Arles
9 August 1888

My dear Theo,

Thank you very much for sending me the canvas and paints, which have just arrived. This time there was 9.80 fr. carriage to pay, so I shan't go and get them out till I get your next letter, having no cash at the moment. But we must make sure that Tasset, who generally pays the forwarding charges in advance and does not fail to note this prepayment on his bill, has omitted it this time. In the same way on the last consignment but one I paid 5.60 fr., so if forwarding charges were put down on the last bill but one, it would be an overcharge. If he had made two separate parcels (usually the cost of carriage is about 3 francs) we should only have had to pay 5.60 fr.

Provided that on the 10 meters of canvas I paint only masterpieces half a meter in size and sell them cash down and at exorbitant prices to distinguished connoisseurs of the Rue de la Paix, nothing will be easier than to make a fortune on this package.

I think it is likely that we are going to have great heat now without wind, since the wind has been blowing for six weeks. If so, it is a very good thing that I have a supply of paints and canvas, because I already have my eye on half a dozen subjects, especially that little cottage garden I sent you the drawing of yesterday. I am thinking about Gauguin a lot, and I am sure that in one way or another, whether it is he who comes here or I who go to him, he and I will like practically the same subjects, and I have no doubt that I could work at Pont-Aven, and on the other hand I am convinced that he would fall in love with the country down here. Well, by the end of the year, supposing he gives you one canvas a month, which would make altogether a dozen a year, he will have made a profit on it, not having incurred any debts and working steadily without interruption; certainly he won't have been the loser, as the money which he will have had from us would be largely made good by the economies that will be possible if we set up house in the studio instead of both of us living in cafes. Besides that, provided we keep on good terms and are determined not to quarrel, we shall be in a stronger position as far as reputation goes.

If we each live alone, it means living like madmen or criminals, in appearance at any rate, and also a little in reality. I am happier to feel my old strength returning than I ever thought I could be. I owe this largely to the people at the restaurant where I have my meals at the moment, who really are extraordinary. Certainly I have to pay for it, but it is something you don't find in Paris, really getting something to eat for your money. And I should very much like to see Gauguin here for a good long time.

What Gruby says about doing without women and eating well is true, for if your very brain and marrow are going into your work, it is pretty sensible not to exhaust yourself more than you must in love-making. But it is easier to put into practice in the country than in Paris.

The desire for women that you catch in Paris, isn't it rather the effect of that very enervation which Gruby is the sworn enemy of than a sign of vigor? So you feel this desire disappearing at the very moment you are yourself again. The root of the evil lies in the constitution itself, in the fatal weakening of families from generation to generation, and besides that, in one's unwholesome job and the dreary life in Paris. The root of the evil certainly lies there, and there's no cure for it.

I think that when the day comes for you to free yourself of those futile accounts and the absurdly complicated management at Goupil's, you would gain enormously in influence with the collectors; these complicated systems of management are the very devil, and I think that no brain exists, no temperament, whoever the man on the job is, that does not lose 50 per cent over it. Our uncle was quite right in what he said about it: much business with few employees and not little business with a lot of them. Unluckily for him he was himself caught in the wheels.

This job of working among people so as to make sales is a job that requires observation and coolness. But if you are forced to give too much attention to the books, you lose your poise.

I do want to know exactly how you are. Anyway, provided the impressionists produce good stuff end make friends, there is always the chance and the possibility of a more independent position for you later on. It's a pity that it cannot be from now on. No letter from Russell yet, but now that he has got the drawings, he is bound to reply. This restaurant where I am is very queer; it is gray all over; the floor is of gray bitumen like a street pavement, gray paper on the walls, green blinds always drawn, a big green curtain in front of the door which is always open, to stop the dust coming in. So it already has a Velasquez gray—like in the "Spinning Women"— and even the very narrow, very fierce ray of sunlight through a blind, like the one that slants across Velasquez's picture, is not wanting. Little tables of course, with white cloths. And behind this room in Velasquez gray you see the old kitchen, as clean as a Dutch kitchen, with floor of bright red bricks, green vegetables, oak chest, the kitchen range with shining brass things and blue and white tiles, and the big fire a clear orange. And then there are two women waitresses, both in gray, a little like that picture of Prevost's you have in your place-—you could compare it point for point.

