Ever Yours

by Vincent Van Gogh

  What you say about the figures is true, that as figures they aren’t like the heads are. I’ve therefore thought about starting it very differently, that is tackling it from the torsos instead of from the heads.

  But then it would have become something altogether different.

  As to sitting, though, don’t forget that these people certainly don’t sit on chairs like in one of Duval’s cafés, say.

  The finest thing I saw was that the woman was simply kneeling — that’s in the first sketch that I sent you.

  But anyway, it’s simply painted the way it’s painted, and we’ll do it again sometime — and then certainly not the same. The last few days I’ve also been busy drawing little figures.

  Thanks, too, for the No. of Le Temps you sent with Paul Mantz’s article about the Salon. I haven’t seen such a good article in a long time. I think it uncommonly good — the opening sentences — the painting of those Laplanders in their dark hut, who see the sun rise after the long winter night — how in art one also sits waiting for light.

  Then immediately afterwards his reference to Millet, who has certainly given new light — ‘and who remains’.

  Then pointing to Lhermitte as Millet’s successor — I think all of it manly language, and outstanding in accuracy and broad view.

  Except I think it a shame that he calls Roll ‘a beginner’ — for that’s to denigrate him, and Roll has already made so many fine things and is — matchless.

  Already matchless since his Miners’ strike at least. When Paul Mantz says that Roll’s labourers don’t work very hard, and that it is ‘a dream’. Well now — it’s a nice conceit and there’s something to it. The only thing is that it’s precisely because it’s Paris, and not the down-to-earth work in the fields. After all, a workman in the city is just exactly the way Roll paints him.

  Rappard has a painting in Antwerp that I think will be very fine, at least the sketch, which practically no one liked, was to my mind very good. I think he’s very clever.

  Have you finished Zola’s book, Germinal, yet? I’d very much like to read it and will send it back within a fortnight or so. Is Lhermitte’s month of May in yet?

  In Mantz’s article I also think what he manages to say about colour in 4 words very good and logical, when he talks about ‘the ash blues that we love’, and ‘the grass of the meadow is very green, the bull is russet brown, the young girl is pink, here is the harmony of 3 tones’, when he talks about the same question in regard to Lhermitte.

  Regards, with a handshake.

  Yours truly,

  Vincent

  I can understand that Besnard must be interesting.

  I’ll add another word or two here — I cannot advise you enough to work out E. Delacroix’s different propositions about colour for yourself.

  Although — out of touch — although out of the art world for a long time — turned out — because of my clogs &c. — yet I see from that article by Mantz that there are still connoisseurs and art lovers, even now, who — know something — and that is what Thoré, what Théophile Gautier knew. And that, leaving aside the self-styled more civilized world of progress for what it is, namely a deception, it continues to come down to what the reformers already announced about taste in ’48, for instance, in a manly and forceful way.

  Just as Israëls won’t be surpassed here in Holland but, it seems to me, will remain the master. And in Belgium, Leys and Degroux.

  Don’t, whatever you do, make the mistake of thinking that I’m insisting on imitation, because I don’t mean that at all.

  You’ve seen much more than I have — and I wish that I’d seen what you’ve seen and are still looking at every day.

  But perhaps seeing a great deal is precisely what makes it difficult to reflect. Anyway.

  My assertion is just that it’s the same with you as with a mass of others, that when you’re older you have to repeat the ground rules once more and study them again. I mean that in your capacity as an art expert you have to know certain rules of colour mixing and perspective just as well as the painters themselves — in terms of theory even better than them actually — since you have to advise and speak about paintings in the making. Don’t take it amiss, for what I say is true; that this would be of more practical use to you than you might think, and would raise you above the usual standard of dealers. Which is necessary, because the usual standard is below standard. I do know a little from my own experience what the dealers know and what they don’t know.

  I believe that they’re often taken in and make deals that they later regret, precisely because they know too little about how a painting is made. Anyway — I know you’re already taking pains — for example by reading good things like the one by Gigoux. Really study the subject of colour etc. for yourself. I’m trying to do it myself too, and I’d also like to read everything you find of that nature. These days I’m working on putting what Delacroix said about drawing into practice on drawing a hand and arm: don’t start from the line but from the middle. One has opportunity enough to start from ovals there. And what I’m trying to get with it is to be able to draw not a hand but THE GESTURE, not a mathematically correct head but the overall expression. The sniffing of the wind when a digger looks up, say, or speaking. Life, in short.

  507 | Nuenen, on or about Tuesday, 9 June 1885 | To Theo van Gogh (D)

  My dear Theo,

  Today I sent off that little crate, containing 1 other painting, Peasant cemetery, besides what I already told you.

