Now must cerebral sympathies always go with or without what precedes. Why regulate all that, eh, what’s the use?
For myself I’m not opposed to love being a microbe, and even so that wouldn’t prevent me at all from feeling things such as respect before the pains of cancer for example.
And do you see, the doctors of whom you say, sometimes they can’t do very much (which I leave you free to say as much as you consider right) — very well — do you know what they can do all the same — they give you a more cordial handshake, gentler than many other hands, and their presence can really be very pleasant and reassuring sometimes.
There you are, I’m letting myself go on and on. Yet often I can’t write two lines, and I really fear that my ideas may be futile or incoherent this time too.
Only I wanted to write to you in any case while you were there. I can’t precisely describe what the thing I have is like, there are terrible fits of anxiety sometimes — without any apparent cause — or then again a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the mind. I consider the whole rather as a simple accident, no doubt a large part of it is my fault, and from time to time I have fits of melancholy, atrocious remorse, but you see, when that’s going to discourage me completely and make me gloomy, I’m not exactly embarrassed to say that remorse and fault are possibly microbes too, just like love.
Every day I take the remedy that the incomparable Dickens prescribes against suicide. It consists of a glass of wine, a piece of bread and cheese and a pipe of tobacco. It isn’t complicated, you’ll tell me, and you don’t think that my melancholy comes close to that place, however at moments — ah but . . .
Anyway, it isn’t always pleasant, but I try not to forget completely how to jest, I try to avoid everything that might relate to heroism and martyrdom, in short I try not to take lugubrious things lugubriously.
Now I wish you good-night, and my respects to your patient, although I don’t know her.
Ever yours,
Vincent
I don’t know if Lies is in Soesterberg at the moment, if she’s there, kind regards from me.
768 | Arles, Friday, 3 May 1889 | To Theo van Gogh(F)
My dear Theo,
Your kind letter did me good today, my word — let’s go for St-Rémy then, but I tell you one more time, if after due consideration and consultation with the doctor it would be perhaps either necessary or simply useful and wise to enlist, let’s consider that with the same eye as the rest, and without prior prejudice against it. That’s all. For dismiss the idea of sacrifice in it — I was writing to our sister the other day that throughout my life, or almost at least, I’ve sought something other than a martyr’s career, of which I’m not capable.
If I find annoyance or cause it, my word I remain stunned by it. Certainly I would gladly respect, I would admire martyrs &c., but you must know that in Bouvard et Pécuchet, for example, quite simply there is some other thing that adapts itself more to our little existences.
Anyway, I’m packing my trunk, and probably Mr Salles will go there with me as soon as he can.
Ah, what you said about Puvis and Delacroix is darned right, those fellows have well demonstrated what painting could be, but let’s not confuse things when there are immense distances. Now, myself as a painter, I’ll never signify anything important, I sense it absolutely. Supposing everything were changed, character, upbringing, circumstances, then this or that could have existed. But we’re too positive to confuse. I sometimes regret not having simply kept the Dutch palette of grey tones, and brushed landscapes in Montmartre without pressing the point.
Also, I’m thinking of beginning to draw more with the reed pen again which, like last year’s views of Montmajour, is less expensive and distracts me just as much. Today I’ve made one of those drawings which became very dark and quite melancholic for springtime, but anyway, whatever happens to me and in whatever circumstances I find myself, that’s something that I could keep as an occupation for a long time, and in some way could even become a means of earning a livelihood.
Anyway, all in all what does it matter to you or to me to have a little more or a little less annoyance.
Certainly you joined up much earlier than I did, if we come to that, at the Goupils’, where all in all you spent some pretty bad moments often enough, for which you weren’t always thanked. And indeed you did it with zeal and devotion, because then our father rather had his back to the wall with the big family at the time, and it was necessary for you to throw yourself into it completely in order to make everything work. I’ve thought again with much emotion of all these old things during my illness.
And in the end the main thing is to feel ourselves closely united, and that hasn’t yet been disturbed.
I have a certain hope that with what I know of my art in total, a time will come when I’ll produce again, although in the asylum. What use would the more artificial life of an artist in Paris be to me — one by which, all in all, I would only be half duped and for which I consequently lack primitive enthusiasm, indispensable for launching myself into it. Physically it’s amazing how well I am, but that isn’t enough of a basis for going on believing that it’s the same mentally.
I would happily, once I was known there a little, try and make myself a male nurse little by little, in short to work at anything and take up an occupation again — the first one that comes along.
I’ll have terrible need of père Pangloss when it naturally comes about that I become amorous again. Alcohol and tobacco have after all this good or bad point — it’s a bit relative, this — that they’re anti-aphrodisiacs, one should call it that I think. Not always to be despised in the exercise of the fine arts.
Anyway, that will be the ordeal in which one mustn’t forget completely how to jest. For virtue and sobriety, I’m only too afraid, would lead me again into those parts where usually I very quickly lose the compass completely, and where this time I must try to have less passion and more bonhomie.
