The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Page 38
But I should be extremely happy if this Bel Ami of the south, which Monticelli was not, but tried to be - who, I’m sure, is on his way, though I realize it isn’t to be me - I should be extremely happy, as I say, if a kind of Guy de Maupassant of painting turned up to make happy pictures of all these beautiful people and things round here.
As for me, I shall carry on working, and here and there something of my work will prove of lasting value - but who will there be to achieve for figure painting what Claude Monet has achieved for landscape? However, you must feel, as I do, that someone like that is on the way - Rodin? - he doesn’t use colour
- it won’t be him. But the painter of the future will be a colourist the like of which has never yet been seen. Manet was getting there but, as you know, the impressionists have already made use of stronger colour than Manet.
I can’t imagine the painter of the future living in small restaurants, setting to work with a lot of false teeth, and going to the Zouaves’ brothels as I do.
But I’m sure I’m right to think that it will come in a later generation, and it is up to us to do all we can to encourage it, without question or complaint. […]
The names of Drs Gruby and Rivet recur in a letter written during the third week of May 1888, when Theo’s severe listlessness was causing Vincent concern. The letter may well have been referring to a depression, one of the symptoms of the neurosyphilis that was to cause Theo’s death. Vincent’s advice to his brother - ‘to have nothing to do with women if you can help it’ - may be read in that light.
An unexpected passage refers to previously unmentioned Parisian acquaintances of Vincent, the Comtesse de la Boissiére and her daughter in Asniéres, to whom he seems to have given two small pictures the year before.
The feeling of being ‘a link in the chain of artists’ reconciled Vincent with his mortality and helped him to sublimate his instincts: ‘I no longer feel so much need for diversion, I am less plagued by passions and am able to work more calmly.’ The art of the future, ‘so lovely and so young that […] we can only gain in serenity by it’, was well worth the sacrifice of youth and health.
489 [F] [part]
[c. 20 May 1888]
My dear Theo,
What you write about your visit to Gruby has upset me, but all the same I’m relieved you went.
Has it occurred to you that the lethargy - the feeling of extreme lassitude - might be due to your heart condition, in which case the potassium iodide would have nothing to do with your exhaustion? Remember how exhausted I was last winter myself, to the point of being completely incapable of doing anything, apart from a little painting, and yet I was taking no potassium iodide at all. So if I were you, I would have it out with Rivet if Gruby tells you not to take any. After all, I’m sure you intend to keep on friendly terms with both.
I often think of Gruby here and now, and generally speaking I feel quite well, but it is the pure air and the warmth here which makes that possible. What with all the troubles & the poor air of Paris, Rivet takes things as he finds them, without trying to create a paradise, and without attempting in any way to make us perfect. But he forges a suit of armour, or rather he arms us against illness and keeps up one’s morale, I think, by making light of any illness one has.
So, if you could spend just one year of your life now in the country and with nature, it would make Gruby’s cure much easier. And he may well advise you to have nothing to do with women if you can help it, but in any case as little as possible. As for me, I’m doing very well, but that’s because I have work and nature here. If I didn’t have that, I should turn melancholy. So long as the work has some attraction for you and the impressionists are doing well, there is much to be gained by staying on. For what is really wretched is loneliness, worries, problems, and the unfulfilled need for kindness and sympathy. Feelings of sadness or disappointment undermine us more than dissipation - those of us, I say, who find ourselves the happy owners of irregular hearts.
I’m sure potassium iodide purifies the blood & the whole system, don’t you think? Can you get along without it? Anyway, you must talk it over frankly with Rivet, he’s not likely to be jealous.
I wish you had people around you more rudely alive, warmer than the Dutch. Although Koning, for all his whims, is a pleasant exception. Anyway, it’s always a good thing to have someone, though I wish you had a few more friends among the French.
