557 [F]
[24 October 1888]
My dear Theo,
Thanks for your letter and the 50 fr. note. As you learned from my telegram, Gauguin has arrived in good health. He even seems to be in better health than I am.
He is very happy about the sale1 you made, of course, and I no less so, since some still absolutely essential settling-in expenses will now no longer need to wait, nor will you be saddled with all of them. G. will undoubtedly be writing to you today.
He is very, very interesting as a man, and I have every confidence that we shall achieve a great deal with him. He will undoubtedly be very productive here, and I hope that I may be, too.
And so I dare hope the burden will be a little less heavy for you, I even hope much less heavy.
I realize, to the point of being morally crushed and physically drained by it, that taking all in all, I have absolutely no other means of ever recovering what we have spent.
I cannot help it that my pictures do not sell.
The day will come, however, when people will see they are worth more than the price of the paint and my living expenses, very meagre on the whole, which we put into them.
As far as money or finances are concerned, what I want and what I am interested in is to have no debts in the first place.
But, my dear brother, my debt is so great that by the time I have paid it off, which I’m still sure I’ll succeed in doing, the strain of producing pictures will have taken my whole life, and it will seem to me that I haven’t lived. The only thing is that producing pictures may become a little more difficult for me, and that, in time, there won’t always be so many.
That they are not selling at the moment distresses me because you suffer for it, but if my bringing nothing in did not inconvenience you, it wouldn’t matter much either way to me.
But as far as finances are concerned, all I need is to remember this truth, that a man who lives for 50 years and spends two thousand a year, spends a hundred thousand francs, and that he must therefore also bring in a hundred thousand. To do a thousand pictures at a hundred francs during one’s lifetime as an artist is a very, very, very difficult thing to do, and since the pictures do indeed fetch a hundred francs… then… our task is very hard at times. But there is nothing we can do to change that.
We shall probably give Tasset2 a miss altogether, because we are going - to a large extent - to make use of cheaper paints, Gauguin as well as I. As for the canvas, we shall prepare it ourselves for the same reason.
I had the feeling for a time that I was going to be ill, but Gauguin’s arrival has so taken my mind off it that I am sure it will pass. I must pay attention to my diet for a while, but that’s all - absolutely nothing else. And before very long you will have some work.
Gauguin has brought a magnificent canvas3 which he’d exchanged with Bernard, Breton women in a green field, white, black, green, and a note of red, and matt flesh tones. So, let’s all be of good heart.
I’m sure the day will come when I shall sell as well, but I am so far behind with you, and am still spending without bringing anything in. From time to time that thought saddens me.
I am very, very pleased with what you write about one of the Dutchmen coming to stay with you,4 so that you too will no longer be alone. It’s very, very good news, especially since winter will soon be here.
Anyway, I’m in a hurry now, and must go out and start work again on another size thirty canvas.
Soon, when Gauguin writes to you, I’ll add another letter to his.
Of course, I don’t know in advance what Gauguin will say about this part of the world, and about our life, but he’s very pleased at any rate about the good sale you made for him.
Goodbye for the present, and a good handshake,
Ever yours,
Vincent
In his reply, Theo tried to dispel Vincent’s anxieties and would have none of the suggestion that Vincent was in his debt. On the contrary, he, Theo, owed so much to Vincent, who could claim the credit for creating ‘a circle of artists & friends’ for the two of them. He mentioned that he was now regularly seeing the Dutch artists Joseph Isaacson and Meijer de Haan.
Initially, Gauguin and Van Gogh worked a great deal together. They painted members of the Ginoux family - Gauguin, too, producing a version of their night cafe - and explored brothels together. Gauguin encouraged Vincent to work more frequently from memory, and even the arch-realist Van Gogh had to admit that ‘things done from memory do indeed assume a more mysterious character’. As a result he produced several works in which he harked back to his Brabant period, amongst them Woman Reading Novels and Memory of the Garden at Etten. During the second half of November he finished two symbolic portraits of Gauguin and himself in the form of two chairs: the one representing himself was ‘wooden, all yellow, rush-bottomed, on red tiles against a wall (by daylight). Then Gauguin’s armchair, red and green, night effect, wall and floor red and green as well, on the chair two novels and a candlestick. On thin canvas with thick impasto.’