In the kitchen, an old woman and a short, fat servant also in gray, black, white. I don't know if I describe it clearly enough for you, but it's here, and it's pure Velasquez.

In front of the restaurant there is a covered court, paved with red brick, and on the walls wild vine, convolvulus and creepers.

It is still the real old Provenal, whereas the other restaurants are so much modeled on Paris that even when they have no kind of concierge whatever, there's his I lodge just the same and the notice "Apply to the Concierge!"

It isn't all brilliant here. I saw a stable with four coffee-coloured cows, and a calf of the same colour. The stable bluish-white hung with spiders' webs, the cows very clean and very beautiful, and a great green curtain in the doorway to keep out flies and dust.

Gray again—Velasquez's gray.

There was such quiet in it—-the cafe-au-lait and tobacco colours of the cows' hides, with the soft bluish gray-white of the walls, the green hanging and the sparkling sunny golden-green outside to make a startling contrast. So you see there's something still to be done, quite different from anything I have done so far.

I must go to work. I saw another very quiet and lovely thing the other day, a girl with a coffee-tinted skin, if I remember correctly, ash-blonde hair, gray eyes, a print bodice of pale pink under which you could see the breasts, shapely, firm and small. This against the emerald leaves of some fig trees. A woman as simple as the herds, every line of her virgin.

It isn't altogether impossible that I shall get her to pose in the open air, and her mother too—-a gardener's wife—-earth colour, dressed just then in soiled yellow and faded blue.

The girl's coffee-tinted complexion was darker than the pink of her bodice.

The mother was amazing, the figure in dirty yellow and faded blue standing out in strong sunlight against a square of brilliant snow-white and citron-yellow flowers. A perfect Van der Meer of Delft, you see.

It's not a bad place, the South.

Ever yours, Vincent

521

Excerpts from Vincent Van Gogh's Letters 

Van Gogh to his brother Theo, 21 July 1882

"Art is jealous, she doesn't like taking second place an indisposition. Hence I shall humor her. ... What I want and have as my aim is infernally difficult to achieve, and yet I don't think I am raising my sights to high. I want to do drawings that touch some people."

Van Gogh to Theo, 20 August 1882

"What I find such a pleasant surprise about painting is that you can, with the same effect you put into a drawing, take something home with you that conveys the impression much better and is much more pleasing to look at. And at the same time more accurate, too. In a word, it is more rewarding than drawing. But it is absolutely essential to be able to draw the proportions correctly and to position the objects fairly confidently before you start. If you make a mistake here, it will all come to nothing."

Van Gogh to Theo, 3 September 1882

"I said to myself while I was doing it: don't let me leave before there is something of the autumnal evening in it, something mysterious, something important. However -- because this effect doesn't last -- I had to paint quickly, putting the figures in all at once, with a few forceful strokes of a firm brush. It had struck me how firmly the saplings were planted in the ground -- I started on them with the brush, but because the ground was already impasted, brush strokes simply vanished into it. Then I squeezed roots and trunks in from the tube and modelled them a little with the brush.
     Well, they are in there now, springing out of it, standing strongly rooted in it.
     In a way I am glad that I never learned painting. In all probability I would then have learned to ignore such effects as this. Now I can say to myself, this is just what I want. If it is impossible, it is impossible, but I'm going to try it even though I don't know how it ought to be done."

Van Gogh to Theo, 22 October 1882

[editor's note: Van Gogh was writing of figures versus landscape, looking at a Daumier drawing]

"What impressed me so much at the time was something so stout and manly in Daumier's conception, something that made me think it must be good to think and to feel like that and to overlook or ignore a multitude of things and to concentrate on what makes us sit up and think and what touches us as human beings more directly and personally than meadows or clouds."

"What is drawing? How does one come to it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How is one to get through that wall -- since pounding at it is of no use? In my opinion one has to undermine that wall, filing through it steadily and patiently."

