The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

by Vincent Van Gogh

  I count on your writing again - you will, won’t you? And once more thanks for the timely remittance which is indispensable if I am to carry on working hard. Goodbye, my dear fellow, let me shake your hand warmly in thought, & believe me,

  Ever yours,

  Vincent

  There is a bit more foreground in the watercolour - here, the figures are too prominent and the eye doesn’t have enough command of the foreground.

  237 [D]

  Sunday afternoon [22 October 1882]

  My dear Theo,

  I don’t need to tell you how delighted I was with your letter & the enclosure, it comes just in time and will be of tremendous help to me.

  We are having autumn weather here, rainy & chilly, but full of atmosphere, especially good for figures, which stand out in tone against the wet streets and roads reflecting the sky. It is what Mauve, in particular, does so beautifully time and again. So I have been able to do some work on the large watercolour of the crowd of people in front of the lottery office, and I have also started another one of the beach, of which this is the composition.

  I entirely agree with what you say about those times now and then when one feels dull-witted in the face of nature or when nature seems to have stopped speaking to us.

  I get the same feeling quite often and it sometimes helps if I then tackle something quite different. When I feel jaded with landscapes or light effects, I tackle figures, and vice versa. Sometimes there is nothing for it but to wait for it to pass, but many a time I manage to do away with the numbness by changing my subject-matter.

  However, I am becoming more and more fascinated by the figure. I remember there used to be a time when my feeling for landscape was very strong and I was much more impressed by a painting or drawing which captured a light effect or the atmosphere of a landscape than I was by the figure. Indeed, figure painters in general filled me with a kind of cool respect rather than with warm sympathy.

  However, I remember very well being most impressed by a drawing of Daumier’s: an old man under the chestnut trees in the Champs Elysées (an illustration for Balzac), though the drawing was not all that important. What impressed me so much at the time was something so stout and manly in Daumier’s conception, something that made me think it must be good to think and to feel like that and to overlook or ignore a multitude of things and to concentrate on what makes us sit up and think and what touches us as human beings more directly and personally than meadows or clouds.

  That is also why I always feel attracted to the figures of both the English draughtsmen and of the English writers, whose Monday-morning-like soberness and studied restraint and prose and analysis is something solid and substantial to which one can hang on in days when one feels weak. Among French writers the same is true of Balzac & Zola.

  I don’t know the books by Murger you mention but I hope to become acquainted with them. Did I tell you that I was reading Daudet’s Les rois en exil? I thought it rather good.

  The titles of those books greatly appeal to me, for instance, La boheme.1 How far we have strayed these days from la boheme of Gavarni’s time! It seems to me that there was definitely something warmer and more light-hearted and alive about those days than there is today. But I cannot be certain, and there is much good nowadays, or there could be much more than in fact there is if there were greater solidarity.

  At the moment I can see a splendid effect out of my studio window. The city, with its towers and roofs and smoking chimneys, is outlined as a dark, sombre silhouette against a horizon of light. This light is, however, no more than a broad streak over which hangs a heavy raincloud, more concentrated below, torn above by the autumn wind into large shreds & lumps that are being chased away. But that streak or light is making the wet roofs glisten here & there in the dark mass of the city (on a drawing one would achieve this with a stroke of body colour), so that although the mass has a single tone one can still distinguish between red tiles & slates. The Schenkweg runs through the foreground like a glistening streak through the wetness, the poplars have yellow leaves, the banks of the ditches & the meadows are a deep green, the little figures are black. I would have drawn it, or rather tried to draw it, had I not been working hard all afternoon on figures of peat-carriers, which are still too much on my mind to allow room for anything new, and should be allowed to linger.

  I long for you so often and think of you so much. What you tell me about the character of some artists in Paris, who live with women, are less narrow-minded than others, perhaps trying desperately to preserve something youthful, I think is shrewdly observed indeed. Such people can be found here as well. It may be even more difficult over there than it is here to preserve some freshness in one’s daily life, because to do so there means swimming even more against the tide. How many have not become desperate in Paris - calmly, rationally, logically and rightly desperate. I have been reading something of that sort about Tassaert, whom I like very much, and I feel sorry that this was what happened to him.

  All the more, all the more do I consider every effort in that direction worthy of respect. I also think it is possible to achieve success without having to start out with despair. Even though one loses out here and there, and even though one sometimes feels a falling off, one must rally and take courage again, even though things should turn out differently from what one originally intended.

  Please don’t think that I look with contempt on such persons as you describe, just because their lives are not based on serious and well-considered principles. My opinion on the matter is this: what matters is deeds, not some abstract idea. I only approve of principles and think them worth the trouble if they turn into deeds, and I think it is good to reflect and to try to be conscientious, because this concentrates a man’s energies and combines his various actions into a whole. The people you describe would, I believe, be more resolute if they thought more clearly about what they were going to do, but for the rest I greatly prefer the likes of them to people who parade their principles without taking the slightest trouble or even thinking about putting them into practice. For the latter gain nothing from the most beautiful principles and the former are precisely the people who, if they come round to living with resolve and thoughtfulness, might do something great For great things do not just happen by impulse but are a succession of small things linked together.

