The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

by Vincent Van Gogh

  I sincerely hope that you won’t conclude from this letter that I am presumptuous enough to think that it will be possible to do something straight away with these first studies. C. M. once interpreted certain remarks I made in that way, although I had meant nothing of the sort. Anyway, I used to be able to tell better than I can now what something was worth and if it could be sold or not. Now it is daily brought home to me that I no longer know about that sort of thing and I am more interested in studying nature than the price of pictures.

  But I do think I can see that the painted studies have a much more pleasing aspect than either those drawn in black & white or the watercolours you saw recently. And that is why I am not certain if giving painting absolute priority might not turn out to be more profitable despite the greater expense.

  I would rather you made such a decision than I, because when it comes to the assessment of financial success I consider you more competent than myself, and because I have complete confidence in your judgement. And if sooner or later I do send you something, it will be to hear whether you have any suggestions to make, not in order to say: I consider this or that item saleable. I no longer know about such things. And I would be sending it to you in any case to show you what I am up to.

  You told me to do my best to complete a little drawing as a watercolour - I’m sure painting will actually help me to produce better watercolours than I did before, if I go back to them. But should it not turn out well, you mustn’t feel discouraged and neither must I, nor must you hesitate to let me have your comments. I don’t throw comments systematically to the winds, though it usually takes longer to change something than to point out what needs changing. For instance, I have only just put into practice things Mauve said to me in January. And I painted that piece of ground, for instance, following a conversation with him about one of his studies.

  228 [D]

  Sunday morning [3 September 1882]

  My dear Theo,

  I have just received your very welcome letter, and as I am taking a bit of a rest today, am answering it right away. Thank you very much for it and for the enclosure, and for the various things you say in it.

  And many thanks for your description of that scene with the workmen in Montmartre, which I found very interesting because you convey the colours so well that I can see them. I am glad you are reading the book on Gavarni. I found it very interesting and it made me love G. twice as much.

  Paris & its environs may be beautiful, but we have no complaints here either.

  This week I did a painting that I think would remind you a little of Scheveningen as we saw it when we walked there together. A large study of sand, sea and sky - a big sky of delicate grey & warm white, with a single small patch of soft blue shimmering through - the sand & the sea light, so that the whole becomes golden, but animated by the boldly and distinctively coloured small figures and fishing smacks, which tend to set the tonal values. The subject of the sketch I made of it is a fishing smack weighing anchor. The horses stand ready for hitching up before pulling the smack into the sea. I am enclosing a small sketch of it.

  It was really hard to do, I just wish I’d painted it on panel or on canvas. I tried to get more colour into it, that is, depth, strength of colour.

  How strange it is that you & I so often seem to have the same thoughts. Yesterday evening, for instance, I came home from the woods with a study, having been deeply preoccupied with the question of depth of colour the whole week, and particularly at that moment. And I should very much have liked to have talked to you about it, especially with reference to the study I had done - and lo and behold, in this morning’s letter you chance to mention that you were struck by the very vivid, yet harmonious, colours of Montmartre. I don’t know if it was precisely the same thing that struck the two of us, but I do know that you would most certainly have been affected by what struck me so particularly and would probably have seen it in the same light.

  As a start, I am sending you a small sketch of the subject and I shall tell you what the problem was. The woods are becoming thoroughly autumnal, and there are colour effects I don’t often see in Dutch paintings.

  Yesterday evening I was working on a slightly rising woodland slope covered with dry, mouldering beech leaves. The ground was light and dark reddish-brown, emphasized by the weaker and stronger shadows of trees casting half-obliterated stripes across it. The problem, and I found it a very difficult one, was to get the depth of colour, the enormous power & solidity of that ground - and yet it was only while I was painting it that I noticed how much light there was still in the dusk - to retain the light as well as the glow, the depth of that rich colour, for there is no carpet imaginable as splendid as that deep brownish-red in the glow of an autumn evening sun, however toned down by the trees.

  Young beech trees spring from the ground, catching the light to one side, where they are a brilliant green, and the shadow side of the trunks is a warm, intense black-green.

  Behind those saplings, behind that brownish-red ground, is a sky of a very delicate blue-grey, warm, hardly blue at all, sparkling. And against it there is a hazy border of greenness and a network of saplings and yellowish leaves. A few figures of wood gatherers are foraging about, dark masses of mysterious shadows. The .white bonnet of a woman bending down to pick up a dry branch stands out suddenly against the deep reddish-brown of the ground. A skirt catches the light, a shadow is cast, the dark silhouette of a man appears above the wooded slope. A white bonnet, a cap, a shoulder, the bust of a woman show up against the sky. These figures, which are large and full of poetry, appear in the twilight of the deep shadowy tone like enormous terres cuites1 taking shape in a studio.

  I am describing nature to you - I’m not sure to what extent I reproduced it in my sketch, but I do know that I was struck by the harmony of green, red, black, yellow, blue, brown, grey. It was very De Groux-like, an effect like, say, that sketch of Le depart du conscrit, formerly in the Palais Ducal.

