The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Page 43
As for the beds, I got the sort of beds they have here, large double beds instead of iron bedsteads. They have an air of solidity, permanence and calm, and if that takes a little more bedding, it’s too bad, but they must have character. Most luckily, I have a housemaid whom I can rely on, otherwise I shouldn’t have dared to start living here. She is quite old and has many varied offspring, and she keeps my tiles nice and red and clean.
I can’t tell you how much pleasure it gives me to be tackling such a big and important task. For I hope that what I am doing here will turn out to be one great decoration.
Thus, as I’ve already told you, I’m going to paint my own bed.
There will be 3 subjects on it. Perhaps a nude woman, I haven’t decided, perhaps a cradle with a child, I don’t know, but I’m going to take my time.
I no longer feel any hesitation at all about staying here, as I have a wealth of ideas for work. I intend to buy something for the house every month now. And given patience, the house will be worth something because of the furniture and the decorations.
I must warn you that very soon I shall be needing a large consignment of paints for the autumn - which I think is going to be absolutely stunning. On second thoughts I am enclosing the order with this.
In my picture of the Night Café, I have tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can destroy oneself, go mad or commit a crime. In short, I have tried, by contrasting soft pink with blood-red and wine-red, soft Louis XV-green and Veronese green with yellow-greens and harsh blue-greens, all this in an atmosphere of an infernal furnace in pale sulphur, to express the powers of darkness in a common tavern. And yet under an outward show of Japanese gaiety and Tartarin’s good nature.
But what would Mr Tersteeg say about this picture, a man who, faced with a Sisley, Sisley mind you, the most unassuming and sensitive of the impressionists, said, ‘I can’t help thinking that the artist who painted this was a bit tipsy.’ Faced with my picture he’d say it was a raging case of delirium tremens.
I can find absolutely nothing to object to in your idea of exhibiting at the Revue Ind6pendante, provided, that is, I don’t make it difficult for those who usually exhibit there.
Except that we must then tell them that I should like to reserve a second exhibition for myself, after this first one, of what are really studies. Then next year I will give them the pictures from the house to exhibit, when the set is complete. Not that I’m all that keen, but I want to make sure that these studies are not taken for compositions, and to convey in advance that the first showing will be one of studies.
For the Sower and the Night Café are the only attempts at finished paintings.
As I write, the poor peasant who resembles a caricature of our father has just come into the cafè. The resemblance really is striking. Particularly the air of evasiveness and weariness and the vagueness of the mouth. It still seems a pity to me that I haven’t been able to do it.
I am adding to this letter the order for paints, which is not exactly urgent, only I am so full of plans, and then autumn promises so many splendid subjects, that I simply don’t know if I’ll be starting 5 or 10 canvases. It will be just as it was in the spring with the orchards in bloom, the subjects will be endless. If you entrusted old Tanguy with the cruder colour, he would probably make a good job of it.
His other, delicate, colours are really inferior, especially the blues.
I hope to improve the quality a little while preparing the next batch. I am doing relatively less work, and spending longer going back over it. I have kept back 50 francs for the week, the furniture having swallowed up 2 5 o already. Still, I’ll be recouping the money. And from today you can tell yourself that you have a kind of country house, unfortunately a little far away. But it would stop being too far away if there were a permanent exhibition in Marseilles. In a year’s time that’s something we may well see. With a handshake,
Ever yours,
Vincent
539 [F] [part]
[c. 17 September 1888]
My dear Theo,
I wrote to you earlier this morning, then I went and did some more work on a picture of a sunny garden. Then I brought it back in - and went out again with a blank canvas, and that, too, has been finished. And now I want to write to you again.
You see, I have never had such luck before, nature here is extraordinarily beautiful. Everything and everywhere. The dome of the sky is a wonderful blue, the sun has rays of a pale sulphur, and it is as soft and delightful as the combination of heavenly blues and yellows in Vermeer of Delft. I cannot paint as beautifully, but it absorbs me so much that I let myself go without giving thought to a single rule.
That makes 3 pictures of the gardens opposite my house. Then the two cafés. Then the sunflowers. Then the portrait of Boch and myself. Then the red sun over the factory, and the men unloading sand, and the old mill. Leaving the other studies aside, you can see that there’s been some work done.
But my paint, my canvas, my purse, are completely exhausted today. The last picture, done with the last tubes of paint on the last canvas, is of a garden, green by nature, but painted without any actual green, nothing but Prussian blue and chrome yellow. I am beginning to feel completely different from the way I did when I came here. I no longer have doubts, I no longer hesitate to tackle things, and this feeling could well grow.
But what scenery! Where I am there’s a public garden right next to the street with the girls of easy virtue, and Mourier, for instance, hardly ever went there even though we go for a walk in the gardens almost every day, on the far side (there are 3 of them). But you see, it’s just that which lends a touch of Boccaccio to the place.
That side of the garden, by the way, is for reasons of chastity or morality bare of flowering shrubs such as oleanders. There are ordinary plane trees, groves of stiff pine, a weeping tree and green grass. But it has such intimacy! There are gardens by Manet like that.
