I must warn you that very shortly I’ll need a big order for colours for the autumn, which I believe is going to be absolutely marvellous. And on reflection, I’ll send you the order enclosed herewith.
In my painting of the night café I’ve tried to express the idea that the café is a place where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes. Anyway, I tried with contrasts of delicate pink and blood-red and wine-red. Soft Louis XV and Veronese green contrasting with yellow greens and hard blue greens.
All of that in an ambience of a hellish furnace, in pale sulphur.
To express something of the power of the dark corners of a grog-shop.
And yet with the appearance of Japanese gaiety and Tartarin’s good nature.
But what would Mr Tersteeg say about this painting? He who, looking at a Sisley — Sisley, the most tactful and sensitive of the Impressionists — had already said: ‘I can’t stop myself thinking that the artist who painted that was a little tipsy’. Looking at my painting, then, he’d say that it’s a full-blown case of delirium tremens.
I find absolutely nothing to object to what you speak of, to exhibit sometime at the Revue Indépendante, as long as I’m not a cause of obstruction for the others who usually exhibit there.
Only we’d then have to tell them that I’d like to reserve a second exhibition for myself, after this first one of what are in fact studies.
Then next year I’d give them the decoration of the house to exhibit, when there would be an ensemble. Not that I insist, but it’s so that the studies shouldn’t be confused with compositions, and to say beforehand that the first exhibition would be one of studies.
Because there’s still hardly more than the sower and the night café that are attempts at composed paintings.
As I write, the little peasant who looks like a caricature of our father is just coming into the café.
The resemblance is amazing, all the same. The receding profile and the weariness and the ill-defined mouth, especially. It continues to seem a pity to me that I haven’t been able to do him.
I’m adding to this letter the order for colours, which isn’t exactly urgent. Only I’m so full of plans, and then the autumn promises so many superb subjects that I simply don’t know if I’m going to start 5 or 10 canvases.
It’ll be the same thing as in the spring, with the orchards in blossom, the subjects will be innumerable. If you gave père Tanguy the coarser paint, he’d probably do that well.
His other fine colours are really inferior, especially for the blues.
I hope, when preparing the next consignment, to gain a little in quality.
I’m doing comparatively less, and coming back to it longer. I’ve kept back 50 francs for the week; thus there has already been 250 for the furniture. And I’ll recoup them anyway, doing it this way. And from today you can say to yourself that you have a sort of country house, unfortunately a bit far away. But it would cease to be very, very far if we had a permanent exhibition in Marseille. We’ll see that in a year, perhaps. Handshake and
Ever yours,
Vincent
678 | Arles, Sunday, 9 and about Friday, 14 September 1888 | To Willemien van Gogh (F)
My dear sister,
Your letter gave me great pleasure, and today I have the leisure to reply to you in peace and quiet. So your visit to Paris was a great success. I would really like it if you were to come here too next year. At the moment I’m furnishing the studio in such a way as always to be able to put someone up. Because there are 2 small rooms upstairs, which look out on a very pretty public garden, and where you can see the sunrise in the morning. I’ll arrange one of these rooms for putting up a friend, and the other one will be for me.
I want nothing there but straw-bottomed chairs and a table and a deal bed. The walls whitewashed, the tiles red. But in it I want a great wealth of portraits and painted studies of figures, which I plan to do as I go along. I have one to start with, the portrait of a young Belgian Impressionist; I’ve painted him as something of a poet, his refined and nervous head standing out against a deep ultramarine background of the night sky, with the twinkling of the stars.
Now the other room, I would like it almost elegant, with a walnut bed with a blue blanket.
And all the rest, the dressing-table and the chest of drawers too, in matt walnut. I want to stuff at least 6 very large canvases into this tiny little room, the way the Japanese do, especially the huge bouquets of sunflowers. You know that the Japanese instinctively look for contrasts, and eat sweetened peppers, salty sweets, and fried ices and frozen fried dishes. So, too, following the same system you should probably only put very small paintings in a large room, but in a very small room you’ll put a lot of big ones.
I hope the day will come when I’ll be able to show you this beautiful part of the world.
I’ve just finished a canvas of a café interior at night, lit by lamps. Some poor night-prowlers are sleeping in a corner. The room is painted red, and inside, in the gaslight, the green billiard table, which casts an immense shadow over the floor. In this canvas there are 6 or 7 different reds, from blood-red to delicate pink, contrasting with the same number of pale or dark greens.
Today I sent Theo a drawing of it, which is like a Japanese print.
Theo wrote telling me that he has given you some Japanese prints. It’s certainly the most practical way of getting to understand the direction that painting has taken at present. Colourful and bright.
For myself, I don’t need Japanese prints here, because I’m always saying to myself that I’m in Japan here. That as a result I only have to open my eyes and paint right in front of me what makes an impression on me.
Have you seen a tiny little mask of a fat, smiling Japanese woman at our place? The expression on that little mask is really surprising.
Did you think of taking one of my paintings with you for yourself? I hope so, and I’m quite intrigued to know which you would have chosen. I myself thought you would have taken the white huts under the blue sky among the greenery, which I did at Saintes-Maries, on the Mediterranean.
