I mustn’t be supine or spineless about this, so, to be blunt: if you do nothing with my work, I do not want your patronage. I state the reason plainly, the more so as I can hardly avoid giving you some explanation for it. So it is not that I am overlooking the help you have given me since the beginning or wish to belittle it. The fact is that I see more good in the most miserable, most wretched drudgery than in patronage, into which matters are degenerating. In the very, very beginning one cannot do without it, but for heaven’s sake, it is time for me to try and muddle along, God knows how, rather than acquiesce in something that, after all, will get us no further.
Whether brotherly or otherwise, if you can do absolutely nothing except give financial assistance, you might as well keep that to yourself too. As matters are now, and have been during the past year, they have, if I may say so, been exclusively confined to money. And though you say you leave me completely free, it seems to me that ultimately, for example, if I keep company with a woman of whom you and others do not approve, perhaps rightly, though sometimes I don’t give a damn about that, there is a small tug at the purse strings to make me feel that it is ‘in my own interests’ to defer to your opinion.
When it came to that business with the woman, you also had your way, and it came to an end, but… I’m damned if I’ll practise morality in order to get a little bit of money. Yet in itself I don’t think it was absurd of you to disapprove when I wanted to go through with it last summer. But I can foresee the following in the future: I shall again have a relationship with someone from what you people call the lower orders - and, should I still have a relationship with you, meet with the same opposition. Opposition from all of you that might have some semblance of justification if I were given enough money to live differently. Which is what you do not, cannot or will not give, apres tout - neither you nor Father nor C. M. nor any of the others who are in the forefront when it comes to disapproving of this or that, and which I don’t want from you, aprés tout, seeing that I don’t give a great deal of thought to the question of lower or upper orders.
Do you see why I wasn’t being foolhardy, and wouldn’t be if I tried the same thing again? Firstly, because I have no pretensions, do not feel the slightest urge to maintain any sort of position in society or whatever you call it, and secondly because, as I do not receive the necessary means from anyone, nor do I earn them, I consider myself absolutely free to consort with the so-called lower orders if the opportunity should arise.
We should be perpetually coming back to the same problem. Now, just ask yourself if I am alone among those in my trade who most resolutely refuse the kind of patronage that entails being obliged to keep up some sort of position while the money is below the requisite level, so that they incur debts instead of making progress. Could it be done on the money, I might perhaps knuckle under like so many others. But we have certainly not reached that point yet - as you said yourself, I still have a good many years to get through during which my work will have precious little commercial value. All right - then I would rather end up having to eke out a living and manger de la vache enragee9 than fall into the hands of Messrs van Gogh.
My only regret about quarrelling with Father at the time is that I didn’t do it 10 years earlier. If you continue to follow in the footsteps of Father, &c, you will find yourself gradually getting bored - and becoming boring to certain people. But those are ‘mauvais coucheurs’10 you will say, people who carry no weight.
Just think it over, my dear fellow - I do not hide my innermost thoughts from you - I weigh the pros and cons on both sides. A wife you cannot give me, a child you cannot give me, work you cannot give me. Money, yes - but what good is that to me? If I have to forgo the rest, your money remains sterile, because it is not used in the way I have always told you it should be - a working man’s household if needs be, but if one doesn’t make sure of having a home of one’s own, then art cannot flourish.
And as for me - I told you plainly enough, to be sure, in my younger days: if I cannot get a good woman, I shall take a bad one, better a bad one than none at all. I know enough people who profess the exact opposite and who are as frightened of ‘children’ as I am of no children’.
And as for me - just because something often goes wrong - I do not give a principle up lightly. And the reason why I have few fears for the future is because I know how and why I have acted in the past. And because I know that there are others who feel the way I do.
You say that you are suspicious - but why, of what, and what good will it do you or me? Do you grow wiser by being suspicious? I hope you realize that the contrary is true - but again, it is loyal of you to admit that you are suspicious - and that is why I reply, something that would otherwise have been beneath me. And my reply is very short: I mean neither you, nor Father nor anyone else any harm, but I am very seriously thinking of deciding to part company with you and of seeking a new relationship, precisely with a view to preventing further harm. Sooner or later we would clash as Father and I have clashed and then I could not allow myself to yield. Voila tout,11 on the one hand my duty commands me to love my father and my brother - which I do - but we are living in an age of renewal and reform and many things have become completely outmoded, and consequently I see, I feel, I believe differently from Father, differently from you. And because I try to distinguish between the good as an abstract ideal and my own imperfect self, I do not come out with big words, but simply say, the way to stay good friends is - to part company. It is a hard thing for me to say, but I am reconciled to it.
You will probably gather that though I may be unclear about the future, I am not afraid. And am even in a very tranquil frame of mind. And yet, there is a great deal going on inside me, in part from a keen sense of obligation, which is certain to persist -and on the other hand from a feeling of disappointment, seeing that the reasons why my career must be broken off as it began, namely with your help and support, strike me as being utterly absurd.
