This way of mine of regarding you and your money balances your way of regarding me and my work — and as long as it remains in balance — I’ll accept it.
If I receive money from you, you drawings or paintings from me — and I have something to justify myself in the view of society and we otherwise have nothing in common with each other, if need be — don’t write or talk about anything — even then it’s enough for me for the moment and I accept it completely. Even if it pleases you to tear my work up or if you want to do nothing with it, or if you want to do something with it, I no longer have the right to criticize as soon as, for my part, I may regard it as a purchase.
Be so good as to tell me which term of abuse I used about your friend Braat in my letter.
In my letter, as far as I know, there was nothing about Braat except that I thought he was already ill in the months that I knew him at G&Cie in Paris. At that time, as far as I can recall, I got on very well with him, and I really don’t understand how you get the idea that I ‘can’t stand’ him. So many years have passed, so much has changed for me in those years, that the people I knew then are fairly vague and indistinct in my memory and — that I seldom if ever think about them — which nobody can blame me for, I believe. But as to Braat, far from my not wanting to take any special notice of him, now that you’ve written about it that way, will you please assure him that my sympathies are with him, as they would be with any sufferer, and that, if he happens to remember me, I send my regards and wish him as much peace and serenity as one may have in such a situation. Yet what good does such a wish do him — not much — so, unless one is called upon to say something, one keeps such things to oneself. I would ask you though, if you’ve said something to him about my having written about him in the way you reproach me with, to tell him that you had only seen that term of abuse in your imagination. For you definitely won’t find it in my letter.
You write that you had tried to answer my letters, but had left off. For my part, too, I had wanted to write to you since then, but also left off.
Know that if you don’t want to do anything with the work you buy from me, or tear it up if need be, this will be no reason for me not to do my best in it.
For this month I have some pen drawings for you; in the first place the ones that are with Rappard at the moment — about which I have a letter from him that he thought they were ALL beautiful, and the sentiment in Behind the hedgerows and the Kingfisher PARTICULARLY beautiful. Then those first 3 Winter gardens too, which he was also taken with. Aside from those, I have some painted studies that are your property — to do with just as you will — which I can send you if you wish — which, if you yourself don’t care to have them, I would ask you if I might keep for a while so as to work from them.
One is a large weaver who is weaving a piece of red cloth — the little church amidst the wheat — a view of a little old village near here.
I’d just like to come back to your letter about my drawings — the one you say I’ve interpreted utterly impossibly.
I see in it first that, among the things you say, there are a few whose tenor is that there were things that pleased you in the tone, in the sentiment — so much the better — if you will, that gives me a good deal of pleasure.
Second, in that letter there’s a comparison of the schools of Millet and Lhermitte. I found what you said about Millet better and more sensitive expressions than I am used to from you — this was overshadowed, however, by the way you were again tired of Lhermitte, and I’d also like to say about your whole argument once again, you’re splitting your hairs too thin — why didn’t you take a broader view, why didn’t you feel the same enthusiasm for both (who to my mind are to each other as Rembrandt is to Maes, say) without immersing yourself in barren hairsplitting about who is the greater?
Third, there was something that was not in that letter, namely an answer to the question as to whether we’d go on or not.
That was the question that it was all about, and since my work depends on my paint and tools (to an extent that I can’t ignore), and they in turn on whether or not I receive money, I can’t possibly ascribe much usefulness to that letter.
It would be less impossible for me to preserve my composure in our correspondence if, when you don’t have the money on the date, you were to write, I haven’t got it, you’ll get it at such and such a time. Now you wrote not a word in response to my saying: it surprises me that I hear nothing, my having said I’d rather have it at once than later, because you said that if I need it I can get the money by return. If you’d written again then, I’m sorry but I haven’t got it, I shouldn’t have had to get ideas into my head that you’re deliberately being lax in order to make my life a bit more difficult. And — when you haven’t got it, I can’t take it amiss — when you ignore — deliberately or not deliberately — that’s something that I really wish you could cure yourself of, and something about which one really has to get angry. What I said about doing something with my work, in Antwerp, for instance, definitely is my plan.
The frame of mind in which you now are about me, the frame of mind in which I now am about you, is cool enough simply to ask and to reply coolly. After all — leaving aside — giving a damn about each other or not — can I count on its being fixed for 1 year that I’ll continue to receive the usual monthly in return for supplying my work? Why I have to know this is because, if I can count on it, I would take a slightly roomier studio somewhere, which I need in order to be able to work with a model.
The one I have at present has the following geographical location,
[Sketch 440A]
440A. Plan of the studio
and my powers of imagination aren’t strong enough to think this an improvement on the situation last year. This doesn’t alter the fact that, if I complain about something, there appear in your letters such passages as: I (Theo) think that your position is better now than last summer. Really? And I also draw the little map in response to your expression ‘I’m not aware’ &c., and I would also not be content with this letter of yours if that wasn’t in it.
