741 | Arles, Tuesday, 22 January 1889 | To Theo van Gogh (F)
My dear Theo,
Thanks for your letter and for the 50-franc note it contained. Naturally I’m now covered until the arrival of your letter after the 1st. What happened as regards that money was absolutely sheer chance and a misunderstanding for which neither you nor I are responsible. To telegraph, as you rightly say, I couldn’t do by the same sheer chance, for I didn’t know if you were still in Amsterdam or back in Paris. It is, with the rest, over now, and one more proof of the proverb that misfortunes never come singly. Yesterday Roulin left (naturally my dispatch of yesterday was sent before the arrival of your letter this morning). It was touching to see him with his children on the last day, above all with the very little one when he made her laugh and bounce on his knees and sang for her.
His voice had a strangely pure, moved timbre which to my ear contained a sweet, distressed wet-nurse’s song and something like a distant echo of the clarion of revolutionary France. He wasn’t sad, though, on the contrary, he had put on his brand-new uniform, which he’d received the same day, and everyone was making much of him.
I’ve just finished a new canvas which has an almost chic little look to it, a willow basket with lemons and oranges — a cypress branch and a pair of blue gloves, you’ve already seen some of these fruit-baskets of mine.
Listen — what you know I’m trying to do, myself, is to recoup the money that my training as a painter has cost, neither more nor less. That’s my right, along with earning my bread each day.
It would appear just to me that it should come back, I don’t say into your hands, since we’ve done what we’ve done together, and we find it so upsetting to talk of money.
But may it go into the hands of your wife, who anyway will join with us to work with the artists.
If I’m not yet busying myself with selling directly it’s because my tally of paintings isn’t yet complete, but it’s coming along and I’ve set to work again with this iron resolve.
I have good and bad luck in my production, but not bad luck alone. If, for example, our Monticelli bouquet is worth 500 francs to an art lover, and it’s worth that, then I dare assure you that my sunflowers are also worth 500 francs to one of those Scots or Americans. Now, to be sufficiently heated up to melt those golds and those flower tones, not just anybody can do that, it takes an individual’s whole and entire energy and attention.
When I saw my canvases again after my illness, what seemed to me the best was the bedroom.
It seems to me that your apartment would be cluttered if I were to send all of this to you in Paris, especially after your wife will be staying there too. Then it would get the canvases known that would have lost their bloom and be talked about downstairs as if they were nothing, before the time and the hour.
The sum we’re working with is certainly quite respectable, but a lot of it runs away and we must above all be watchful to ensure that not everything slips through the net from year to year. It’s also the fact that even if the month goes on I’m always trying to strike more or less a balance through production, at least relative. So many annoyances certainly make me a little anxious and fearful, but I’m not yet in despair.
The trouble I foresee is that much prudence will be required to prevent the expenses we have when selling from exceeding the sale itself when the day comes. As regards that, how many times have we been in a position to see that sad thing in the lives of artists.
I have the portrait of Roulin’s wife on the go that I was working on before being ill.
In it I had ranged the reds from pink to orange, which rose into the yellows as far as lemon with light and dark greens. If I could finish that, it would give me great pleasure but I fear she won’t want to pose any more, with her husband away.
You’re right in seeing that Gauguin’s departure is terrible, right because it pushes us back down when we had created and furnished the house to take in friends in bad times.
Only we’ll keep the furniture &c. all the same. And although today everyone will be afraid of me, that may disappear with time.
We’re all mortal and subject to all possible illnesses, what can we do about it when the latter aren’t precisely of a pleasant kind. The best thing is to try to recover from them.
I find remorse, too, in thinking of the trouble that I’ve occasioned on my side, however involuntarily it may be — to Gauguin. But prior to the last days I could see only one thing, that he was working with his heart divided between the desire to go to Paris to carry out his plans, and life in Arles. What will the outcome of all that be for him?
You’ll feel that although you have a good salary we still lack capital, except in goods, and that we need to be even more powerful to really change the sad position of the artists we know. But then one often just comes up against distrust on their part, and the fact that they’re always plotting among themselves, which always arrives at the result of — emptiness. I think that at Pont-Aven 5 or 6 of them had already formed a new group, perhaps broken up already.
They aren’t dishonest, but that’s a thing without name and one of their defects as ‘enfants terribles’.
Now the main thing will be that your marriage isn’t delayed. By marrying you’re putting Mother’s mind at rest and making her happy, and anyway what your position in life and business rather necessitates. Will that be appreciated by the society to which you belong? Perhaps no more than the artists suspect that from time to time I’ve worked and suffered for the community . . . So from me, your brother, you won’t wish for the absolutely banal congratulations and the assurances that you’ll be transported straight to paradise.
And with your wife you’ll cease to be alone, which I’d so wish for our sister Wil too.
I still hope that perhaps, if we can’t make her meet and marry a doctor, we might at least perhaps be able to make her meet a painter.
That, after your own marriage, would be what I would wish for now more than all the rest.