  What is drawing? How does one come to it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How is one to get through that wall - since pounding at it is of no use? In my opinion one has to undermine that wall, filing through it steadily and patiently. And there you are - how can one continue such work assidu2 without being distracted or diverted, unless one reflects and orders one’s life by principles? And as it is with art so it is with other things. And great things are not something accidental, they must be distinctly willed.

  Whether a man’s deeds originate in his principles or his principles in his deeds is something that seems to me as indeterminable (and as little worthy of determination) as the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. But I consider that trying to develop one’s power of thought and will is something positive and of much moment.

  I am very curious to know what you will make of the figures I am doing these days, when you eventually see them. That poses another chicken-ç-egg question: must one do figures for a previously planned composition, or combine figures that one has done separately so that they give rise to a composition? It seems to me that it probably comes down to the same thing, provided only that one keeps working.

  I conclude with the same thing you said at the end of your letter, that we share a liking for peering behind the scenes, or, in other words, we have a tendency to analyse things. Now I believe that this is precisely the quality one has to have in order to paint - the strength one must exert in painting or drawing. It may be that nature has favoured us to some extent (in any case you and I certainly have it - perhaps we owe it to our boyhood in B
rabant and to surroundings that taught us to think more than is usual), but it is really and truly not until later that the artistic sensibility develops and matures through work. I cannot tell you how you might become a very good painter, but that you have it in you and can bring it out is something I really do believe. Goodbye, my dear fellow, thank you for what you sent me and an affectionate handshake,

  Ever yours,

  Vincent

  I have already lit my small stove. My dear fellow, how I wish we could just spend an evening together looking at drawings & sketches, and woodcuts, I have some splendid new ones. I hope to get some boys from the orphanage to pose for me this week, I might yet be able to save that drawing of orphans.

  Van Gogh was convinced that the art of his day was in decline: ‘We have sunk enormously since Millet - the word decadence, now whispered or pronounced in guarded terms […], will soon ring out like an alarm clock.’ His pessimism was increased by the inner emptiness he felt, an emptiness ‘I cannot fill with the daily round’. Contemporary art had ‘something hectic and hurried that is not at all to my liking, just as if death had passed over it all’. He objected to the attitude of the Hague painter and art collector Hendrik Willem Mesdag, who had eyes for the most up to date only and who despised ‘the old style’. With almost religious fervour, Van Gogh stood up for the painters of the last generation, and particularly for Delacroix and Millet: ‘There used, in short, to be a body of painters, writers and artists, who were united despite their differences, and they were a force. They did not walk in the dark but iri the light of knowing for certain, beyond any doubt, what they wanted.’

  Van Gogh’s intense study of the figure during this period also coloured his perception of nature as a system of animated figures: ‘I see expression in the whole of nature, for instance in trees, and, as it were, a soul. A row of pollard willows sometimes has something of a procession of orphan men about it. The young corn can have an inexpressibly pure and tender air and awaken the same emotions as, say, the expression of a sleeping baby. The trampled grass by the side of the road seems as tired and dusty as people from the backstreets. When it snowed recently, I saw a group of Savoy cabbages standing stiff with cold which reminded me of a group of women I had seen standing in a basement hot-water-and-coals shop early in the morning, in their thin skirts and old shawls.’

  In November 1882, inspired by English magazine illustrators and their ‘Heads of the People’ series, he started on a group of lithographs of working men such as The Pensioner Drinking Coffee and The Digger. The lithographs were to dominate his correspondence with both Theo and Van Rappard for many months. This work, he felt, would have to culminate in a popular edition, from the people for the people. In addition, he hoped that it would bring him in work as a magazine illustrator. The series was to run to thirty sheets, but he failed to produce anything like that number in the end.

  In January 1883 it was Theo’s turn to make his brother privy to problems of an amorous nature: he had fallen in love with a woman who also happened to be ill. Van Gogh’s heart overflowed with warmth at this shared confidence. He sketched their respective situations in graphic terms: ‘To you and to me there appeared on a cold, pitiless pavement the downcast, sorrowful figure of a woman, and neither you nor I passed her by, but both of us stopped and followed the dictates of our human heart. Such an encounter is rather like an apparition, at least when one recalls it one sees a pale face, a sorrowful look like an Ecce Homo against a dark background.’ It encouraged Vincent to write more often about his life with Sien, whose name had not been mentioned in their correspondence for quite a while.

  At about the same time, in early February 1883, Vincent first told Van Rappard about his new life with Sien, which he glowingly described as Bohemian. His often quite light-hearted tone makes a striking contrast with the intense letters about Sien he had exchanged with his brother the summer before. At the time, Van Rappard was recovering from ‘brain fever’, and Van Gogh did not hesitate on occasion to plead the nerve-racking nature of the artist’s life as a mitigating circumstance in his letters to Theo. He also mentioned the fact that as soon as the landscape painter Martinus Boks was admitted to a lunatic asylum, his Hague colleagues’ appreciation of his work began to increase. Van Gogh observed this phenomenon with not a little irony. That his own work would be linked to his mental illness by later generations renders these comments particularly poignant. In general, however, Van Gogh’s reactions to his colleagues’ afflictions were very down to earth. Thus he had nothing positive to say about the effects of Breitner’s condition on his work. But even when much later he described his own condition in Saint-Remy following various attacks, he rarely romanticized the illness, feeling as he did that it had a negative effect on his work. He emphatically gave the word ‘healthy’ a positive connotation in connection with art.