To which I say — I don’t care whether or not you’re aware that this or that isn’t quite in order, as long as you just don’t ask me to walk round befuddled about it, and as long as you give me the means to improve things I have no objection to your being ‘aware’ of all sorts of things.
I hope this letter is as cool as yours — and I thank you very much for what you sent — which makes up for the rest — at least makes it such that, if I could count on its continuing thus for a year, I ask nothing more of you and will right gladly send you my work.
And would just suggest one other small thing to you: that if I can sell something in Antwerp or somewhere, I notify you of it, and it’s deducted from the 150 francs.
I don’t write to Rappard about business matters — at least I haven’t told him that latterly I haven’t been on terms with you as in the past. Just think about whether it’s quite in order that you, who know Rappard, have never seen anything of his work, have absolutely no idea what he’s doing — no longer take any notice whatsoever of him, except perhaps by hearsay from me. Yet he’s one of the people who will amount to something — with whom people will have to reckon — of whose work people will have to take notice. At the time Rappard came to you and felt small in your presence, you who knew so much about art. Since that year he was in Paris — how immensely he has progressed — but you — haven’t you rested on your laurels a bit???
442 | Nuenen, on or about Monday, 24 March 1884 | To Theo van Gogh (D)
My dear Theo,
Because it’s possible that you didn’t properly understand what I asked you before, and so that there can’t be any question later of having misunderstood something or anything like that, I say it again.
At the end of January or beginning of February I wrote to you that, on coming home, it became all too evident to me that the money which I usually received from you was regarded firstly as something PRECARIOUS,
secondly as, yes, what I’ll call a gift of charity to a poor nincompoop. While I could observe that this opinion was even imparted to people who have absolutely nothing to do with it — for instance the respectable natives of these parts — and, for example, 3 times in one week I heard people who were then complete strangers to me ask, ‘why is it that you don’t sell?’ Just how pleasant everyday life is when one sees this all the time, I leave to you.
In addition to this, I had already made up my mind this summer — on account of your letting me feel the reins then, that it was in my interests to go along with this and that — just to let you feel that, for my part, if you made it difficult for me by fiddling with those reins a lot, I would leave the reins in your hands but not be on the end of them myself — in other words — if I’m not at liberty in my private life, I decline this allowance from you. In short that my work (not my private life) should be what determined whether or not I stayed on my feet financially, at least as far as the 150 francs are concerned. Summing these things up, I said in a letter at the end of January that I didn’t want to keep it exactly as it was until today, namely without any specific agreement.
That I would like, though — would even like very much — nothing better than that — to go on in the same way, provided there’s a specific agreement about supplying work.
And that to try this out I would send one thing and another by March.
Your answer was evasive, it certainly wasn’t something forthright like: Vincent, I appreciate all these complaints and I approve of us coming to an agreement that you will send me drawings monthly which you can consider as the equivalent of the 150 francs that I usually send you, so that you can consider this money as money earned. I most certainly noticed that you simply did not write anything like the above.
Well, I thought, I’ll send one thing and another by March anyway and see how it goes. I then sent 9 watercolours and 5 pen drawings, wrote to tell you that I had a 6th pen drawing as well, and the painted study of the old tower that you had especially wished for at one time. But now that I see that your expressions remain just as vague, I can do nothing other than say to you most decidedly that this is no way to behave.
As far as my work is concerned, up to now it was indeed apparently the case that you would rather I didn’t send something than that I did.
If that’s still the case — well, then in my view either I’m not worthy of your patronage or you think only too flippantly about my drawings.
I have still not withdrawn my proposal for a regular supply of work. When I speak of the fact that I want to be able to consider the 150 francs or whatever it may be, more or less as the equivalent of what I send you, in this respect it’s still a very private affair, and we leave aside altogether the question of whether or not my work has commercial value.
But then I’m more justified in the view of Tom, Dick and Harry, whom I don’t have to anticipate accusing me of living off private means or — absolutely regarding me as ‘having NO means of support’.
At the same time, it’s a sign of confidence in my future on your part, which I most certainly won’t try to force on you, though — and I tell you again that whatever you decide in this matter won’t change the past, and that I most certainly won’t ignore your help in the past and really will appreciate it.
But you have to decide entirely of your own accord whether or not our relationship will endure in the future — for the current year, say.
I end with the assurance, though, that if you refuse to enter into my proposal to supply you with work regularly (you can do whatever you like with that work as regards whether or not you deal in it, although I do in any event insist that you show it from time to time as you already did at the very outset, and rightly to my mind) then I would go ahead with a separation. It seems to me that honour is at stake — so EITHER this change OR — finished. Regards.