The possible passionate thing is no great thing for me, although the power remains, I dare believe, to feel oneself attached to the human beings with whom one lives. How is père Tanguy — you must give him my warm regards.
I hear in the newspapers that there are good things at the Salon. Listen — don’t make yourself a completely exclusive Impressionist after all, if there’s good in something let’s not lose sight of it. Certainly colour is making progress, precisely by the Impressionists, even when they go astray. But Delacroix was already more complete than they are.
And my goodness, Millet, who has hardly any colour, what work his is!
Madness is salutary for this, that one becomes perhaps less exclusive.
I don’t regret having wanted to know a little technically about this question of the theories of colours.
As an artist one is merely a link in a chain, and whether you find or you don’t find, you can console yourself with that.
I’ve heard talk of a completely green interior with a green woman at the Salon which people were saying good things about, as well as a portrait by Mathey, and another by Besnard, ‘The siren’. People were also saying that there’s something extraordinary by a fellow called Zorn, but they didn’t say what, and that there was a Carolus-Duran there, Triumph of Bacchus, bad. However, I still find his ‘Lady with a glove’ in the Luxembourg so good; anyway, there are things that aren’t serious that I like a lot, such as a book like Bel-ami. And Carolus’s work is a little like that. Our epoch has been like that, though, and all Badinguet’s time too. And if a painter does as he sees, he always remains someone.
Ah, to paint figures like Claude Monet paints landscapes. That’s what remains to be done despite everything, and before, of necessity, one sees only Monet among the Impressionists.
For after all in figures, Delacroix, Millet, several sculptors have otherwise done better than the Impressionists, and even J. Breton.
Anyway, my dear brother, let’s be just, and I say to you as I retire, let’s think, just when
we’re getting too old to class ourselves with the young ones, of what we have loved in our time, Millet, Breton, Israëls, Whistler, Delacroix, Leys. And be fully assured that I myself am sufficiently convinced that I shan’t see a future beyond that, nor moreover desire one.
Now society is as it is, naturally we can’t wish for it to adapt itself just to our personal needs. Anyway, however while finding it really really good to go to St-Rémy, however with people like me it would really be more just to stuff them into the legion. We can’t do anything about it, but more than probably they’d refuse me there, at least here where my adventure is too well known, and above all exaggerated. I say this very, very seriously, physically I’m better than I have been for years and years, and I could do military service. So let’s think again about that while going to St-Rémy. I shake your hand heartily, and your wife’s too.
Ever yours,
Vincent
Ah, when I wrote to you that we mustn’t forget to appreciate what’s good in those who aren’t Impressionists, I didn’t exactly mean to say that I was urging you to admire the Salon beyond measure, but rather a heap of people like, for example, Jourdan, who has just died in Avignon, Antigna, Feyen-Perrin, all those whom we knew so well before, when we were younger, why forget them or why attach no importance to their present-day equivalents? Why are Daubigny and Quost and Jeannin not colourists for example? So many distinctions in Impressionism do not have the importance one wanted to see in them.
Crinolines also had something pretty and consequently good about them, but anyway the fashion was fortunately short-lived all the same. Not for some people.
And thus we’ll always retain a certain passion for Impressionism, but I sense that I’m returning more and more to the ideas I already had before coming to Paris.
Now that you’re married we no longer have to live for great ideas but, believe it, for little ones only. And I find that a real relief which I don’t complain about at all.
(In my room I have the famous portrait of a man (the wood engraving) that you know, a mandarin woman by Monorou (the large print from the Bing album), the blade of grass (from the same album), the Pietà and the good Samaritan by Delacroix, and Meissonier’s reader, then two large reed pen drawings.)
At the moment I’m reading Balzac’s Le médecin de campagne, which is really fine, in it there’s a character of a woman, not mad but too sensitive, who is really charming, I’ll send it to you when I’ve finished it. Wil wrote me a kind letter, still very firm and calm.
They have a lot of room here at the hospital, there’d be enough to make studios for thirty or so painters.
I really must make up my mind, it’s only too true that an awful lot of painters go mad, it’s a life which makes you very distracted, to say the least. If I throw myself fully into work again, that’s good, but I still remain cracked. If I could enlist for 5 years I would recover considerably and would be more rational and more the master of myself.
But one or the other, it’s all the same to me.
I hope that in the heap of canvases I’ve sent you there may be some which will end up giving you pleasure. If I remain a painter, then sooner or later I’ll probably see Paris again, and I firmly promise myself that I’ll thoroughly touch up several old canvases on that occasion. What’s Gauguin doing, I’m still avoiding writing to him until I’m completely normal, but I think of him so often, and I’d so much like to know if everything is going relatively well for him.
If I hadn’t been in such a hurry, if I’d kept my studio, this summer I would have worked again on all the canvases I’ve sent you. As long as the impasto isn’t dry all the way through, naturally it can’t be scraped.
You’ll clearly see that the two women’s expressions are different from the expressions one sees in Paris.
Is Signac back in Paris yet?
