The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

by Vincent Van Gogh

  I am writing to you at Sien’s mother’s, beside a window overlooking a sort of courtyard. I have drawn it twice, once on a large scale and once on a smaller one. C. M. has those two and they were the ones Rappard was pleased with, especially the large one. I should like you to have a look at them if you happen to be at C. M.’s, for I should like to know what you think, especially of the larger one. When are you coming? I look forward to seeing you very much.

  Well, brother, you are to blame for my being so happy today that it made me cry. Thanks for everything, my dear fellow, and believe me, with a handshake in my thoughts,

  Ever yours,

  Vincent

  Full of optimism, Van Gogh now prepared himself for his new role of paterfamilias. He moved to 136 Schenkweg, a larger house with a good studio area to which a carpenter had drawn his attention. The simplicity of the accommodation suited him. ‘The fact that studio and household merge into each other can be no bad thing as far as the figure is concerned. I clearly remember Ostade’s studio interiors, small pen drawings, most likely of corners of his own house, which were enough to show that Ostade’s studio probably had little in common with those studios in which Oriental weapons and vases and Persian carpets, &c, may be found.’ As for his social position, ‘What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity or an eccentric or an obnoxious person - someone who has no position in society and never will have, in short the lowest of the low. Well, then - even if that were all absolutely true, I should one day like to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric, of such a nobody.’

  Once again he tried to explain to his brother the difference between the affection he had felt for Kee Vos and his present feelings for Sien. Whereas his passion for Kee had been unrequited, Sien and he had adefinite need of each other, so that she and I were no longer to be parted, our lives became more and more intertwined, and it was love’. He characterized his new life as ‘a new studio, a still young household in full swing. No mystical or mysterious studio, but one rooted in real life. A studio with a cradle and a commode’.

  However, an unsolicited visit from Tersteeg ‘in policeman-like mood’ caused him a great deal of agitation. The art dealer, strongly opposed to Vincent’s domestic arrangements, failed to appreciate his new work and seemed about to incite Vincent’s family against him. Van Gogh considered responding there and then by marrying Sien, although his financial means were inadequate. But why should that matter, he wrote to Theo: ‘There is a promise of marriage between her & me and I would not want you to think that I look upon her as a kept woman or as someone with whom I am having some kind of liaison with no thought to the consequences.’ Compassion for Sien set the tone of the extensive correspondence that followed. In one of his letters, he drew Theo’s attention to his drawing, given the English title Sorrow, of a crouching nude inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholy, for which Sien had sat as his model.

  Gradually Van Gogh recovered sufficiently to go back to drawing and to painting watercolours and, as he did, art again began to play a dominant role in his letters. The new and larger studio inspired him, not least by the quality of the light.

  213 [D]

  Thursday [6 July 1882]

  My dear Theo,

  It is now the evening before I go back to hospital again, and I don’t know what they are going to tell me there - perhaps I’ll only be in for a short while, perhaps they’ll bring out their probes again and I’ll have to keep to my bed for days.

  That’s why I am writing once again from home. It is so quiet and peaceful here in the studio right now - it is already late -but it is stormy and rainy outside - and that makes the calm inside even greater.

  How I wish I had you here with me during this quiet hour, brother - how much I should have to show you. The studio looks so much like the real thing, or so it seems to me, plain grey-brown wallpaper, scrubbed floorboards, muslin stretched on slats across the windows, everything bright. And, of course, the studies on the wall, an easel on either side and a large unpainted wooden work-table. The studio gives on to a sort of alcove, where the drawing boards, portfolios, boxes, sticks, &c. are kept, as well as all the prints. And in the corner a cupboard with all the pots and bottles and on top of that all my books.

  Then the little living room with a table, a few kitchen chairs, an oil stove, a large wicker armchair for the woman in the corner by the window overlooking the yard and the meadows that you know from the drawing, and next to it a small iron cradle with a green cover.

  This last piece of furniture is something I cannot look at without emotion - because a man is gripped by a strong and powerful emotion when he sits down next to the woman he loves with a baby in the cradle beside them. And although it was in a hospital that she lay and I sat next to her - it is always that eternal poetry of Christmas night with the infant in the stable, as the old Dutch painters conceived it and Millet and Breton - a light in the darkness, a brightness in the middle of a dark night. And so I hung the large etching after Rembrandt over it, the two women by the cradle, one of them reading from the Bible by candlelight, while the great shadows cast a deep chiaroscuro over the whole room.

  I’ve hung a few other prints there, all of them very beautiful, the Christus Consolator by Scheffer, a phot, after Boughton, Le semeur and Les bêcheurs by Millet, Le buisson by Ruysdael, splendid large wood engravings by Herkomer & Frank Holl, and Le bane des pauvres by De Groux.

  Now then, in the small kitchen I have only the barest necessities, but such that if the woman recovers before me she will find all the essentials and be able to get a meal ready in 10 minutes, in short, such as will show her, when she steps into a house which has flowers in the window where she will be sitting, that someone has been giving her a great deal of thought. And upstairs in the large attic, a big bedstead for the two of us and my old one for the child, with all the bedding in good order.

