All the same, this isn’t in complete disagreement with certain passages of our earlier correspondence.
If Gauguin were to examine himself properly in Paris or have himself examined by a specialist doctor, my word I don’t really know what the result of it would be.
Several times over I’ve seen him do things that you or I wouldn’t permit ourselves to do, having consciences that feel things differently — I’ve heard two or three things said of him in the same vein — but I, who saw him at very, very close quarters, I believed him led by his imagination, by pride perhaps but — — quite irresponsible. This conclusion doesn’t imply that I firmly recommend that you listen to him in all circumstances. But in the matter of settling his account I see that you acted with a higher conscience, and so I believe that we have nothing to fear from being led into errors of ‘banking in Paris’ by him. But as for him … upon my word, let him do what he wants, let him have his independences????? (in what way does he consider his character independent), his opinions . . . and let him go his own way, as it seems to him that he knows it better than we do.
I find it quite odd that he’s claiming a painting of sunflowers from me, offering me in exchange I suppose, or as a gift, a few studies that he left here. I’ll send back his studies — which will probably have uses for him that they certainly wouldn’t have for me.
But for the moment I’m keeping my canvases here, and I’m categorically keeping those sunflowers of mine.
He already has two of them, let that be enough for him. And if he’s unhappy with the exchange he made with me he can take back his little canvas of Martinique and his portrait that he sent me from Brittany, giving me back for his part both my portrait and my two canvases of sunflowers which he took in Paris. So if he ever raises this subject again, what I’ve said is clear enough.
How can Gauguin claim to have feared disturbing me by his presence when he would have difficulty denying that he knew I asked for him continually, and people told him time and again that I was insisting on seeing him that very moment?
Precisely to tell him to keep it between himself and me without disturbing you. He wouldn’t listen.
It wearies me to recapitulate all this and calculate and recalculate things of this kind.
I’ve tried in this letter to show you the difference that exists between my net expenses which come directly from me and those for which I am less responsible. I was sorry that just at that moment you should have those expenses, which were of no benefit to anyone.
What will happen next, I’ll see if my position is tenable as I regain my strength. I so dread a change or moving house precisely because of new expenses. For quite a long time I’ve never been able to catch my breath completely. I’m not giving up work, because at moments it’s going well, and I believe that it’s precisely with patience that I’ll arrive at this result of being able to recover the previous expenses with paintings I’ve done.
Roulin’s going to leave, and as early as the 21st, he’s going to be employed in Marseille.
The increase in salary is minimal, and he’ll have to leave his wife and his children for a while, who won’t be able to follow him until much later because the expenses of a whole family would be heavier in Marseille.
It’s a promotion for him, but it’s a very, very meagre consolation the government gives in this way to such an employee after so many years of work.
And at heart I think they, he and his wife, are still very, very upset. Roulin has very often kept me company during this past week.
I completely agree with you that we mustn’t meddle in doctors’ issues that have absolutely nothing to do with us.
Just because you wrote a note to Mr Rey saying you would introduce him in Paris, I thought you meant to Rivet.
I didn’t think I was doing anything compromising by saying to Mr Rey myself that if he went to Paris it would give me great pleasure if he wanted to take a painting from me to Mr Rivet as a keepsake.
Naturally I didn’t speak of anything else, but what I said is that I would always regret not being a doctor, and that those who believe painting is beautiful would do well to see in it only a study of nature.
All the same, it will continue to be a pity that Gauguin and I were perhaps too quick to drop the question of Rembrandt and light which we embarked upon.
Are De Haan and Isaäcson still there, they mustn’t get discouraged.
After my illness I’ve naturally had a very sensitive eye. I have re-looked at De Haan’s undertaker, of which he was kind enough to send me a photograph. Well, it seems to me that there’s some real Rembrandt spirit in that figure, which seems lit by the reflection of a light emanating from the open tomb before which the said undertaker stands like a sleep-walker. It’s there in a very subtle way. I don’t tackle the question with charcoal and he, De Haan, has taken as a means of expression this very charcoal, which is again a colourless material.
I would really like De Haan to see a study of mine of a lighted candle and two novels (one yellow, the other pink) placed on an empty armchair (Gauguin’s armchair, to be precise), no. 30 canvas in red and green. I’ve just been working on the pendant again today, my own empty chair, a deal chair with a pipe and a tobacco pouch. In these two studies, as in others, I myself sought an effect of light with bright colour — De Haan would probably understand what I’m seeking if you read him what I write to you on this subject.
However long this letter may now be, in which I’ve tried to analyze the month and in which I complain a little about the strange phenomenon of Gauguin preferring not to speak to me again while at the same time making himself scarce, it remains for me to add a few words of appreciation.
What’s good about him is that he knows how to apportion expenditure from day to day marvellously well.
Whereas myself, I’m often absent-minded, preoccupied with reaching a good end-point.
He has more of a sense for balancing money for each day than I do.
But his weakness is that by a sudden attack and animal-like impulse he upsets everything he was setting up.