Thanks to his friendship with the postman Roulin, Vincent at long last obtained the models he so badly needed. At the beginning of December he reported, ‘I have done portraits of a whole family, that of the postman whose head I did earlier: husband, wife, baby, the little boy and the 16-year old son, all of them characters and very French, though they look Russian.’
In Paris, Gauguin had admired a still life with sunflowers by Vincent and acquired it, probably by way of exchange. Van Gogh now informed Theo proudly that Gauguin considered the new still lifes with sunflowers he had painted for the Yellow House even finer than a similar work by Claude Monet. It was also as the sunflower painter par excellence that Gauguin portrayed his friend in December 1888. Van Gogh, however, seems to have been far from pleased with the painting, apparently saying, ‘It’s certainly me, but me gone mad.’ According to Gauguin, Van Gogh’s violent reaction to the portrait one evening was the prelude to the so-called ‘grande catastrophe’ of the following week. On the evening in question, Van Gogh is said to have thrown a glass of absinthe at his colleague’s head after a loud argument in a café. The incident was smoothed over, apologies offered, and on 17 or 18 December the two painters decided to interrupt their work briefly to pay a joint visit to the Montpellier gallery. Here, amongst other things, they were able to inspect the Bruyas Collection, with work by Delacroix, Courbet and Couture. The heated discussions occasioned by that visit, however, brought to light such vast differences in their respective artistic views that Van Gogh told Theo in a brief note written just before Christmas that their relationship had been impaired.
564 [F]
[second half of December 1888]
My dear Theo,
Yesterday Gauguin and I went to Montpellier to see the gallery there, particularly the Bruyas room, where there are lots of portraits of Bruyas by Delacroix, Ricard, Courbet, Cabanel, Couture, Verdier, Tassaert and others. There are also other paintings by Delacroix, Courbet, Giotto, Paulus Potter, Botticelli, Th. Rousseau, very fine.
Bruyas was a benefactor of artists, and I shall say no more to you than that. In the portrait by Delacroix he is a gentleman with a beard and red hair, who bears an amazing resemblance to you and to me, and made me think of that poem by Musset: Partout ou j’ai touche la terre - un malheureux vêtu de noir aupres de nous venait s’asseoir qui nous regardait comme un frére.1 It would have the same effect on you, I’m sure.
Do go to that bookshop where they sell lithographs of past and present artists, and try, if it doesn’t cost too much, to get the lithograph after Delacroix’s Le Tasse dans la prison des fous, since I think that figure must have some connection with this fine portrait of Bruyas.
There are other Delacroixs there, a study of a mulatto woman (which Gauguin copied at one time), Les odalisques, Daniel dans la fosse aux lions, and, by Courbet, I. Les demoiselles de village, magnificent, a nude woman viewed from behind, another lying on the ground in a landscape, 2. La fileuse (superb)
, and lots of other Courbets. Anyway, you must know of the existence of this collection, or at least know people who have seen it, and who can talk about it. So I will not dwell on the gallery (except on the Barye drawings and bronzes!).
Gauguin and I discuss Delacroix, Rembrandt, etc., a great deal. The debate is exceedingly electric, and sometimes when we finish our minds are as drained as an electric battery after discharge.
We had been right in the midst of magic, for as Fromentin puts it so well: Rembrandt is above all a magician and Delacroix is a man of God, a fantastic man of God, and that’s bloody well all there is to it in the name of God.
I am writing you this in connection with our Dutch friends, De Haan and Isaacson, who have studied and admired Rembrandt so much, hoping that you will encourage them to continue their research.
There must be no discouragement when it comes to that.