Van Gogh to Anton van Rappard, March 1884

"I certainly forsee that as I gain more of what I shall call expressive force, people will say not less but even more than they do now that I have no technique." ... "Do you really think I don't care about technique or that I don't try for it? Oh, but I do, although only inasmuch as it allows me to say what I want to say (and if I cannot do that yet, or not yet perfectly, I am working hard to improve), but I don't give a damn whether my language matches that of the rhetoricians..."

Van Gogh to Theo, October 1884

"You don't know how paralysing that is, that stare of a blank canvas, which says to the painter: you can't do a thing." ... "Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of 'you can't' once and for all."

Van Gogh to Theo, c. 30 April 1885

"When weavers weave that cloth which I think they call cheviot, or those curious multicoloured Scottish tartan fabrics, then they try, as you know, to get strange broken colours and greys into the cheviot -- and to get the most vivid colours to balance each other in the multicoloured chequered cloth -- so that instead of the fabric being a jumble, the effect produit of the pattern looks harmonious from a distance.
     A grey woven from red, blue, yellow, off-white & black threads -- a blue broken by a green and an orange, red or yellow thread -- are quite unlike plain colours, that is, they are more vibrant, and primary colours seem hard, cold and lifeless beside them.
     Yet the weaver, or rather the designer, of the pattern or the colour combination does not always find it easy to make an exact estimate of the number of threads and their direction -- no more than it is easy to weave brush strokes into a harmonious whole."

Van Gogh to Theo, July 1885

"All academic figures are put together in the same way, and, let us admit, 'on ne peut mieux' -- impeccably -- faultlessly. You will have gathered what I am driving at -- they do not lead us to any new discoveries."
     "... a Parisian who has learned his drawing at the academy, will always convey the limbs and the structure of the body in the ame way -- sometimes charming, accurate in proportion and anatomical detail. But when Israls, or say, Daumier or Lhermitte, draw a figure, one gets much more of a sense of the shape of the body, and yet -- and that's the very reason I'm pleased to include Daumier - the proportions will sometimes be almost arbitrary, the anatomy and structure often anything but correct in the eyes of the academicians. But it will live. And Delacroix too, in particular."
     "... if one were to photograph a digger, he would certainly not be digging then. ... I long most of all to learn how to produce those very inaccuracies, those very aberrations, reworkings, transformations of reality, as may turn it into, well -- a lie if you like -- but truer than the literal truth."

Van Gogh to Theo, 3 September 1888

"...suffering as I am, I cannot do without something greater than myself, something which is my life -- the power to create.
     And if, deprived of the physical power, one tries to create thoughts instead of children, one is still very much part of humanity. And in my pictures I want to say something consoling, as music does. I want to paint men and women with a touch of the eternal, whose symbol was once the halo, which we try to convey by the very radiance and vibrancy of our colouring."

Arles
9 August 1888

My dear Theo,

Thank you very much for sending me the canvas and paints, which have just arrived. This time there was 9.80 fr. carriage to pay, so I shan't go and get them out till I get your next letter, having no cash at the moment. But we must make sure that Tasset, who generally pays the forwarding charges in advance and does not fail to note this prepayment on his bill, has omitted it this time. In the same way on the last consignment but one I paid 5.60 fr., so if forwarding charges were put down on the last bill but one, it would be an overcharge. If he had made two separate parcels (usually the cost of carriage is about 3 francs) we should only have had to pay 5.60 fr.

Provided that on the 10 meters of canvas I paint only masterpieces half a meter in size and sell them cash down and at exorbitant prices to distinguished connoisseurs of the Rue de la Paix, nothing will be easier than to make a fortune on this package.

I think it is likely that we are going to have great heat now without wind, since the wind has been blowing for six weeks. If so, it is a very good thing that I have a supply of paints and canvas, because I already have my eye on half a dozen subjects, especially that little cottage garden I sent you the drawing of yesterday. I am thinking about Gauguin a lot, and I am sure that in one way or another, whether it is he who comes here or I who go to him, he and I will like practically the same subjects, and I have no doubt that I could work at Pont-Aven, and on the other hand I am convinced that he would fall in love with the country down here. Well, by the end of the year, supposing he gives you one canvas a month, which would make altogether a dozen a year, he will have made a profit on it, not having incurred any debts and working steadily without interruption; certainly he won't have been the loser, as the money which he will have had from us would be largely made good by the economies that will be possible if we set up house in the studio instead of both of us living in cafes. Besides that, provided we keep on good terms and are determined not to quarrel, we shall be in a stronger position as far as reputation goes.

