The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

by Vincent Van Gogh

  By the way, since, aprés tout, I’ve been virtually fasting for 4 or 5 days at this year’s end - send your letter no later than 1 January.

  You may well find it difficult to imagine, but it is a fact -when I receive the money my greatest craving will not be for food, though I shall have been fasting, but even more so for painting - and I shall immediately go on a hunt for models and continue until all the money is gone. Meanwhile what will be keeping me going is my breakfast with the people where I live, and a cup of coffee and some bread in the crêmerie11 in the evening. Supplemented, when I can, by a second cup of coffee and bread in the crêmerie for my supper or else some rye bread I keep in my trunk. As long as I am painting that is more than enough, but when my models have left, a feeling of weakness does come over me.

  The models here appeal to me because they’re so completely unlike the models in the country. And more especially because their character is completely different. And the contrast has given me some new ideas for the flesh colours in particular. And though I’m still not satisfied with what I’ve achieved with my last head, it does differ from the earlier ones.

  I think you value the truth enough for me to speak freely to you. For much the same reasons that if I paint peasant women I want them to be peasant women - so I want to get a whore’s expression when I paint whores.

  That is precisely why a whore’s head by Rembrandt struck me so forcefully. Because he had caught that mysterious smile in such an infinitely beautiful way, with a serieux12 of his very own - the magician of magicians.

  This is something new for me, and I want to achieve it at all costs. Manet has done it and Courbet - well, sacrebleu,13 I’ve the same ambition too, the more so as I’ve felt the infinite beauty of the study of women by the giants of literature - Zola, Daudet, de Goncourt, Balzac - in the very marrow of my bones.

  Even Stevens fails to satisfy me, because his women are not like any I know personally. And those he chooses are not the most interesting there are, I find.

  Well, be that as it may - I want to get on a tout prix,14 and -I want to be myself. I am feeling obstinate, too, and no longer care what people say about me or about my work.

  It seems more difficult to get a nude model here - the girl I used wouldn’t do it, at any rate. Of course, that ‘wouldn’t’ is probably relative, but you certainly can’t take it for granted. Still, the fact is she would be splendid.

  From a business point of view I can only say that we are in what people have already begun to call ‘la fin d’un siécle’15 -that the women have the same charm as at a time of revolution - and just as much to say - and that one would be ‘retiré du monde’ if one worked without them. It is the same everywhere, in the country as much as in the city - one has to take women into account if one wants to be up to date.

  Goodbye, have a happy New Year, with a handshake,

  Ever yours,

  Vincent

  On 18 January Van Gogh enrolled in the painting class of Charles Verlat, director of the Antwerp Academy. He also attended the evening course in drawing from classical plaster casts. He told Theo that he had been thinking of moving on to Paris to seek inspiration in the Louvre and from the modern paintings in the Musée du Luxembourg. He also wanted to take further lessons there. Theo suggested in reply that he try to get into Fernand Cormon’s studio in Paris.

  Vincent was chronically short of money and his health, too, was suffering. To make matters worse, he had large dentist’s bills to pay. His lamentations alternated with philosophical and political diatribes that sounded as if he had only just picked them up in artistic circles. They included reflections on life during the fin-de-siéde, that interesting period in which they lived: ‘… we are in the last, 4th quarter of a century that will again end in a tremendous revolution. But let us suppose that we are both there to witness its beginning at the end of our lives. We shall certainly not live to see the better times when the air is cleared and all society refreshed after those great storms […] we may be stifling now, but generations to come will be able to breathe more freely.’ His reading of Zola, the de Goncourts, Turgenev and Daudet strengthened him further in this belief Meanwhile, he was continually at loggerheads with his teachers at the Antwerp Academy, who felt that he was a bad influence on his fellow students, and he decided to stop attending the classes there. The brothers Van Gogh then discussed the date on which Vincent should move to Paris, where they would be able to cut costs by sharing an apartment. Theo was not immediately enthusiastic about this proposed move at such short notice and would have preferred Vincent to come after July. Vincent, for his part, assured Theo ‘that I’ll be very pleased if I could have a year to work at Cormon’s […] The ancients won’t interfere with our being realists, far from it. I also can’t wait, of course, to see the French paintings.’ Vincent was not in favour of a temporary return to Nuenen and, to bring further speculation and discussion to an end, he faced his brother with a fait accompli: at the beginning of March he unexpectedly turned up in Paris.

  459 [F]

  [c. 1 March 1886]

  My dear Theo,

  Don’t be angry with me for arriving out of the blue. I’ve given it so much thought and I’m sure we’ll gain time this way. Shall be at the Louvre from midday onwards, or earlier if you like.

  Please let me know what time you can get to the Salle Carrée. As far as expenses are concerned, I repeat that it won’t make much difference. I still have some money left, of course, and I want to talk to you before spending any of it. We’ll sort everything out, you’ll see.

  So come as soon as you can. I shake your hand.

