The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

by Vincent Van Gogh

  At the same time, he was working on a number of portraits. A young soldier, a Zouave, about to go off to Africa, at long last provided him with a decent model: ‘[…] a young man with a small face, a bull neck, the eyes of a tiger’. He was consciously aiming for an ‘ugly’ effect - ‘a rough combination of incongruous colours […] very harsh, and yet I’d be happy if I could always work on such vulgar and even garish portraits as this’. At the same time he was still thinking of producing a painting of the starry sky.

  B7 [F] [letter from Vincent to émile Bernard]

  [c. 18 June 1888]

  My dear Bernard,

  Forgive me for writing in haste, I’m afraid my letter will be illegible, but I did want to reply at once.

  Do you realize that we have been very stupid, Gauguin, you and I, in not going to the same place? But when Gauguin left, I still wasn’t sure if I could get away, and when you left, that awful money business, and the bad reports I sent you about the cost of living here, stopped you from coming.

  It wouldn’t have been such a stupid thing to do if we had all gone to Aries together, for with three of us here, we could have done our own housekeeping. And now that I have found my bearings a bit more, I am beginning to discover the advantages. For my part, I’m getting on better here than I did in the north. I even work right in the middle of the day, in the full sun, with no shade at all, out in the wheat fields, and lo and behold, I am as happy as a cicada. My God, if only I had known this country at 2 5 instead of coming here at 35! At that time I was fascinated by grey, or rather lack of colour. I kept dreaming of Millet, and then I also had such acquaintances among the Dutch painters as Mauve, Israëls, etc.

  Here is a sketch of a sower: a large piece of land with clods of ploughed earth, for the most part a definite purple. A field of ripe wheat, in yellow ochre with a little carmine.

  The sky chrome yellow, almost as bright as the sun itself, which is chrome yellow 1 with a little white, while the rest of the sky is chrome yellow 1 and 2 mixed. Thus very yellow.

  The Sower’s smock is blue and his trousers white.

  Size 25 canvas, square.

  There are many touches of yellow in the soil, neutral tones produced by mixing purple with the yellow, but I couldn’t care less what the colours are in reality. I’d sooner do those naive pictures out of old almanacs, old farmers’ almanacs where hail, snow, rain or fine weather are depicted in a wholly primitive manner, like the one Anquetin used so successfully in his Moisson.1 To be honest with you, I have absolutely no objection to the countryside, since I grew up in it - I am still enchanted by snatches of the past, have a hankering after the eternal, of which the sower and the sheaf of corn are the symbols. But when shall I ever get round to doing the starry sky, that picture which is always in my mind?

  Alas, alas, it is just as the excellent fellow Cyprien says in J. K. Huysman’s ‘En ménage’: the most beautiful paintings are those which you dream about when you lie in bed smoking a pipe, but which you never paint

  Yet you have to make a start, no matter how incompetent you feel in the face of inexpressible perfection, of the overwhelming beauty of nature.

  How I should like to see the study you have done of the brothel!

  I am always reproaching myself for not having done any figures here yet.

  Herewith another landscape. Setting sun? Rising moon?

  A summer sun, anyway.

  Town purple, celestial body yellow, sky green-blue. The wheat has all the hues of old gold, copper, green-gold or red-gold, yellow-gold, yellow-bronze, red-green. Size 30 canvas, square.

  I painted it at the height of the mistral. My easel was fixed in the ground with iron pegs, a method I recommend to you. You push the legs of the easel deep into the ground, then drive iron pegs fifty centimetres long into the ground beside them. You tie the whole lot together with rope. This way you can work in the wind.

  This is what I wanted to say about black and white. Take the Sower. The picture is divided in two; one half is yellow, the upper part, the lower part is purple. Well, the white trousers help rest the eye and distract it just as the excessive contrast of yellow and purple starts to jar. There you are, that’s what I wanted to say.

  I know a second lieutenant in the Zouaves here; his name is Milliet. I give him drawing lessons - with my perspective frame - and he is beginning to do some drawings and, honestly, I’ve seen far worse. He is keen to learn, has been in Tonkin, etc… He is leaving for Africa in October. If you were to join the Zouaves, he would take you along and guarantee you a fairly large measure of freedom to paint, at least if you were willing to help him with his artistic plans. Might this be of any use to you? If so, let me know as soon as possible.

  One reason for working is that the canvases are worth money. Since you doubt that, you may call this reason fairly prosaic. But it is true. One reason for not working is that canvases and paint simply swallow up our money while they are waiting to be sold.

  Drawings, on the other hand, don’t cost a lot.

  Gauguin too is bored at Pont-Aven, complains just like you of his isolation. If only you could go and see him! But I haven’t any idea whether he means to stay, and I’m inclined to think he’s planning to go to Paris. He told me he thought you would come to Pont-Aven. My God, if only all three of us were here! You will say that it’s too out of the way. All right, but think of the winter, for here you can work all year round. The reason why I love this country is that I have less to fear from the cold, which, because it stops my blood circulating properly, makes it impossible for me to think or even do anything at all.

  You will see that for yourself when you are a soldier. Then your melancholy will be gone, which could easily be the result of your having too little or the wrong blood, which I don’t really think is the case.

