The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

by Vincent Van Gogh

  Nowadays, when connoisseurs stand in front of a painting like the one by Benj. Constant, or like some reception given by some cardinal by I don’t know which Spaniard - it’s the custom to say, with a meaningful air, something about ‘clever technique’. But as soon as those same connoisseurs are confronted by a subject from peasant life or a drawing by, say, Raffaëlli, they criticize the technique with the same knowing air - a la C. M.

  You may think I’m wrong to comment on this, but I’m so struck by the fact that all these exotic pictures were painted in the studio. Just try going outside and painting things on the spot! All sorts of things happen then. I had to pick off a good hundred or more flies from the 4 canvases you’re about to receive, not to mention dust and sand, &c, not to mention the fact that if one carries them through heath and hedgerows for a couple of hours, a branch or two is likely to scratch them, &c. Not to mention the fact that when one arrives on the heath, one feels tired and hot after a couple of hours’ walk in this weather. Not to mention the fact that the figures don’t stand still like professional models, and that the effects one wants to capture change as the day wears on.

  I don’t know how it is with you - but as far as I am concerned, the more I work at it, the more absorbed I get in peasant life. And the less I care for Cabanel-like things, among which I would include Jacquet, and the present-day Benj. Constant - or the highly praised but inexpressibly, hopelessly dry technique of the Italians & Spaniards. ‘Imagiers!’8 I often think of that term of Jacque’s.

  Yet I do have parti pris,9 I respond to Raffaelli, who paints something quite other than peasants - I respond to Alfred Stevens, to Tissot, to mention something completely different from peasants -I respond to a beautiful portrait.

  Zola, who otherwise, in my opinion, makes some colossal blunders when he judges pictures, says something beautiful about art in general in Mes haines: ‘Dans le tableau (l’oeuvre d’art), je cherche, j’aime l’homme - l’artiste.’10

  There you have it; I think that’s absolutely true. I ask you, what kind of man, what kind of visionary, or thinker, observer, what kind of human character is there behind certain canvases extolled for their technique - often no kind at all, as you know. But a Raffaelli is somebody, a Lhermitte is somebody, and with many pictures by almost unknown people one has the feeling that they were made with a will, with feeling, with passion, with love.

  The technique of a painting from peasant life or - in Raffaelli’s case - from’the heart of urban workers, introduces problems quite other than those of the smooth painting and portrayal of actions of a Jacquet or Benjamin Constant. Namely, living in cottages day in and day out, being out in the fields just like the peasants - in the heat of the sun in summer, enduring snow and frost in winter, not indoors but out in the open, and not just while taking a walk but day in, day out, like the peasants themselves.

  And I ask you, all things considered, am I really so wrong to object to the criticisms of those experts, who more than ever before bandy this so often irrelevant word ‘technique’ about (giving it an increasingly conventional relevance)? Considering all the traipsing and trudging it takes to paint ‘the mourning peasant’ in his cottage, I dare say this work involves a longer, more tiring journey than the one so many painters of exotic subjects - whether ‘la justice au harem’ or ‘reception at a cardinal’s’ - have to go on to produce their choicest eccentric subjects - since Arabic or Spanish or Moorish models are readily available, against payment, in Paris. But anyone who, like Raffaelli, paints the ragpickers of Paris in their own quarter, has greater problems and his work is more serious.

  Nothing seems simpler than painting peasants or ragpickers and other workers, but - there are no subjects in painting as difficult as those everyday figures! As far as I know, not a single academy exists in which one can learn to draw and to paint a digger, a sower, a woman hanging a pot over the fire, or a seamstress. But every city of any importance has an academy with a choice of models for historical, Arabic, Louis XV - in a nutshell, every sort of figure, provided they do not exist in reality.

  When I send you & Serret a few studies of diggers or peasant women weeding, gleaning corn, &c, as the first of a whole series on all kinds of work in the fields, you or Serret may discover flaws in them, which it will be helpful for me to know about and which I shall in all probability acknowledge.

