The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Page 12
I cannot tell you (though fresh problems arise & will continue to arise every day), I cannot tell you how happy I am that I have taken up drawing again. I had been thinking about it for a long time, but always considered it impossible & beyond my abilities. But now, though I continue to be conscious of my failings & of my depressing dependence on a great many things, now I have recovered my peace of mind & my energy increases by the day.
As far as coming to Paris is concerned, it would be of particular advantage to me if we could manage to establish contact with some good & able artist, but to be quite blunt about it, it might only be a repetition on a large scale of my trip to Courriéres, where I hoped to come across a living example of the species Artist and found none. For me the object is to learn to draw well, to gain control of my pencil, my charcoal or my brush. Once I have achieved that I shall be able to do good work almost anywhere and the Borinage is as picturesque as old Venice, as Arabia, as Brittany, Normandy, Picardy or Brie.
Should my work be no good, it will be my own fault But in Barbizon, you most certainly have a better chance than elsewhere of meeting a good artist who would be as an angel sent by God, should such a happy meeting take place. I say this in all seriousness and without exaggeration. So if, sometime or other, you should see the means & the opportunity, please think of me. Meanwhile I’ll stay here quietly in some small workman’s cottage and work as hard as I can.
You mentioned Meryon again. What you say about him is quite true. I know his etchings slightly. If you want to see something curious, then place one of his meticulous & powerful sketches next to a print by Viollet-le-Duc or anyone else engaged in architecture. If you do, then you will see Meryon in his true light, thanks to the other etching which will serve, whether you like it or not, as a foil or contrast. Right, so what do you see? This. Even when he draws bricks, granite, iron bars or the railing of a bridge, Meryon puts into his etchings something of the human soul, moved by I know not what inner sorrow. I have seen V. Hugo’s drawings of Gothic buildings. Well, though they lacked Meryon’s powerful and masterly technique, they had something of the same sentiment. What sort of sentiment is that? It is akin to what Albrecht Diirer expressed in his Melancholia, and James Tissot and M. Maris (different though these two may be) in our own day. A discerning critic once rightly said of James Tissot, ‘He is a troubled soul.’ However this may be, there is something of the human soul in his work and that is why he is great, immense, infinite. But place Viollet-le-Duc alongside and he is stone, while the other, that is, Meryon, is Spirit.
Meryon is said to have had so much love that, just like Dickens’s Sydney Carton, he loved even the stones of certain places. But in Millet, in Jules Breton, in Jozef Israels, the precious pearl, the human soul, is even more in evidence and better expressed, in a noble, worthier, & if you will allow me, more evangelical tone.
But to return to Meryon, in my view he also has a distant kinship with Jongkind & perhaps with Seymour Haden, since at times these two artists have been extremely good.
Just wait, and perhaps you’ll see that I too am a workman. Though I cannot predict what I shall be able to do, I hope to make a few sketches with perhaps something human in them, but first I must do the Bargue drawings and other more or less difficult things. Narrow is the way & strait the gate & there are only a few who find it.
Thanking you for your kindness, especially for Le buisson, I shake your hand,
Vincent.
I have now taken your whole collection, but you will get it back later and in addition I’ve got some very fine things for your collection of wood engravings, which I hope you will continue, in the 2 volumes of the Musee Universal which I am keeping for you.
Etten
In April 1881 Van Gogh returned to the Netherlands and moved in with his parents in Etten at the start of a lengthy stay. Theo supplied him with paper, and Vincent spent most of his time making figure studies, until new clashes with his father - Vincent refused to join the family at church for Christmas - led to his being shown the door.
Van Gogh had an enduring need to enlist the support of other artists, of the older generation no less than of his own. He attached great importance to the opinion of Anton Mauve, both a leading figure in the Hague School and, by virtue of his marriage to Jet Carbentus, a relative. He also had regular contacts with Theophile de Bock, a contemporary and a great admirer of Corot.
150 [D]
[c. September 1881]
My dear Theo,
Though it is only a short time since I wrote to you, I have something more to tell you now.
For there has been a change in my drawings, both in the way I set about them and in the result.
Also, as a consequence of some of the things Mauve told me, I have started to work with live models again. Luckily I have been able to get several people to sit here for me, including Piet Kaufman, the labourer.
Careful study and the constant & repeated copying of Bargue’s Exercices au fusain have given me a better insight into figure-drawing. I have learned to measure and to see and to look for the broad outlines, so that, thank God, what seemed utterly impossible to me before is gradually becoming possible now. I have drawn a man with a spade, that is ‘un bêcheur’,1 5 times over in a variety of poses, a sower twice, and a girl with a broom twice. Then a woman in a white cap peeling potatoes & a shepherd leaning on his crook and finally an old, sick peasant sitting on a chair by the hearth with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees.
And it won’t be left at that, of course. Once a few sheep have crossed the bridge, the whole flock follows.
Now I must draw diggers, sowers, men & women at the plough, without cease. Scrutinize & draw everything that is part of country life. Just as many others have done & are doing. I no longer stand as helpless before nature as I used to do.
I brought along some conté-crayon in wood (just like pencils) from The Hague and I work with them a great deal now.
