I didn’t go into C.M.’s with him.
The two little panels I painted in Amsterdam were done in a tearing hurry, one of them, mark you, in the station waiting room when I was a bit early for the train, the other one in the morning, before I went to the museum at about 10 o’clock. Even so, I’m sending them to you, in the manner of tiles on which one has dashed something off with a few strokes.
As regards the end of this month — old chap, I’m literally cleaned out — what’s to be done? Couldn’t you send an extra twenty francs or something? I have to pay for paint again next month, 1 Nov. 25 guilders rent.
As regards connections for my work — I did speak to someone, and if I ever go again I’ll take work with me. There’s a general laxness that MAKES it EASY ENOUGH as regards finding a chance to exhibit.
LET’S PAINT A VERY GREAT DEAL. That’s the message if we want to succeed, work a lot precisely because it’s slack — then one day, rather than finding all ports closed to us — we may be able to lash a broom to the mast. Regards.
Yours truly,
Vincent
537 | Nuenen, on or about Wednesday, 28 October 1885 | To Theo van Gogh (D)
My dear Theo,
I read your letter about black with great pleasure. And it convinces me accordingly that you aren’t prejudiced against black.
Your description of the Manet study, The dead toreador, was well analyzed. And the whole letter proves to me the same as your croquis of Paris made me think at the time, that if you put your mind to it you can paint something in words.
It’s certain that by studying the laws of colours one can move from an instinctive belief in the great masters to being able to account for why one likes what one likes, and that’s very necessary nowadays when one considers how terribly arbitrarily and superficially people judge.
You must just let me maintain my pessimism about today’s trade, because it definitely does not imply despondency. This is how I reason to myself. Suppose that I’m right when I increasingly see something like tulip mania in the curious haggling about the price of paintings. Suppose, I say, that like tulip mania at the end of the previous century, the art trade, with other branches of speculation, were to disappear at the end of this as it came, that’s to say relatively quickly.
Tulip mania may have perished, BULB-GROWING REMAINS. And for my part I’m content, for better or worse, to be a little gardener who loves his nursery.
Presently my palette is thawing, and the bleakness of the earliest beginnings has gone.
I still often run up against a blank wall when undertaking something, but all the same, the colours follow one another as if of their own accord, and taking a colour as the starting-point I see clearly in my mind’s eye what derives from it, and how one can get life into it.
Jules Dupré is like Delacroix in landscape, for what enormous diversity of mood he expressed in symphonies of colour.
Now a seascape, with the most delicate blue-greens and broken blue, and all sorts of pearly tones.
Then an autumn landscape with foliage from deep wine red to vivid green, from bright orange to dark havana, with yet more colours in the sky in greys, lilacs, blue, white, forming another contrast to the yellow leaves.
Then again a sunset in black, in violet, in fiery red.
Then again more capricious, like the corner of a garden by him that I saw and have never forgotten; black in the shadow, white in the sun, bright green, a fiery red, and then again a dark blue, a bituminous greenish brown and a light brownish yellow. Truly colours that can have quite a lot to say to one another.
I’ve always idolized Jules Dupré, and he’ll become even more recognized than he is now. For he’s a real colourist — always interesting, and with something so powerful and dramatic. Yes, he is indeed a brother to Delacroix.
As I said, I think your letter about black very good, and what you say about not doing it in the local colour is also correct.
Still, it doesn’t satisfy me. To my mind there’s far more behind not doing it in the local colour. True painters are the ones who don’t do it in the local colour — that was what Blanc and Delacroix discussed once.
May I not simply understand by it that a painter does well if he starts from the colours on his palette instead of starting from the colours in nature?
I mean, when one wants to paint a head, say, and one looks closely at the nature one has before one, then one might think, this head is a harmony of reddish brown, violet, yellow, all broken — I’ll put a violet and a yellow and a reddish brown on my palette, and break them into each other.