Now, does one remain at one’s post once one has taken it, or does one desert it? I don’t judge anyone in this, hoping not to be condemned myself should I lack the strength. But if Gauguin has so much real virtue and such capacities for doing good, how is he going to employ himself? As for me, I’ve ceased to be able to follow his actions, and I halt silently but with a question mark.
From time to time he and I have exchanged ideas on French art, on Impressionism …
It now seems to me impossible, at least quite improbable, that Impressionism will organize itself and calm down.
Why will the same not happen as happened in England at the time of the Pre-Raphaelites?
The association is dissolved.
Perhaps I take all these things too much to heart, and I’m perhaps too sad about them. Has Gauguin ever read Tartarin sur les Alpes, and does he remember Tartarin’s illustrious pal from Tarascon who had such an imagination that in one fell swoop he imagined an entire imaginary Switzerland?
Does he remember the knot in a rope rediscovered high up in the Alps after the fall?
And you, who wish to know how things happened, have you ever read the whole of Tartarin?
That would teach you to recognize Gauguin pretty well.
I urge you in all seriousness to look at that passage in Daudet’s book again.
During your trip here were you able to notice the study that I painted of Tarascon’s diligence, which as you know is mentioned in Tartarin the lion-hunter?
And then do you remember Bompard in Numa Roumestan and his happy imagination?
This is what we have here, though of another kind, Gauguin has a fine and frank and absolutely complete imagination of the south, with that imagination he’s going to work in the north! My word, we may yet see some more funny things!
And now dissecting the situation in all boldness, nothing prevents us from seeing him as the little Bonaparte tig
er of Impressionism as regards . . . I don’t know quite how to say this, his vanishing let’s say from Arles is comparable or parallel to the Return from Egypt of the little corporal mentioned above, who also went to Paris afterwards. And who always left the armies in the lurch.
Happily Gauguin, I and other painters aren’t yet armed with machine guns and other very harmful engines of war. I, for one, am quite determined to try to remain armed only with my brush and my pen.
With loud shouts Gauguin nevertheless demanded from me in his last letter ‘HIS FENCING MASKS AND GLOVES’ hidden in the little room of my little yellow house.
I’ll make haste to send him these childish things by parcel post. Hoping that he’ll never use more serious things.
He’s physically stronger than we are, so his passions must also be much stronger than ours. Then he’s the father of children, then he has his wife and his children in Denmark, and at the same time he wants to go right to the other end of the globe to Martinique. It’s horrifying, all the vice versa of incompatible desires and needs which that must cause him. I had dared to assure him that if he’d stayed quietly with us, working here in Arles without wasting money, earning it, since you were busying yourself with his paintings, his wife would certainly have written to him and would have approved of his quiet life. There’s still more besides, there’s the fact that he was sick and seriously ill, and that it was a question of discovering both the illness and the remedy. Now here his pains had already ceased. Enough for today.
Do you have the address of Laval, Gauguin’s friend? You can tell Laval that I’m very astonished that his friend Gauguin didn’t take a portrait of me which I intended for him, in order to give it to him. I’ll now send it to you and you can let him have it. I have another new one for you too. Thanks again for your letter. Please try and think that it would be really impossible to live for 13 days on the 23.50 francs that I’ll have left. I’ll try to manage with 20 francs which you’d send me next week.
Handshake, I’ll read your letter again and will write to you soon about the other matters.
Ever yours,
Vincent
739 | Arles, Monday, 21 January 1889 | To Paul Gauguin (F)
My dear friend Gauguin,
Thanks for your letter. Left behind alone on board my little yellow house — as it was perhaps my duty to be the last to remain here anyway — I’m not a little plagued by the friends’ departure.
Roulin has had his transfer to Marseille and has just left. It has been touching to see him these last days with little Marcelle, when he made her laugh and bounce on his knees.
His transfer necessitates his separation from his family, and you won’t be surprised that as a result the man you and I simultaneously nicknamed ‘the passer-by’ one evening had a very heavy heart. Now so did I, witnessing that and other heart-breaking things.
His voice as he sang for his child took on a strange timbre in which there was a hint of a woman rocking a cradle or a distressed wet-nurse, and then another sound of bronze, like a clarion from France.
Now I feel remorse at having perhaps, I who so insisted that you should stay here to await events and gave you so many good reasons for doing so, now I feel remorse at having indeed perhaps prompted your departure — unless, however, that departure was premeditated beforehand? And that then it was perhaps up to me to show that I still had the right to be kept frankly au courant.
Whatever the case, I hope we like each other enough to be able to begin again if need be, if penury, alas ever-present for us artists without capital, should necessitate such a measure.
You talk to me in your letter about a canvas of mine, the sunflowers with a yellow background — to say that it would give you some pleasure to receive it. I don’t think that you’ve made a bad choice — if Jeannin has the peony, Quost the hollyhock, I indeed, before others, have taken the sunflower.
I think that I’ll begin by returning what belongs to you, making it plain that it’s my intention, after what has happened, to contest categorically your right to the canvas in question. But as I commend your intelligence in the choice of that canvas I’ll make an effort to paint two of them, exactly the same. In which case it might be done once and for all and thus settled amicably, so that you could have your own all the same.
