The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Page 36
I’ve done two pictures since you left. Have only got two louis1
Don’t forget that when I started working at Asniéres I had plenty of canvases and Tanguy was very good to me. In fact he still is, but his old witch of a wife realized what was going on and complained. So I gave Tanguy’s wife a piece of my mind and told her that it was her fault if I didn’t buy anything more from them. Old man Tanguy is sensible enough to keep quiet, and will do whatever I want anyway. But with all this, work isn’t easy.
I saw Lautrec today, he’s sold a picture, through Portier I think. A watercolour of Mme Mesdag’s has arrived which I find very beautiful.2
Now I hope you’ll enjoy your trip over there, remember me to my mother, to Cor & to Wil. And if you could manage, by sending me something again, to ensure that I don’t have too hard a time from now until you get back, then I shall try to do some more pictures for you - as I’m really very happy as far as my work goes. What worried me a little about this business was that it looked a little cowardly not going there, to the Tambourin. And my peace of mind has been restored by my going there.
I shake your hand,
Vincent
462 [F]
Paris [summer 1887]
My dear friend,
Thank you for your letter, and for what it contained. It saddens me to think that even successful paintings do not cover their costs. I was touched by what you wrote about the family. ‘They are fairly well but even so it’s sad to see them.’ Twelve years ago one would have sworn that, come what may, the family would always get on and do well. It would give Mother much pleasure if your marriage came off, and you also ought not to stay single for the sake of your health and business. As for me - I feel the desire for marriage and children dwindling and now and then I’m rather depressed that I should be like that as I approach 35, when I ought to be feeling quite the opposite. And sometimes I blame it all on this rotten painting. It was Richepin who said somewhere: the love of art is the undoing of true love. I think that’s absolutely right, but on the other hand true love makes one weary of art. And although I already feel old and broken, I can still be amorous enough at times to feel less passionate about painting. One must have ambition to succeed, and ambition seems to me absurd. I wish above all I were less of a burden to you - and that needn’t be impossible from now on, for I hope to make such progress that you’ll be able to show what I do in full confidence without compromising yourself. And then I’ll retire somewhere down south and get away from the sight of so many painters who fill me with disgust as human beings.
You can be sure of one thing - I shan’t be trying to do any more work for the Tambourin. Anyway, I think it’s about to change hands, and I most certainly won’t raise any objections to that. As for la Segatori, that is quite a different matter. I still feel affection for her and I hope that she, too, still feels some for me. But at the moment she is in a difficult situation, she is neither a free agent nor mistress in her own house, on top of which she’s in pain and unwell. Although I wouldn’t say so openly - I’m convinced she’s had an abortion (unless, that is, she did have a miscarriage) - anyway, in her case I don’t hold it against her.
She’ll be better in about two months’ time, I hope, and then she may well be grateful to me for not having bothered her. Mind you, once she’s well again, if she refuses in cold blood to return what is mine, or does me down in any way, I shan’t pull my punches - but it won’t come to that. After all, I know her well enough to trust her still. And mind you, if she does manage to hang on to her establishment, then from a business point of view I shouldn’t blame her for choosing to fleece rather than be fleeced. If that means she has to tread on my toes a bit - all right - she can get on with it. When I saw her last, she didn’t tread all over my heart, which she would have done had she been as nasty as people say.
I saw Tanguy yesterday and he has put a canvas I’ve just done in the window. I’ve done four since you left and I’ve got a big one under way. I realize that these big, long canvases are hard to sell, but later on people will see that there’s fresh air and good humour in them. The whole lot would do well as decoration for a dining room or a country house. And if you were to fall properly in love and were to get married, then it doesn’t seem impossible to me that you might manage to acquire a country house like so many other art dealers. If one lives well, one spends more, but also gains more ground, and perhaps nowadays one does better looking rich than looking hard up. It’s better to enjoy life than to do away with oneself. Regards to all at home.
Ever yours,
Vincent
WI [D] [letter from Vincent to Wil]
[summer or autumn 1887]
My dear little sister,
Thank you very much for your letter, but for my part I hate writing these days. Still, there are some questions in your letter which I should like to answer.
To begin with, I must disagree with you when you say you thought Theo looked ‘so wretched’ this summer. Personally, I think that on the contrary Theo’s appearance has become a great deal more distinguished during the past year. One has to be strong to stand life in Paris for as many years as he has done.
But might it have been that Theo’s family and friends in Amsterdam and The Hague didn’t treat him, or even receive him, with the cordiality he deserved from them and was entitled to expect? On that score, I can tell you that he may have felt hurt but is otherwise not at all bothered; after all, he is doing business even in these particularly bad times for the picture trade, so may it not be that his Dutch friends were somewhat affected by jalousie de métier?1
Now, what shall I say about your little piece on the plants & the rain? You can see yourself that in nature many flowers are trampled underfoot, frozen or scorched, and for that matter that not every grain of corn returns to the soil after ripening to germinate & grow into a blade of corn - indeed, that by far the greatest number of grains of corn do not develop fully but end up at the mill - isn’t that so? To compare human beings with grains of corn, now - in every human being who is healthy and natural there is a germinating force, just as there is in a grain of corn. And so natural life is germination. What the germinating force is to the grain, love is to us.