  But please don’t think I bought all this in one fell swoop. We had already started buying a few bits and pieces here and there during the winter, although at the time I didn’t know how things would turn out and where we would finish up. And the result is now, thank God, that this little nest is ready for her after all her pain.

  How her mother and I have been exerting ourselves these last few days, especially her. And the most difficult thing was the bedding, everything made or altered by ourselves - we bought straw, sea-grass, coarse linen, &c, and stuffed the mattresses ourselves in the attic. Otherwise it would have been too expensive.

  And now, after having paid my old landlord, I still have 40 guilders left out of what you sent me. True, I have to pay 10 guilders of that tomorrow to the hospital, but for that I’ll get food and medical treatment there for 14 days. So that this month, although it includes the full cost of moving and settling in and Sien’s return after her confinement with all that entails, the cradle, &c, I shall be able to manage without your sending me more than the usual.

  On est sur de perir a part, on ne se sauve qu’ensemble1 - I believe this saying to be the truth and I base my life on it, might that be a mistake or a miscalculation?

  You see, brother, I think of you a very great deal these days, in the first place because everything, all that I have, is really yours, my lust for life and my energy, too, for I am able to get going now with your help and can feel my capacity to work flowing back.

  But I think of you so often for another reason, too. I remember that only a short while ago I came back to a house that was not a real home - not full of warmth as it is now - where two great voids stared at me day and night. There was no woman, there was no child, and though I do not believe there was any the less grief, I do believe there was less love. And those two voids kept me company to right and left, in the street, at work, everywhere and always. There was no woman, there was no child.

  Look, I don’t know if you’ve ever had that feeling which sometimes forces a sort of sigh or groan from one when one is alone: oh God, where is my wife, oh God, where is my child - is
being alone really living? Thinking of you, I’m sure I’m not mistaken in supposing that some of this same melancholy is in you, too, perhaps less passionately and nerve-rackingly than in me, but nevertheless to some extent and at certain moments. And I don’t know whether you will approve of it or not, whether you will judge it right or wrong of me, when I tell you that now and then that is how I think of you.

  This much, however, I believe about you, and this much I know about myself, notwithstanding my nervousness, that in both our characters there is a foundation of serenity - serenity quand bien meme,2 so that neither of us is unhappy, our serenity being based on the fact that we truly and sincerely love our trade and our work, and that art occupies a large part of our thoughts and makes life interesting. So I most certainly do not want to make you melancholy, but only to explain my conduct and philosophy of life by dint of something in your own temperament.

  That brings me to Father - do you think Father would go on being cold and finding fault - beside a cradle? You see, a cradle is not like anything else - there is no trickery about it. And no matter what Sien’s past may have been, I know no other Sien than the one from last winter, than that mother in the hospital whose hand pressed mine as we looked with tears in our eyes at the baby for whom we had been toiling all winter.

  And look here - entre nous, soit dit3 - without sermonizing - if there is no God, there is nevertheless one very close by somewhere, and one feels His presence at moments like this. Which is tantamount to saying something for which I would happily substitute the straightforward statement: I believe in a God, and that it is His will that man does not live alone but with a wife and a child, if everything is to be normal.

  And it is my hope that you will understand the way I have behaved and take it for what it is, namely natural, and that you will not think of it as tricking myself or being tricked. And, my dear fellow, when you do come - and if you can, come soon to have a look - then please take Sien, just as I do, for a mother and an ordinary housewife and for nothing else. For that is what she really is and in my opinion all the better for having known le revers de la medaille.4

  The last thing I did was to get a few plates, forks, spoons and knives - for neither Sien nor I had any until now. I thought, 3 people, so 3 sets, but then I had another thought - an extra set for Theo or for Father when they come and have a look. So your little spot by the window and your place at our table are ready and waiting for you… So, I only want to say - you are definitely coming, aren’t you?… and Father as well?

  I thought it sensible and tactful of you not to have spoken about it to Father and Mother as yet - now the confinement is over and the flowers are out again - and it was better for Father and Mother not to be mixed up in it before now. I mean, I thought it best to keep the thorns to myself and to let Father and Mother see nothing but the rose. Thus when the woman is back and I am better, I should like to talk about it in the way I told you, so should they ask you anything now, you could well drop a hint. Goodbye, good-night,

  Ever yours,

  Vincent

  218 [D]

  [21 July 1882]

  Dear brother,

  It is already late, but I felt like writing to you again anyway. You are not here - but I need you & sometimes feel we are not far away from each other.

  Today I promised myself something, that is, to treat my indisposition, or rather what remains of it, as if it didn’t exist. Enough time has been lost, work must go on. So, well or not well, I am going back to drawing regularly from morning till night. I don’t want anybody to be able to say to me again, ‘Oh, but those are only old drawings.’

