Letter From Vincent       

Arles
23 July 1890

Thanks for your letter of today and the 50-fr. note it contained.

Perhaps I'd rather write you about a lot of things, but to begin with, the desire to do so has completely left me, and then I feel it is useless.

I hope that you will have found those worthy gentlemen well disposed toward you.

As far as I'm concerned, I apply myself to my canvases with all my mind, I am trying to do as well as certain painters whom I have greatly loved and admired.

Now I'm back, what I think is that the painters themselves are fighting more and more with their backs to the wall.

Very well . . . but isn't the moment for trying to make them understand the usefulness of a union already gone? On the other hand a union, if it should take shape, would founder if the rest should have to founder. Then perhaps you would say that some dealers might combine on behalf of the impressionists, but that would be very short-lived. Altogether I think that personal initiative remains powerless, and having had experience of it, should we start again?

I noticed with pleasure that the Gauguin from Brittany which I saw was very beautiful, and I think that the others has done there must be so too.

Perhaps you will look at this sketch of Daubigny's garden. It is one of my most purposeful canvases. I add a sketch of some old thatched roofs and the sketches of two size 30 canvases representing vast fields of wheat after the rain. Hirschig asked me to beg you to be kind enough to order for him the list of paintings enclosed at the same colour merchant's whose paints you send me.

Tasset can send them to him direct, cash on delivery, but then he would have to give him the 20 per cent reduction, which would be simplest. Or else you can put them in with the package of paints for me, adding the bill, or telling me how much the total is, and then he would send the money to you. You cannot get anything good in the way of paints here.

I have reduced my own order to the barest minimum. Hirschig is beginning to understand things a little, it seems to me; he has done a portrait of the old schoolmaster, he has got him well--and then he has some landscape studies which are like the Konings at your place, almost the same in colour. They will come to be quite like these perhaps, or like the things by Voerman which we saw together.

Good-by now and good luck in business, etc., remember me to Jo and handshakes in thought.

Ever yours, Vincent