I retain from nature a certain sequence and a certain correctness of placement of the tones, I study nature so as not to do anything silly, to remain reasonable — but — I don’t really care whether my colours are precisely the same, so long as they look good on my canvas, just as they look good in life. Truer by far is a portrait by Courbet, manly, free — painted in all sorts of beautiful, deep tones of reddish brown, of goldish, of colder violet in the shadow, with black as a foil, with a little piece of tinted white linen as a rest for the eye — finer than a portrait by anyone you will — who has imitated the colour of the face with hideous precision.
A man’s head or a woman’s head, looked at very composedly, is divinely beautiful, isn’t it? Well then — with painfully literal imitation one loses that general effect of looking beautiful against one another that tones have in nature; one preserves it by re-creating it in a colour spectrum PARALLEL to, but not necessarily exactly, or far from the same as the subject.
Always and intelligently making use of the beautiful tones that the paints form of their own accord when one breaks them on the palette, again — starting from one’s palette — from one’s knowledge of the beautiful effect of colours, isn’t the same as copying nature mechanically and slavishly.
Now here’s another example. Suppose I have to paint an autumn landscape, trees with yellow leaves. Very well — if I conceive it as — a symphony in yellow, what does it matter whether or not my basic yellow colour is the same as that of the leaves — it makes little difference. Much, everything comes down to my sense of the infinite variety of tones in the same family.
If you think this a dangerous tendency towards romanticism, a betrayal of ‘realism’ — painting from the imagination — having a greater love for the colourist’s palette than for nature, well then, so be it.
Delacroix, Millet, Corot, Dupré, Daubigny, Breton, 30 more names, do they not form the heart of this century where art is concerned, and all of them, do they not have their roots in romanticism, even if they surpassed romanticism? Romance and romanticism are our era, and one must have imagination, sentiment in painting. HAPPILY, realism and naturalism ARE NOT FREE of THEM. Zola creates, but doesn’t hold a mirror up to things, creates them amazingly, but creates, poetizes. That’s why it’s so good. So much for naturalism and realism, which are NONETHELESS related to romanticism. And I still say that I’m touched when I see a painting from the days of 30–48, a Paul Huet, an old Israëls like the Zandvoort fisherman, a Cabat, an Isabey. But I find that saying, don’t paint the local tone, so very true — that I would far rather see a painting with lower values than nature than one that’s exactly the same as nature.
Rather a watercolour that’s somewhat vague and unfinished, on the other hand, than one that has been worked up to capture reality.
That saying has a broad meaning — don’t paint the local tone — and leaves the painter free to seek colours that form a whole and are related to one another, which comes out all the more through contrast to another series.
What do I care that the portrait of a worthy citizen tells me precisely what the milk and water, pinkish, purplish, nondescript colour of the pious man’s face — which I’d never seen — is? But the fellow citizens of the little town where the individual in question made himself so estimable that he felt it incumbent upon him to keep posterity familiar with his physiognomy — are very edified by the speaking lik
eness.
COLOUR EXPRESSES SOMETHING IN ITSELF. One can’t do without it; one must make use of it. What looks beautiful, really beautiful — is also right. When Veronese had painted the portraits of his beau monde in the The marriage feast at Cana, when he had devoted to it all the richness of his palette in sombre violets, in magnificent golden tones — then — there was still a faint azure and a pearly white he thought of — which doesn’t appear in the foreground. He flung it on at the back — and it was right, changed of its own accord into the surroundings of marble palaces and sky that singularly complete the array of figures.
That background is so magnificent in that it came about of its own accord, spontaneously, from a colour calculation.
Am I wrong about this?
Isn’t it painted differently from how someone would do it who had thought about the palace and about the figures at the same time? As a single whole?
All that architecture and sky is conventional and subordinate to the figures, calculated to make the figures show up well.
That is truly painting — and the result is more beautiful than precise imitation of the things themselves. Thinking about one thing and letting the surroundings belong to it, derive from it.
Making studies from nature, wrestling with reality — I don’t want to argue it away. I’ve tackled it that way myself for years and years, almost fruitlessly and with all sorts of sad results. I wouldn’t want to have missed that — error.
Always carrying on in the same way would be folly and stupid, that’s what I mean — but not that all my effort has been utterly in vain.
One begins by killing, one ends by healing is a doctors’ saying.