  Ever yours,

  Vincent

  Paris

  During the period that the brothers shared an apartment - from March 1886 to February 1888 - they had no need to continue the correspondence from which we have been able to glean so many details of Van Gogh’s life. The lack of letters from just these years is especially unfortunate because the period was so turbulent. Thus we have nothing more than scanty and indirect knowledge of Van Gogh’s time in Cormon’s studio, of his introduction to Impressionist and Neo-Impres-sionist circles, of his friendship with his new comrades - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Signac, émile Bernard and Louis Anquetin (the so-called Impressionists of the Petit Boulevard) - of his cafe life, and of his painting expeditions to the new suburbs of Paris. All we have to go by for this period are the statements of others, and the few reminiscences Van Gogh himself devoted to this period during his stay in Provence. By contrast, the works painted in Paris provide a very good insight into his artistic development.

  That development was tempestuous. Van Gogh eagerly absorbed the new impressions gained from his visits to exhibitions and from close association with artists of his generation. In this, he benefited at first from Theo’s connections, but he in turn seems to have put Theo in touch with such modernists as Lautrec and Bernard, whom Vincent had met at Cormon’s studio and who were to change the face of French painting in their day.

  It was thanks to Theo that Vincent first became acquainted with the work of Claude Monet and other Impressionists. Although Impressionism had by then ceased to be a novelty confined to avant-garde circles, only a few of the artists Van Gogh characterized as ‘les impressionistes du Grand Boulevard’ were able to live by their work.

  The year 1886 was a turning point in the history of art. It not only saw the eighth and last group exhibition by the Impressionists but also witnessed the launching of the Neo-Impressionist movement by Seurat and Signac. The last Impressionist group exhibition had already included work by some of the younger artists with whom Van Gogh was to form links, among them Paul Signac and Lucien Pissarro. That exhibition also presented for the first time a number of masterpieces by Georges Seurat, painted in the revolutionary, quasi-scientific technique of divisionism.

  Van Gogh assimilated all these influences in his own way. Having clung for some time to the dark palette associated with his Nuenen days, he made a rapid chan
ge to the use of brighter colours. We can follow this development with the help of some twenty self-portraits he painted in Paris at different times. In a series of still lifes with flowers he also experimented with various colour combinations, and in his landscapes he tried now an impressionist, now a pointillist, approach, or at times both methods side by side or mixed up together. Van Gogh’s highly original interpretation of Seurat’s pointillism, the use of separate dots of unmixed colour, gradually paved the way for a strikingly individual and expressive method of applying colour in streaks and dashes, which would henceforth typify Van Gogh’s brushstroke no less than his drawing style.

  In Paris, both brothers also became involved in building up an art collection of their own. In a letter Theo wrote to his mother in June 1886, he told her that though Vincent had not yet sold anything, he had started to exchange work with fellow artists and that an art dealer had taken four of his pictures on consignment. The two brothers acquired paintings by Adolphe Monticelli, an artist from Marseilles, and at the same time Vincent added appreciably to his collection of Japanese prints with purchases from the print dealer Siegfried Bing. The influence of these woodcuts on his own work may be gathered not only from the copies he painted after them but also from his increasingly daring compositions, from his stylized contours and from his expressive use of colour.

  Although Van Gogh had come to Paris with the aim of learning what he could from Cormon, he must have been amazed to discover how out of touch his own method of working was with that of his leading contemporaries. And though he would later turn his back on much in their art that struck him as being modish and superficial, for the time being he changed course drastically. As a result, his Parisian period became a new term of apprenticeship, much more so than he could have anticipated. He not only embraced the new colour theories and other technical and theoretical insights of the Impressionists but also changed his subject-matter radically. In Paris he seems for the first time to have broken free of the hold of Millet and the painters of rural life, flinging himself into the portrayal of urban scenes, of the cafes and boulevards, and of life in the new suburbs of Paris such as Asnieres.

  Until the end of June 1886, the brothers lived in an apartment in the rue de Laval, from where they moved to more spacious quarters in Montmartre, at 54 rue Lepic. A letter written - in English - by Van Gogh to the English painter Horace M. Livens, whom he had met in Antwerp, painted a favourable picture of his first few months in the French capital, but also included a warning about the high cost of living there.

  ‘My dear Mr. Levens [sic],

  Since I am here in Paris I have very often thought of yourself and work. You will remember that I liked your colour, your ideas on art and literature and I add, most of all your personality. I have already before now thought that I ought to let you know what I was doing where I was. But what refrained me was that I find living in Paris is much dearer than in Antwerp and not knowing what your circumstances are I dare not say come over to Paris from Antwerp without warning you that it costs one dearer, and that if poor, one has to suffer many things - as you may imagine -. But on the other hand there is more chance of selling. There is also a good chance of exchanging pictures with other artists.

  In one word, with much energy, with a sincere personal feeling of colour in nature I would say an artist can get on here notwithstanding the many obstructions. And I intend remaining here still longer.

  There is much to be seen here - for instance Delacroix, to name only one master. In Antwerp I did not even know what the impressionists were, now I have seen them and though not being one of the club yet I have much admired certain impressionists’ pictures - Degas nude figure - Claude Monet landscape.