  But I should like to point out something perhaps worthy of consideration. All academic figures are put together in the same way, and, let us admit, ‘on ne peut mieux’11 - impeccably -faultlessly. You will have gathered what I am driving at - they do not lead us to any new discoveries.

  Not so the figures of a Millet, a Lhermitte, a Regamey, a Lhermitte [sic], a Daumier. They are also well put together -but aprés tout, not the way the academy teaches. I believe that no matter how academically correct a figure may be, it is superfluous, though it were by Ingres himself (with the exception of his Source, because that surely was, is and always shall be, something new), once it lacks that essential modern aspect, the intimate character, the real action.

  You may ask, when will the figure not be superfluous, for all its faults, and grave faults to my way of thinking? When the digger digs, when the peasant is a peasant and the peasant woman is a peasant woman, is this anything new? Yes, even the little figures by Ostade and Terborch don’t work as people do today.

  I could say much more on the subject, and I should like to say how much I myself want to improve what I have begun - and how much more highly I value the work of some others than I do my own. I ask you - do you know of a single digger, a single sower, in the old Dutch school? Did they ever try to do ‘a worker’? Did Velasquez look for one in his water carrier or his types from the people? No. Work, that’s what the figures in the old pictures don’t do.

  I’ve been plodding away the last few days at a woman whom I saw pulling carrots in the snow last winter. Look - Millet has done it, Lhermitte, and by and large the painters of peasants from this century - say an Israëls - they consider it more beautiful than anything else. But even in this century, how relatively few among the legion of artists paint the figure - yes, for the figure’s sake avant tout,12 i.e. for the sake of form and modelé,13 yet cannot imagine it otherwise than in action, and want - what the old masters and even the old Dutch masters who depicted so many conventional actions avoided - want, as I say, to paint the action for the action’s sake. So that the painting or the drawing has to be a figure drawing for the sake of the figure and of the unutterably harmonious form of the human body - but at the same time a pulling of carrots in the snow. Do I make myself clear? I hope so, and you might mention it to Serret.

  I can put it more succinctly - a nude by Cabanel, a lady by Jacquet, and a peasant woman not by Bastien Lepage but by a Parisian who has learned his drawing at the academy, will always convey the limbs and the structure of the body in the same way - sometimes charming, accurate in proportion and anatomical detail. But when Israels, or, say, Daumier or Lher-mitte, draw a figure, one gets much more of a sense of the shape of the body, and yet - and that’s the very reason I’m pleased to include Daumier - the proportions will sometimes be almost arbitrary, the anatomy and structure often anything but correct in the eyes of the academicians. But it will live. And Delacroix too, in particular.

  It still isn’t well put. Tell Serret that I should be in despair if my figures were good, tell him that I don’t want them to be academically correct, tell him that what I’m trying to say is that if one were to photograph a digger, he would certainly not be digging then. Tell him that I think Michelangelo’s figures are splendid, although the legs are unquestionably too long, the hips and buttocks too broad. Tell him that, to my mind, Millet and Lhermitte are the true artists, because they do not paint things as they are, examined in a dry analytical manner, but as they, Millet, Lhermitte, Michelangelo, feel them to be. Tell him that I long most of all to learn how to produce those very inaccuracies, those very aberrations, reworkings, transformations of realit
y, as may turn it into, well - a lie if you like - but truer than the literal truth.

  And now it’s nearly time to close - but I felt the need to say once more that those who paint peasant life or the life of the people, though they may not be counted among the ‘hommes du monde’,14 may well stay the course better in the long run than the creators of exotic harems and cardinals’ receptions, painted in Paris.

  I know that it is disagreeable of one to ask for money at awkward moments - but my excuse is that painting what appear to be the most commonplace things is sometimes the most difficult and expensive. The expenses that I must incur if I want to work, are at times considerable when compared with my means. I assure you that had my constitution not become virtually like that of a peasant, through exposure to the elements, I should not have been able to endure it, for there is simply nothing left over for my personal comfort. But then I don’t seek that for myself either, any more than many peasants seek anything other than to live as they do. But what I do ask for is paint, and above all models.

