For all that, people still persist in thinking that life is flat and runs from birth to death.
But life, too, is probably round, and much greater in scope and possibilities than the hemisphere we now know.
Future generations will probably be able to enlighten us on this very interesting subject, and then science itself - with all due respect - may reach conclusions that are more or less in keeping with Christ’s sayings about the other half of our life.
Be that as it may, the fact is that we are painters in real life, and it’s a matter of continuing to draw breath while one has breath left in one’s body.
Oh, what a beautiful picture that is by Eug. Delacroix, Christ in the Boat on the Sea of Gennesaret! He - with his pale lemon-yellow aureole, sleeping, luminous in the dramatic purple, dark-blue, blood-red patch of the group of bewildered disciples - on that terrible emerald-green sea, rising, rising, right to the top of the frame. Ah, what an inspired conception! I would do a sketch of it for you, but because I’ve been drawing and painting a model - a Zouave - for three or four days now, I am all in. Writing, on the other hand, calms and diverts me.
What I’ve been doing looks very ugly - a drawing of a seated Zouave, a painted sketch of the Zouave against a completely white wall, and finally his portrait against a green door and some orange bricks in a wall. It is harsh, and taking it all in all, ugly and unsuccessful. Yet, because I was tackling a real difficulty with it, it may pave the way for the future.
Nearly all the figures I do look abominable in my own eyes, let alone the eyes of others. Yet the study of the figure is the most useful of all, provided one does it in a different way from that taught at, for instance, Monsieur Benjamin Constant’s.
Your letter pleased me very much, the sketch1 is very, very interesting, and I thank you very much for it. One of these days I shall be sending you a drawing of mine. Tonight I am too exhausted, my eyes are tired even if my mind is not
Tell me, do you remember the John the Baptist by Puvis? I find it staggeringly beautiful and as magical as Eugéne Delacroix.
The passage about John the Baptist you tracked down in the Gospel means exactly what you have read in it… people crowding round a man: ‘Are you the Christ? Are you Elias?’ As would happen today if you were to ask of impressionism or of one of its questing representatives, ‘Have you found it yet?’ Exactly the same.
My brother is holding an exhibition of Claude Monets, 10 paintings done in Antibes from February to May, apparently it’s all very beautiful.
Have you ever read the life of Luther? Because Cranach, Dürer, Holbein belong with him. He - his personality - is the shining light of the Middle Ages.
I don’t like the Sun King any more than you do - that Louis XIV was rather a killjoy, it seems to me - my God, what an utter bore that Methodist Solomon was. I don’t like Solomon either and Methodists not at all. Solomon strikes me as a hypocritical heathen. I have really no respect for his architecture, an imitation of other styles, and none at all for his writings, for the heathens have done better.
Do tell me how things are going with your military service. Do you want me to speak to that second lieutenant in the Zouaves or not? Are you going to Africa or not? Do the years in Africa count double in your case or not? Try to make sure above all that your blood is all right - anaemia doesn’t get you very far and your painting slows right down. You must try to acquire an iron constitution, a constitution that will allow you to grow old, you ought to live like a monk who goes to the brothel every two weeks - that’s what I do myself, it isn’t very poetic, but I feel it’s my duty to subordinate my life to painting.
If I were at the Louvre with you, what I should very much like would be to go and see the primitives in your company. I still go, full of love, to look at the Dutch in the Louvre, Rembrandt first, Rembrandt, whom I used to study so much -and then, say, Potter, who paints a white stallion alone in a meadow on a size 4 or 6 panel - a stallion neighing and aroused - forlorn under a heavy thundery sky, inconsolable in the soft green immensity of the damp meadow. In short, there are marvels among the old Dutchmen which cannot be compared to anything else.
