufts, as if they were blown there, loosely and with the sky shining through them, on poplars, birches, limes, apple trees. The sky unbroken, clear, illuminating, not white but a lilac that cannot be deciphered, white in which one sees swirling red, blue, yellow, which reflects everything and one feels above one everywhere, which is vaporous and unites with the thin mist below. Brings everything together in a spectrum of delicate greys.
I didn’t find a single painter in Zweeloo, though, and the people said they never come there in the winter. It’s precisely in the winter that I hope to be there. Since there were no painters, I decided to walk back and do some drawing on the way instead of waiting for my landlord’s return.
So I started to make a sketch of the very apple orchard where Liebermann made his large painting. And then back along the road we had driven down early on. At the moment that area around Zweeloo is entirely given over to young wheat — vast, sometimes, that most tender of tender greens that I know. With above it a sky of a delicate lilac white that gives an effect — I don’t think it can be painted, but for me it’s the basic tone that one must know in order to know what the basis of other effects is.
A black earth, flat — infinite — a clear sky of delicate lilac white. That earth brings forth that young wheat — it’s as if that wheat is a growth of mould. That’s what the good, fertile fields of Drenthe are, au fond — everything in a vaporous atmosphere. Think of the Last day of creation by BRION — well, yesterday I felt that I understood the meaning of that painting.
The poor soil of Drenthe is the same, only the black earth is even blacker — like soot — not a lilac black like the furrows, and melancholically overgrown with eternally rotting heather and peat. I see that everywhere — the chance effects on that infinite background: in the peat bogs the sod huts, in the fertile areas, really primitive hulks of farmhouses and sheepfolds with low, very low walls, and huge mossy roofs. Oaks around them. When one travels for hours and hours through the region, one feels as if there’s actually nothing but that infinite earth, that mould of wheat or heather, that infinite sky. Horses, people seem as small as fleas then. One feels nothing any more, however big it may be in itself, one only knows that there is land and sky.
However, in one’s capacity as a tiny speck watching other tiny specks — leaving aside the infinite — one discovers that every tiny speck is a Millet. I passed a little old church, just exactly, just exactly the church at Gréville in Millet’s little painting in the Luxembourg; but here, instead of the little peasant with the spade in that painting, a shepherd with a flock of sheep came along the hedge. One didn’t see through to the sea in the background but only to the sea of young wheat, the sea of furrows instead of that of the waves. The effect produced: the same. I saw ploughmen, very busy now,a sand-cart, shepherds, road workers, dung-carts. In a little inn along the way drew a little old woman at the spinning wheel, little dark silhouette — like something out of a fairy tale — little dark silhouette against a bright window through which one saw the bright sky and a path through the delicate green and a few geese cropping the grass.
And then, when dusk fell — imagine the silence, the peace of that moment! Imagine, right then, an avenue of tall poplars with the autumn leaves, imagine a broad muddy road, all black mud with the endless heath on the right, the endless heath on the left, a few black, triangular silhouettes of sod huts, with the red glow of the fire shining through the tiny windows, with a few pools of dirty, yellowish water that reflect the sky, where bogwood trunks lie rotting. Imagine this muddy mess in the evening twilight with a whitish sky above, so everything black on white. And in this muddy mess a rough figure — the shepherd — a throng of oval masses, half wool, half mud, that bump into one another, jostle one another — the flock. You see it coming — you stand in the midst of it — you turn round and follow them.
With difficulty and reluctantly they progress along the muddy road. Still, there’s the farm in the distance — a few mossy roofs and piles of straw and peat between the poplars. Again the sheepfold is like a triangle in silhouette. Dark.
The door stands wide open like the entrance to a dark cave. The light from the sky behind shines through the cracks in the boards at the back. The whole caravan of masses of wool and mud disappears into this cave — the shepherd and a woman with a lantern shut the doors behind them.
That return of the flock in the dusk was the finale of the symphony that I heard yesterday. That day passed like a dream, I had been so immersed in that heart-rending music all day that I had literally forgotten even to eat and drink — I took a slice of coarse peasant bread and a cup of coffee at the little inn where I drew the spinning wheel. The day was over, and from dawn to dusk, or rather from one night to the other night, I had forgotten myself in that symphony. I came home and, sitting by the fire, it occurred to me that I was hungry, and I found I was terribly hungry. But that’s how it is here. One feels exactly as if one had been at an exhibition of one hundred masterpieces, for example. What does one get out of a day like that? Just a few scratches. And yet one gets something else out of it, too — a calm passion for work.
Above all, do write to me soon. It’s Friday today but your letter isn’t here yet; I’m looking forward to it eagerly. It takes time to get it changed, since it has to go back to Hoogeveen again and then back here again. We don’t know how it will work out, but apart from that I would now say — the simplest thing perhaps would be to send money once a month. In any event write again soon. With a handshake.
Ever yours,
Vincent.
408 | Nieuw-Amsterdam, Saturday, 1 December 1883 | To Theo van Gogh (D)
My dear Theo,
Thanks for your letter and the enclosure. Your letter explains your silence to me.
You thought that ‘ feeling that I was flush’, I was giving you an ‘ultimatum’ — in the way — similar — that the nihilists, say, might send them to the Tsar. Well, fortunately both for you and for me, there’s no question here of anything of the kind or similar.
However, I do understand your interpretation now that I know what it is, but I had to know. For a start I meant something different — it was simply: ‘I wouldn’t want to flourish if you had to wither in consequence; I wouldn’t want to develop the artistic in me if you had to suppress the artistic in you for my sake. I wouldn’t approve if you were to suppress the artistic in you for anyone’s sake, even for the sake of father, mother, sister, brother or wife’. There you have my meaning — perhaps expressed nervously and in the wrong words — most decidedly there was no more nor anything else behind it than that. You understand it well enough now, don’t you?