For as long as you can bear the burden of all the paint and canvas and all the money that I have to spend, carry on sending it to me, because what I am getting ready will be better than the last batch, and I’m sure we’ll make a profit out of it instead of losing, provided I can manage to produce a decent set. Which is what I am trying to do.
But is it absolutely impossible for Thomas to lend me two or three hundred francs against my studies? That would mean I’d earn more than a thousand on them, and I can’t tell you how thrilled, thrilled, thrilled I am by what I see. And that fills one with expectations for the autumn, an enthusiasm which makes the time pass without one’s feeling it - beware the morning after the night before, and the winter mistrals!
Today, working all the while, I thought a lot about Bernard. His letter is full of veneration for Gauguin’s talent - he says that he thinks him so great an artist that he is almost afraid of him, and that he finds everything that he, Bernard, does inadequate in comparison with Gauguin. And you know that last winter Bernard was still picking quarrels with Gauguin. In the long run, be that as it may and whatever happens, it’s very comforting that these artists are our friends, and I like to think they’ll remain so, no matter how things turn out.
I am so happy with the house - with work - that I even dare to think that this happiness will not remain confined to me, but that you, too, will share in it and have some good luck as well!
Some time ago I read an article on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Giotto and Botticelli. My God, that made an impression on me, reading the letters of those men! Now Petrarch lived very near here, at Avignon, and I see the same cypresses and oleanders. I have tried to put something of that into one of the Gardens, painted in a thick impasto of lemon yellow and lime green. I was most of all touched by Giotto - always suffering, and always full of benevolence and zeal, as though he were already living in another world.
Giotto is extraordinary, anyway, and I understand him better than I do the poets Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. It always seems to me that poetry is more terrible tha
n painting, although painting is dirtier and ultimately more tedious. And the painter on the whole says nothing, he holds his tongue, and I prefer that too.
My dear Theo, when you have seen the cypresses, the oleanders and the sun here - and that day will come, rest assured -then you will think even more often of the beautiful works of Puvis de Chavannes, of Doux pays, and so many others.
There is so much that is Greek throughout both the Tartarin side and the Daumier side of this strange country, where the good people have the accent with which you are familiar, and there is a Venus of Aries just like the Lesbos one, and despite everything, one is still aware of the youth of it all.
I haven’t the slightest doubt that one day you too will know the south. Perhaps you’ll go and see Claude Monet when he is in Antibes, or you’ll find some opportunity, anyway.
When the mistral blows, however, it is just the opposite of a pleasant country, because the mistral gets on one’s nerves badly. But what compensation, what compensation when there is a day without wind. What intensity of colours, what pure air, what vibrant serenity.
Tomorrow I am going to draw until the paint arrives. But I am now resolved not to draw any more pictures with charcoal. It serves no purpose, you must tackle drawings with colour if you want to draw well.
Oh - the exhibition at the Revue Ind6pendante - good - but once and for all, we have smoked too much to put the wrong end of the cigar in our mouths. We must try to sell if we want to do the things we have sold all over again, but better. It’s because we are in a bad trade - but don’t let’s play to the gallery and suffer for it at home.
This afternoon I had a select audience… 4 or 5 pimps and a dozen urchins, who found it extremely interesting watching the paint come out of the tubes. Well, that audience - there’s fame for you, or rather, I firmly intend to be as unconcerned about ambition and fame as those urchins and layabouts along the Rh6ne and the rue du Bout d’Aries.
I went to Milliet’s today. He is coming tomorrow, having prolonged his stay by 4 days.
I wish Bernard would do his military service in Africa, because he would do some good things there, and I still don’t know what to say to him. He told me that he would exchange his portrait for one of my studies.
But he says he daren’t do Gauguin as I asked him to, because he feels too shy in front of Gauguin. Bernard is basically so temperamental!! He can be silly and unpleasant sometimes, but I certainly haven’t any right to reproach him, because I myself am only too familiar with that nervous disorder, and I’m sure he would not reproach me either. If he went to Africa to stay with Milliet, Milliet would certainly befriend him, for Milliet is a very loyal friend, and makes love so easily that he almost holds love in contempt.
What is Seurat doing? I wouldn’t dare show him the studies I’ve sent you, but the ones of the sunflowers, and the taverns, and the gardens, I wouldn’t mind him seeing those - I often think about his method, and yet I don’t follow it at all, but he is an original colourist, and so is Signac, but to a different degree. The pointillists have discovered something new, and anyway I like them a lot. But as far as I am concerned - I tell you frankly - I am going back more to what I was trying to do before I went to Paris, and I don’t know if anyone before me has spoken of suggestive colour, but Delacroix and Monticelli did it without talking about it.
But I am the way I was at Nuenen again, when I made a vain effort to learn music - I was keenly aware even then of the relationship between colour and Wagner’s music.
Now, it is true that I see in impressionism a resurrection of Eugéne Delacroix, but as the interpretations are both divergent and also rather irreconcilable, impressionism cannot yet formulate a doctrine. That is why I am staying with the impressionists, because it means nothing, and commits you to nothing, and as one of them I do not have to take up any position. My God, you have to play the fool in this life. I ask only for time to study, and you, do you ask for anything other than that? I know that you, like me, must love having the peace one needs for objective study.