With a handshake, and once again thanks for your letter and your sketch,
Ever yours,
Vincent
[…]
When Van Gogh nevertheless tried to paint a religious subject soon afterwards, he was so dissatisfied that he destroyed it, informing Theo in early July, ‘I have scraped off a large painted study, an olive garden, with a figure of Christ in blue and orange, a yellow angel, a red stretch of earth, green and blue hills, olive trees with purple and carmine trunks and grey-green and blue-green foliage, lemon yellow sky. I have scraped it off because I don’t think one should do figures of this importance without a model.’ In a few portraits and the olive gardens he was to do later in Saint-Remy, he did, however, manage to translate these religious subjects into paint.
At the end of June 1888, Theo reported that Gauguin had agreed to share a house with Vincent, but it was not until later - in October - that he actually arrived in Aries.
In the meantime, Van Gogh regularly followed in the footsteps of his most important predecessors in Provence. His own struggle with the mistral, he felt, had helped him to understand and forgive the ‘clumsy touch’ C6zanne had shown in some of his studies: it was the wind which had made the easel wobble. He had also begun to wonder whether the intensity of a painter’s feelings and thoughts was not worth more than perfect brushwork. Although Van Gogh held relatively traditional views of what constituted a good painting worthy of the name, and did not grant that status to many of his own outdoor studies, he gradually became convinced that work he painted quickly, in a single long session, was often among his best. He explained this paradox with the conclusion, ‘quickly done, but given a great deal of thought beforehand’.
In his use of colour he felt some affinity with Adolphe Monticelli, the painter from nearby Marseilles who had died in 1886 and whose work he and Theo had collected in Paris. As so often with artists he admired, he allied respect for the technical quality of the work with personal identification with the artist. True, he wrote, his ‘colour philosophy [is] a maze from which you cannot easily escape unscathed [but] I think very, very often of that excellent painter, Monticelli, who - they said - was such a drunkard and a bit soft in the head, when I myself come back home after the mental exertion of having had to balance the six primary colours - red, blue, yellow, orange, lilac, green - a labour of cool calculation in which the mind is strained to the utmost, like an actor on the stage playing a difficult role - with a thousand and one things to think of simultaneously in one half hour’.
That summer, the dominant colour was yellow: the colour of the fierce sun and of the sunflowers. The other seasons, too, had their characteristic colours, however, and Van Gogh eagerly looked forward to the autumn: ‘The wheat fields offered as great an opportunity to work as the orchards in bloom. And I only just have time to prepare for the next campaign, the grape harvest. And in between I should also like to do some seascapes. The orchards stand for pink and white, the wheat fields for yellow, the seascapes for blue. Perhaps I shall now go in search of greens a bit more. Well, autumn provides the entire spectrum.’
For lack of willing models among the local population, he turned to his friends, the family of the postman, Joseph Roulin, and Madame Ginoux, the wife of the owner of the Café de la Gare, where he lived before moving to the Yellow House, and remained a regular customer.
He got on well with the Zouave lieutenant and particularly with Joseph Roulin, in his blue uniform and gold trimmings, and heavily bearded, whom he compared, as he had done earlier with Tanguy, to Socrates. The painter Dodge MacKnight had been joined by the Belgian painter Eugéne Boch, but until Gauguin turned up, the painters’ muse remained Van Gogh’s chief companion: ‘Far from complaining, it is just at times like these that I feel almost as happy living the artist’s life -though it isn’t real life - as I might be liv
ing the ideal, the real, life.’
His failure to master the Provençal dialect stood in the way of his befriending the locals: ‘So far, I have made not the slightest headway in people’s affection […]. Whole days go by without my speaking a single word to anyone, except to order my meals or a coffee. And so it has been from the beginning. But up to now the loneliness hasn’t troubled me much because I’ve been held in thrall by the fiercer sun and its effect upon nature.’ More than company, he needed ‘feverish hard work’, and ‘if the storm within grows too violent, I take a glass too many to seek diversion’. Just like Delacroix, he had ‘un soleil dans la tete et un orage dans le coeur [a sun in the head and a storm in the heart]’.
And then, of course, there were his letters to his friends. He discussed Cèzanne with Bernard, while repeatedly enjoining him to model himself on the seventeenth-century Dutch masters, Rembrandt in particular, of course.