  It was a hard job painting it. The ground used up one and a half large tubes of white - even though the ground is very dark - and for the rest red, yellow, brown, ochre, black, sienna, bistre, and the result is a reddish-brown, but one ranging from bistre to deep wine-red and to a pale, golden ruddiness. Then there are still the mosses and a border of fresh grass which catches the light and glitters brightly and is very difficult to capture. So there in the end you have it, a sketch that I maintain has some significance, something to tell, whatever may be said about it.

  I said to myself while I was doing it: don’t let me leave before there is something of the autumnal evening in it, something mysterious, something important. However - because this effect doesn’t last - I had to paint quickly, putting the figures in all at once, with a few forceful strokes of a firm brush. It had struck me how firmly the saplings were planted in the ground - I started on them with the brush, but because the ground was already impasted, brush strokes simply vanished into it. Then I squeezed roots and trunks in from the tube and modelled them a little with the brush.

  Well, they are in there now, springing out of it, standing strongly rooted in it.

  In a way I am glad that I never learned painting. In all probability I would then have learned to ignore such effects as this. Now I can say to myself, this is just what I want. If it is impossible, it is impossible, but I’m going to try it even though I don’t know how it ought to be done. I don’t know myself how I paint it, I just sit down with a white board in front of the spot that appeals to me, I look at what is in front of my eyes, and I say to myself: that white board has got to turn into something - I come back, dissatisfied, I lay it to one side and when I have rested a bit, I go and look at it with a kind of awe. Then I am still dissatisfied, because I have that splendid scenery too much in mind to be satisfied. Yet I can see in my work an echo of what appealed to me, I can see that the scenery has told me something, has spoken to me and that I have taken it down in shorthand. My shorthand may contain words that cannot be deciphered, mistak
es or gaps, and yet there is something left of what the wood or the beach or the figure has told me, and it isn’t in tame or conventional language derived from a studied manner or from some system, but from nature herself

  Enclosed another little sketch from the dunes. There are small bushes there whose leaves are white on one side, dark green on the other side & are constantly moving & glittering. Beyond them dark trees.

  You can see that I am plunging full speed ahead into painting, I am plunging into colour. I have refrained from doing so up till now & am not sorry for it. Had I not already done some drawing, I should be unable to get the feeling of, or be able to tackle, a figure that looks like an unfinished terre cuite. But now that I sense I have gained the open sea, painting must go full speed ahead as fast as we are able.

  If I am going to work on panel or canvas, then the expenses will go up again, everything is so expensive, paint is expensive, too, and so quickly used up. Well, these are complaints all painters have, we must see what can be done. I know for certain that I have a feeling for colour and shall acquire more & more, that painting is in the very marrow of my bones.

  I value your loyal and effective help more than I can say. I think of you so much; I should so like my work to become vigorous, serious, virile, so that you too may get some pleasure from it as soo’n as possible.

  One thing I should like to bring to your attention as a matter of importance - wouldn’t it be possible to obtain paint, panels, brushes, &c, at discount prices? I am having to pay the retail price at the moment. Have you any connection with Paillard or someone like that? If so, I think it would be much more economical to get paints, say, wholesale, for instance white, ochre, sienna, and we could then come to some arrangement about the money. Everything would be cheaper, it goes without saying. Do think it over.

  One doesn’t paint well by using a lot of paint, but in order to do a ground effectively or to get a sky bright, one must sometimes not spare the tube. Sometimes the subject calls for less paint, sometimes the material, the nature of the subjects themselves, demands impasto. Mauve, who paints very frugally in comparison with J. Maris and even more so in comparison with Millet or Jules Dupré, nevertheless has cigar boxes fall of the remnants of tubes in the corners of his studio, as plentiful as the empty bottles in the corners of rooms after a soirée or dinner such as Zola describes, for instance.

  [228]: enclosed sketch.

  Well, if there could be a little extra this month, that would be wonderfal. If not, then not. I shall work as hard as I can. You ask about my health, but what about yours? I would imagine my remedy would be yours as well: to be out in the open, painting. I am well, I still feel like it even when I’m tired, and that is getting better rather than worse. It’s also a good thing, I think, that I live as frugally as possible, but my main remedy is painting.

  I sincerely hope that your luck is in and that you will have even more. Please accept a handshake in my thoughts, and believe me,

  Ever yours,

  Vincent

  You will see that there is a soft, golden effect in the little marine sketch and a more sombre, more serious mood in the woods. I am glad that both exist in life.

  Much as he had been disappointed with the letters of Gerard Bilders because they lacked the spark of inspiration that made the biographies of Millet or of the illustrator Gavarni so exemplary, so he now was disappointed with his colleagues in The Hague. Looking back over the year 1882, he concluded that nothing had come of his hopes in them: ‘I had imagined that the painters here formed a sort of circle or association where warmth and cordiality and a certain solidarity prevailed.’ What he had found instead was ‘coolness and discord’. From one of Theo’s letters, moreover, he gathered that all was not what it might have been in Parisian artists’ circles either ‘How many have not become desperate in Paris?’ The madness that had struck at the Belgian painter Octave Tassaert was further proof of the martyrdom artists have to face. For all that, Van Gogh never abandoned his dream of setting up a close-knit artists’ community.