One begins by fruitlessly working oneself to death to follow nature, and everything is contrary.
One ends by quietly creating from one’s palette, and nature is in accord with it, follows from it. But these two opposites don’t exist without each other. Swotting, even if it’s apparently in vain, gives a familiarity with nature, a sounder knowledge of things. And a fine saying of Doré’s, who’s sometimes so clever! is I remember.
Although I believe that the finest paintings are made relatively freely from the imagination, I can’t break with the idea that one can’t study nature, swot even, too much.
The greatest, most powerful imaginations have also made things directly from reality that leave one dumbfounded.
In reply to your description of the study by Manet, I’m sending you a still life of an open, hence an off-white Bible, bound in leather, against a black background with a yellow-brown foreground, with an additional note of lemon yellow.
I painted this in one go, in a single day. This to show you that when I say that perhaps I haven’t swotted entirely for nothing I mean it, because these days it really comes quite readily to me to paint a given object, whatever the shape or colour may be, without hesitation.
Lately I made several studies outdoors, of the autumn landscape. I’ll send you the still life and one of these autumn studies soon. I’ll write again in the next few days anyway, and send this letter in haste to say that I was very pleased with what you say about black. Regards.
Yours truly,
Vincent
541 | Nuenen, on or about Saturday, 14 November 1885 | To Theo van Gogh (D)
My dear Theo,
I came across the following sentence that you’d underlined in the article on Chardin in De Goncourt’s book. After speaking about painters being badly paid, he says: ‘What to do, what to become. He must abandon himself to the inferior occupations or die of hunger. The first course is adopted’. So, he goes on to say, aside from a few martyrs, the rest ‘become fencing masters, soldiers or comedians’.
That really has remained fundamentally true. Seeing as you’d marked the above, I considered it possible you might want to know what I intend to do next, especially since I’ve just informed you that I’ve given notice on my current studio.
The present day isn’t entirely the same as Chardin’s, and nowadays there are a few things that are hard to argue away. The number of painters is much greater.
Now it immediately makes a fatal impression on the public if a painter ‘does something on the side’. I’m not at all above that in this respect, I should say keep on painting, make a hundred studies, and if that’s not enough, two hundred, and just see if that doesn’t get you over ‘doing something on the side’. Then accustoming yourself to poverty, seeing how a soldier or a labourer lives and stays healthy in wind and weather with the ordinary people’s food and dwelling, is as practical as earning a guilder or a bit more a week. After all, one’s not in the world for one’s comfort and doesn’t have to be any better off than the next man. Being better off helps hardly at all — after all, we can’t hold on to our youth.
If THAT were possible — but the thing that really makes one happy, being young and staying so for a long time — well, that isn’t here — that isn’t even in Arabia or Italy, although that is better there than here.
And for my part, I’m of the opinion that one has the greatest chance of staying strong and renewing oneself — in today’s third estate. Anyway. So I’m saying that I seek to find it in painting, without ulterior motives. But — I’d do well, I think, to bear portrait painting in mind if I want to earn. I know it’s difficult to please people with a ‘likeness’, and I dare not say beforehand that I feel sure of my case. I certainly don’t consider it altogether impossible, though, because the people here will be much the same as people elsewhere. Well then, the peasants and the folk from the village aren’t mistaken and promptly say, even contradicting me if I say they’re wrong, that is Renier de Greef, that’s Toon de Groot and that’s Dien van der Beek &c. And sometimes even recognize a figure seen from behind. In town, the bourgeois folk, and certainly no less the tarts, no matter who they are, always value portraits. And Millet — discovered that ship’s captains actually ‘respect someone for it’ if he can do that (those portraits are probably intended for their mistresses ashore). This hasn’t been exploited yet. Do you remember this in Sensier? I’ve always remembered how Millet kept himself going in Le Havre this way.
Well roughly, my plan is to go to Antwerp — I can’t possibly calculate the ins and outs beforehand.
I’ve come by the addresses of 6 art dealers, so I’d want to take something with me and further, as to the work, I plan to paint a few views of the city as soon as I get there — reasonably large — — and show them straightaway too.