You know the strange and superb portrait of a man by Rembrandt in the Lacaze Gallery? I said to Gauguin that I saw a certain family or racial resemblance to Delacroix or to Gauguin himself in it.
I don’t know why, but I always call this portrait ‘the traveller’ or the man come from afar.
It’s a similar and parallel idea to the one I’ve mentioned to you, to see your future self in the portrait of the old Six, that fine portrait with the gloves, and your past and present in Rembrandt’s etching entitled Six reading near a window in a ray of sunshine.
So that’s where we’ve got to.
Gauguin said to me this morning, when I asked him how he was, ‘that he felt his former self coming back’, which gave me great pleasure. When I came here last winter, weary and almost mentally exhausted, I had to suffer a little inwardly too before I could start on my recovery.
How I wish that you could see the gallery in Montpellier some time, there are some very beautiful things there!
Tell Degas that Gauguin and I have been to see the portrait of Bruyas by Delacroix at Montpellier. Because we must dare to believe that what is, is, and the portrait of Bruyas by Delacroix resembles you and me like another brother.
As far as founding an artists’ colony for friends is concerned, such strange things have been known, and I’ll close with what you’re always saying - only time will tell. You can say all that to our friends Isaacson and De Haan, and even feel free to read this letter to them. I would have written to them already if I had felt the necessary electric charge.
A very hearty handshake to you all on behalf of Gauguin as well as me.
Ever yours,
Vincent
In case you think that Gauguin or I get down to work effortlessly, let me tell you that work does not always come easily to us. And my wish for our Dutch friends, and for you as well, is that they should feel no more discouraged by their difficulties than we do.
565 [F]
[23 December 1888]
My dear Theo,
Thank you very much for your letter, for the 100 fr. note enclosed and also for the money order for 50 fr.
I think that Gauguin was a little disenchanted with the good town of Aries, the little yellow house where we work, and above all with me.
Indeed, there are serious problems to overcome here still, for him as well as for me.
But these problems lie more in ourselves than anywhere else.
In short, I think that he’ll either simply leave or he’ll simply stay.
I’ve told him to think it over and weigh up the pros and cons before doing anything.
Gauguin is very strong, very creative, but he needs peace precisely because of that.
Will he find it elsewhere if he doesn’t find it here?
I await his decision with absolute equanimity.
With a good handshake,
Vincent
Van Gogh had been describing his discussions with Gauguin in terms of the discharge of an electric battery, and now, on this self-same 23 December, all the fuses blew. While Gauguin worked on a self-portrait and Van Gogh on a version of his portrait of Madame Roulin, the so-called Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle), their strained relationship came to a head. In the evening, when Gauguin went for a walk through the small gardens at the place Lamartine, Van Gogh suddenly appeared behind him and threatened his friend with a razor. By looking him straight in the face, Gauguin was able to calm Van Gogh down, but he decided, for safety’s sake, not to spend the night in the Yellow House and to go instead to a hotel. At half past eleven that night Van Gogh appeared at a brothel and asked for the prostitute called Rachel. With the words, ‘Take good care of this’, he handed her a piece he had cut from his earlobe. Next morning, the police found him unconscious in his bed.
What we know about these incidents stems mainly from Gauguin’s account, given long after the event. That version can be challenged in several respects, but it certainly conveys the gist of what actually happened. Understandably, Van Gogh’s own letters offer no more than a weak echo of the events that were to give his life and artistic career so tragic a turn. However, in the weeks that followed, he let something of what had happened slip out bit by bit, as the implications, especially for his future, gradually dawned on him. He was gripped by deep uncertainty.
Alerted by a telegram from Gauguin, Theo rushed to Aries. Vincent was admitted to the local hospital, where the sympathetic Dr Felix Rey treated him. His condition appeared critical, but on New Year’s Eve Theo, back in Paris, received positive news of his brother’s recovery. Meanwhile, Vincent’s friend Roulin was looking after the Yellow House, which ‘because of this episode was in a shambles, all the linen and my clothes being soiled’.