If we each live alone, it means living like madmen or criminals, in appearance at any rate, and also a little in reality. I am happier to feel my old strength returning than I ever thought I could be. I owe this largely to the people at the restaurant where I have my meals at the moment, who really are extraordinary. Certainly I have to pay for it, but it is something you don't find in Paris, really getting something to eat for your money. And I should very much like to see Gauguin here for a good long time.

What Gruby says about doing without women and eating well is true, for if your very brain and marrow are going into your work, it is pretty sensible not to exhaust yourself more than you must in love-making. But it is easier to put into practice in the country than in Paris.

The desire for women that you catch in Paris, isn't it rather the effect of that very enervation which Gruby is the sworn enemy of than a sign of vigor? So you feel this desire disappearing at the very moment you are yourself again. The root of the evil lies in the constitution itself, in the fatal weakening of families from generation to generation, and besides that, in one's unwholesome job and the dreary life in Paris. The root of the evil certainly lies there, and there's no cure for it.

I think that when the day comes for you to free yourself of those futile accounts and the absurdly complicated management at Goupil's, you would gain enormously in influence with the collectors; these complicated systems of management are the very devil, and I think that no brain exists, no temperament, whoever the man on the job is, that does not lose 50 per cent over it. Our uncle was quite right in what he said about it: much business with few employees and not little business with a lot of them. Unluckily for him he was himself caught in the wheels.

This job of working among people so as to make sales is a job that requires observation and coolness. But if you are forced to give too much attention to the books, you lose your poise.

I do want to know exactly how you are. Anyway, provided the impressionists produce good stuff end make friends, there is always the chance and the possibility of a more independent position for you later on. It's a pity that it cannot be from now on. No letter from Russell yet, but now that he has got the drawings, he is bound to reply. This restaurant where I am is very queer; it is gray all over; the floor is of gray bitumen like a street pavement, gray paper on the walls, green blinds always drawn, a big green curtain in front of the door which is always open, to stop the dust coming in. So it already has a Velasquez gray—like in the "Spinning Women"— and even the very narrow, very fierce ray of sunlight through a blind, like the one that slants across Velasquez's picture, is not wanting. Little tables of course, with white cloths. And behind this room in Velasquez gray you see the old kitchen, as clean as a Dutch kitchen, with floor of bright red bricks, green vegetables, oak chest, the kitchen range with shining brass things and blue and white tiles, and the big fire a clear orange. And then there are two women waitresses, both in gray, a little like that picture of Prevost's you have in your place-—you could compare it point for point.

In the kitchen, an old woman and a short, fat servant also in gray, black, white. I don't know if I describe it clearly enough for you, but it's here, and it's pure Velasquez.

In front of the restaurant there is a covered court, paved with red brick, and on the walls wild vine, convolvulus and creepers.

It is still the real old Provenal, whereas the other restaurants are so much modeled on Paris that even when they have no kind of concierge whatever, there's his I lodge just the same and the notice "Apply to the Concierge!"

It isn't all brilliant here. I saw a stable with four coffee-coloured cows, and a calf of the same colour. The stable bluish-white hung with spiders' webs, the cows very clean and very beautiful, and a great green curtain in the doorway to keep out flies and dust.

Gray again—Velasquez's gray.

There was such quiet in it—-the cafe-au-lait and tobacco colours of the cows' hides, with the soft bluish gray-white of the walls, the green hanging and the sparkling sunny golden-green outside to make a startling contrast. So you see there's something still to be done, quite different from anything I have done so far.

I must go to work. I saw another very quiet and lovely thing the other day, a girl with a coffee-tinted skin, if I remember correctly, ash-blonde hair, gray eyes, a print bodice of pale pink under which you could see the breasts, shapely, firm and small. This against the emerald leaves of some fig trees. A woman as simple as the herds, every line of her virgin.

It isn't altogether impossible that I shall get her to pose in the open air, and her mother too—-a gardener's wife—-earth colour, dressed just then in soiled yellow and faded blue.