  And now for what regards what I myself have been doing, I have lacked money for paying models else I had entirely given myself to figure painting. But I have made a series of colour studies in painting, simply flowers, red poppies, blue corn flowers and myosotys, white and red roses, yellow chrysanthemums - seeking oppositions of blue with orange, red and green, yellow and violet seeking les tons rompus et neutres [broken and neutral tones] to harmonise brutal extremes. Trying to render intense colour and not a grey harmony.

  Now after these gymnastics I lately did two heads which I dare say are better in light and colour than those I did before.

  So as we said at the time: in colour seeking life the true drawing is modelling with colour.

  I did a dozen landscapes too, frankly green frankly blue.

  And so I am struggling for life and progress in art.

  […]’

  He gave a vivid, amusing and warm account of his early days in Paris to his sister Wil, responding most affectionately to a description of nature she had sent him, and saying that people in love were ‘perhaps more serious and saintly than those who sacrifice their love and their hearts to an idea’. He told her something of his ambition to become a portrait painter and disclosed his plan to travel to the south. The letter to Wil also contains an ironic self-portrait in words that bear out some of the painted self-portraits we know from the Paris period.

  The few letters preserved from the Paris period suggest that the brothers’ love-life continued to be eventful. A letter Vincent wrote to Theo, who was then in the Netherlands, in August 1886, makes it clear that Theo was attempting to break with a sick mistress. A recently discovered letter from Vincent’s sister Wil, written to a Dutch girlfriend, Line Kruysse, on 26 August 1886, comments on this visit by Theo to the Netherlands. It is an interesting document because it reveals how sympathetic the family in Holland was towards Vincent’s career, and how optimistically Theo viewed the future in the summer of 1886.

  ‘My second brother, Theo, from Paris, left yesterday; he really is a dear boy. He told us so many good things about Vincent, the eldest, who is living with him. His paintings are getting so much better and he is beginning to exchange them for those of other painters, so everything’s sure to come right in time. According to Theo, he is definitely making a name for himself. But we are under no illusions, and are only too grateful that he is having some slight success. You don’t know what a hard life he has had, and who can say what is still in store for him. His disappointments have often made him feel bitter and have turned him into an unusual person. That was difficult for my parents, who could not always follow him and often misunderstood him. My father was strict, and attached to all sorts of conventions of which my brother never took any particular notice; needless to say, that often led to clashes and to words spoken in anger, which neither party was quick to forget. So during the past eight years Vincent has been a bone of contention with many, and all too often one tended to forget all the good there was in him, the appearances to the contrary. During the past few years he has been working at home with us; after my father’s death, Anna thought it would be more peaceful for Mother if he stopped living at home, and saw to it that he left us. He took that so badly that from then on he has not been in touch with us, and it is only through Theo that we have news of him.’

  One year later, Theo was again in the Netherlands, and now it was Vincent himself who was involved in the aftermath of an affair, with the Italian artists’ model Agostina Segatori. He calmly noted that his desire for family life was dwindling. La Segatori was the proprietress of the Café Le Tambourin, and his comment, ‘I still feel affection for her and I hope that she, too, still feels some for me’, alludes to a relationship with her. Vincent organized an exhibition of Japanese prints at her café which made a great impression on many of his friends. In the portrait he did of her, seated at one of the small tambourine-shaped tables from which her establishment took its name, the Japanese prints may be seen in the background.

  Japanese prints also form the setting for two fine portraits of Pére Tanguy, the generous art and paint dealer who supported so many young Impressionists and who, in his shop, was one of the first to offer Van Gogh’s work for sale. His name, too, crops up in these letters.

  461 [F]


  [summer 1887]

  My dear friend,

  Enclosed is a letter which arrived yesterday, but which the concierge didn’t give me straight away.

  I’ve been to the Tambourin, since if I hadn’t gone, they would have thought I was afraid.

  And I told la Segatori that I wouldn’t pass judgement on her in this matter, but that it was for her to judge herself

  That I had torn up the receipt for the pictures - but that she had to return everything.

  That if she had not had a hand in what had happened to me, she would have seen me the next day.

  That as she didn’t come to see me, my feeling was that she knew they were trying to pick a quarrel with me, but that she had tried to warn me by saying, ‘Go away,’ which I hadn’t understood, and furthermore, perhaps didn’t want to understand.

  To which she replied that the pictures, & all the rest, were at my disposal. She maintained that it was I who had tried to pick a quarrel - which doesn’t surprise me - knowing that if she sided with me they would take it out on her. I also saw the waiter when I went in, but he made himself scarce. I didn’t want to take the pictures immediately, but I said that when you returned we would discuss the matter because these pictures belong to you as much as to me, and in the meantime I advised her to think about what had happened again. She didn’t look well and was white as a sheet, which isn’t a good sign. She didn’t know that the waiter had gone up to your place. If that’s true, I would be more inclined to believe she had tried to warn me they were trying to pick a quarrel with me than that she had plotted the whole thing herself. She cannot do as she likes. I’m awaiting your return now before taking any action.