  From what I write about the figure drawings you will no doubt have gathered that I am particularly keen on going ahead with them. You wrote not long ago that Serret had spoken to you ‘with conviction’ about certain faults in the structure of the figures in the Potato Eaters. But you will have seen from my answer that I found fault on that score myself as well, though I did point out that this was my impression after I had seen the cottage many evenings in the dim lamplight, after I had painted 40 heads, from which it follows that I set out from a different point of view.

  However, now that we have started to discuss the figure, I have a great deal more to say. I find Raffaelli’s perception of ‘character’, that is, the words he uses to describe it, good and well chosen and exemplified by the drawings. But those who, like Raffaelli, move in artistic and literary circles in Paris, have, apres tout, different ideas from, for instance, mine, out here in the country among the peasants. My point is that they are looking for a single word that will sum up all their ideas - he suggests the word ‘character’ for the figures of the future. I agree with that, with what I think is the meaning - but I believe as little in the accuracy of the word as in the accuracy of other words - as little as in the accuracy or effectiveness of my own expressions.

  Rather than say, ‘there must be character in a digger’, I would put it like this: the peasant must be a peasant, the digger must dig, and then there will be something essentially modern in them. But I feel that even these words may give rise to misconceptions - even were I to add a whole string of them.

  Far from cutting down on the expenses for models - which is a fairly heavy burden on me now as it is - I think spending a little more is called for, very much called for. For what I am aiming at is quite different from doing ‘a little figure’ drawing. To show the peasant figure in action, that - I repeat - is what an essentially modern figure painting really does, it is the very essence of modern art, something neither the Greeks nor the Renaissance nor the old Dutch school have done.

  This is a question I ponder every day. The difference between the great, or the lesser, masters of today (the great, e.g. Millet, Lhermitte, Breton, Herkomer; the lesser, e.g. Raffaelli and Re-gamey) and the old schools is, however, something I have rarely seen frankly expressed in articles about art. Just think about it and see if you don’t agree. They started doing peasants’ and workmen’s figures as a ‘genre’ - but nowadays, with Millet, the perennial master, in the lead, these figures have become the very essence of modern art and so they will remain.

  People like Daumier - one must respect them, for they are among the pioneers. The simple but modern nude - as revived by Henner and Lefévre - ranks high. Baudry, and above all such sculptors as Mercier and Dalou, are also amongst the very soundest. But the fact is that peasants and ouvriers15 are not nudes, nor does one need to imagine them in the nude. The more that people begin to do workers’ and peasants’ figures, the better I shall like it. And for myself, I can think of nothing I like as much. This is a long letter and I’m not even sure if I’ve made myself entirely clear. Perhaps I’ll write a few lines to Serret too. If I do, I’ll send the letter to you to read, for I do want to make plain how much importance I attach to the figure issue.

  During the summer months Van Gogh was busy with scenes of the wheat harvest and ‘little women among the potatoes’. At the beginning of September, he informed Theo that the ‘reverend gentlemen of the [Roman Catholic] clergy’ were beginning to make his life difficult by advising the people of Nuenen (‘God-fearing natives’) not to pose for him any longer because he was thought to be responsible for the pregnancy of a local girl: ‘These last two weeks, I have had a lot of trouble with the reverend gentlemen of the clergy, who gave me to understand, albeit with the best intentions and believing like so many others that they were obliged to intervene - that I ought not to be too familiar with people below me in station. But while they put the matter to me in these terms, they used quite a different tone with the “people of lower station”, namely threatening them if they allowed themselves to be painted. This time, I went straight to the burgomaster and told him all about it, pointing out that it was no business of the priests, and that they ought to stick to their own sphere of more abstract concerns. In any case, for the moment I am having no more opposition from them and I hope it will stay like that.