  I’ve left out some details — I wanted to say how this ruin shows that for centuries the peasants have been laid to rest there in the very fields that they grubbed up in life — I wanted to say how perfectly simply death and burial happen, coolly as the falling of an autumn leaf — no more than a bit of earth turned over — a little wooden cross. The fields around — where the grass of the churchyard ends, beyond the little wall, they make a last fine line against the horizon — like the horizon of a sea. And now this ruin says to me how a faith and religion mouldered away, although it was solidly founded — how, though, the life and death of the peasants is and will always be the same, springing up and withering regularly like the grass and the flowers that grow there in that churchyard. Victor Hugo, whom they’ve also just buried, said Religions pass, God remains.

  I don’t know whether you’ll see anything in these two things — the cottage with the mossy roof reminded me of a wren’s nest. Anyway, you must just look at them.

  Now I must take this opportunity of explaining to you again — which I found new, clear words for — why I wrote and write to you that I’m still far from sure whether your present view is your definite conviction. The firm of G&Cie isn’t a good school for getting to know paintings, let alone painters. I tell you this as my opinion — that one doesn’t even learn how to look independently there.

  Who did they greatly honour? Paul Delaroche.

  I don’t have to tell you how Delaroche was one of the people who really didn’t stand up to scrutiny — there’s simply no one left who takes his part.

  Someone else who won’t stand up to scrutiny — even though he’s better — although he did make something very fine once or twice — who will also fail — that is — Gérôme.

  His Prisoner, though, his Syrian shepherd are felt, and I think them as fine as anybody, and readily and willingly.

  But by far the most often he’s a Delaroche II. Each of them, taking into account the context of their age, is of equal worth. What I’m now asserting is — that I consider it highly likely that the whole situation will BORE you more by the year.

  What I further assert is that one does both others and especially oneself too a disservice by being bored. In spite of many wise lessons, I’ve never seriously granted that being bored ‘for one’s own good’ can have its good, practical side. Now a MASS of people have reformed themselves at the age of about 30 and changed very considerably.

  Just think calmly about this — I tell you that NOTHING of wha
t I learnt and heard about art at G&Cie stood up to scrutiny. How if one reverses the generalities that count there as the conversation killers in judging art — namely praising the old or present-day Delaroche to the skies and discrediting the unorthodox — if, I say, one reverses certain maxims, then — one takes a breath of fresh air. In short — old chap — such curious turns in situations and affairs are possible — not only that — but even the rule. It’s funny, isn’t it — that, after all, I still doubt whether you’ll stay in the trade.

  You don’t have to take any notice of this or reply to it — I say it to you just to express my idea frankly, not to start futile exchanges of words.

  But it’s — an enchanted land — where one isn’t free.

  Anyway — I’ll hear sometime whether you’ve received the little crate and whether you find anything in it.

  Tomorrow I’m going to paint a thing in another village — also a cottage — in a smaller size. I found it last Sunday on a long trip I made in the company of a peasant boy — in order to get hold of a wren’s nest. We found 6; without doubt it was a place that Bodmer would have adored. And they were all nests from which the young had already flown, so that one could take them without too many pangs of conscience. It was so real; I also have some other splendid nests. Regards, write soon, with a handshake.

  Yours truly,

  Vincent

  I’d like you to give both the paintings a varnish before you show them to Portier or Serret.

  The peasant cemetery has sunk in particularly badly, because it was very different on the canvas at first and I scraped the first thing off completely. It was a total failure at first — then I gave it short shrift and started from the beginning, went and sat on another side and painted early in the morning instead of in the evening. Well, and the other — the one of the cottage — was originally a shepherd. The sheep were shorn last week; I saw it — on a table in a barn.

  I’m glad that this time I can show Portier something very different again. I’m busy drawing, by the way, so as to send a few full-length figures in a little while. But working on the cottages — perhaps you’ll say imitations of Michel, although they aren’t — and searching for subjects, I’ve found such splendid cottages that I now really must go bird’s nesting with a number of variations of these ‘people’s nests’, which remind me so much of the nests of wrens — that’s to say, paint them.

  Oh — one mustn’t doubt — anyone who paints the peasants nowadays and has his heart in his work, he wins — at least a part, and not the worst although it’s not the largest — of the public.

  This doesn’t alter the fact that my end or second half of the month — can still work out remarkably meagre. But the same happens to the peasant lads too, and — they still have fun.

  I wish you’d been here on Sunday when we went on that trip. I came back covered in mud because we had to spend a good half hour wading through a stream. But for me painting is now becoming as stimulating and enticing as hunting — it is a hunt, after all, for models, and beautiful places too. Regards again, and best wishes to you. It’s already late and I have to be at the place at 5 o’clock, so — adieu.

  509 | Nuenen, on or about Monday, 22 June 1885 | To Theo van Gogh (D)

  My dear Theo,

  Thanks for your letter and the enclosure, which is exactly what I meant and enables me to work at the end of the month just as at the beginning of the month.

  I was very pleased to hear that Serret is the painter about whom you had previously written things that I had really remembered, but the name had escaped me. I’d like to write much more to you than I will in this letter, but when I get home nowadays I’m really not in the mood for writing when I’ve been sitting in the sun all day. As to what Serret says, I think so too — I’ll drop him a line, because I’d like to become friends with him. As I already told you, these days I’m hard at work on figure drawings — I’ll send them specifically with an eye to Serret, to show him that I’m far from indifferent to the unity of a figure and the form.