I should have gone back to Saintes-Maries already, now that there are people on the beach. But anyway, I have so much to do right here.
I definitely want to paint a starry sky now. It often seems to me that the night is even more richly coloured than the day, coloured in the most intense violets, blues and greens.
If you look carefully you’ll see that some stars are lemony, others have a pink, green, forget-me-not blue glow. And without labouring the point, it’s clear that to paint a starry sky it’s not nearly enough to put white spots on blue-black.
My house here is painted outside in the yellow of fresh butter, with garish green shutters, and it’s in the full sun on the square, where there’s a green garden of plane trees, oleanders, acacias. And inside, it’s all whitewashed, and the floor’s of red bricks. And the intense blue sky above. Inside, I can live and breathe, and think and paint. And it seems to me that I should go further into the south rather than going back up north, because I have too great a need of the strong heat so that my blood circulates normally. I’m in really much better health here than in Paris.
Now I have scarcely a doubt that for you, too, you would like the south enormously.
It’s the sun, that has never sufficiently penetrated us northerners.
I started this letter several days ago, up to here, and I’m picking it up again now.
I was interrupted precisely by the work that a new painting of the outside of a café in the evening has been giving me these past few days. On the terrace, there are little figures of people drinking. A huge yellow lantern lights the terrace, the façade, the pavement, and even projects light over the cobblestones of the street, which takes on a violet-pink tinge. The gables of the houses on a street that leads away under the blue sky studded with stars are dark blue or violet, with a green tree. Now there’s a painting of night without black. With nothing but beautiful blue, violet and green, an
d in these surroundings the lighted square is coloured pale sulphur, lemon green. I enormously enjoy painting on the spot at night. In the past they used to draw, and paint the picture from the drawing in the daytime. But I find that it suits me to paint the thing straightaway. It’s quite true that I may take a blue for a green in the dark, a blue lilac for a pink lilac, since you can’t make out the nature of the tone clearly. But it’s the only way of getting away from the conventional black night with a poor, pallid and whitish light, while in fact a mere candle by itself gives us the richest yellows and oranges. I’ve also done a new portrait of myself, as a study, in which I look like a Japanese. You never told me if you had read Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-ami, and what you now think of his talent in general. I say this because the beginning of Bel-ami is precisely the description of a starry night in Paris, with the lighted cafés of the boulevard, and it’s something like the same subject that I’ve painted just now.
Speaking of Guy de Maupassant, I find what he does really beautiful, and I really recommend that you read everything that he’s done. Zola — Maupassant, De Goncourt, one has to have read them as thoroughly as possible in order to get a reasonably clear idea of the modern novel. Have you read Balzac? I’m reading him again here.
My dear sister, I believe that at present we must paint nature’s rich and magnificent aspects; we need good cheer and happiness, hope and love.
The uglier, older, meaner, iller, poorer I get, the more I wish to take my revenge by doing brilliant colour, well arranged, resplendent.
Jewellers are old and ugly too, before they know how to arrange precious stones well. And arranging colours in a painting to make them shimmer and stand out through their contrasts, that’s something like arranging jewels or — designing costumes.
You’ll see now that by regularly looking at Japanese prints you’ll enjoy making bouquets even more, working among flowers. I must finish this letter if I want it to go off today. I’ll be very happy to have the photograph of our mother that you mention, so don’t forget to send it to me. Give my warm regards to our mother; I often think of you both, and I’m really pleased that now you know our life a little better. I really fear that Theo will find himself too lonely. But one of these days there’ll be a Belgian Impressionist painter, the one I mentioned above, who’ll come to spend some time in Paris. And there’ll be many other painters who’ll soon come back to Paris with their studies done during the summer.
I kiss you affectionately, and Mother too.
Ever yours,
Vincent
683 | Arles, Tuesday, 18 September 1888 | To Theo van Gogh (F)
My dear Theo,
I already wrote to you early this morning, then I went to continue working on a painting of a sunny garden. Then I brought it back — and went out again with a blank canvas and that’s done, too. And now I feel like writing to you again.
Because I’ve never had such good fortune; nature here is extraordinarily beautiful. Everything and everywhere. The dome of the sky is a wonderful blue, the sun has a pale sulphur radiance, and it’s soft and charming, like the combination of celestial blues and yellows in paintings by Vermeer of Delft. I can’t paint as beautifully as that, but it absorbs me so much that I let myself go without thinking about any rule.
That gives me 3 paintings of the gardens facing the house. Then the two cafés. Then the sunflowers. Then Boch’s portrait, and mine. Then the red sun over the factory and the men unloading sand. The old mill. Leaving the other studies aside, you can see that some hard work has been done.
But my colours, my canvas, my wallet are completely exhausted today. The last painting, done with the last tubes on the last canvas, is a naturally green garden, is painted without green as such, with nothing but Prussian blue and chrome yellow. I’m beginning to feel quite different from what I was when I came here, I have no more doubts, I no longer hesitate to tackle something, and that could increase still further.
