[Sketch 628A]
628A. Sower with setting sun
Here’s croquis of a sower.
Large field with clods of ploughed earth, mostly downright violet.
Field of ripe wheat in a yellow ochre tone with a little crimson.
The chrome yellow 1 sky almost as bright as the sun itself, which is chrome yellow 1 with a little white, while the rest of the sky is chrome yellow 1 and 2 mixed, very yellow, then.
The sower’s smock is blue, and his trousers white. Square no. 25 canvas. There are many repetitions of yellow in the earth, neutral tones, resulting from the mixing of violet with yellow, but I could hardly give a damn about the veracity of the colour. Better to make naive almanac pictures — old country almanacs, where hail, snow, rain, fine weather are represented in an utterly primitive way. The way Anquetin got his Harvest so well.
I don’t hide from you that I don’t detest the countryside — having been brought up there, snatches of memories from past times, yearnings for that infinite of which the Sower, the sheaf, are the symbols, still enchant me as before.
But when will I do the starry sky, then, that painting that’s always on my mind? Alas, alas, it’s just as our excellent pal Cyprien says, in ‘En ménage’ by J. K. Huysmans: the most beautiful paintings are those one dreams of while smoking a pipe in one’s bed, but which one doesn’t make. But it’s a matter of attacking them nevertheless, however incompetent one may feel vis-à-vis the ineffable perfections of nature’s glorious splendours.
But how I’d like to see the study you did at the brothel. I reproach myself endlessly for not having done figures here yet.
[Sketch 628B]
628B–C (top to bottom). Wheatfield with setting sun; Leg of an easel with a ground spike
Here’s another landscape. Setting sun? Moonrise? Summer evening, at any rate.
Town violet, star yellow, sky blue-green; the wheatfields have all the tones: old gold, copper, green gold, red gold, yellow gold, green, red and yellow bronze. Square no. 30 canvas.
I painted it out in the mistral. My easel was fixed in the ground with iron pegs, a method that I recommend to you.
[Sketch 628C]
You shove the feet of the easel in and then you push a 50-centimetre-long iron peg in beside them. You tie everything together with ropes; that way you can work in the wind.
Here’s what I wanted to say about the white and the black. Let’s take the Sower. The painting is divided into two; one half is yellow, the top; the bottom is violet. Well, the white trousers rest the eye and distract it just when the excessive simultaneous contrast of yellow and violet would annoy it. That’s what I wanted to say.
I know a second lieutenant of Zouaves here called Milliet. I give him drawing lessons — with my perspective frame — and he’s beginning to make drawings — my word, I’ve seen a lot worse than that, and he’s eager to learn; has been to Tonkin, &c. He’s leaving for Africa in October. If you were in the Zouaves he’d take you with him and would guarantee you a wide margin of relative freedom to paint, provided you helped him a little with his own artistic schemes. Could this be of some use to you? If so, LET ME KNOW AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
One reason for working is that canvases are worth money. You’ll tell me that first of all this reason is very prosaic, then that you doubt that it’s true. But it’s true. A reason for not working is that in the meantime canvases and paints only cost us money. Drawings, though, don’t cost us much.
Gauguin’s bored too in Pont-Aven; complains about isolation, like you. If you went to see him — but I have no idea if he’ll stay there, and am inclined to think that he intends to go to Paris. He said that he thought you would have come to Pont-Aven.
My God, if all three of us were here! You’ll tell me it’s too far away. Fine, but in winter — because here one can work outside all year round. That’s my reason for loving this part of the world, not having to dread the cold so much, which by preventing my blood from circulating prevents me from thinking, from doing anything at all. You can judge that for yourself when you’re a soldier. Your melancholy will go away, which may darned well come from the fact that you have too little blood — or tainted blood, which I don’t think, however. It’s that bloody filthy Paris wine and the filthy fat of the steaks that do that to you — dear God, I had come to a state in which my own blood was no longer working at all, but literally not at all, as they say. But after 4 weeks down here it got moving again, but, my dear pal, at that same time I had an attack of melancholy like yours, from which I would have suffered as much as you were it not that I welcomed it with great pleasure as a sign that I was going to recover — which happened too.
Instead of going back to Paris, then, stay out in the country, because you need strength to get through this ordeal of going to Africa properly. Now the more blood, and good blood, that you make yourself beforehand, the better, because over there in the heat it’s perhaps harder to produce it. Painting and fucking a lot aren’t compatible; it weakens the brain, and that’s what’s really damned annoying.
The symbol of Saint Luke, the patron of painters, is, as you know, an ox; we must therefore be as patient as an ox if we wish to labour in the artistic field. But bulls are pretty glad not having to work in the filthy business of painting. But what I wanted to say is this. After the period of melancholy you’ll be stronger than before, your health will pick up — and you’ll find the surrounding nature so beautiful that you’ll have no other desire than to do painting. I believe that your poetry will also change, in the same way as in your painting. After some eccentric things you have succeeded in making some that have an Egyptian calm and a great simplicity.