Now we tend to stand about pulling a long face and at a loss for words, I think, when, thwarted in our natural development, we find that germination has been foiled and we ourselves placed in circumstances as hopeless as they must be for a grain between the millstones.
When that happens to us and we are utterly bewildered by the loss of our natural life, there are some amongst us who, though ready to bow to the inevitable, are yet unwilling to relinquish their self-confidence, and determine to discover what is the matter with them and what is really happening.
And if, full of good intentions, we search in the books of which it said that they illuminate the darkness, with the best will in the world we find precious little that is certain, and not always the satisfaction of personal consolation.
And the diseases from which we civilized people suffer most are melancholy and pessimism. So I, for instance, who can count so many years of my life during which I lost any inclination to laugh - leaving aside whether or not this was my own fault - I, for one, feel the need for a really good laugh above all else. I’ve found it in Guy de Maupassant, and there are others - Rabelais among the older writers, Henri Rochefort among the present-day ones - who provide it as well - and Voltaire in Candide,
If, on the other hand, one wants the truth, life as it is, then there are, for instance, de Goncourt in Germinie Lacerteux,2 La fille Eliza, Zola in La joie de vivre and L’assommoir, and so many other masterpieces, all portraying life as we feel it ourselves, thus satisfying our need for being told the truth.
The work of the French naturalists, Zola, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, de Goncourt, Richepin, Daudet, Huysmans, is magnificent, and one can scarcely be said to be of one’s time if one is not acquainted with them. Maupassant’s masterpiece is Bel-ami. I hope to be able
to get it for you.
Is the Bible enough for us? These days I think Jesus himself would say again to those who sit down in melancholy, ‘It is not here, it is risen. Why seek ye the living among the dead?’ If the spoken or written word is to remain the light of the world, then we have the right and duty to acknowledge that we live in an age when it should be written and spoken in such a way that, if it is to be just as great and just as good and just as original and just as potent as ever to transform the whole of society, then its effect must be comparable to that of the revolution wrought by the old Christians.
I, for my part, am always glad that I have read the Bible more carefully than many people do nowadays, just because it gives me some peace of mind to know that there used to be such lofty ideals.
But precisely because I find the old beautiful, I find the new beautiful á plus forte raison3 because we are able to take action in our own time while the past and the future concern us but indirectly.
My own adventures are confined above all to making swift progress towards growing into a little old man - you know, with wrinkles, a tough beard, a certain number of false teeth, &c. But what does all that matter? I have a dirty and difficult trade, painting, and if I were not as I am, I should not paint, but being as I am, I often work with pleasure and can visualize the vague possibility of one day doing paintings with some youth and freshness in them, even though my own youth is one of the things I have lost.
If I didn’t have Theo, I should not be able to do justice to my work, but having him for a friend, I’m sure I shall make progress and things will fall into place. As soon as possible I plan to spend some time in the south, where there is even more colour and even more sun.
But what I really hope to do is to paint a good portrait. So there.
To get back to your little piece, I have qualms about adopting for my own use, or about advising others to do so for theirs, the belief that there are powers above us that interfere personally in order to help or console us. Providence is such a strange thing, and I must confess that I haven’t the slightest idea what to make of it. And well, there is still a degree of sentimentality in your little piece, and its form is reminiscent above all of tales about the above-mentioned providence, or let us say the providence under consideration. Tales that so often do not hold water, and to which a great many objections might be made.
And above all I find it alarming that you believe you must study in order to write. No, my dear little sister, learn how to dance, or fall in love with one or more notary’s clerks, officers, in short, any within your reach - rather, much rather commit any number of follies than study in Holland. It serves absolutely no purpose than to make people slow-witted, so I won’t hear of it.
For my part, I still continue to have the most impossible and highly unsuitable love affairs, from which as a rule I come away with little more than shame and disgrace. And in my own opinion I’m absolutely right to do this, since, as I keep telling myself, in years gone by, when I ought to have been in love, I gave myself up to religious and socialist affairs, and considered art holier than I do now.
Why are religion or justice or art so sacred? People who do nothing but fall in love are perhaps more serious and saintly than those who sacrifice their love and their hearts to an idea. Be that as it may, in order to write a book, do a deed, make a picture with some life in it, one has to be alive oneself. And so, unless you never want to progress, study is a matter of very minor importance for you. Enjoy yourself as much as you can, have as many amusements as you can, and remember that what people demand in art nowadays is something very much alive, with strong colour and great intensity. So intensify your own health and strength and life, that’s the best study.
I should be most obliged if you could let me know how Margot Begemann is and how things are with the De Groots, how did that business turn out? Did Sien de Groot marry her cousin? And did her child live?
Of my own work I think that the picture of peasants eating potatoes I did in Nuenen is aprés tout4 the best I’ve done. But since then I’ve had no chance of getting models, though on the other hand I did have the chance to study the colour question. And if I should find models again for my figures later, then I would hope to be able to show that I am after something other than little green landscapes or flowers.
