My
dear Theo,
Many thanks for your letter and the 50-franc note
which it contained. It isn't cheery news that the pains
in your leg have come back—-Good Lord—-you ought to
be able to live in the South too, because I always think
that what we need is sun and fine weather and a blue sky
as the most efficacious cure. The weather here remains
fine, and if it was always like this, it would be better
than the painters' paradise, it would be absolute Japan.
I keep thinking of you and Gauguin and Bernard all the
time wherever I go. It is so beautiful, and I so wish
you were here.
Enclosed a little sketch of a square size 30 canvas,
the starry sky actually painted at night under a gas
jet. The sky is greenish-blue, the water royal blue, the
ground mauve. The town is blue and violet, the gas is
yellow and the reflections are russet-gold down to
greenish-bronze. On the blue-green expanse of sky the
Great Bear sparkles green and pink, its discreet pallor
contrasts with the harsh gold of the gas.
Two colourful little figures of lovers in the
foreground.
Also a sketch of a size 30 canvas representing the
house and its surroundings in sulphur-coloured sunshine,
under a sky of pure cobalt. The subject is frightfully
difficult; but that is just why I want to conquer it.
It's terrific, these houses, yellow in the sun, and the
incomparable freshness of the blue. And everywhere the
ground is yellow too. I shall send you a better drawing
than this rough improvised sketch out of my head later
on.
The house on the left is pink with green shutters, I
mean the one in the shadow of the tree. That is the
restaurant where I go for dinner every day. My friend
the postman lives at the end of the street on the left,
between the two railway bridges. The night cafe I
painted is not in the picture, it is to the left of the
restaurant.
Milliet thinks this horrible, but I need not tell you
that when he says he cannot understand anyone amusing
himself doing such a dull grocer's shop, and such stark,
stiff houses with no grace whatever, remember that Zola
did a certain boulevard at the beginning of L'Assommoir
and Flaubert a corner of the Quai de la Villette in the
midst of the dog days at the beginning of Bouvard et
Pécuchet and neither of them is moldy yet.
And it does me good to do difficult things. That does
not prevent me from having a terrible need of-—shall I
say the word?-—of religion. Then I go out at night to
paint the stars, and I am always dreaming of a picture
like this with a group of living figures of our
comrades.
I had a letter from Gauguin, who seems very unhappy
and says that as soon as he has sold something, he will
certainly come, but he still does not make it clear
whether he would agree to shake himself free and come if
he had his fare paid.
He says that the people where he is staying are and
have been wonderful to him, and that to leave them like
that would be an outrage. But that I would be twisting
the knife in his heart if I thought that he would not
come straight off if he could. And he says too that if
you could sell his pictures at a low price, he would be
quite content. I shall send you his letter with my
reply.
Certainly his coming would increase the importance of
this attempt to paint in the South by 100 per cent. And
once here, I can't see him going away again because I
think he will take root. And I keep telling myself that
in the end what you are doing privately will be a far
bigger thing with his collaboration than with my work
alone. You will have more satisfaction out of it and no
increase in expenses. Later on, if someday perhaps you
are on your own with impressionist pictures, you will
only have to continue and encourage an already existing,
concern. Gauguin also says that Laval has found someone
who will give him 150 francs a month for at least a
year, and that Laval also may come in February. And as I
wrote to Bernard that I thought he could not live in the
South for less than 3.50 or 4 francs a day for board and
lodging alone, he says that he thinks that on 200 francs
a month there would be board and lodging for all three,
and that is not impossible if we eat and sleep at the
studio.
That Benedictine Father must have been very
interesting. What would the religion of the future be
according to him? He will probably say, Always the same
as that of the past. Victor Hugo says, God is an
eclipsing lighthouse and in that case we are certainly
passing through that eclipse now.
I only wish that they would succeed in proving to us
something that would tranquiilize and comfort us so that
we might stop feeling guilty and wretched, and could go
on just as we are without losing ourselves in solitude
and nothingness, and not have to stop at every step in a
panic, or calculate nervously the harm we may
unintentionally be doing to other people. That queer
fellow Giotto, whose biographer says that he was always
in pain and always full of ardor and ideas, there,
that's what I should like to achieve, such a
self-confidence that makes you happy and gay and alive
in all conditions. That would come true more easily in
the country or in a small town than in the furnace of
Paris.
I should not be surprised if you liked the
"Starry Night" and the "Plowed
Fields," there is a greater quiet about them than
in the other canvases. If the work always went on like
that, I should be less worried about money, for it would
be easier for people to take to them, if the technique
kept on growing more harmonious. But this blasted
mistral makes it very hard to get one's brushwork firm
and interwoven with feeling, like a piece of music
played with emotion. In this still weather I let myself
go and don't have to struggle so much against
impossibilities.
Tanguy's parcel has arrived, and I thank you very,
very much for it, because I now hope to be able to do
something for the next exhibition during the autumn.