On 2 January, Van Gogh wrote a scribbled note to Theo, who just at this dramatic time had become engaged to Johanna Bonger, the sister of their Dutch friend Andries from Paris. In this note, he asked if he had frightened Gauguin off and why he had heard nothing from him. Alarmed that his dream of an artists’ house in the south had now foundered, he enjoined Gauguin two days later not to say ‘one bad word about our little yellow house’ to colleagues in Paris. He also sent a reassuring note to his mother and Wil in Holland and wrote in a letter to Theo, ‘I hope that I have had no more than a perfectly ordinary attack of artistic temperament, followed by high fever as a consequence of the loss of a very great deal of blood because an artery had been severed.’
Having first played down his attack, he gave Theo a more realistic account of what had happened a little later. Gauguin too received another letter in which Van Gogh did his best to put the seriousness of the incident into perspective and was even able to respond soberly and practically to Gauguin’s request for his fencing mask and fencing gloves, as well as for Van Gogh’s still life with sunflowers.
Hope and resignation alternated in the letters Vincent wrote during the first months following his recovery. He was deeply depressed by the departure of Gauguin, as well as of his good friend Roulin, who had been transferred to Marseilles. After his original delight at the speed of his recovery, Van Gogh now asked himself the existential question, ‘What am I getting better for?’ On top of that, he could not help fearing a possible relapse. He was aware that his letters still sounded somewhat strained, but, as he remarked wryly, ‘in this good land of Tarascon, everyone’s a little bit crazy’. He was also relieved that, despite all that had happened, he had not lost his zest for painting. Still holding on to his idea that an artist’s oeuvre constitutes an indivisible whole, he wrote to Theo about the fate of his work: ‘Well, the paintings may perhaps become scattered beyond recall, but when you see the whole of what I have in mind, then, I hope, you will receive a comforting impression of it’
570 [F] [part]
[9 January 1889]
My dear Theo,
[…]
Physically I am well. The wound is healing very well, and the great loss of blood is righting itself, as I am eating well and my digestion is good. The thing I dread most is insomnia, but the doctor hasn’t mentioned it to me, nor have I mentioned it to him as yet. But I am fighting that m
yself
I fight it with a very, very strong dose of camphor in my pillow and my mattress, and if ever you’re unable to sleep, I recommend this to you. I very much dreaded the idea of sleeping alone in the house, and I’ve been worried about not being able to fall asleep, but all that’s quite over now and I dare say it won’t recur.
In hospital I suffered terribly from it, and yet during it all, when it was worse than losing consciousness, I can tell you as an odd fact that I continued to think about Degas. Gauguin and I had been talking about Degas beforehand, and I had pointed out to Gauguin that Degas had said… ‘I am saving myself for the Arlesiennes.’
Now you know how discerning Degas is, so on your return to Paris, just tell Degas that I confess that up to now I have been powerless to paint the women of Aries without venom, and that he mustn’t believe Gauguin if Gauguin is too quick to speak well of my work, since it is nothing more than that of a sick man.
Now if I recover, I must start afresh, but I shall never again be able to reach the heights to which the illness to some extent led me.
[…]
Ever yours,
Vincent
[F] [letter from Vincent to Paul Gauguin]
[c. 22 January 1889]
My dear friend Gauguin,
Thank you for your letter. Left behind alone on board my little yellow house - as it was perhaps my duty anyway to be the last to leave -I am not a little put out at my friends’ departure.
Roulin got his transfer to Marseilles and has just left. It has been touching to see him these last few days with little Marcelle, making her laugh and dandling her on his knee.
His transfer means his being separated from his family, and you will not be surprised that the one you and I nicknamed ‘the passer-by’ one evening, was very heavy-hearted. As was I, witnessing that and other upsetting things.
When he sang to his child, his voice took on a strange timbre in which one could hear the voice of a woman rocking a cradle or of a sorrowing wet-nurse, and then another trumpet sound like a clarion call to France.
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh Page 45