Last year I painted almost nothing but flowers so as to get used to colours other than grey, viz. pink, soft or bright green, light blue, violet, yellow, orange, glorious red.
And when I was painting landscapes at Asniéres this summer, I saw more colour in them than I did before. Now I’m going to try it with a portrait. And I must say that I’m not painting any the worse for it, perhaps because I could tell you a very great deal that’s wrong with both painters and paintings if I wanted to, quite as easily as I could tell you something that’s good about them…
I don’t want to be included among the melancholy or those who turn sour and bitter and bilious. ‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner’,5 and I believe that if we knew everything we should attain some serenity. Now, having as much of that serenity as possible, even when one knows little or nothing for certain, is perhaps a better remedy for all ills than what is sold in the pharmacy. Much of it comes by itself, one grows and develops of one’s own accord.
So don’t study and swot too much, for that makes one sterile. Enjoy yourself too much rather than too little, and don’t take art or love too seriously - there is very little one can do about it, it is chiefly a question of temperament.
If I were living near you, I should try to drive home to you that it might be more practical for you to paint with me than to write, and that you might be able to express your feelings more easily that way. In any case, I could do something personally about your painting, but I am not in the writing profession.
Anyway, it’s not a bad idea for you to become an artist, for when one has fire within and a soul, one cannot keep bottling them up - better to burn than to burst, what is in will out For me, for instance, it’s a relief to do a painting, and without that I should be unhappier than I am.
Give Mother much love from me,
Vincent
I was deeply moved by A la recherche du bonheur. I’ve just read Mont-Oriol by Guy de Maupassant.
Art often seems very exalted and, as you say, sacred. But the same can be said of love. And the only problem is that not everyone thinks about it this way, and that those who do feel something of it and allow themselves to be carried away by it have to suffer a great deal, firstly because they are misunderstood, but quite as often because their inspiration is so often inadequate or their work frustrated by circumstance. One ought to be able to do two or even more things at once. And there are certainly times when it is far from clear to us that art should be something sacred or good.
Anyway, do weigh up carefully if those with a feeling for art, and trying to work at it, wouldn’t do better to declare that they are doing it because they were born with that feeling, cannot help themselves and are following their nature, than make out they are doing it for some noble purpose. Doesn’t it say in A la recherche du bonheur that evil lies in our own nature - which we have not created ourselves? I think it so admirable of the moderns that they do not moralize like the old. Thus many people are appalled and scandalized by ‘Le vice et la vertu sont des produits chimiques, comme le sucre et le vitriol’.6
Aries
In the letter to Wil just quoted, Van Gogh was already talking of his wish to go south, ostensibly in search of more light and colour. There has been much speculation about the precise reason why Van Gogh left Paris for Provence. He himself gave somewhat conflicting explanations in his letters.
Frequently recurring tensions between the two brothers cannot, of course, be ruled out. In March 1887, Theo had been very frank about this matter in a letter to Wil. At the time there was already talk of Vincent leaving in order to live on his own, but within a month the ‘intolerable’ situation had been repaired. That the brothers’ rel
ationship improved markedly during the rest of 1887 may be gathered from Theo’s great sense of emptiness once Vincent had left for Aries: ‘When he came here two years ago, I did not think we would grow so attached to each other, for I certainly feel an emptiness now that I am alone in the apartment once again. If I can find somebody, then I shall take him in, but someone like Vincent is not easy to replace.’
Vincent himself cited the severe Parisian winter and his indifferent health to Wil as reasons for his departure for the south, and in the letter he sent Theo on 21 February 1888, after his arrival in Aries, he declared: ‘It appears to me to be almost impossible to work in Paris, unless you have a retreat where you can go to recover your peace of mind and self-confidence. Otherwise you become irrevocably dulled.’ He described himself as a worn-out Paris cab horse about to be put out to pasture.
An incontestable fact is that Van Gogh arrived in Aries, the capital of Provence, on Monday, 20 February 1888. Taking temporary lodgings at the Restaurant Carrel, he found to his amazement that the little town (‘no bigger than Breda’) lay under a thick blanket of snow: ‘And the landscapes in the snow, with the white peaks against a sky as bright as the snow, were just like the winter landscapes the Japanese do.’ For all that, the almond trees were already in blossom.
Although Van Gogh barely devoted one stroke of his brush to the countless relics of Roman antiquity during his stay in Aries, he does not seem to have been entirely insensitive to the local architecture: ‘There is a Gothic portico here which I am beginning to marvel at, the portico of St Trophlme. But it is so brutal, so monstrous, so like a Chinese nightmare, that even this splendid monument in so grand a style seems to belong to another world, to which I fortunately belong no more than to the glorious world of the Roman Emperor, Nero. In all honesty, I have to add that the Zouaves, the brothels, the charming little Arlési-ennes on their way to their first Communion, the priest in his surplice, who resembles a dangerous rhinoceros, and the absinthe drinkers, also strike me as beings from another world.’