In other words concentrate everything on doing something there. And going there poor, at any rate I can’t lose much.
Now as regards here — I know the area and the folk too well and love them too much to believe I’m going for good. I’ll see about renting a place to store my things, and then I’m also covered should I want to leave Antwerp for a while — or should become homesick for the country.
As for ‘doing something on the side’ — right from the outset Tersteeg, for instance, nagged me about it. And that was nagging, whatever else one may think of Tersteeg. Those who talk about it the most aren’t at the same time able to explain precisely what. And as to that, in order to clear the whole thing up in my case — if I did ‘something on the side’, then the only thing would be that, if I knew either dealers or painters, I would possibly do something with paintings, for instance by going to England for them &c.
Things like this, which are obviously directly related to painting, are an exception, but otherwise, as a rule, a painter must be wholly a painter.
Don’t forget, either, that I’m not cut out to be a melancholic. The nickname I have around here is generally ‘the little painter fellow’, and it’s not entirely without a measure of malice that I’m going there. I’ve also thought of Drenthe, though, but as more difficult to bring about.
That would be good, though, should my work from the countryside be liked in Antwerp. If the things from here were liked, either now or later, then I would continue with them, and vary them with similar things
from Drenthe.
But the issue is that I can only do one thing at a time, that if I’m engaged in painting peasants, I can’t occupy myself with business in town. The present moment is ideal for breaking away, since I’ve had trouble getting models and am going to move in any case. As to that, it’s to be expected that there would never be an end to it in this studio right next door to the priest and the sacristan. So I’m changing that.
But anyway, it doesn’t make an absolute impression on people, and by renting another room and letting things lie for a few months, the intrigue will lose a great deal of its force. Wouldn’t it be best if I could spend the next couple of months, December and January, there? In Amsterdam I lodged in a soup kitchen for 50 cents; I’d do the same there, or better yet reach agreement with some painter or other to be allowed to work in his studio. There’s another reason, too — that it’s not absolutely impossible I might find an opportunity somewhere to paint from the nude.
They wouldn’t want me at the academy, nor probably would I — but — with a sculptor, say, there must surely be a few living there, one might readily find some sympathy. It goes without saying that people with money can get as many models as they want, but it’s a difficult matter without it. All the same, there must be people there who use nude models and with whom one could split the cost. I need it for many things.
I received your letter while I was writing to you. I’m willing to go to Van de Loo if need be, only you know that doctors sometimes don’t tell you everything, particularly in doubtful cases. You should also understand that what I said about her being rather in a fog will probably recur, is a thing that most people who are getting old have. In any event I think it a very practical idea not to let her stay in the midst of the upheaval of the removal, unless she absolutely insists. For the rest, old chap, for my part I believe that Van de Loo has given Ma all, absolutely all the advice there was to give, and would say nothing new. I mean, he would already have given a warning if a danger that could be averted were threatening. But if he doesn’t say anything it’s a sign that, if there were something, he can’t do anything about it and nothing should be done about it; if he’s letting nature take its course, he’s doing it because that’s the best thing — Van de Loo is enormously scrupulous and — Zola-like cool and calm. Anyhow — I’ll speak to Wil about it, and either I may go there or Ma may come across Van de Loo sometime when he’s in the village; we’ll do something. But I think it will just have to take its course. Now in such cases, you’ll agree with me, worrying and being overanxious is intolerable for the patient if she notices it. And with old people there’s often no way of predicting it, precisely because in so many cases their hearts aren’t normal, because of fatty degeneration, say, and they can just as easily go off suddenly as carry on for another 5, another 10 years. Emotion can have an effect, of course, but precisely because of this there’s much more chance of staying alive if the mind is no longer all too clear, than in periods of lucidity. Something else — I’m quite sure that, from time to time at least, there’s definitely a substratum of deep thoughts in Ma (for her inner life, her life of the mind is fairly complicated and has levels or layers) that she neither wants to nor could express. In many cases she was rather silent, so — I for one would rather say that I don’t always know everything about her. Particularly now that she’s lucid, letting her do as she wants is certainly the easiest, firstly for her and secondly the most sensible for us.
Ever Yours Page 69