Would you do me a great favour? My friend the Dane, who is leaving for Paris on Tuesday, will give you 2 little pictures -nothing special - which I should like to present to Mme la Comtesse de la Boissiére in Asniéres. She lives in the Boulevard Voltaire, on the first floor of the first house, at the end of the Pont de Clichy. Old Perruchot’s restaurant is on the ground floor. Would you take them there in person for me, and say that I had hoped to see her again this spring, and that even here I have not forgotten her? I gave them 2 small ones last year, too, her and her daughter. I’m sure you won’t regret making the acquaintance of these ladies - they are a real family.
The countess is far from young, but she is a countess first, then a lady, the daughter the same. And it makes sense for you to go, because I can’t be sure that the family is staying at the same place this year (though they’ve been going there for several years, and Perruchot should know their address in town). Perhaps I’m deceiving myself, but - I can’t help thinking about it, and it might give them some pleasure, and you too, if you met them.
[..]
I’ve done two still lifes this week.
A blue enamelled coffee pot, a cup (on the left), royal blue and gold, a pale blue & white checked milk jug, a cup - on the right - white with a blue & orange pattern, on a greyish-yellow earthenware plate, a blue barbotine or majolica jug, with a pattern of reds, greens and browns, and lastly 2 oranges and 3 lemons. The table is covered with a blue cloth. The background is greenish-yellow, so there are 6 different blues and 4 or 5 yellows & oranges. The other still life is the majolica jug with wild flowers.
Thank you very much for your letter and the 50 fr. note. I hope the packing case will arrive within a day or so. Next time, I think I’ll take the canvases off the stretchers so they can be rolled up and sent by express train.
[…]
I haven’t yet managed to do any business with the furniture dealer. I’ve seen a bed, but it is dearer than I thought it would be. I feel I ought to get a lot more work done before spending more on furniture. My lodging is 1 fr. per night. I’ve bought some more linen and also some paint. I got very hard-wearing linen.
As my blood is gradually coming right, thoughts of success are also reviving. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if your illness, too, were a reaction to that awful winter, which lasted an eternity. And so it will be the same story as mine. Take as much spring air as possible, go to bed very early, because you must have sleep, and as for food, plenty of fresh vegetables, and no bad wine or bad alcohol. And very few women, and lots of patience.
If it doesn’t clear up immediately, no matter. Gruby will prescribe a high meat diet for you there. I couldn’t take much of that here - and here there’s no need for it.
That mental exhaustion of mine is disappearing, I no longer feel so much need for diversion, I am less plagued by passions, and am able to work more calmly. I could be alone without getting bored. I have come out of this feeling a little older, but no sadder.
I shall not believe you if you tell me in your next letter that there’s nothing wrong with you any longer. There may well be a radical change, though, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you were a little despondent during the time it takes for you to recover. At the height of artistic life there is, and remains, and returns time and again, a hankering after real life - ideal and unattainable.
And sometimes one lacks the will to throw oneself back wholeheartedly into art, and to regain one’s capacity for it. One knows one is a cab horse, and that one is going to be hitched up to the same old cab again - and that one would rather not, and would pref
er to live in a meadow, with sunshine, a river, other horses for company as free as oneself, and the act of procreation.
And perhaps, in the end, the heart complaint is caused by that. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if it is to some extent. One no longer rebels against things, but neither is one resigned - one is ill and does not get better - and one cannot find a precise cure.
I’m not sure who called this condition ‘being stricken by death and immortality’. The cab one is pulling along must be of some use to people one doesn’t know. And so, if we believe in the new art, in the artists of the future, our presentiment will not play us false.
When good old Corot said a few days before his death, ‘Last night in a dream, I saw landscapes with skies all pink,’ well, they’ve arrived, haven’t they, those pink skies, and yellow and green ones into the bargain, in the impressionist landscape? Which means that some things one can foresee in the future do indeed come about.
And those of us who are, as I am led to believe, still fairly far from death, nevertheless feel that these things are bigger than we are and will outlive us.