What is most urgent now is 5 or even 10 meters of
canvas. I am writing to you again and I shall send
Gauguin's letter with my reply.
It is very interesting, what you say of Maurin.
Certainly his drawings are not expensive at 40 francs.
More and more I come to think that the true and right
way in the picture trade is to follow one's taste, what
one has learned from the masters, in short, one's faith.
It is no easier, I am convinced, to make a good
picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl: it
means taking trouble, and you risk your life for it as a
dealer or as an artist. Then once you have some good
stones, you must never doubt yourself again, but boldly
fix your price and stick to it. Meanwhile, however . . .
but still this thought encourages me to work, even while
I naturally still suffer at having to spend money. But
this idea of the pearl came to me in the midst of my
suffering, and I should not be surprised if it did you
good, too, during periods of discouragement. There are
as few good pictures as good diamonds.
I wanted to do some more sunflowers too, but they
were already gone. Yes, during autumn I very much want
to be able to do a dozen square size 30 canvases, and as
far as I can see, I may very well manage to do it. I
have a terrible lucidity at moments, these days when
nature is so beautiful, I am not conscious of myself any
more, and the picture comes to me as in a dream. I am
rather afraid that this will mean a reaction and
depression when the bad weather comes, but I will try to
avoid it by studying this business of drawing figures
from memory.
I am always finding my best powers frustrated by the
lack of models, but I do not worry, I do landscape and
colour without fussing about where it will lead me. I
know this, that if I went and begged the models—-Now
do pose for me, I beseech you-—I should be behaving
like Zola's good painter in L'OEuvre Certainly
Manet did nothing like that. And Zola does not say in
his book how the people who saw nothing supernatural in
the painting behaved.
But we must not criticize Zola's book. I will send
you five of Bernard's drawings in the same style as the
others.
I wrote to him that, as Gauguin had not stated
definitely whether he would or would not come, I could
not offer him free hospitality, nor even hospitality to
be paid for in pictures and drawings. And that his food
and lodging here would in any case cost him a little
more than where he is now. Unless, indeed, we should
save something by having meals at the studio, with or
without Gauguin.
But that in any case I did not insist upon his
coming. But as I counted on spending the winter here,
his company would be very welcome to me, but first of
all he must make his calculations.
If Gauguin writes to you definitely one of these
days, either to you or to me, we can see again about
Bernard. I think that Bernard would find what he wants
here, but his father would really have to be a little
more generous toward him. Because Bernard is
painstaking. I do not like these drawings, though, as
well as the earlier ones.
At the beginning of next month there will again be
heaps of things coming down on me all at once, with the
frames and the stretchers that I am having made here for
the decoration of the house at the same time as the
month's rent and the charwoman.
But I can put off taking the frames and stretchers,
and in any case I feel sure I shall manage somehow.
The one thing I do hope is that by working hard I
shall have enough pictures at the end of a year to have
a show if I want to, or, if you wish it, at the time of
the exhibition. I am not set on it myself, but what I am
set on is showing you something that is not wholly bad.
I need not exhibit, but we would have work of mine
that would prove that I am neither a slacker nor a
good-for-nothing and I should be content. But the main
thing is, I think, that I must not take less trouble
than the painters who are working expressly for it.
Whether one exhibits or doesn't exhibit, one must
produce, and after that one has the right to smoke one's
pipe in peace.
But this year we will produce, and I am struggling to
make the new series better than the first two lots.
And among the studies there will be some, I hope,
which might be pictures. As for the "Starry
Sky," I'd still like very much to paint it, and
perhaps one of these nights I shall be in the same
plowed field if the sky is sparkling.
Tolstoi's book My Religion was published in
French as early as 1885, but I have never seen it in any
catalogue.
He does not seem to believe much in the resurrection
of either the body or the soul. Above all he seems not
to believe much in heaven—-he reasons so like a
nihilist-—but-—and here he rather parts company with
them-—he attaches great importance to doing what you
are doing well, since it is probably all you have.
But if he does not believe in resurrection, he seems
to believe in the equivalent-—the continuance of
life—-the progress of humanity—-the man and his work
almost infallibly continued by humanity in the next
generation, so the solution he gives should not be
ephemeral. Himself a nobleman, he turned laborer, he can
make boots, mend frying pans, guide the plow, and dig
the earth.
I can do none of that, but I can respect a human soul
vigorous enough to mold itself anew. Good God! we must
not complain of living in an age of nothing but slackers
when we are contemporaries of such specimens of poor
mortals as this, and even with no great faith in heaven
itself at that. He believes-—perhaps I have already
told you—-in a peaceful revolution, caused by the need
of love and religion which must appear among men as a
reaction to skepticism, and to that desperate suffering
that makes one despair.
Good-by for now. Your last letter was dated Friday.
It would be rare good luck if I got your next one as
early as Wednesday. But there is no hurry and it will be
all right whatever happens.
With a handshake,
Ever yours,
Vincent