Yours truly,
Vincent
What I prefer not to hear later would be that this or that agreement is more a notion of mine than the intention of the other side, namely yours. You know that you told me C.M. said something of the sort to you about me this summer. As a result I learned that it was important to dot the i’s and cross the t’s where agreements are concerned.
I believe, because I already wrote to you repeatedly about this change, that by now summing it up once again, everything has been explained plainly and clearly enough, and that for my part I may also ask for a plain yes or a plain no.
The reason I haven’t sent you the 6th pen drawing yet is because, just as I insist that you show my work now and then, I’ll also occasionally let Rappard see some of my things from now on, since he knows quite a few people — and that drawing was with R. at the time and I should have got it back, but he still has it along with two other ‘winter garden’ pen drawings.
Well then, I’ve already dropped you a line about the painted study in a previous letter, that I was discouraged from sending it because if you don’t see anything in the ones from Drenthe I don’t think you’ll like this one either. It seems to me — as I recall — that among the ones from Drenthe there are some that I would do precisely the same way if I had to do them again.
For the current month I already had the following drawings, Winter garden — Pollard birches — Avenue of poplars — the Kingfisher, which I would otherwise have sent you in April.
446 | Nuenen, between about Monday, 12 and about Thursday, 15 May 1884 | To Theo van Gogh (D)
My dear Theo,
I’ve already left it too long before answering your last letter — and you’ll see how it came about. Let me start by saying that I thank you for your letter and for the enclosed 200 francs. And then I’ll tell you that today I’ve just about finished arranging a spacious new studio I’ve rented. Two rooms — one large and one small — en suite. I’ve been rather busy because of it this last fortnight. I believe I’ll be able to work a good deal more pleasantly there than in the little room at home. And hope that you’ll approve the step I’ve taken when you’ve seen it.
By the way, of late I’ve continued working hard on the large Weaver — which I mentioned to you recently — and also started a canvas of the little tower you know.
I think what you write about the Salon is very important. What you say about Puvis de Chavannes gives me very great pleasure that you see his work thus, and I’m in complete agreement with you in appreciating his talent.
And as regards the colourists — it’s after all the same with me as with you — I can immerse myself in a Puvis de Chavannes, and yet that doesn’t alter the fact that I should feel the same for Mauve’s landscape with cows and Israëls’s paintings as you feel for them.
As regards my own colour, in the work I’m doing here you’ll find not silvery but rather brown tones (Bitumen, for instance, and Bistre) — which I don’t doubt some people would take amiss of me. But you’ll see for yourself what it’s like when you come. I’ve been so busy painting that recently I haven’t made a single drawing between times.
I’ve heard from Rappard that he’s coming at the end of this week, which pleases me greatly. What’s more, I have the idea that this year he’ll come back again for a little longer.
He’s bringing a number of drawings of mine, which I’ll then send you right away.
Perhaps — in a while — I’ll agree with you that my position has improved because of the change last year, and that that change was good.
It will always be a sadness to me, though, that I had to give something up then that I’d have liked to pursue further at the time.
Ma is doing very well, in my view — yesterday she came to my new studio in her bath chair. Walking is getting better, although old age considerably frustrates her progress, which continues regularly now, although not as fast as one might think could be the case.
I’ve recently been getting on better with the people here than at the outset, which is worth a great deal to me, for one has a definite need to be able to give oneself a
little distraction, and when one feels too lonely the work always suffers in consequence. One must, however, perhaps prepare oneself that these things won’t last for ever.
But I’m in good heart — it seems to me that the people in Nuenen are generally better than those in Etten or Helvoirt — there’s more sincerity here — at least that’s my impression now that I’ve been here a while. People do take a sanctimonious position in what they do — that’s true — but in such a way that for my part I have no scruples about going along with it a bit. And reality sometimes comes very close to the Brabant that one has dreamt.
My original plan of settling in Brabant — which fell to pieces — I must confess is attracting me strongly again. Yet knowing how something like that can collapse, we have to see whether or not it would be an illusion. Anyway, I have enough to do for the time being. I now have the space again to be able to work with a model.
And as to how long it will last, there’s no telling.
Well, regards — the Salon will certainly give you plenty to do, but at the same time also be an interesting time.
Thanks again for what you sent, which I really needed because of this change, by the way. I hope you’ll be able to agree with it when you see how I’ve fitted it out.
Adieu, with a handshake.
Yours truly,
Vincent
Regards from everyone at home, and they ask whether you won’t write to them sometime. Pa has been to Breda; Aunt Bertha was doing well and the dressing had been taken off.
450 | Nuenen, mid-June 1884 | To Theo van Gogh (D)
My dear Theo,
I think I already told you in my last letter that I also wanted to start a large male figure as well as that woman spinning. I now send you a little scratch of it herewith. Perhaps you remember two studies of the same corner, which I already had in the studio when you were here.
Ever Yours Page 60