  On the other hand, Van Gogh nourished the conviction that the artist’s exceptional calling and position in society sometimes caused him to overstep the bounds of sanity. That placed him in a long, romantic tradition of looking on insanity as an extension, indeed even a prerequisite at times, of genius. In this connection he had mentioned as early as 1873 a painting by the Belgian artist émile Wauters, whose subject was the madness of the fifteenth-century painter Hugo van der Goes. Later, too, when linking Breitner’s work, which he found incomprehensible, to that artist’s mental health, he referred to Wauters’s painting.

  During the first few months of 1883, in addition to indulging his passion for English wood engravings, Van Gogh confined himself largely to the drawing of working people, including fishermen. He also made a series of compositions of scenes in the public soup kitchen. At about the same time, his reading in Dutch of Fritz Reuter’s Ut mine Festungstid (From My Time in Prison) gave him the courage to tackle his landlord and to demand improvements to his studio: ‘I love my studio in the same way that a sailor loves his ship.’

  The painters whose company he kept regularly in The Hague included Herman van der Weele, who followed in Mauve’s wake, and Theophile de Bock, whose landscapes were strongly influenced by Corot. Van Gogh wrote: ‘There is always something fresh and friendly in them. But there is a certain art, perhaps less flowery and more thorny, that is more after my own heart’ His letters from this time are markedly serene. The appeal of the winter - ‘an indescribably beautiful Black & White exhibition’ - inspired him once again to poetic descriptions of nature and small vignettes of a Biedermeier-like intimacy.

  276 [D]

  [c. 21–28 March 1883]

  My dear Theo,

  You have so often afforded me a glimpse of Paris with your descriptions; this time for a change I am giving you a glimpse out of my window at the snow-covered yard.

  I am adding a glimpse into a corner of the house, and they are two impressions of one and the same winter’s day.

  We are surrounded by poetry on all sides, but putting it on paper is, alas, not as readily done as looking at it. I made a watercolour of the above, from which this small sketch is taken, but I don’t think it is vivid and powerful enough.

  I believe I’ve already written to you that I, was able to find some mountain chalk here in the city. I am at work with that, as well.

  To my mind the cold spell we had last week was the most perfect part of this winter. It was fantastically beautiful, what with the snow and the curious skies. The thawing of the snow today was almost more beautiful still. But it was typical winter weather, if I may call it that - the kind of weather that awakens old memories and lends the most ordinary things the sort of look one cannot help associating with stories from the age of stagecoaches and post chaises.

  Here, for example, is a quick little sketch I made in just such a dream-like state. It shows a gentleman who, having missed a coach or something of the sort, has had to spend the night in a village inn. Now he has risen early, and having ordered a glass of brandy against the cold, he is paying the landlady (a little woman in a peasant’s cap). It is still very ear
ly in the morning, la piquette du jour1 - he must catch the post chaise - the moon is still shining and one can see the snow gleaming through the taproom window, and all the objects are casting curious, whimsical shadows. This story is really of no consequence, nor is the little sketch, but one or other may perhaps help you to understand what I mean, that is, that lately everything has a certain je ne sais quoi which makes one feel like getting it down quickly on paper. Still, the whole of nature is an indescribably beautiful Black & White exhibition2 during such snow effects.

  As I am doing small sketches at present anyway, I am adding another, very slight one, of a draw, done in mountain chalk, the girl by the cradle, done like the woman & child you mention. This mountain chalk is truly the strangest material. The other little sketch of a bargee is after a drawing in which a great deal has been lavis3 with neutral tint and sepia.

  It would not surprise me at all if the few things I sent you recently seem to you rather meagre products. Indeed I believe it could hardly be otherwise. There is something inevitable about the fact that, to appreciate the characteristic nature of work in Black & White,4 one must take the whole set into account all the time, which cannot always be done. What I mean is that there is a difference between making 10 drawings and making 100 drawings or sketches or studies. Not because of the quantity, to be sure - forget about the quantity - what I am trying to say is this, there is a kind of tolerance to Black & White5 that enables one to draw a single figure one admires in perhaps 10 different poses, while if one were to do it in, say, watercolour, or to paint it, one would do just one pose.

  Now suppose that 9 of those 10 are no good, and I hope in all conscience that this would not be the proportion of good to bad all the time, but just suppose that to be the case. If you were here in the studio yourself, it is my belief that not a week would pass without my being able to show you, not just one, but a whole number of studies, and I should be surprised if you were unable to pick out one from amongst that number that appealed to you every time. Meanwhile the rest would not have been done wholly in vain, since in some respects even unsuccessful studies are likely to prove useful or serviceable one day for some new composition.