And I am so afraid of depriving you of it by my demands for money.
And yet, I budget so carefully, but found today again that with the ten metres of canvas I had budgeted accurately for all the colours except one, the fundamental one of yellow. If all my colours are used up at the same time, isn’t that proof that I can sense the relative amounts in my sleep? It’s the same with drawing, I take hardly any measurements, and in that I differ quite radically from Cormon, who says that if he didn’t measure he would draw like a pig.
[…]
It’s a comfort that we are always engrossed in our raw
materials, not speculating but wanting only to produce. And so we cannot go wrong.
I hope it will go on being like that, and if I am doomed to exhaust my paint, my canvas and my purse, not even that will be our undoing, of that you may be sure. Even supposing you exhaust your own purse and everything in it yourself, that would be a serious matter, of course, but just say to me calmly, there is nothing left - and there will still be something left, because of what I have done with your money.
But you will then quite naturally say to me - and in the meantime? In the meantime - I’ll do some drawing, since doing nothing but drawing is easier than painting.
A warm handshake. What days these are, not because of what is happening, but because I feel so strongly that you and I are not in decline, nor done for yet, nor are we going to be. But you know, I won’t argue with the critics who will say that my pictures are not - finished.
With a handshake, and for now,
Ever yours,
Vincent
I too have read Richepin’s C6sarine - I very much like what the woman says about that fool: the whole of life is just a matter of the right equations.
542 [F] [part]
[24 September 1888]
My dear Theo,
The lovely weather of the last few days has gone, to be replaced by mud and rain. But it’s sure to come back again before winter. Only one must make the most of it, as the fine days are short.
Especially for painting. This winter Iintend to do a lot of drawing. If only I could draw figures from memory, I should always have something to do. But if you take a figure by the most skilful of all the artists who sketch from life - Hokusai, or Daumier - in my opinion that figure will never compare to a figure painted from the model by those same masters or other master portrait painters.
Anyway - if we are so often fated to go short of models, and especially of intelligent models, we mustn’t despair or tire of the struggle.
I have arranged all the Japanese prints in the studio, and the Daumiers, and the Delacroixs, and the Géricaults. If you come across Delacroix’s Pietá again, or the Géricault, I urge you to get as many of them as you can. ,
What I should really love to have in the studio as well is Millet’s Les Travaux des champs - and Lerat’s etching of his Semeur, which Durand-Ruel sells for 1.25 fr. And lastly the little etching by Jacquemart after Meissonier, Le liseur, a Meissonier I’ve always admired. I cannot help liking Meissonier’s work.
I am reading an article on Tolstoy in the Revue des Deux Mondes - it appears that Tolstoy is enormously interested in the religion of his people. Like George Eliot in England. I believe there is a book on religion by Tolstoy, I think it’s called My Religion, it’s sure to be very good. In it he goes in search, or so I gather from the article, of what remains eternally true in the Christian religion and what all religions have in common. It seems that he admits neither the resurrection of the body, nor even that of the soul, but says, like the nihilists, that after death there is nothing else. Though man dies, and dies completely, living humanity endures for ever.
Anyhow, not having read the book itself, I’m not able to say exactly what his conception is, but I don’t imagine that his religion is a cruel one which increases our suffering, but must be, on the contrary, a very comforting one, inspiring one with peace of mind, and energy, and the courage
to live, and many other things.
I think the drawing of the blade of grass and the carnations and the Hokusai in Bing’s reproductions are admirable.
But whatever they say, the most ordinary Japanese prints, coloured in flat tones, seem admirable to me for the same reason as Rubens and Veronese. I know perfectly well that they are not primitive art. But just because the primitives are so admirable, there is absolutely no reason for me to say, as is becoming the custom, ‘When I go to the Louvre I cannot get any farther than the primitives.’
If I said to a serious collector of Japanese art - to Levy himself - Sir, I cannot help admiring these Japanese prints at 5 sous apiece, it is more than probable that he would be a little shocked, and would pity my ignorance and bad taste. Just as at one time it was considered bad taste to admire Rubens, Jordaens and Veronese.
I’m sure I shan’t end up feeling lonely in the house, and that during bad winter days, and the long evenings, I shall find something absorbing to do.
A weaver or a basket maker often spends whole seasons alone, or almost alone, with his craft as his only distraction. And what makes these people stay in one place is precisely the feeling of being at home, the reassuring and familiar look of things. Of course I’d welcome company, but it won’t make me unhappy if I don’t have it, and anyway, the time will come when I will have someone, I have little doubt of that.
I’m sure that if you were willing to put people up in your house too, you’d find plenty of artists for whom the question of lodgings is a very serious problem.
As for the pictures done in fairly thick impasto, I think they need longer to dry out here. I’ve read that the works of Rubens in Spain have remained infinitely richer in colour than those in the north. Even the ruins here exposed to the open air remain white, whereas in the north they turn grey, dirty, black, &c. You may be sure that if the Monticellis had dried in Paris, they would be very much duller by now.