But what scenery! It’s a public garden where I am, just near the street of the good little ladies, and Mourier, for example, never went there, whereas we used to walk in these gardens almost every day, but on the other side (there are 3 of them). But you’ll understand that it’s precisely that which gives a je ne sais quoi of Boccaccio to the place. That side of the garden is also, for the same reason of chastity or morality, empty of flowering shrubs such as the oleander. It’s ordinary plane trees, pines in tall clumps, a weeping tree and green grass. But it has such intimacy! There are gardens like that by Monet.
As long as you can bear the burden of all the colours, canvas, money that I’m forced to spend, keep on sending me them. Because what I’m preparing will be better than the last consignment, and believe that we’ll gain rather than lose by it. If, that is, I manage to do an ensemble that will hold together. Which I’m trying to do.
But is it absolutely impossible for Thomas to lend me two or three hundred francs on my studies? That would mean that I would earn over a thousand from them, because I couldn’t tell you enough, I’m thrilled, thrilled, thrilled with what I see.
And that gives you yearnings for autumn, a zest that means that time passes without your feeling it. Beware the morning after, beware the winter mistrals.
Today, while actually working, I thought a lot about Bernard. His letter is full of veneration for Gauguin’s talent — he says that he finds him so great an artist that it almost frightens him, and he finds everything that he, Bernard, does, bad in comparison with Gauguin. And you know that last winter Bernard was still trying to pick a quarrel with Gauguin. Ah well, whatever the case, and whatever happens, it’s very consoling that those artists are our friends, and I dare to believe will remain so, no matter how things turn out.
I have such luck with the house — with work — that I even dare believe that blessings won’t come singly, but that you’ll share them for your part, and have good luck too. Some time ago I read an article on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Giotto, Botticelli; my God, what an impression that made on me, reading those people’s letters! Now Petrarch was just near here, in Avignon, and I see the same cypresses and oleanders.
I’ve tried to put something of that into one of the gardens, painted with thick impasto, lemon yellow and lemon green. Giotto touched me the most — always suffering and always full of kindness and ardour as if he were already living in a world other than this.
Giotto is extraordinary, anyway, and I feel him more than the poets: Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio.
It always seems to me that poetry is more terrible than painting, although painting is dirtier and more damned annoying, in fact. And after all, the painter says nothing; he keeps quiet, and I like that even better.
My dear Theo, when you’ve seen the cypresses, the oleanders, the sun down here — and that day will come, don’t worry — you’ll think even more often of beautiful works by Puvis de Chavannes: Pleasant land and so many others.
Throughout the Tartarin side and the Daumier side of this funny part of the world, where the good folk have the accent that you know, there’s already so much that’s Greek, and there’s the Venus of Arles, like the one of Lesbos, and you can still feel that youthfulness, despite everything.
I don’t doubt in the very least that one day you too will know the south.
You’ll perhaps go to see Claude Monet when he’s in Antibes, or you’ll find some opportunity, anyway.
When the mistral’s blowing, though, it’s the very opposite of a pleasant land here, because the mistral’s really aggravating. But what a compensation, what a compensation, when there’s a day with no wind. What intensity of colours, what pure air, what serene vibrancy. Tomorrow I’m going to draw until the colours arrive. But now I’ve reached the point where I’ve made up my mind not to draw a painting in charcoal any more. There’s no point; you have to tackle the drawing with the colour itself in order to draw well.
Ah — the exhibition at the Revue Indépendante — fine — but once and for all — we’re far too much smo
kers to put the cigar in our mouth the wrong way round.
We’ll be obliged to try to sell, in order to be able to do again, better, the same things sold; that’s because we’re in a lousy trade — but let’s look for something other than the joy of the town, which means grief at home.
This afternoon I had a select audience . . . . . of 4 or 5 pimps and a dozen kids who found it particularly interesting to watch the colours come out of the tubes. Ah, well, that sort of audience — that’s fame, or rather, I have the firm intention of thumbing my nose at ambition and fame, like these kids and these ruffians from the banks of the Rhône and rue du Bout d’Arles.
I was at Milliet’s today; he’s going to come tomorrow, having extended his stay by 4 days. I’d like Bernard to go to do his military service in Africa, because he’d do fine things there, and I still don’t know what to say to him. He said he’d exchange his portrait for one of my studies.
But he said that he daren’t do Gauguin, as I’d asked him, because he feels too shy with Gauguin. Bernard is actually so temperamental!! He’s sometimes crazy and mean, but I’m certainly not the one who has the right to blame him for that, because I know the same neurosis too much myself, and I know that he wouldn’t blame me either. If he went to see Milliet in Africa, Milliet would certainly make friends with him. Because Milliet’s very loyal as a friend, and makes love so easily that he almost has contempt for love.
What’s Seurat doing? I wouldn’t dare show him the studies I’ve already sent, but the ones of the sunflowers and the bars and the gardens, those I’d like him to see — I often think about his system, and yet I won’t follow it at all, but he’s an original colourist, and it’s the same thing for Signac, but to a different degree; the pointillists have found something new, and I like them very much all the same. But I — I say so frankly — I’m returning more to what I was looking for before coming to Paris, and I don’t know if anyone before me has talked about suggestive colour. But Delacroix and Monticelli, while not talking about it, did it.
Ever Yours Page 89