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 9 May 1889–13 May 1890
772 | Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Thursday, 9 May 1889 | To Theo van Gogh and Jo van Gogh-Bonger (F)
My dear Theo,
Thanks for your letter. You’re quite right to say that Mr Salles has been perfect in all of this, I’m much obliged to him.
I wanted to tell you that I think I’ve done well to come here, first, in seeing the reality of the life of the diverse mad or cracked people in this menagerie, I’m losing the vague dread, the fear of the thing. And little by little I can come to consider madness as being an illness like any other. Then the change of surroundings is doing me good, I imagine.
As far as I know the doctor here is inclined to consider what I’ve had as an attack of an epileptic nature. But I haven’t made any enquiries.
Have you by chance yet received the crate of paintings, I’m curious to know if they’ve suffered more, yes or no.
I have two others on the go — violet irises and a lilac bush. Two subjects taken from the garden.
The idea of my duty to work comes back to me a lot, and I believe that all my faculties for work will come back to me quite quickly. It’s just that work often absorbs me so much that I think I’ll always be absent-minded and awkward in getting by for the rest of life too.
I won’t write you a long letter — I’ll try to answer the letter from my new sister, which greatly touched me, but I don’t know if I’ll manage to do it.
Handshake, and ever yours,
Vincent
My dear sister,
Thanks very much for your letter, in which I above all looked for news of my brother. And I find it very good. I can see that you have already observed that he loves Paris and that this surprises you a little, you who don’t like it, or rather who above all like the flowers there, such as, I suppose, for example, the wisterias which are probably beginning to flower. Could it not be the case that in liking a thing one sees it better and more accurately than in not liking it.
For him and for me Paris is certainly already a cemetery in a way, where many artists have perished, whom we knew directly or indirectly.
Certainly Millet, whom you’ll learn to like a lot, and with him many others, have tried to get out of Paris. But Eugène Delacroix, for example, it’s difficult to portray him ‘as a man’ other than as a Parisian.
All this to urge you — with all caution, admittedly — to believe in the possibility that there are homes in Paris, and not just apartments.
Anyway — fortunately you are now his home yourself.
It’s quite odd perhaps that the result of this terrible attack is that in my mind there’s hardly any really clear desire or hope left, and I’m wondering if it is thus that one thinks when, with the passions somewhat extinguished, one comes down the mountain instead of climbing it. Anyway my sister, if you can believe, or almost, that everything is always for the best in the best of worlds then you’ll also be able to believe, perhaps, that Paris is the best of the towns in it.
Have you noticed yet that the old cab-horses there have big, beautiful heartbroken eyes, like Christians sometimes. Whatever the case, we’re not savages nor peasants, and we perhaps even have a duty to love civilization (so-called). Anyway, it would probably be hypocritical to say or believe that Paris is bad when one lives there. The first time one sees Paris it may be, besides, that everything there seems against nature, dirty and sad. Anyway, if you don’t like Paris, above all do not like painting nor those who directly or indirectly are engaged in it, for it’s only too doubtful whether that’s beautiful or useful.
But what can you do, there are people who love nature while being cracked or ill, those are the painters, then there are some who love what is done by the hand of man, and those even go as far as liking paintings.
Although there are a few people here who are seriously ill, the fear, the horror that I had of madness before has already been greatly softened.
And although one continually hears shouts and terrible howls as though of the animals in a menagerie, despite this the people here know each other very well, and help each other when they suffer crises. They all come to see
when I’m working in the garden, and I can assure you are more discreet and more polite to leave me in peace than, for example, the good citizens of Arles.
It’s possible that I’ll stay here for quite a long time, never have I been so tranquil as here and at the hospital in Arles to be able to paint a little at last. Very near here there are some little grey or blue mountains, with very, very green wheatfields at their foot, and pines.
I shall count myself very happy if I manage to work enough to earn my living, for it makes me very worried when I tell myself that I’ve done so many paintings and drawings without ever selling any. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to consider this an injustice, I don’t know anything at all about it.
Thanking you again for writing to me, and being very happy to know that now my brother doesn’t return to an empty apartment when he comes home in the evening, I shake your hand in thought, and believe me
your brother
Vincent
776 | Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, on or about Thursday, 23 May 1889 | To Theo van Gogh (F)
My dear Theo,
Your letter which I’ve just received gives me great pleasure. You tell me that J.H. Weissenbruch has two paintings in the exhibition — but I thought he was dead — am I mistaken? He certainly is one hell of an artist and a good man, with a big heart too.
What you say about the Berceuse gives me pleasure; it’s very true that the common people, who buy themselves chromos and listen with sentimentality to barrel organs, are vaguely in the right and perhaps more sincere than certain men-about-town who go to the Salon.
Gauguin, if he’ll accept it, you shall give him a version of the Berceuse that wasn’t mounted on a stretching frame, and to Bernard too, as a token of friendship.
But if Gauguin wants sunflowers it’s only absolutely fair that he gives you something that you like as much in exchange. Gauguin himself above all liked the sunflowers later, when he had seen them for a long time.
Ever Yours Page 100