The girl's coffee-tinted complexion was darker than the pink of her bodice.

The mother was amazing, the figure in dirty yellow and faded blue standing out in strong sunlight against a square of brilliant snow-white and citron-yellow flowers. A perfect Van der Meer of Delft, you see.

It's not a bad place, the South.

Ever yours, Vincent

521

Excerpts from Vincent Van Gogh's Letters 

Van Gogh to his brother Theo, 21 July 1882

"Art is jealous, she doesn't like taking second place an indisposition. Hence I shall humor her. ... What I want and have as my aim is infernally difficult to achieve, and yet I don't think I am raising my sights to high. I want to do drawings that touch some people."

Van Gogh to Theo, 20 August 1882

"What I find such a pleasant surprise about painting is that you can, with the same effect you put into a drawing, take something home with you that conveys the impression much better and is much more pleasing to look at. And at the same time more accurate, too. In a word, it is more rewarding than drawing. But it is absolutely essential to be able to draw the proportions correctly and to position the objects fairly confidently before you start. If you make a mistake here, it will all come to nothing."

Van Gogh to Theo, 3 September 1882

"I said to myself while I was doing it: don't let me leave before there is something of the autumnal evening in it, something mysterious, something important. However -- because this effect doesn't last -- I had to paint quickly, putting the figures in all at once, with a few forceful strokes of a firm brush. It had struck me how firmly the saplings were planted in the ground -- I started on them with the brush, but because the ground was already impasted, brush strokes simply vanished into it. Then I squeezed roots and trunks in from the tube and modelled them a little with the brush.
     Well, they are in there now, springing out of it, standing strongly rooted in it.
     In a way I am glad that I never learned painting. In all probability I would then have learned to ignore such effects as this. Now I can say to myself, this is just what I want. If it is impossible, it is impossible, but I'm going to try it even though I don't know how it ought to be done."

Van Gogh to Theo, 22 October 1882

[editor's note: Van Gogh was writing of figures versus landscape, looking at a Daumier drawing]

"What impressed me so much at the time was something so stout and manly in Daumier's conception, something that made me think it must be good to think and to feel like that and to overlook or ignore a multitude of things and to concentrate on what makes us sit up and think and what touches us as human beings more directly and personally than meadows or clouds."

"What is drawing? How does one come to it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How is one to get through that wall -- since pounding at it is of no use? In my opinion one has to undermine that wall, filing through it steadily and patiently."

Van Gogh to Anton van Rappard, March 1884

"I certainly forsee that as I gain more of what I shall call expressive force, people will say not less but even more than they do now that I have no technique." ... "Do you really think I don't care about technique or that I don't try for it? Oh, but I do, although only inasmuch as it allows me to say what I want to say (and if I cannot do that yet, or not yet perfectly, I am working hard to improve), but I don't give a damn whether my language matches that of the rhetoricians..."

Van Gogh to Theo, October 1884

"You don't know how paralysing that is, that stare of a blank canvas, which says to the painter: you can't do a thing." ... "Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of 'you can't' once and for all."

Van Gogh to Theo, c. 30 April 1885

"When weavers weave that cloth which I think they call cheviot, or those curious multicoloured Scottish tartan fabrics, then they try, as you know, to get strange broken colours and greys into the cheviot -- and to get the most vivid colours to balance each other in the multicoloured chequered cloth -- so that instead of the fabric being a jumble, the effect produit of the pattern looks harmonious from a distance.
     A grey woven from red, blue, yellow, off-white & black threads -- a blue broken by a green and an orange, red or yellow thread -- are quite unlike plain colours, that is, they are more vibrant, and primary colours seem hard, cold and lifeless beside them.
     Yet the weaver, or rather the designer, of the pattern or the colour combination does not always find it easy to make an exact estimate of the number of threads and their direction -- no more than it is easy to weave brush strokes into a harmonious whole."