As to what I wrote in my last letter, it arose out of your silence, an absolute mystery to me, absolutely inexplicable to me until I knew what the matter was. I already had an answer as far as Marie is concerned before I ever received your letter, simply because I remembered what you wrote to me in the past about your meeting with her and thought, that has to be all right, that can’t be what’s wrong. So even my letter on the subject was meant like this: brother, you seem to abandon me without warning; if you did this on purpose it would be treachery in my view, but I CAN not think THAT, so ‘explain it to me’ — no more nor less than this was behind that, and as to what I said about Lady Macbeth, you’ve interpreted it correctly, as a hint in general that was not even a question but only to make you feel: EITHER it has to be like this OR it is a misunderstanding.
Be aware of this, though, brother, that I’m absolutely cut off from the outside world — except for you — so that for me it was enough to make me crazy when your letter didn’t come at a moment when, far from being ‘flush’, I was in dire straits — although I didn’t mention that — because I reckon that I’m somewhat above the cares that peck at my vitals, regarding this torture as understandable, so be it, although not as deserved. As to ‘I wouldn’t want to flourish if someone else had to wither in consequence’, I hope that I would say this — which lay in what you conceived to be an ultimatum — WHETHER I was ‘flush’ OR in ‘agony’.
It seems to me that the conclusion that I spoke as if I was ‘flush’ was rather shallow or hasty on your part — although it must have been in the way I expressed it, for it was certainly not what I felt.
I just want to tell you that since I’ve been here I’ve had to see to it that my equipment was organized, that I had paint, that I went to see this and that, that I paid for my lodgings, that I sent the woman something, that I paid off some debts. All this keeping me very hard up all the time — to put it mildly. Add to this that singular torture . . . loneliness, and you really will no longer be able to think that there’s any possibility of my feeling ‘flush’ for the time being — or that I felt it then.
I say loneliness and not even in peace — but that loneliness which a painter in an isolated region encounters when every Tom, Dick and Harry takes him to be a madman — a murderer — a vagabond &c. &c. Granted it may be a petty vexation, but a vexation it is. Being a stranger, doubly strange and unpleasant — however stimulating and beautiful the countryside may be.
But I see in this only a bad time that one has to get through. Something, though, which one can do very little about oneself — that is, about the attitude of the people whom one would so much like to have as models and can’t get.
With hindsight, I see clearly enough how you and I came to misunderstand each other. There was a moment when you were very melancholy, and you wrote me the following: the gentlemen are making it almost impossible for me, and I actually believe that they would rather dismiss me than that I should resign (the underlined precisely my case at the time). And you said, ‘sometimes I think I should just disappear’ — and you said — there were things about the idea of painting to which you were at least not averse.
Very well — then I candidly told you all my thoughts about the possibility of your becoming a painter, I said you can do it provided you want to, and I believe in you as an artist, from the moment you pick up a brush, even if no one else does.
What I said about that, I’ll say to you in the future should a misfortune — a calamity — strike you — what is NOW stopping you from ‘a complete renewal’ is indeed a misfortune. If a calamity were to strike you, I believe that you as a person would become a greater person as a result, with — with — with — an eternally painful wound at the same time.
I would expect of you that it would raise you up, not ‘drag you down’, that wound which can only be caused by a calamity.
But your later letters differ so much in tone and so much in content that I now say: if your rigged ship is sound, very well, then stay on it.
However I’ll always maintain what I said should a calamity put you in a different position in relation to society. Were that ever to happen, I say in that regard: let it be a sign for you to make a complete change of profession, rather than starting all over again doing the same thing.
But as long as you have your rigged ship, I don’t say that I advise you to put to sea in a fishing-boat. Although I wouldn’t wish for G&Cie’s rigged ship back, as far as I personally
am concerned. At the time I thought, for God’s sake, calamity — do your worst!
At first I didn’t know what to think about the change in the tone of your letters. Now, looking back, I think as regards your somewhat melancholy but for me so touching letter, written at a time when G&Cie were being terribly nasty to you (a moment COMPARABLE to what I experienced myself) — now in hindsight I think, I say, that you took a different view of that moment when I said to the G&Cie gentlemen ‘if you force me to go, I won’t refuse to go’, and that things really have CALMED DOWN, perhaps for good — and with your consent — so be it — I won’t object. Well, I do not take it amiss of you — because I believe that in such a case certain conditions that really are acceptable CAN be laid down — and I think that you would not have accepted them were there to have been anything dishonest in accepting them. But why I said something like, ‘if you stay then I’ll refuse your financial support,’ was because you had said ‘let me stay where I am because I have to take care of Pa, Ma, Wil and Marie’, and (although you didn’t mention me) me as well. Tact on your part not to mention me, to which I had to respond with tact on my part — I don’t want that — you sacrificing yourself in so far as you would stay there against your will for the sake of others. There you have what you interpreted as giving you an ultimatum.
If you stay there because ‘you have a renewed pleasure in it’ — it’s all to the good as far as I’m concerned, and I congratulate you on your newly rigged ship, although for myself I have no desire to go back.
What you write about Serret interests me greatly. A man like that who eventually produces something heart-rending as blossom from a hard and difficult life is a phenomenon like the blackthorn, or better yet a gnarled old apple tree which suddenly bears blossoms that are among the tenderest and most ‘pure’ things under the sun.
Ever Yours Page 55