We do not feel we are dying, but we do feel that in reality we count for little, and that to be a link in the chain of artists we are paying a high price in health, in youth, in liberty, none of which we enjoy, any more than does the cab horse pulling a coachload of people out enjoying themselves in spring.
Anyway - what I wish you, as well as myself, is success in regaining our health, because we are going to need it. That Esperance by Puvis de Chavannes is so very true. There is an art of the future, and it will be so lovely and so young that even if we do give up our youth for it, we can only gain in serenity by it.
It may be very silly to write all this down, but that is how I feel. It seemed to me that you were suffering, like me, from seeing our youth go up in smoke - but if it throws out new growth in one’s work then nothing is lost, for the capacity to work is another form of youth. So take a bit of trouble over getting better, because we shall need our health. A warm handshake for you, and for Koning,
Ever yours,
Vincent
Early in June 1888 Van Gogh visited the little port of Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer on the Mediterranean. Here he produced some magnificent seascapes and the delightful Fishing Boats on the Beach. Besides painting ‘marines’ he hoped also to draw inspiration for ‘a furious onslaught on the figure’, as he wrote to his Dutch colleague Arnold Koning. He planned, in addition, to combine various drawings into albums as the Japanese do and to present these to Gauguin and Bernard.
Japanese influences continued to dominate his philosophy: ‘We like Japanese painting, we are influenced by it - all impressionists have that in common.’ A stay in the south was bound to bring an artist very close to Japan: ‘In time, your outlook changes, you look on things with a more Japanese eye, you experience colours differently. […] So I’m convinced that my personality will develop if I live here for a long time.’ To emphasize his identification with Japanese art, he sent Gauguin a portrait of himself as a ‘bonze’ (a Japanese priest).
Van Gogh grew impatient at the lack of news about Gauguin’s departure for the south. To expedite his plans for sharing a house with Gauguin, he sent Theo a draft letter of proposals he had written for Gauguin towards the end of May 1888: ‘If my brother were to send us 250 francs a month for the two of us, would you be prepared to come then? We’d be able to share things. If we do that, however, we shall have to make up our minds to eat at home as often as possible. We can take on a cleaning woman or the like for a few hours a day and so save on all hotel expenses. And you would give my brother one painting a month and do what you like with the rest.’
His ambition to set up a community of artists was reinforced when he read a book on Richard Wagner, whose ideas on ‘total’ and ‘communal’ art had found an echo at the time in many French artists. Wagner was then considered a revolutionary artist par excellence, thanks to his artistic no less than to his political beliefs. ‘What an artist! A man like him in painting would be quite something, and one will come,’ Van Gogh wrote to Theo.
Summer inspired him, as it had done earlier in Nuenen, to depict harvest scenes. The landscape of the Camargue and the Crau was ‘beautiful and infinite like the sea’, and the cicadas carried on ‘like Dutch frogs’. After some pen sketches of the plain of the Crau, he did one of his most important works, the magnificent Harvest Landscape, with a painting of haystacks as the pendant. The immense stretch of flat land reminded him of paintings by such seventeenth-century Dutch artists as Ruysdael and Philips Koninck. Van Gogh was captivated by the variety of motifs he discovered in Provence. This very profusion enabled him to distinguish himself from his colleagues and to choose quite different subjects from Monet and even from Cezanne, still the pre-eminent painter of Provence. In a letter to Theo, he dwelt on the contrast between his own portrayal of the harvest and Cézanne’s.
497 [F]
[12–13 June
My dear Theo,
I’m dropping you another line as your letter hasn’t come yet. But I take it you thought I would probably be in Sres Maries.
Since the rent of the house and the painting of the doors & windows and the purchases of canvases all came at the same time, I’ve run out, and you would be doing me a very great service if you could send me the money a few days earlier.
I’m working on a landscape with wheat fields which, I think, is as good as, say, the white orchard. It is in the same genre as the two Butte Montmartre landscapes which were at the Indépen-dants, but I think it’s more robust and rather more stylish.
And I’ve another subject, a farm and some haystacks, which will probably be the pendant.