These last few days I read Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème; it provides interesting remarks about Japan. At the moment my brother has an exhibition of Claude Monet, I’d very much like to see them. Guy de Maupassant, among others, had been there, and said that from now on he would often revisit boulevard Montmartre.
I have to go and paint, so I’ll finish — I’ll probably write to you again before long. I beg a thousand pardons for not having put enough stamps on the letter; and yet I did stamp it AT THE POST OFFICE and this isn’t the first time that it’s happened here, that when in doubt, and asking at the post office itself, I’ve been misled about the postage.
You can’t imagine the carelessness, the nonchalance of the people here. Anyway, you’ll see that shortly with your own eyes in Africa. Thanks for your letter, I hope to write to you soon at a moment when I’m in less of a hurry. Handshake.
Ever yours,
Vincent
631 | Arles, on or about Monday, 25 June 1888 | To Theo van Gogh (F)
My dear Theo,
If we take a whole piece of ordinary canvas, this is the net price, which I’ve just found out by chance:
Ordinary rough yellow canvas, No. 0
Width two metres
Whole piece 10 metres long
Price 40 francs
The discount is definitely 25%;
probably the price from the factory —
at first hand — 33⅓%.
So here’s an opportunity to check Tasset’s prices. Leaving aside, or not, the 5 metres that I’d requested, the best thing would be to take a whole piece.
Having recently bought some canvases from which I’ll keep the stretching frames, it’s a big saving.
To do a no. 30 canvas — not counting the stretching frame, which I have — the canvas doesn’t cost me 1.50 (at the price quoted above) and at present, with the stretching frame, 4 francs. Count 1 franc for the stretching frame — which costs less; on every no. 30 canvas that makes a difference of 1.50, and more. This extra goes for carriage, which will be 5 francs.
See — if you can — what Tasset says when you ask him the price by the piece, but what I’m telling you about the price by the piece is just so, and you’ll be able to compare.
Do you remember among the small drawings a wooden bridge with a washing-place — a
view of a town in the background? I’ve just painted that subject in large format.
I must warn you that everyone will find that I work too quickly.
Don’t you believe a word of it.
Isn’t it the emotion, the sincerity of our feeling for nature, that leads us and — if these emotions are sometimes so strong that we work — without feeling that we’re working — when sometimes the brushstrokes come in a sequence and in relation one to another like the words in a speech or a letter — then we have to remember that it hasn’t always been like that, and that in the future there will also be quite a few heavy days without inspiration. So we have to strike while the iron’s hot and lay aside the bars we forge.
I don’t yet have half of the 50 canvases fit to be presented in public, and I need all of them by the end of this year.
I know in advance that they’ll be criticized as hasty.
I also know that I very much hope to stick to my argument of the past winter, when we talked about an association of artists.
Not that I still have a great desire or hope to bring it about, but as it was a serious argument, we have to retain our seriousness and retain the right to come back to it, to this question.
If Gauguin weren’t to come to work with me, then I have no other resources to balance my expenses but my work.
This prospect only mildly frightens me. If my health doesn’t let me down I’ll do a whole heap of my canvases and out of that lot there’ll be some that will do.
I’m almost reconciled with the orchard, which wasn’t on a stretching frame, and its pendant with the stippling. Out of the whole lot, they’ll do. But I’m working with less trouble in the full heat than back in the spring.
Soon I’ll send you some rolled canvases, and the rest as and when it’s possible to roll them up.
I’d very much like to double the order for the zinc whites. This zinc white is part of the reason why everything dries so slowly, but it has other advantages in the mixtures.
Wasn’t it pleasant at Guillaumin’s last winter — finding the landing and even the stairs, not to mention the studio — chock-full of canvases? You understand since then that I have a certain ambition, not about the number of canvases, but that these canvases as a whole should, after all, represent a real labour on your part as well as mine.
The wheatfields — that has been an opportunity to work, like the orchards in blossom.
And I only just have time to prepare myself for the new campaign, the one on the vineyards.
And between the two I’d like to do some more seascapes.
The orchards represented pink and white,
the wheatfields yellow,
the seascapes blue.
Perhaps now I’ll have a try at doing greens. Now autumn — that gives you the whole range of tones.
I’m quite curious to know what Gauguin will do — the main thing is not to discourage him — I still think his whole plan was just a whim.
Do you know what I’d like to tell you once again — this — that my personal desires are subordinate to the interests of a number of people, and that it always seems to me that another person could benefit from the money I spend by myself. Either Vignon, or Gauguin, or Bernard, or someone else.
And that for these arrangements, even if they’d involve my moving, I’m prepared. Two people who get along don’t spend — and even three — much more than one.
No more on colours, either.
So — without counting the surplus of finished works — there would be the satisfaction for you of providing for two or three people instead of one.