Still, it would be wrong to carry on, since - if we did - we should most probably have a violent quarrel in a few years’ time, and it might end in hatred. Now I still have time to look around - and if I should be forced to do battle elsewhere, then at least it will not be with my brother. And - isn’t that looking at things coolly and weighing up the pros and cons?
I shan’t be depressed as a result, believe me, but neither am I being reckless. I have found peace of mind now that I have resolved on a separation, because I am convinced that if we went on as before, we should later become a hindrance to each other rather than a help.
Rappard said, don’t go to Antwerp before you are sure of finding something there - but how can one tell in ad -uce what one may come across? And if I keep my studio here as a bolthole, then now is the time to make a start. It will always be there, so it is certainly not my immediate intention to turn my back on these parts completely.
You probably realize, Theo, that on my long walks I have thought things over at length and often. I don’t want to get embroiled in a second series of quarrels, of the kind I had with Father I, with Father II - Father II being yourself. One is enough. That phrase is planted fair and square at the centre of my thoughts - draw your own conclusions.
What’s more, let me also tell you that I never behaved aggressively towards Father, nor do I want to be aggressive towards you, my brother. I have often restrained myself- when with strangers I would have fought quite differently and more fiercely.
But this is just what ties my hands in the circumstances. There is a new field over there for me and one where I can do as I please, as a stranger among strangers - over there, I shall have neither rights nor duties. And shall be able to be more offhand -bonne volonte d’etre inoffensif, certitude de r6sister,12 that is my goal and I am in search of it with all there is in me.
But taking’ everything lying down has to be paid for later - so - one has to act. Working here and looking for new contacts is the way forward. Unfortunately money is needed for both and the prospects f
or making a breakthrough are poor. And - time is money, too - and by carrying on as I am now I shall not get any richer.
But now you know my motives - if I should go on, you would become Father II in my life, and although I know that you mean well - you don’t understand me at all and so no headway can be made.
While his relationship with his brother remained under great strain and Van Gogh ranked the associated emotions among ‘things without pith’, his letters to Van Rappard increasingly served as a vehicle for his thoughts on art. He sent his friend drawings and copied out innumerable poems by Franêois Coppée and Jules Breton. They exchanged ideas on art criticism and above all on the relativity of the concept of ‘technique’. Central to an understanding of Van Gogh’s views is the passage in which he states that ‘art is something which, though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from man’s soul […].’ It was that dimension in a work of art that caused Van Gogh, in addition to his purely factual account, to give this description of a weaver at his loom: ‘Whenever that black monster of grimy oak, with all its slats, stands out starkly against the greyness in which it is set, then right in the very middle of it there sits a black ape or hobgoblin or spook making a clatter with those slats from early morning till late at night’
R43 [D] [letter from Vincent to Anthon van Rappard]
[second half of March 1884]
Dear friend Rappard,
Many thanks for your letter, which I was pleased to get. I was very glad to hear that you saw something in my drawings.
I shan’t enter into generalities concerning technique, but I certainly foresee that as I gain more of what I shall call expressive force, people will say not less but even more than they do now that I have no technique.
Hence I absolutely agree with you that what I am saying in my present work will have to be said more forcefully, and I am working hard to strengthen that aspect, but - that the general public will understand me better when I do - no.
That doesn’t alter the fact that, in my view, the reasoning of the artless fellow who asked of your work, ‘Does he paint for money?’, is the reasoning of a bloody idiot, since this intelligent creature evidently considers it axiomatic that originality prevents one from making money with one’s work. Trying to pass this off as an axiom, because it can decidedly not be proved as a proposition, is, as I said, a common trick of bloody idiots and idle little Jesuits.
Do you really think I don’t care about technique or that I don’t try for it? Oh, but I do, although only inasmuch as it allows me to say what I want to say (and if I cannot do that yet, or not yet perfectly, I am working hard to improve), but I don’t give a damn whether my language matches that of the rhetoricians (you remember making the comparison: if someone had something useful, true and necessary to say but said it in terms that were hard to understand, what good would that be to the speaker or to his audience?).
Let me just hold on to this point - the more so as I have often come across a rather peculiar historical phenomenon. Don’t misunderstand me: it goes without saying that one must speak in the mother tongue of one’s audience, if that audience knows one language only, and it would be absurd not to take that for granted.
But now for the second part of the question. Suppose a man has something to say and says it in a language in which his audience, too, is at home. Time and again we shall find that the speaker of truth lacks oratorical style and does not appeal to the greater part of his audience, indeed, is scorned as a man ‘slow of tongue’ and despised as such. He can count himself lucky if he can edify just one, or at best a very few, with what he says, because those few are not interested in oratorical tirades, but positively listen out for the true, useful, necessary content of the words, which enlighten them, broaden their minds, make them freer or more intelligent.