Today I made a fresh start on the canvas I had painted of Mrs Roulin, the one which had remained in a vague state as regards the hands because of my accident. As an arrangement of colours: the reds moving through to pure oranges, intensifying even more in the flesh tones up to the chromes, passing into the pinks and marrying with the olive and Veronese greens. As an Impressionist arrangement of colours, I’ve never devised anything better.
And I believe that if one placed this canvas just as it is in a boat, even one of Icelandic fishermen, there would be some who would feel the lullaby in it. Ah! my dear friend, to make of painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner has been before us . . . a consolatory art for distressed hearts! There are as yet only a few who feel it as you and I do!!!
My brother understands you well, and when he tells me that you’re a kind of unfortunate like me, then that indeed proves that he understands us.
I’ll send you your things, but at times weakness overcomes me again, and then I can’t even make the gesture of sending you back your things. I’ll pluck up the courage in a few days. And the ‘fencing masks and gloves’ (make the very least possible use of less childish engines of war), those terrible engines of war will wait until then. I now write to you very calmly, but I haven’t yet been able to pack up all the rest.
In my mental or nervous fever or madness, I don’t know quite what to say or how to name it, my thoughts sailed over many seas. I even dreamed of the Dutch ghost ship and the Horla, and it seems that I sang then, I who can’t sing on other occasions, to be precise an old wet-nurse’s song while thinking of what the cradle-rocker sang as she rocked the sailors and whom I had sought in an arrangement of colours before falling ill. Not knowing the music of Berlioz. A heartfelt handshake.
Ever yours,
Vincent
It will please me greatly if you write to me again before long. Have you read Tartarin in full by now? The imagination of the south creates pals, doesn’t it, and between us we always have friendship.
Have you yet read and re-read Uncle Tom’s cabin by Beecher Stowe? It’s perhaps not very well written in the literary sense. Have you read Germinie Lacerteux yet?
740 | Arles, on or about Tuesday, 22 January 1889 | To Arnold Koning (D)
My dear friend Koning,
Thank you for sending me New Year’s greetings from the far north of our old native country. I received your postcard in the hospital in Arles, where I was quartered at the time because of an attack of brain or some other fever that had already pretty much passed off. And as regards the causes and effects of the illness in question, we’ll do best to leave it to possible discussions by the Dutch catechists as to whether or not I have been or still am — mad, fancy myself mad, or regarded as mad in a flight of fancy consisting only of sculpture.
And if not, whether I already was before that time; am or am not at present, or will be hereafter.
Having thus informed you more than enough about my mental and physical state . . . it will appear less odd to you that I didn’t reply to you sooner. But meanwhile we mustn’t forget to stick to our guns.
And starting from there, I ask you: what are you doing in painting at the moment, and how are you working with colour?
I’ve seen absolutely nothing of your studies sent to Theo (I believe), despite urging you to make an exchange. Is this to do with Theo, who possibly had other things on his mind, or with the not inconsiderable distance between us?
Did you know that Theo is engaged and will marry an Amsterdam girl quite soon?
After this question about your work, a few words about mine. At present I have a portrait of a woman on the go, or rather on the easel.
Which I’ve called ‘l
a berceuse’, or as we say in Dutch with Van Eeden (you know, who wrote that book I got you to read) — or would simply call in Van Eeden’s Dutch ‘our lullaby’, or the woman by the cradle.
It’s a woman dressed in green (bust olive green and the skirt pale Veronese green). Her hair is entirely orange and in plaits. The complexion worked up in chrome yellow, with a few broken tones, of course, in order to model. The hands that hold the cradle cord ditto ditto. The background is vermilion at the bottom (simply representing a tiled floor or brick floor). The wall is covered with wallpaper, obviously calculated by me in connection with the rest of the colours. This wallpaper is blue-green with pink dahlias and dotted with orange and with ultramarine. I believe I’ve run fairly parallel to Van Eeden in this, and consequently don’t regard his style of writing as unparallel to my style of painting in the matter of colour. Whether I’ve actually sung a lullaby with colour I leave to the critics, particularly to those aforementioned. But we’ve talked enough about this in the past, haven’t we? About the eternal question of colour that guides us, in so far as our composure can go.
In any event, on leaving the hospital I painted my own doctor’s portrait. And haven’t yet altogether lost my equilibrium as a painter.
But obviously I’ve painted a lot more other studies or paintings in all this time. Among other things this summer, two flower-pieces with nothing but Sunflowers in a yellow earthenware pot. Painted with the three chrome yellows, yellow ochre and Veronese green and nothing else.
For the time being I’m still in Arles and at your disposal for further correspondence by letter or painted study. Theo went to see Breitner recently, and said of his work that he thought Breitner the best painter and thinker among you over there.
Regards, my dear friend, with a handshake in thought.
Your friend
Vincent
Address still
2 Place Lamartine
Arles.
If you see Breitner, you may let him read this epistle or tell him about it just as I write it, without bringing too much of your own imagination into play.
Ever Yours Page 96