This for sooner or later. And as long as I’m as strong as the others. You can be sure of this, that it would be hard for us to be deceived, seeing that if they make difficulties about working, I know those difficulties too. And I’d perhaps know what it was all about.
Now, we’d have a perfect right — and perhaps even a duty — to urge them to work.
And that’s what we have to do.
If I’m alone, my word, I can’t do anything about that — then I have less need for company than for frantic work, and that’s why I’m boldly ordering canvas and paints. And so I only feel life when I’m working at full stretch.
And in company I’d feel a bit less need to do that, or rather, I’d work on more complicated things.
But in isolation I can count only on my excitement at certain moments, and then I let myself run to extravagances.
And so the canvases I bought here really not so long ago are almost all covered. When I send you the rolled up canvases you could perhaps take quite a few unimportant things off their stretching frames.
So as to be able, at the end of the year, let’s say, to show 50 of them to Pissarro and the others. And the rest, it’s studies, which will be a source of information, and being thoroughly dried, we can keep them in a portfolio or in a cupboard without their taking up a lot of space.
Handshake to you, and to the pals if you see any of them.
Ever yours,
Vincent
632 | Arles, Tuesday, 26 June 1888 | To Emile Bernard (F)
My dear Bernard,
You do very well to read the Bible — I start there because I’ve always refrained from recommending it to you.
When reading your many quotations from Moses, from St Luke, &c., I can’t help saying to myself — well, well — that’s all he needed. There it is now, full-blown — — — — … the artist’s neurosis.
Because the study of Christ inevitably brings it on, especially in my case, where it’s complicated by the seasoning of innumerable pipes.
The Bible — that’s Christ, because the Old Testament leads towards that summit; St Paul and the evangelists occupy the other slope of the holy mountain.
How petty that story is! My God, are there only these Jews in the world, then? Who start out by declaring that everything that isn’t themselves is impure?
The other peoples under the great sun over there — the Egyptians, the Indians, the Ethiopians, Babylon, Nineveh. Why didn’t they write their annals with the same care? Still, the study of it is beautiful, and anyway, to be able to read everything would be almost the equivalent of not being able to read at all.
But the consolation of this so saddening Bible, which stirs up our despair and our indignation — thoroughly upsets us, completely outraged by its pettiness and its contagious folly — the consolation it contains, like a kernel inside a hard husk, a bitter pulp — is Christ. The figure of Christ has been painted — as I feel it — only by Delacroix and by Rembrandt . . . . . . . . And then Millet has painted . . . . Christ’s doctrine.
The rest makes me smile a little — the rest of religious painting — from the religious point of view — not from the painting point of view. And the Italian primitives (Botticelli, say), the Flemish, German primitives (V. Eyck, and Cranach) . . . . . They’re pagans, and only interest me for the same reason that the Greeks do, and Velázquez, and so many other naturalists. Christ — alone — among all the philosophers, magicians, &c. declared eternal life — the endlessness of time, the non-existence of death — to be the principal certainty. The necessity and the raison d’être of serenity and devotion.
Lived serenely as an artist greater than all artists — disdaining marble and clay and paint — working in LIVING FLESH. I.e. — this extraordinary artist, hardly conceivable with the obtuse instrument of our nervous and stupefied modern brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor even books . . . . . he states it loud and clear . . he made . . LIVING men, immortals.
That’s serious, you know, especially because it’s the truth.
That great artist didn’t make books, either — Christian literature as a whole would certainly infuriate him, and its literary products that could find favour beside Luke’s Gospel, Paul’s epistles — so simple in their hard or warlike form — are few and far between. This great artist — Christ — although he disdained writing books on ideas and feelings — was certainly much less di
sdainful of the spoken word — THE PARABLE above all. (What a sower, what a harvest, what a fig tree, &c.)
And who would dare tell us that he lied, the day when, scornfully predicting the fall of the buildings of the Romans, he stated, ‘heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’
Those spoken words, which as a prodigal, great lord he didn’t even deign to write down, are one of the highest, the highest summit attained by art, which in them becomes a creative force, a pure creative power.
These reflections, my dear old Bernard — take us a very long way — a very long way — raising us above art itself. They enable us to glimpse — the art of making life, the art of being immortal — alive.
Do they have connections with painting? The patron of painters — St Luke — physician, painter, evangelist — having for his symbol — alas — nothing but the ox — is there to give us hope.
Nevertheless — our own real life — is humble indeed — our life as painters.
Stagnating under the stupefying yoke of the difficulties of a craft almost impossible to practise on this so hostile planet, on the surface of which ‘love of art makes one lose real love’.
Since, however, nothing stands in the way — of the supposition that on the other innumerable planets and suns there may also be lines and shapes and colours — we’re still at liberty — to retain a relative serenity as to the possibilities of doing painting in better and changed conditions of existence — an existence changed by a phenomenon perhaps no cleverer and no more surprising than the transformation of the caterpillar into a butterfly, of the white grub into a cockchafer.
Ever Yours Page 82