Once your marriage is done, there will perhaps be others in the family, and in any case, you’ll see your path clear and the house will no longer be empty.
Whatever I think on a few other points, our father and our mother have been exemplary as married people.
And I’ll never forget Mother on the occasion of our father’s death, when she said only one small word, which for me made me begin to love our old mother again more than before. Anyway, as married people our parents were exemplary, like Roulin and his wife to quote another specimen.
Well, go straight ahead along that road.
During my illness I again saw each room in the house at Zundert, each path, each plant in the garden, the views round about, the fields, the neighbours, the cemetery, the church, our kitchen garden behind — right up to the magpies’ nest in a tall acacia in the cemetery.
That’s because I still have the most primitive memories of all of you, of those days; to remember all this there’s now only Mother and me. I shan’t go on since it’s better that I don’t try to restore everything that passed through my mind then.
Know only that I’ll be very happy when your marriage has taken place.
Listen now, if as regards your wife it would perhaps be good for a painting of mine to be at the Goupils’ from time to time, then I’ll drop my old grudge that I have against them in the following way. I said that I didn’t want to return there with too innocent a painting. But you can exhibit the two canvases of sunflowers there if you wish.
Gauguin would be pleased to have one of them, and I very much enjoy doing Gauguin quite a big favour. So, he wants one of those two canvases, well I’ll do one of them over again, the one he wants.
You’ll see that these canvases will catch the eye. But I’d advise you to keep them for yourself, for the privacy of your wife and yourself.
It’s a type of painting that changes its aspect a little, which grows in richness the more you look at it. Besides, you know that Gauguin likes them extr
aordinarily. He said to me about them, among other things:
‘that — . . . that’s . . . the flower’.
You know that Jeannin has the peony, Quost has the hollyhock, but I have the sunflower, in a way. And all in all it will give me pleasure to continue the exchanges with Gauguin, even if sometimes it costs me dear too.
Did you see, during your fleeting visit, the portrait in black and yellow of Mrs Ginoux?
That’s a portrait painted in 3 quarters of an hour.
I must finish for the moment.
The delay in sending the money is sheer chance, and thus neither you nor I could do anything about it.
Handshake.
Ever yours,
Vincent
743 | Arles, Monday, 28 January 1889 | To Theo van Gogh (F)
My dear Theo,
Just a few words to tell you that I’m getting along so-so as regards my health and work.
Which I already find astonishing when I compare my state today with that of a month ago. I well knew that one could break one’s arms and legs before, and that then afterwards that could get better but I didn’t know that one could break one’s brain and that afterwards that got better too.
I still have a certain ‘what’s the good of getting better’ feeling in the astonishment that an ongoing recovery causes me, which I wasn’t in a state to dare rely upon.
When you visited I think you must have noticed in Gauguin’s room the two no. 30 canvases of the sunflowers. I’ve just put the finishing touches to the absolutely equivalent and identical repetitions. I think I’ve already told you that in addition I have a canvas of a Berceuse, the very same one I was working on when my illness came and interrupted me. Today I also have 2 versions of this one.
On the subject of that canvas, I’ve just said to Gauguin that as he and I talked about the Icelandic fishermen and their melancholy isolation, exposed to all the dangers, alone on the sad sea, I’ve just said to Gauguin about it that, following these intimate conversations, the idea came to me to paint such a picture that sailors, at once children and martyrs, seeing it in the cabin of a boat of Icelandic fishermen, would experience a feeling of being rocked, reminding them of their own lullabies. Now it looks, you could say, like a chromolithograph from a penny bazaar. A woman dressed in green with orange hair stands out against a green background with pink flowers. Now these discordant sharps of garish pink, garish orange, garish green, are toned down by flats of reds and greens. I can imagine these canvases precisely between those of the sunflowers — which thus form standard lamps or candelabra at the sides, of the same size; and thus the whole is composed of 7 or 9 canvases.
(I’d like to make another repetition for Holland if I can get the model again.)
As it’s still winter, listen. Let me quietly continue my work, if it’s that of a madman, well, too bad. Then I can’t do anything about it.
However, the unbearable hallucinations have stopped for now, reducing themselves to a simple nightmare on account of taking potassium bromide, I think.
It’s still impossible for me to deal with this question of money in detail, but I want to deal with it in detail all the same, and I’m working furiously from morning till night to prove to you (unless my work is yet another hallucination), to prove to you that really, truly, we’re following in Monticelli’s track here and, what’s more, that we have a light on our way and a lamp before our feet in the powerful work of Bruyas of Montpellier, who has done so much to create a school in the south.
Only don’t be absolutely too amazed if, in the course of the coming month, I would be obliged to ask you for the month in full, and even the relative extra included.
After all, it’s only right if in these productive times when I expend all my vital warmth I should insist on what is necessary to take a few precautions. The difference in expenditure is certainly not excessive on my part, not even in cases like that. And once again, either lock me up in a madhouse straightaway, I won’t resist if I’m wrong, or let me work with all my strength, while taking the precautions I mention.