I have also started to introduce the brush and the stump. With a little sepia or India ink, and now and then with a little colour.
What is quite certain is that the drawings I have been doing lately bear little resemblance to anything I have done before.
The size of the figures is about the same as that of an Exercice au fusain.
As for landscape, I don’t see why it need suffer in any way as a result. On the contrary, it will gain. Enclosed are a few small sketches to give you an idea.
Of course I have to pay the people who pose. Not much, but because it happens every day it is one expense more until I manage to sell some drawings.
But since a figure is hardly ever a complete failure, I am sure that the outlay on the model will be recovered in full relatively soon.
For nowadays anyone who has learned to tackle a figure and hang on to it until it is safely down on paper, can earn quite a bit. I need hardly tell you that I am merely sending you these sketches to give you some idea of the pose. I dashed them off today in no time at all and can see that there is a lot wrong with the proportions, more so anyway than in the actual drawings. I’ve had a nice letter from Rappard, who seems to be hard at work. He sent me some very good landscape sketches. I wish he would come back here again for a few days.
This is a field or rather a stubble, where they are ploughing & sowing. Have made a fairly large sketch of it with a gathering thunderstorm.
The other two sketches are poses of diggers. I hope to do several more of them.
The other sower has a basket. I am tremendously anxious to get a woman to pose with a seed basket, so as to find a little figure like the one I showed you in the spring and which you can see in the foreground of the first little sketch.
Well, as Mauve says, the works are in full swing.
If you like and are able to, please remember the Ingres paper, the colour of unbleached linen, the stronger kind if possible. In any case, write as soon as you can, and accept a handshake in my thoughts,
Ever yours,
Vincent
> 152 [D]
[12–15 October 1881]
My dear Theo,
I was very pleased to get your letter just now, and as I intended to write to you anyhow in the next day or so, I am replying right away.
I’m so glad you’ve sent the Ingres paper. I’ve still got some left, but not the right colour.
I was happy to hear what Mr Tersteeg said to you about my drawings, and certainly no less glad that you saw progress yourself in the sketches I sent you. If that is indeed so, I mean to work to such effect that neither you nor Mr T. will have any reason to take back your more favourable opinions. I shall do my very best not to let you down.
The artist always comes up against resistance from nature in the beginning, but if he really takes her seriously he will not be put off by that opposition, on the contrary, it is all the more incentive to win her over - at heart, nature and the honest draughtsman are as one. (Nature is most certainly ‘intangible’,1 yet one must come to grips with her and do so with a firm hand.) And having wrestled and struggled with nature for some time now, I find her more yielding and submissive, not that I have got there yet, no one is further from thinking that than I am, but things are beginning to come more easily.
The struggle with nature is sometimes a bit like what Shakespeare calls ‘taming the shrew’2 (which means wearing down the opposition, bon gré et mal gré3). In many fields, but especially in drawing, I think that ‘serrer de près vaut mieux que lâcher’.4
I have come to feel more and more that figure drawing is an especially good thing to do, and that indirectly it also has a good effect on landscape drawing. If one draws a pollard willow as if it were a living being, which after all is what it is, then the surroundings follow almost by themselves, provided only that one has focused all one’s attention on that particular tree and not rested until there was some life in it.
Enclosed are a few small sketches. I’m doing quite a bit of work on the Leurs road these days. Working with watercolour & sepia now and then too, but that isn’t coming off too well yet.
Mauve has gone to Drenthe. We’ve agreed that I’ll go and see him there as soon as he writes, but perhaps he’ll come and spend a day at Prinsenhage first.
I went to see the Fabritius in Rotterdam on my last trip, and I’m glad you had a chance to see that Mesdag draw, among other things. If the drawing by Mrs Mesdag you mention is of yellow roses on a mossy ground, then I saw it at the exhibition and it is indeed very beautiful and artistic.
What you say about De Bock is, I think, true in every respect. I take the same view of him, but could not have put it as well as you did in your letter. If he could and wanted to concentrate, he would certainly be a better artist than he is. I told him straight out, ‘De Bock, if you and I were to apply ourselves to figure drawing for a year, then we would both end up quite different from what we are now, but if we do not apply ourselves and simply carry on without learning anything new, then we won’t even stay as we are but will lose ground. If we don’t draw figures, or trees as if they were figures, then we have no backbone, or rather one that’s too weak. Could Millet & Corot, of whom we both think so much, draw figures, or couldn’t they? I think those Masters tackled just about anything.’ And he agreed with me about this, in part at least.
In fact, I think he’s been working very hard on the Panorama, and even though he refuses to admit it, that too will have a generally favourable effect on him.
He told me a very funny thing about the Panorama, which made me feel very warmly towards him. You know the painter Destrée. He went up to De Bock with a very superior air, and said to him, with great disdain, of course, yet in an unctuous and insufferably patronizing way, ‘De Bock, they asked me to paint that Panorama, too, but seeing it was lacking in any artistic worth I felt I simply had to refuse.’