  Do you ever see Wallis? Might the watercolour of the auction be something for him? If it were something for Wisselingh, then better he should take it. I once gave Wisselingh a couple of heads and also just sent him the lithograph. But because he didn’t send so much as a word in reply, I think that all I’d get would be an insult if I sent something.

  It just happened to me that, having not heard anything from him in 3 months or so, I suddenly got a letter from Rappard, with whom I’ve been on good terms for years, so supercilious and so full of insults and, it seemed to me, so obviously written after he’d been in The Hague that I’m as good as certain that I’ve lost him as a friend for good.

  It’s precisely because I tried it first in The Hague, that’s to say my own country, that I have every right and reason to forget all that unpleasantness and to think of something else outside my own country.

  You know Wallis well, so perhaps you could bring it up sometime apropos of that watercolour, but act as the opportunity arises. If I could earn something with my work, if we had some firm ground, even a little — under our feet, to be able to go on living — and if ever the desire to become an artisan took shape in you — let me say to make it clear — in the manner of, say, discounting all the differences in age &c. — Hennebeau in Germinal — what you would be able to paint then! Still, the future’s always other than one thinks, so one can never know for sure. The drawback to painting is that if one doesn’t sell one’s paintings one still has to have money for paints and models to make progress. And that drawback is ugly. But otherwise — painting and, to my mind, particularly painting peasant life, gives peace of mind, even though one has a lot of scraping along and wretchedness on the outside of life. I mean painting is a home, and one doesn’t have that homesickness, that peculiar thing that Hennebeau had.

  The passage I copied out then struck me very much because, almost literally at that time, I had just such a longing to be something like a grass-mower or polder worker.

  And I was sick of the boredom of civilization. It is better, one is happier if one puts it into effect — but pretty much literally — at least one feels really alive. And it is something to be deep in the snow in winter, to be deep in the yellow leaves in the autumn, to be deep in the ripe wheat in the summer, to be deep in the grass in the spring. It is something to always be with the mowers and the peasant girls, in summer with the big sky above, in the winter by the black fireplace. And to feel — this has always been so and always will be. One may sleep on straw, eat rye bread — well then, in the long run one is the healthier for it.

  I’d like to write more but — as I said — I’m not really in the mood for writing, and I wanted to enclose a note for Serret, which you must just read, since I write in it about what I wanted to send before long, especially because I want to let Serret see my particular figure studies. Regards,

  Yours truly,

  Vincent

  Serret may agree with you that making good things and selling are quite separate. But there’s no truth in that. When the public saw Millet at last, his work collected together — then the public in both Paris and London was enthusiastic. And who was it who had stood in the way and rejected Millet? — the dealers — the so-called experts &c. I ask you, would a Mouret have said something like that, to keep talking about business?

  514 | Nuenen, on or about Monday, 13 July 1885 | To Anthon van Rappard (D)

  My dear friend Rappard,

  All that has passed means that when I come to write to you it’s more in order to be clear than because I do it for my pleasure. As to my having returned your last letter to you forthwith, there were two reasons for it, each in its own right, to my mind, providing a motive. Firstly — suppose that your comments on the lithograph I sent you were correct, suppose I had nothing to say against them — even then, you wouldn’t have been justified in condemning my work in such an insulting manner, or rather in ignoring it as you did.

  And secondly — wher
eas you have had more friendship than you have given, not just from me but from my family too, you certainly cannot claim that on an occasion such as my father’s death we were obliged to send something other than a printed notice.

  Particularly not me, since before that time you hadn’t replied to a letter from me. Particularly not me, since on the occasion of my father’s death you did send an expression of sympathy in a letter addressed to my mother — but such a one that when it arrived there was comment at home about what reason there might be for not writing to me then — which I didn’t want, however, nor do I.

  You know — I haven’t been on the best of terms with them at home for years. In the first few days after my father died, I had to correspond with the immediate family. But otherwise, as soon as family arrived, I withdrew from it all completely. And regarding any omissions, not me but the family. And I have to tell you that in so far as it goes, you’re an exception, that I asked them at home if they’d sent you word and it appeared that it had been forgotten. Much more than enough about that.

  The reason I’m writing to you again is in no way to respond to your comment in that regard. Nor to repeat what I said about your remarks about painting. You’ve been able to re-read your own letter. If you still believe that was justified, if you still really think that ‘if you put your mind to it, you can deuced well express yourself correctly’ — well — then it’s best simply to leave you to your delusions.

  To get to the point — the reason why I’m writing to you is simply that — although it was you who insulted me in the first place, not I you — I’ve known you too long for me to consider this a reason to break off all acquaintance. What I have to say to you is as a painter to a painter and — so long as you and I paint — it will remain so — whether we know each other, whether we don’t. There was mention of Millet.