I’m very curious to know what Gauguin plans to do. I hope he’ll be able to come. You’ll tell me it’s pointless to think of the future, but the painting is progressing slowly and where that’s concerned you do have to plan ahead. If I sold no more than a few canvases, that would be neither Gauguin’s salvation nor mine. To be able to work one has to order one’s life as best one can, and to secure one’s existence one needs a fairly solid basis. If he and I stay here for a long time, our pictures will become more and more individual, precisely because we shall have made a more thorough study of subjects in this region.
Now that I have made a start in the south, I can hardly conceive of going anywhere else. Better not to do any more moving - just to keep going out into the countryside.
I’m sure I should have a greater chance of success if I tackled subjects - and even business matters - on a somewhat bigger scale, instead of confining myself to one that is too small.
And for that very reason I’m thinking of working on larger canvases and going over boldly to the 30 square. These cost me
4 francs apiece here, and taking carriage into account that isn’t expensive.
The latest canvas completely slays all the rest - it’s only a still life with coffee pots and cups and plates in blue & yellow, but it’s in a different class. It must be due to the drawing.
I can’t help recalling what I’ve seen of C6zanne’s work, because - as in the harvest which we saw at Portier’s - he has brought out the harsh side of Provence so much.
It has changed entirely from what it was in the spring, but certainly [my love for] the countryside, which is already beginning to appear scorched, has grown no less. You could say that everything has old gold, bronze and copper in it, and this, together with the green-azure of the white-hot sky, imparts a delicious, exceptionally harmonious colour, with broken tones á la Delacroix.
If Gauguin were willing to join us it would be, I think, a step forward for us. It would establish us firmly as openers-up of the south, and no one could argue with that.
I must try to achieve the solidity of colour I got in that picture which slays all the rest I remember Portier used to say that his Cézannes, seen on their own, looked like nothing on earth, but that when placed next to other canvases they wiped the colour out of all the
rest. And also that the Cézannes looked good in gold, which implies a brilliant palette.
Perhaps, perhaps, I am therefore on the right track and am getting an eye for the countryside here.
We’ll have to wait and see.
This latest picture stands up well to the red surroundings of the bricks with which the studio is paved. When I put it on the floor, on this brick-red, deep red, ground, the colour of the picture does not look washed-out or blanched.
The countryside near Aix - where Cézanne works - is just the same as here, it is still the Crau. When I get back home with my canvas and say to myself, hallo, I’ve got old Cézanne’s very tones, all I mean is that since Cézanne, just like Zola, is so at home in these parts and hence knows them so intimately, one must be making the same mental calculation to arrive at the same tones. It goes without saying that seen side by side they would go together, but not look alike. With a handshake, I hope you’ll be able to write one of these days,
Ever yours,
Vincent
In Parisian art circles, Theo gradually emerged as champion of the Impressionists, who were still fighting for recognition. He even sent their work to Goupil’s in The Hague, hoping to open a market for them in the Netherlands. In particular, he supported Camille Pissarro, who had found himself in dire financial straits. Theo also organized an ‘absolutely beautiful’ Monet exhibition at about this time. When he wrote to his brother that the naturalist writer Guy de Maupassant, whom Vincent admired, had come to see the exhibition, Vincent replied that, for him, Maupassant was to Zola what Vermeer was to Rembrandt.
In Aries, Vincent worked steadily on, adding to his oeuvre as a painter of peasant life. Writing to émile Bernard in the middle of June 1888, he explained how his ambitious painting of The Sower had come about and how he had handled the colours. In it, Van Gogh had tried to match his distinguished model, Millet, whose work by the same name he had already copied and imitated in his earliest drawings. For him the new picture was the embodiment of a hankering after ‘the eternal, of which the sower and the sheaf of corn are the symbols’; it gave him the chance to realize his greatest ambition: ‘[…] what still remains to be done after Millet and Lhermitte is… the sower in colour and large-sized’.