  It’s the fault of that damned foul wine in Paris and those foul greasy steaks.

  My God, I had reached the point where my blood was no longer circulating at all, literally no longer at all. But after four weeks it has started to circulate again. However, my dear friend, at the same time I have had, just like you, a fit of melancholy, from which I would have suffered as much as you, had I not welcomed it with great pleasure as a sign that I was recovering -which is indeed what happened.

  So, don’t go back to Paris but stay in the countryside, for you will need your strength to come through the trial of serving in Africa. Well then, the more blood you produce beforehand, good blood, the better it will be, for over there in the heat you may not be able to do it quite so easily.

  Painting and fucking a lot don’t go together, it softens the brain. Which is a bloody nuisance.

  The symbol of St. Luke, the patron saint of painters, is, as you know, an ox. So you just be patient as an ox if you want to work in the artistic field. Still, bulls are lucky not to have to work at that foul business of painting.

  But what I wanted to say is this: after the period of melancholy is over you will be stronger than before, you will recover your health, and you will find the scenery round you so beautiful that you will want to do nothing but paint.

  I think that your poetry will change in the same way as your painting. After a few eccentric things, you have succeeded in doing some with Egyptian calm and a great simplicity.

  ‘Que l’heure est done brève

  Qu’on passe en aimant,

  C’est moins qu’un instant,

  Un peu plus qu’un rêve.

  Le temps nous enlève

  Notre enchantement.’2

  That’s not by Baudelaire, I don’t know who wrote it. They’re the words of a song found in Daudet’s Nabab - that’s where I took it from - but doesn’t it express the idea just like a shrug of the shoulders from a real lady?

  The other day I read Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème, it includes interesting details about Japan.

  My brother is holding a Claude Monet exhibition at the moment which I should very much like to see. Guy de Maupassant among others came to have a look
, and said that he’ll be coming often to the Boulevard Montmartre in the future.

  I must go and paint, so I’ll stop; I’ll probably write again soon. A thousand apologies for my not putting enough stamps on that letter, even though I stuck them on at the post office, nor is this the first time that it has happened here that, being in doubt and enquiring at the counter, I have been given the wrong information about the postage. You have no idea of the indifference, the unconcern of the people here. Anyway, you’ll soon be seeing all that with your own eyes, in Africa. Thanks for your letter, I hope to write again soon, at a moment when I’m in less of a rush. With a handshake,

  Vincent

  The plan to set up a painters’ cooperative with some twelve Impressionists was continually on Van Gogh’s mind. He broached the subject frequently in letters to Theo or to fellow painters, as well as to his sister Wil, to whom he aired his dissatisfaction with the artist’s social status: ‘We live in an unspeakably awful and miserable world for artists. The exhibitions, the shops selling pictures, everything, everything is in the hands of people who grab all the money.’ Patronage or a rich wife seemed to be the artist’s only means of escape: ‘Painting is like keeping a mistress of ill-repute who does nothing but spend money and more money and never has enough.’

  Vincent was sorry to hear that Theo’s attempt to introduce the work of the Impressionists in Holland had failed. Apparently the Dutch public had been ‘bitterly, bitterly disappointed, finding it slapdash, ugly, badly painted, badly drawn, badly coloured, altogether miserable’. But Vincent could understand their reaction: ‘That had also been my impression when I first arrived in Paris, my head full of Mauve, Israels and other accomplished painters.’ But though the Impressionists were still being rejected by the Salon, Van Gogh was convinced that in the long run his French friends would turn the tables on official art, which had outlived its usefulness and was ‘slow-witted and mouldering, like religion’. Salvation would come from ‘those twenty or so painters who are called impressionists - though a few of them have become fairly rich and quite big names in the world, the majority are poor devils, who hang about in coffee houses, lodge in cheap taverns and live from hand to mouth’.

  While a letter to Wil written in Paris and quoted earlier (see page 333) contained a somewhat ironic self-portrait in words, the letter to her from Aries mentioned above included an interesting account of his famous Self-Portrait in Front of the Easel. This ambitious canvas was one of the last works he had painted in Paris and had been hanging in Theo’s apartment ever since. Johanna van Gogh was later to refer to it as the best likeness in a self-portrait that she knew. It shows the artist with a ‘pinkish-grey face and green eyes, ash-coloured hair, wrinkles on his forehead and around the mouth, stiff, wooden, a very red beard, fairly untidy and sad-looking, but the lips are full, a blue smock of coarse linen and a palette with lemon yellow, vermilion, Veronese green, cobalt blue, in short, a palette with all the colours save the orange of the beard, though unbroken colours only. The figure is against a greyish-white wall.

  ‘You’ll say that it has a slight resemblance to, for instance, the face of - Death, in Van Eeden’s book, or something of the sort, all right, but it’s still a figure - and it isn’t easy to paint oneself- not, at any rate, if it is to be something other than a photograph. And you see - in my opinion this is just what impressionism has over the rest - it is not banal, and aims at a deeper likeness than the photographer’s.’