  I drew a study today of the child’s little cradle with some touches of colour in it. I am also at work on one like those meadows I sent you recently.

  My hands have become a little too white for my liking, but that’s too bad. I’m going to go back outdoors again, a possible relapse matters less to me than staying away from work any longer.

  Art is jealous, she doesn’t like taking second place to an indisposition. Hence I shall humour her. So you will, I hope, be receiving a few more reasonably acceptable things shortly.

  People like me really should not be ill. I would like to make it perfectly clear to you how I look at art. To get to the essence of things one has to work long & hard.

  What I want & have as my aim is infernally difficult to achieve, and yet I don’t think I am raising my sights too high. I want to do drawings that will touch some people.

  Sorrow is a small beginning - perhaps such little landscapes as the Meerdervoort Avenue, the Rijswijk Meadows, and the Dab Drying Shed are also a small beginning. There is at least something straight from my own heart in them. What I want to express, in both figure and landscape, isn’t anything sentimental or melancholy, but deep anguish. In short, I want to get to the point where people say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels keenly. In spite of my so-called coarseness - do you understand? - perhaps for that very reason. It seems pretentious to talk like that now, but that is the reason why I want to put all my energies into it.

  What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.

  All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.

  That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love malgré tout,1 based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.

  Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

  Other things increasingly lose their hold on me, and the more they do so the more quickly my eye lights on the picturesque. Art demands dogged work, work in spite of everything and continuous observation. By dogged, I mean in the first place incessant labour, but also not abandoning one’s views upon the say-so of this person or that.

  I am not without hope, brother, that in a few years’ time, or perhaps even now, little by little you will be seeing things I have done that will give you some satisfaction after all your sacrifices.

  I have had singularly little discourse with painters lately. I haven’t been the worse for it. It isn’t the language of painters so much as the language of nature that one should heed. I can understand better now than I could a good six months ago why Mauve said: don’t talk to me about Dupré, I’d rather you talked about the bank of that ditch, or something of the sort. That may sound a bit strong, and yet it is absolutely right. The feeling for things themselves, for reality, is of greater importance than the feeling for painting; anyway it is more productive and more inspiring.

  Because I now have such a broad, such an expansive feeling for art and for life itself, of which art’ is the essence, it sounds so shrill and false when people like Tersteeg do nothing but harry one.

  For my own part, I find that many modern pictures have a peculiar charm which the old ones lack. To me, one of the highest and noblest expressions of art will always be that of the English, for instance Millais and Herkomer and Frank Holl. What I would say with respect to the difference between old & present-day art is - perhaps the modern artists are deeper thinkers.

  There is a great difference in sentiment between, for instance, Chill October by Millais and Bleaching Ground at Overveen by Ruysdael. And equally between Irish Emigrants by Holl and the women reading from the Bible by Rembrandt. Rembrandt & Ruysdael are sublime, for us as well as for their contemporaries, but there is something in the moderns that seems to us more personal and intimate.

  It is the same with Swain’s woodcuts & those of the old German masters.

  And so it was a mistake when the modern painters thought it all the rage to imitate the old ones a few years ago. That’s why I think old Millet is so right to sa
y, ‘Il me semble absurde que les hommes veuillent paraitre autre chose que ce qu’ils sont.’2 That may sound trite, and yet it is as unfathomably deep as the ocean, and personally I am all for taking it to heart.

  I just wanted to tell you that I am going to get back to working regularly again, and must do so quand même3 - and I’d

  [218]: enclosed sketch.

  Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, 2 3 July 1882

  just like to add that I look forward so much to a letter - and for the rest, I bid you good-night. Goodbye, with a handshake,

  Ever yours,

  Vincent

  Please remember the thick Ingres if you can, enclosed is another sample. I still have a supply of the thin kind. I can do watercolour washes on the thick Ingres, but on the sans fin,4 for instance, it always goes blurry, which isn’t entirely my fault.

  I hope that by keeping hard at it I shall draw the little cradle another hundred times, besides what I did today.

  219 [D] [part]

  Sunday morning [23 July 1882]

  My dear Theo,

  […]

  I can’t tell you how wonderful I find all the space in the studio -now that I have set to work, the effect is immediately apparent. We’ll teach them to say of my drawings ‘they’re only the old ones’. After all, I didn’t get ill for the fun of it.

  So you must picture me sitting at my attic window as early as 4 o’clock in the morning, studying the meadows & the carpenter’s yard with my perspective frame just as they’re lighting the fires to make coffee in the yard and the first worker comes strolling in. A flock of white pigeons comes soaring over the red tile roofs between the smoking black chimney stacks. Beyond it all lies an infinity of delicate, soft green, miles & miles of flat meadow, and a grey sky, as calm, as peaceful as Corot or Van Goyen.

  That view over the ridges of the roofs & the gutters with grass growing in them, very early in the morning, & those first signs of life & awakening - the flying bird, the smoking chimney, the small figure strolling along far below - that is the subject of my watercolour. I hope you will like it.