If I’m not mad the time will come when I’ll send you what I’ve promised you from the beginning. Now, these paintings may perhaps be fated for dispersal, but when you, for one, see the whole of what I want, you will, I dare hope, receive a consolatory impression from it.
You saw, as I did, a part of the Faure collection file past in the little window of a framer’s shop in rue Lafitte, didn’t you? You saw, as I did, that this slow procession of canvases that were previously despised was strangely interesting.
Good. My great desire would be that sooner or later you should have a series of canvases from me that could also file past in that exact same shop window.
Now, in continuing the furious work this February and March I hope I’ll have finished the calm repetitions of a number of studies I did last year. And these, together with certain canvases of mine that you already have, such as the harvest and the white orchard, will form quite a firm base. During this same time, so no later than March, we can settle what has to be settled on the occasion of your marriage.
But although I’ll work during February and March, I’ll consider myself to be still ill, and I tell you in advance that in these two months I may have to take 250 a month from the year’s allowance.
You’ll perhaps understand that what would reassure me in some way regarding my illness and the possibility of a relapse would be to see that Gauguin and I didn’t exhaust our brains for nothing at least, but that good canvases result from it. And I dare hope that one day you’ll see that in remaining upright and calm now, precisely on the question of money — it will be impossible later on to have acted badly towards the Goupils. If indirectly I’ve eaten some of their bread, certainly through you as an intermediary —
Directly I will then retain my integrity.
So, far from still remaining awkward with each other almost all the time because of that, we can feel like brothers again after that has been sorted out. You’ll have been poor all the time to feed me, but I’ll return the money or turn up my toes.
Now your wife will come, who has a good heart, to make us old fellows feel a bit younger again.
But this I believe, that you and I will have successors in business, and that precisely at the moment when the family abandoned us to our own resources, financially speaking, it will again be we who haven’t flinched.
My word, may the crisis come after that . . . Am I wrong about that, then?
Come on, as long as the present earth lasts there will be artists and picture dealers, especially those who are apostles at the same time, like you. And if ever we’re comfortably off, even while perhaps being old Jewish smokers, at least we’ll have worked by forging straight ahead and won’t have forgotten the things of the heart that much, even though we have calculated a little.
What I tell you is true: if it isn’t absolutely necessary to shut me away in a madhouse then I’m still good for paying what I can be considered to owe, at least in goods.
Then, my dear brother, we have 89. The whole of France shivered at it and so did we old Dutchmen, with the same heart.
Beware of 93, you may perhaps tell me.
Alas there’s some truth in that, and that being the case let’s stay with the paintings.
In conclusion I must also tell you that the chief inspector of police came yesterday to see me, in a very friendly way. He told me as he shook my hand that if ever I had need of him I could consult him as a friend. To which I’m a long way from saying no, and I may soon be in precisely that case if difficulties were to arise for the house. I’m waiting for the moment to come to pay my month’s rent to interrogate the manager or the owner face to face.
But to chuck me out they’d more likely get a kick in the backside, on this occasion at least. What can you say, we’ve gone all-out for the Impressionists, now as regards myself I’m trying to finish the canvases which will indubitably guarantee my little place that I’ve taken among them.
&n
bsp; Ah, the future of that . . . but from the moment when père Pangloss assures us that everything is always for the best in the best of worlds — can we doubt it?
My letter has become longer than I intended, it matters little — the main thing is that I ask categorically for two months’ work before settling what will need to be settled at the time of your marriage.
Afterwards, you and your wife will set up a commercial firm for several generations in the renewal. You won’t have it easy. And once that’s sorted out I ask only a place as an employed painter as long as there’s enough to pay for one.
As a matter of fact, work distracts me. And I must have distractions — yesterday I went to the Folies Arlésiennes, the budding theatre here — it was the first time I’ve slept without a serious nightmare. They were performing — (it was a Provençal literary society) what they call a Noel or Pastourale, a remnant of Christian theatre of the Middle Ages. It was very studied and it must have cost them some money.
Naturally it depicted the birth of Christ, intermingled with the burlesque story of a family of astounded Provençal peasants. Good — what was amazing, like a Rembrandt etching — was the old peasant woman, just the sort of woman Mrs Tanguy would be, with a head of flint or gun flint, false, treacherous, mad, all that could be seen previously in the play. Now that woman, in the play, brought before the mystic crib — in her quavering voice began to sing and then her voice changed, changed from witch to angel and from the voice of an angel into the voice of a child and then the answer by another voice, this one firm and warmly vibrant, a woman’s voice, behind the scenes.
That was amazing, amazing. I tell you, the so-called ‘Félibres’ had anyway spared themselves neither trouble nor expense.
As for me, with this little country here I have no need at all to go to the tropics.
I believe and will always believe in the art to be created in the tropics, and I believe it will be marvellous, but well, personally I’m too old and (especially if I get myself a papier-mâché ear) too jerry-built to go there.
Ever Yours Page 97