  After that description of this impressive if sombre portrait, Van Gogh went on to give an account of his looks at the time, after several months in the south of France: ‘Well, nowadays I look different as I have neither hair nor beard, both being kept close-shaved. Apart from that my complexion has changed from greenish-grey-pink to greyish-orange, and I am wearing a white suit instead of a blue one. I’m always covered with dust and invariably loaded up like a porcupine with sticks, an easel, canvases and other articles. Only the green eyes have stayed the same […].’

  In a letter to his friend Bernard, dated 23 June 1888, Van Gogh attacked the prevailing views about the representation of religious subjects in contemporary art. He was alarmed at the turn Bernard’s own work appeared to be taking, and contended that the only nineteenth-century painters who seemed to have truly grasped the message of the Bible and to have produced religious art in the real sense of the word were Delacroix, Millet and Puvis de Chavannes. No one should try to paint the figure of Christ without a proper model, as Bernard and Gauguin had done. In the Bible, Christ was the pivot round whom, in Van Gogh’s view, everything revolved - ‘an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh’. The painter’s role, he concluded laconically, was that of ‘a monk who goes to the brothel every two weeks’.

  B8 [F] [letter from Vincent to émile Bernard]

  [postscript omitted]

  [23 June 1888]

  My dear Bernard,

  You do very well to be reading the Bible. I begin with that, because I have always refrained from advising you to do so. As I read the many sayings of Moses, Luke, etc., I couldn’t help thinking, you know, that’s all he needs - and now it has come to pass… the artistic neurosis. For that is what the study of Christ inevitably leads to, especially in my case, where it is aggravated by the smoking of innumerable pipes.

  The Bible is Christ, for the Old Testament leads to that culmination. Paul and the evangelists stand on the other slope of the holy mountain.

  How small-minded the old story really is! My God! Does the world consist solely of Jews, who declare from the very start that all those who are different from them are impure?

  Why didn’t the other nations under the great sun over there, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Ethiopians, Babylon and Nineveh, record their annals with the same care? Well, anyway, the study of it is beautiful, and, after all, being able to read everything would be tantamount to not being able to read at all.

  But the consolation of that deeply saddening Bible, which arouses our despair and indignation, which seriously offends us and thoroughly confuses us with its pettiness and infectious foolishness - the consolation it contains like a stone inside a hard rind and bitter pulp, is Christ.

  Only Delacroix and Rembrandt have painted the face of Christ in such a way that I can feel him… and then Millet painted… the teachings of Christ.

  The rest rather makes me laugh, the rest of religious painting - from the religious point of view, not from the point of view of painting. And the Italian primitives - Botticelli, or let’s say the Flemish primitives, Van Eyck, the German, Cranach - they are no more than heathens who only interest me for the same reason as do the Greeks, Velasquez and so many other naturalists.

  Christ alone, of all the philosophers, magicians, etc., has affirmed eternal life as the most important certainty, the infinity of time, the futility of death, the necessity and purpose of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh. In other words, this peerless artist, scarcely conceivable with the blunt instrument of our modern, nervous and obtuse brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor books. He maintained in no uncertain terms that he made… living men, immortals.

  That is a profoundly serious matter, the more so as it is the truth.

  Nor did this great artist write books. Christian literature as a whole would undoubtedly have aroused his ire, and includes very few literary works beyond Luke’s Gospel or Paul’s epistles

  - so simple in their austere and militant form - that would have found favour in his eyes.

  This great artist - Christ - although he did not concern himself with writing books on ideas (sensations), felt considerably less disdain for the spoken word, and for parables in particular (what a sower, what a harvest, what a fig tree! etc.).

  And who would dare claim that he lied on that day when, scornfully predicting the destruction of Rome, he said, ‘Heaven and
earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’

  These spoken words - which, like a prodigal grand seigneur, he did not even deign to write down - form one of the pinnacles, the highest pinnacle, reached by art, which at that point becomes creative force, pure creative force.

  These thoughts, Bernard, dear frend, lead us far, very far, afield, they raise us above art itself They give us a glimpse of the art of life-creation, the art of being immortal and alive. They are bound up with painting. The patron saint of painters - Luke, physician, painter, evangelist - who has as a symbol, alas, nothing more than an ox, gives us hope.

  Yet our own life is a modest one indeed, our life as painters, languishing under the back-breaking yoke of the problems of a calling that is almost too hard to practise on this ungrateful planet, where ‘love of art drives out true love’.

  However, since nothing confutes the assumption that lines and forms and colours exist on innumerable other planets and suns as well, we are at liberty to feel fairly serene about the possibilities of painting in a better and different existence, an existence altered by a phenomenon that is perhaps no more ingenious and no more surprising than the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly or of a grub into a maybug.

  The existence of a painter-butterfly would be played out on the countless celestial bodies which, after death, should be no more inaccessible to us than the black dots on maps that symbolize towns and villages are in our earthly lives.

  Science - scientific reasoning - strikes me as being an instrument that will go a very long way in the future.

  For look: people used to think that the earth was flat. That was true, and still is today, of, say, Paris to Asniéres.

  But that does not alter the fact that science demonstrates that the earth as a whole is round, something nobody nowadays disputes.