To which De Bock retorted, ‘Mr Destrée, which is easier, painting a panorama or refusing to paint one? Which is more artistic, doing it or not doing it?’ I’m not sure if those were his precise words, but that was certainly the gist of it, and I thought it straight to the point.
And I respect it as much as I respect your way of dealing with the older and wiser members of your society, whom you have left to their own old age and wisdom while you yourself have got on with things in your younger and more energetic way. That is true philosophy and makes us act as De Bock & you do when the need arises; it can be said of such philosophy that it is practical as well, in the same way as Mauve says, ‘Painting is drawing as well.’
I’ve filled up my paper, so I shall end and go out for a walk. My warmest thanks for all your efforts on my behalf, a handshake in my thoughts, and believe me,
Ever yours,
Vincent
There followed a fascinating episode: Vincent’s unrequited love for his cousin Kee Vos. These tender feelings had first appeared when Kee and her small child stayed with his parents in Etten in the summer of 1881. While studying theology in Amsterdam, Vincent had already given a warm account of the atmosphere in the home she had shared with her husband, writing in his letter to Theo dated 18 September 1877, ‘I spent Monday evening with Vos and Kee, they are devoted to each other and one can readily see that where Love dwells the Lord commands His blessing. […] When one sees them sitting together in the evening in the friendly light of the lamp in their small sitting room and close by the bedroom of their boy, who wakes up every so often to ask his mother for this or that, it is an idyll, though they have also known grim days and sleepless nights and fear and worry.’
Vincent was longing for just such sheltered family life and now projected that longing on to Kee Vos, who had meanwhile been widowed. She failed to notice Vincent’s feelings for her until he made them unmistakably clear. Brusquely - at least in Vincent’s eyes - she turned him down. Her rejection of him in three short, stinging words, ‘Never, no, never’, aggrieved and hurt him deeply. Though she left no room for doubt that it was pointless to entertain any hopes, Vincent did not give up. Moreover, his repeated attempts to contact her and his obstinate refusal to accept the obvious gave him a bad name among his relatives. But Van Gogh could not help himself. He opened his heart to Theo: ‘If I did not give vent to my feelings every so often, then, I think, the boiler would burst.’
153 [D]
Etten, 3/9 18811
My dear Theo,
There is something on my mind that I want to tell you about. You may perhaps know something of it already & it will not be news to you. I wanted to let you know that I fell so much in love with Kee Vos this summer that I can find no other words for it than, ‘It is just as if Kee Vos were the closest person to me and I the closest person to Kee Vos,’ and - those were the words I spoke to her. But when I told her this, she replied that her past and her future remained as one to her so that she could never return my feelings.
Then I was in a tremendous dilemma about what to do. Should I resign myself to that ‘never, no, never’, or consider the matter not yet settled & done with, keep in good heart and not give up.
I chose the latter. And to this day I do not regret this approach, although I am still up against that ‘never, no, never’. Since then, of course, I have had to put up with quite a few easy-going.
’petites misères de la vie humaine’,2 which, had they been written about in a book, might well have served to amuse some people, but which if one experiences them oneself must be deemed anything but pleasant.
However, to this day I am glad that I left the resignation - or the ’how not to do it’3 method — to those who have a mind for it & for myself kept in good heart. You will understand that in a case like this it is surprisingly difficult to tell what one can, may & must do. Yet ’we pick up the scent as we wander about, not as we sit idly by’.
One of the reasons why I have not written to you before about all this is that my position was so uncertain & unsettled that I was unable to explain it to you. Now, however, we have reached the point where I have spoken about it, not only to her but to Father
and Mother, to Uncle & Aunt Strieker & to our Uncle & Aunt at Prinsenhage.
The only one to say to me, and that very informally and privately, that there really might be a chance for me if I worked hard & made progress, was someone from whom I least expected it: Uncle Cent. He was pleased with the way in which I reacted to Kee’s never, no, never, that is not making heavy weather of it but taking it in quite good humour, and said for instance, ’Don’t give grist to the never, no, never mills which Kee has set up, I wish her all the best, but I rather hope those mills will go bankrupt’
Similarly, I didn’t take it amiss when Uncle Strieker said that there was the danger that I ’might be severing friendly relationships and old ties’. Whereupon I said that in my view the real issue, far from severing old ties, was to see if the old ties could not be renewed where they were in need of repair.
Anyway, that is what I hope to go on doing, to cast out despondency & gloom, meanwhile working hard — and ever since I met her, I have been getting on much better with my work.
I told you that the position has now become a bit more clear-cut. ist - Kee says never, no, never, and then - I have the feeling that I’m going to have an immense amount of difficulty with the older people, who consider the matter settled & done with now and will try to force me to drop it.
For the time being, however, I think they’ll go about it very gently, keeping me dangling and fobbing me off with fair words until Uncle & Aunt Strieker’s big celebration (in December) is over. For they are anxious to avoid a scandal. After that, though, I fear they will be taking measures to get rid of me.
Forgive me for expressing myself somewhat harshly in order to make the position clear to you. I admit that the colours are somewhat glaring & the lines somewhat starkly drawn, but that will give you a clearer insight into the affair than if I were to beat about the bush. So do not suspect me of lacking in respect for the older people.