  His estrangement from Mauve in the wake of the Sien affair hurt Van Gogh most of all, but he also felt bitter about him as a teacher: ‘I would sooner have had M[auve] speak to me about the use of body colour than tell me, “Whatever you do, you mustn’t use body colour,” while he himself, and others, use it all the time, so to speak, and to best effect.’

  ‘Finding out for himself is the only thing the self-taught painter can do, and Van Gogh took comfort from his correspondence with Anthon van Rappard, who was trying to kindle his enthusiasm for a sojourn in Drenthe. Vincent shared his impressions of the Dutch and French paintings he saw at various exhibitions with Van Rappard, and he devoted whole pages to their common passion for the English wood engravers: ‘For me, the English draughtsmen are what Dickens is to literature. They have the same sentiment, noble and healthy, and one always returns to them.’ With these English illustrations and Daumier as his main sources of inspiration, Van Gogh had meanwhile produced about i oo figure studies, mainly of types he found among ordinary men and women. Among the new subjects he tackled in the autumn of 1882 were studies of seaside visitors strolling along the beach, figures on a small bench under trees, ‘orphan’ men, ‘flocks of orphans with their spiritual shepherds’, and autumnal scenes in the Haagse Bos, the wooded park to the east of The Hague. The decline of nature in autumn had a particular appeal for him: ‘How beautiful the mud is, and the withering grass.’ He even picked his props from rubbish dumps: ‘That collection of discarded buckets, baskets, kettles, soldiers’ mess kits, oil cans, iron wire, street lamps, stovepipes, might have come from one of Andersen’s fairy tales… I am sure to dream about them tonight,’ he wrote to Van Rappard in late October.

  A high point from this period was his watercolour of Mooijman’s State Lottery office in Spuistraat.

  235 [D]

  [e. 1 October 1882]

  My dear Theo,

  Just a word to acknowledge the safe receipt of your letter, for the contents of which my hearty thanks.

  I have done hardly anything but watercolours these last few days. Enclosed is a small sketch of a large one. You may remember Mooijman’s State Lottery office at the top of Spui-straat. I passed it one rainy morning when a crowd of people were standing outside waiting to get their lottery tickets. Most of them were little old women and the sort of people of whom one cannot tell what they do or how they live, but who evidently scrape and struggle to make their way through life.

  Of course, superficially a small crowd of people like that so patently interested in ‘Today’s Draw’ is something to make you and me smile, neither of us giving two pins for the lottery.

  But I was struck by that small group and their expectant expressions, and while I did the sketch it assumed a greater and deeper significance for me than it had at first sight. It seems to me that it takes on more significance when one views it as: the poor and money. However, that is true of nearly all groups of figures - one must think about them before one can tell what one is looking at. The keen interest in, and the illusions about, the lottery may seem rather childish to us, but are serious indeed when we think of their counterpart, the misery and the sort of efforts de perdus1 of those poor wretches to find salvation, as they think, through a lottery ticket possibly paid for with their last pennies, money that should have gone on food.

  Be that as it may, I am trying my hand at a large watercolour of it. And am also doing one of a pew, which I saw in a small church in the Geest attended by the almshouse people (in these parts they are called, very expressively, orphan men and women).

  Once again hard at work drawing, I sometimes think there is nothing nicer than drawing.

  This is a part of that pews piece - there are other heads, of men, in the background. Things like this are difficult, however, and don’t always work straight away. When they do work, it’s sometimes the end result of a whole series of failures.

  Speaking of the orphan men, I was interrupted while w
riting these lines by the arrival of my model. And I worked with him until dark. He was wearing a large old overcoat (which lends him a curiously broad figure).

  I think you may perhaps like this collection of orphan men in their Sunday best & their working clothes.

  Then I got him sitting with a short pipe as well. He has a nice bald head, large ears (N.B.) and white side-whiskers.

  N.B. Deaf

  I did this sketch at dusk, but perhaps you can just make out the composition. Once it’s all together, it’s quickly drawn, but it wasn’t all that easy to put it together and I wouldn’t say that I’ve put it together as well as I would have liked. I should like to paint it, with the figures about one foot high, or a little less, and the composition a little wider.

  But I don’t know if I’ll do it. It would need a large canvas, and if things go wrong it could mean quite a bit of money wasted. So, much as I should like to do it, I think that if I carry on with my typical figures, these things will come by themselves. They will spring naturally from the studies after the model, be it in this or in another form, but with the same sentiment.

  I am beginning to see more and more how useful and essential it is to keep hold of one’s studies after the model. Though they have less value for others, the one who made them will recognize the model in them and will be reminded vividly of how things were.

  If you get a chance, please try to return some of my old studies. I hope that I shall be able to do better things with them in time.

  It goes without saying that in that group of figures, of which I am sending you a quick black sketch, there were many splendid things in colour - blue smocks and brown jackets, white, black and yellowish workmen’s trousers, faded shawls, an overcoat that had turned greenish, white bonnets and black top hats, muddy paving stones and boots setting off pale or weather-beaten faces. And it all cries out for watercolour or oils. Well, I am hard at it.