B11 [F] [letter from Vincent to émile Bernard]
[c. I7 july 1888]
My dear friend Bernard,
I’ve just sent you another 9 sketches after painted studies. So you’ll see subjects from the scenery that inspires old man Cèzanne, because the Crau near Aix is almost the same as the countryside round Tarascon or the Crau here. The Camargue is even plainer, for often there is nothing, nothing, other than poor soil and tamarisk bushes and the coarse grass that is to these bare pastures what esparto grass is to the desert.
Knowing how keen you are on Cèzanne, I thought you might like these sketches of Provence; not that a drawing of mine and one by Cèzanne have much in common. No, indeed, any more than Monticelli and I! But I too love the countryside they have loved so much, and for the same reasons, the colour and the logical composition.
My dear friend Bernard, by collaboration I did not mean to say that I think two or more painters would have to work on the same pictures. What I was driving at was paintings that differ from one another yet go together and complement one another.
Just take the Italian primitives or the German primitives or the Dutch school or the real Italians, in short, take the whole of the art of painting!
Whether they want it or not, their work forms a ‘group’, a ‘series’.
Well, now, at present the impressionists also form a group, despite all their disastrous civil wars, in which both sides have been trying to get at each other’s throats with a dedication they would have done better to reserve for other ends.
In our northern school, you have Rembrandt, who heads that school because his influence may be seen in anyone who comes to know him more closely. Thus we find Paulus Potter painting rutting and excited animals in equally exciting landscapes - in a thunderstorm, in the sunshine, in the melancholy of autumn - while that selfsame Paulus Potter, before he came to know Rembrandt, was rather dry and over-fussy.
Here are two people, Rembrandt and Potter, who belong together like brothers, and even though Rembrandt probably never touched a picture by Potter with his brush, that doesn’t alter the fact that Potter and Ruysdael owe him all that is best in them - the thing that moves us so deeply when we have learned how to look at a corner of old Holland as if through their temperament.
Moreover, the material problems of the painter’s life make it desirable that painters should collaborate and unite (much as they did in the days of the Guilds of St. Luke). If only they would ensure their material well-being, and love one another like friends instead of making one another’s life hell, painters would be happier, and in any case less ridiculous, less foolish and less culpable.
However, I shan’t labour the point, because I realize that life carries us along so fast that we haven’t the time to talk and to work as well. That is the reason why, with unity still a long way off, we are now sailing the trackless deep in our frail little boats, all alone on the high seas of our time.
Is it a renaissance? Is it a decline? We cannot judge, because we are too close to it not to be deceived by distorted perspectives. Contemporary events, our setbacks and successes, probably assume exaggerated proportions in our eyes.
A hearty handshake from me and I hope to hear something from you soon.
Ever yours,
Vincent
B12 [F] [letter from Vincent to émile Bernard]
[c.23 July 1888]
My dear friend Bernard,
Many, many thanks for the drawings you sent me. I very much like the avenue of plane trees along the seashore with the two women talking in the foreground and people strolling about. And the woman under the apple tree, the woman with the umbrella. Then the four drawings of nude women, especially the one who is washing herself, a grey effect, enhanced with black, white, yellow, brown. It’s charming.
Ah, Rembrandt!… With all due admiration for Baudelaire, I venture to presume, especially going by those verses, that he knew virtually nothing about Rembrandt. Not long ago I found and bought a small etching after Rembrandt here, a study of a male nude, realistic and simple. He stands, leaning against a door or a pillar, in a dark interior, a shaft of light from above glancing across his bent head and thick red hair. A Degas, you would say, because the animality of the body is real and intensely felt. But listen, have you ever taken a good look at the ‘Ox’ or the ‘Interior of a Butcher’s Shop’ in the Louvre? You haven’t taken a really good look at them, have you, and Baudelaire infinitely less so. It would be a real treat for me to spend a morning with you in the Dutch Gallery. All those things are almost impossible to describe, but standing in front of the paintings I should be able to point out the miracles and mysteries which are the reason why the primitives do not necessarily take first place in my admiration.