And now for the painters - is it the object and the ‘non plus ultra’ of art to produce those peculiar smudges of colour, that waywardness in the drawing - that are known as the refinement of technique? Certainly not. Take a Corot, a Daubigny, a Dupré, a Millet or an Israels - men who are certainly the great forerunners - well, their work goes beyond the paint, standing out from that of the fashionable crowd as much as an oratorical tirade by, say, a Numa Roumestan differs from a prayer or a good poem.
So the reason why one must work on one’s technique is simply to express better, more accurately, more profoundly what one feels, and the less verbiage the better. As for the rest, one need not bother with it.
Why I say this is because I think I have noticed that you sometimes disapprove of things in your own work which in my opinion are rather good. In my view, your technique is better than, say, Haverman’s, because your brushstroke often has an individual, distinctive, reasoned and deliberate touch, while what one invariably gets with Haverman is convention, redolent at all times of the studio, and never of nature.
For instance, those sketches of yours I saw, the little weaver and the Terschelling women, appeal to me, they are a stab at the core of things. All I get with Haverman is a feeling of malaise and boredom, little else.
I am afraid that you - and I congratulate you on it - are going to hear the same remarks about your technique in the future as well, and about your subjects and… about everything, in fact, even when that brushstroke of yours, which has so much character already, acquires still more of it. Yet there are art lovers who, apres tout,1 appreciate most what has been painted with emotion. Although we no longer live in the days of Thor6 and Th6ophile Gautier, alas.
Just consider whether it is sensible to talk a great deal about technique nowadays. You will say that I myself am doing just that - as a matter of fact, I regret it. But as far as I am concerned, I am determined, even when I shall be much more master of my brush than I am now - to go on telling people methodically that I cannot paint. Do you understand? Even when I have achieved a solid manner of my own, more complete and concise than the present one.
I liked what Herkomer said when he opened up his own art school- to a number of people who already knew how to paint -he urged his students to be kind enough not to paint the way he did but in their own way. ‘My aim,’ he said, ‘is to set original forms free, not to recruit disciples for Herkomer’s doctrine.’ Entre lions on ne singe pas.2
Anyway, I’ve been painting quite a bit lately, a seated girl winding shuttles for the weavers and a weaver on his own. I’m rather anxious that you should see my painted studies one of these days - not because I’m satisfied with them but because I think they’ll convince you that I really am keeping my hand in, and that when I say that I set relatively little store by technique, it’s not because I’m trying to save myself trouble or to avoid problems, for that is not my way.
Apart from that, I am looking forward to your getting to know this corner of Brabant some day - in my opinion it is much more beautiful than the Breda side.
These last few days it has been delightful. There is a village here, Son en Breugel, which bears an amazing resemblance to Courrieres, where the Bretons live - though the figures are even more beautiful over there. As one’s love for the form grows, one may well come to dislike ‘the Dutch national costume’, as it’s called in the photograph albums they sell to foreigners.
I detest writing or talking about technique in general, Rappard
- though I may occasionally get the urge none the less to discuss how to execute some idea or other of mine, be it with you or with someone else, and I never make light of the practical value of such discussions. But that doesn’t gainsay my first thought -which I may not have expressed properly.
That thought, I can’t find the right words, is based not on something negative but on something positive. On the positive awareness that art is something greater and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning. That art is something which, though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from man’s soul, while much of the proficiency and technical
expertise associated with art reminds me of what would be called self-righteousness in religion.
My strongest sympathies in the literary as well as in the artistic field are with those artists in whom I see the soul at work most strongly - Israels, for example, is clever as a technician, but so is Vollon - but I like Israels more than Vollon because I see something more in Israels, something quite different from the masterly reproduction of the materials, something quite different from light and brown, something quite different from the colour
- yet that something quite different is achieved by the precise rendering of the light effect, the material, the colour.
This something different of which I find so much more in Israels than in Vollon is pronounced in Eliot, and Dickens has it as well. Does it lie in their choice of subjects? No, for that, too, is only an effect.
What I am driving at, among other things, is that while Eliot is masterly in her execution, above and beyond that she also has a genius all of her own, about which I would say, perhaps one improves through reading these books, or perhaps these books have the power to make one sit up and take notice.
In spite of myself I keep writing about exhibitions, though actually I give them precious little thought. Now that by chance I do happen to be thinking about them, I am examining my thoughts with some surprise. I should not be expressing them fully enough if I didn’t add that in some pictures there is something so thoroughly honest and good that no matter what is done with them - whether they end up in good or in bad, in honest or dishonest hands - something good emanates from them. ‘Let your light shine before men,’ is, I believe, the duty of every painter, but in my view does not mean that letting the light shine before men must be done through exhibitions. Believe me, I just wish there were more and better opportunities than exhibitions to bring an to the people. Far from wanting to hide the light under a bushel, I would sooner let it be seen. Well, enough of this.
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh Page 29