  ‘A girl I had frequendy painted was about to have a baby and they suspected me, though I had nothing to do with it. But I heard what had really happened from the girl herself, namely that a member of the priest’s own congregation in Nuenen had played a particularly ugly part in the affair, and so they could not get at me, at least not on that occasion. But you can see that it isn’t easy to paint people in their own home or to draw them going about their business.’

  At the beginning of October 1885, longing once again to feast his eyes on the old Dutch masters, Van Gogh travelled to Amsterdam for a few days, accompanied by his friend and pupil, Anton Kerssemakers. The new Rijksmuseum had just been opened with great ceremony, and there he admired not only the work of great seventeenth-century painters but also Jozef Israëls’s Zandvoortse visser and the Dutch and French Romantic painters in the Fodor Collection. Van Gogh looked to his predecessors for support of his own working method, and he was pleasantly surprised to discover that the old Dutch paintings, for example the work of Frans Hals, had ‘for the most part been done quickly’. Moreover, his short excursion to Amsterdam convinced him that the old masters, too, had considered ‘drawing and colour as one’.

  Observations on the theory of colours filled many pages of the letters he wrote during this period. Delacroix was his great exemplar, and he considered the Barbizon painter Jules Dupré to be Delacroix’s peer when it came to landscape. Much as would happen later in his Paris period, the painting of still lifes helped Van Gogh to apply the colour theory he was learning at the time from Bracquemond’s book Du dessin et de la couleur. He responded to Theo’s analysis of the use of colour in Manet’s painting of a dead bullfighter by sending his brother his own Still Life with Open Bible, which he had dedicated to his late father as a second act of homage and a memento mori.

  Despite his profound interest in technique, he felt that other considerations were of still greater importance: ‘Let people talk rot as much as they like about technique in pharisaical, hollow, hypocritical terms - true painters are guided by that conscience which is called sentiment. Their soul, their brains, are not there for the sake of the brush but the brush for their brains. Furthermore, it is the canvas which is frightened of the real painter, not the painter who is frightened of the canvas.’

  From Nuenen to Antwerp

  During the first weeks of November 1885 Van Gogh still managed to produce several glorious autumn landscapes. In the middle of the month, his old intention of going to Antwerp surfaced once again, and he decided to terminate his tenancy of the studio in Nuenen as from May 1886. The antagonism of the sexton and the priest had continued
to thwart his search for a model, and there could be no question of drawing nudes in Brabant. Antwerp now beckoned as a welcome release from banishment The recent trip to Amsterdam had shown him that a painter must keep in constant touch with the work of his predecessors, and he felt that, in Antwerp, he could learn much from the work of Rubens, in his view the greatest of all Baroque painters of the figure.

  He arrived in Antwerp at the end of November and rented a small room above a paint-merchant’s shop at 194 rue des Images - a fittingly named street. For the first time we read that the reproductions pinned to his walls included a ‘lot of small Japanese prints’. When and how Van Gogh first became interested in Japanese woodcuts remains somewhat obscure - at the end of the nineteenth century they were to be found in various Dutch collections, but there is no mention of these in Van Gogh’s letters. It would seem that his recent perusal of the de Goncourts’ book on eighteenth-century art, and their battle cry ‘Japonaiserie for ever’, had kindled his interest in ‘fanciful, peculiar, unheard of Japanese art. During the second half of his Parisian period in particular and again in Aries, the influence of Japanese prints would be clearly reflected in his work, and though that influence is hard to detect in the Antwerp period, we have his own word that it already coloured his experience of that city significantly.

  Brought face to face with heads by Rubens and Jordaens, Hals and Rembrandt, in Antwerp, Van Gogh decided to concentrate on portraits himself. In this field, he resolved to surpass photography, which, he felt, remained lifeless at all times, while ‘painted portraits have a life of their own, which springs straight from the painter’s soul and which no machine can approach’. However, when acute lack of cash forced him to forgo hot meals, he was prepared to compromise and to consider earning some money with portraits painted from photographs.