But then, I am scarcely an eccentric; a Greek statue, a peasant by Millet, a Dutch portrait, a female nude by Courbet or Degas, these calm and perfectly modelled representations are the reason why very many other things, the primitives no less than the Japanese, give me the impression of having been composed with the pen. I find that immensely interesting, but anything complete and perfect renders infinity tangible, and the enjoyment of any beautiful thing is like coitus, a moment of infinity.
Do you, for instance, know a painter called Vermeer, who, among other things, painted a very beautiful and pregnant Dutch lady? The palette of this remarkable painter is blue, lemon yellow, pearl grey, black, white. Of course, all the riches of a full palette are there too, in his rarely encountered pictures, but the combination of lemon yellow, pale blue and pearl grey is as characteristic of him as black, white, grey and pink are of Velàsquez.
Anyway, I know perfectly well that Rembrandt and the Dutch painters are scattered widely over museums and collections, and it isn’t very easy to get an overall idea of them if you only know the Louvre. Yet it is the French, Charles Blanc, Thore, Fromentin and several others, who have written about their art better than the Dutch have.
Those Dutch painters had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but an enormous amount of taste and a feeling for composition. They did no paintings of Christ, Our Lord, etc. - Rembrandt did, of course, but he was the only one (and biblical subjects are relatively rare in his work). He was the only one who, exceptionally, painted figures of Christ, etc. And with him, they look quite unlike anything done by other religious painters, it is all metaphysical magic.
This is how Rembrandt painted angels. He does a self-portrait, old, toothless, wrinkled, wearing a cotton cap, a picture from life, in a mirror. He is dreaming, dreaming, and his brush takes up his self-portrait again, but this time from memory, and the expression on the face becomes sadder and more saddening. He dreams, dreams on, and why or how I cannot tell, but just as Socrates and Mohammed had their guardian spirits, so Rembrandt paints a supernatural angel with a da Vinci smile behind that old man who resembles himself
I am showing you a painter who dreams and paints from the imagination, and I started by contending that it is characteristic of the Dutch that they do not invent anything, that they have neither imagination nor fantasy.
Am
I being illogical? No.
Rembrandt did not invent anything, and that angel and that strange Christ came about because he knew them, felt that they were there.
Delacroix paints a Christ using the unexpected note of bright lemon yellow in such a way that the colourful and radiant note in the picture assumes the inexpressible strangeness and charm of a star in a corner of the firmament. Rembrandt works with tonal values in the same way that Delacroix works with colours.
Well now, there is a world of difference between the method used by Delacroix and Rembrandt and that of all other religious painters.
I’ll write again soon. This is to thank you for the drawings, which have given me enormous pleasure. I have just finished a portrait of a girl of 12, brown eyes, black hair and black eyebrows, yellowish-grey flesh, white background, strongly tinged with Veronese green, a blood-red bodice with violet stripes. Blue skirt with large orange polka dots, an oleander flower-in the sweet little hand. It has exhausted me so much that I am hardly in a fit state to write. Goodbye for now, and once more many thanks,
Ever yours,
Vincent
During the second half of July, Van Gogh painted some splendid ‘studies’ of flower gardens: ‘This really is a subject for a painting, just as in other studies I have. And I really can’t tell if I shall ever again do paintings that are calmly and quietly worked out, because I have the feeling that they will always be incoherent’ It was at this time that he began to work on his famous Night Cafe: ‘I shall probably make a start today on the interior of the café where I live - at night, by gaslight. It is what they call a “night cafe’” (they are fairly common here), which stays open all night. “Night owls” can take refuge there if they haven’t enough money to pay for lodgings or are too drunk to be taken in anywhere.’
At the same time, he tried to put heart into Theo, who was clearly still bowed down by depression, insisting that, as an art dealer, Theo was an inspiration to artists, playing an essential role in their lives and indirectly participating in their creative work.
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh Page 40