Van Gogh to Theo, July 1885

"All academic figures are put together in the same way, and, let us admit, 'on ne peut mieux' -- impeccably -- faultlessly. You will have gathered what I am driving at -- they do not lead us to any new discoveries."
     "... a Parisian who has learned his drawing at the academy, will always convey the limbs and the structure of the body in the ame way -- sometimes charming, accurate in proportion and anatomical detail. But when Israls, or say, Daumier or Lhermitte, draw a figure, one gets much more of a sense of the shape of the body, and yet -- and that's the very reason I'm pleased to include Daumier - the proportions will sometimes be almost arbitrary, the anatomy and structure often anything but correct in the eyes of the academicians. But it will live. And Delacroix too, in particular."
     "... if one were to photograph a digger, he would certainly not be digging then. ... I long most of all to learn how to produce those very inaccuracies, those very aberrations, reworkings, transformations of reality, as may turn it into, well -- a lie if you like -- but truer than the literal truth."

Van Gogh to Theo, 3 September 1888

"...suffering as I am, I cannot do without something greater than myself, something which is my life -- the power to create.
     And if, deprived of the physical power, one tries to create thoughts instead of children, one is still very much part of humanity. And in my pictures I want to say something consoling, as music does. I want to paint men and women with a touch of the eternal, whose symbol was once the halo, which we try to convey by the very radiance and vibrancy of our colouring."

Arles
9 August 1888

My dear Theo,

Thank you very much for sending me the canvas and paints, which have just arrived. This time there was 9.80 fr. carriage to pay, so I shan't go and get them out till I get your next letter, having no cash at the moment. But we must make sure that Tasset, who generally pays the forwarding charges in advance and does not fail to note this prepayment on his bill, has omitted it this time. In the same way on the last consignment but one I paid 5.60 fr., so if forwarding charges were put down on the last bill but one, it would be an overcharge. If he had made two separate parcels (usually the cost of carriage is about 3 francs) we should only have had to pay 5.60 fr.

Provided that on the 10 meters of canvas I paint only masterpieces half a meter in size and sell them cash down and at exorbitant prices to distinguished connoisseurs of the Rue de la Paix, nothing will be easier than to make a fortune on this package.

I think it is likely that we are going to have great heat now without wind, since the wind has been blowing for six weeks. If so, it is a very good thing that I have a supply of paints and canvas, because I already have my eye on half a dozen subjects, especially that little cottage garden I sent you the drawing of yesterday. I am thinking about Gauguin a lot, and I am sure that in one way or another, whether it is he who comes here or I who go to him, he and I will like practically the same subjects, and I have no doubt that I could work at Pont-Aven, and on the other hand I am convinced that he would fall in love with the country down here. Well, by the end of the year, supposing he gives you one canvas a month, which would make altogether a dozen a year, he will have made a profit on it, not having incurred any debts and working steadily without interruption; certainly he won't have been the loser, as the money which he will have had from us would be largely made good by the economies that will be possible if we set up house in the studio instead of both of us living in cafes. Besides that, provided we keep on good terms and are determined not to quarrel, we shall be in a stronger position as far as reputation goes.

If we each live alone, it means living like madmen or criminals, in appearance at any rate, and also a little in reality. I am happier to feel my old strength returning than I ever thought I could be. I owe this largely to the people at the restaurant where I have my meals at the moment, who really are extraordinary. Certainly I have to pay for it, but it is something you don't find in Paris, really getting something to eat for your money. And I should very much like to see Gauguin here for a good long time.

What Gruby says about doing without women and eating well is true, for if your very brain and marrow are going into your work, it is pretty sensible not to exhaust yourself more than you must in love-making. But it is easier to put into practice in the country than in Paris.

The desire for women that you catch in Paris, isn't it rather the effect of that very enervation which Gruby is the sworn enemy of than a sign of vigor? So you feel this desire disappearing at the very moment you are yourself again. The root of the evil lies in the constitution itself, in the fatal weakening of families from generation to generation, and besides that, in one's unwholesome job and the dreary life in Paris. The root of the evil certainly lies there, and there's no cure for it.

I think that when the day comes for you to free yourself of those futile accounts and the absurdly complicated management at Goupil's, you would gain enormously in influence with the collectors; these complicated systems of management are the very devil, and I think that no brain exists, no temperament, whoever the man on the job is, that does not lose 50 per cent over it. Our uncle was quite right in what he said about it: much business with few employees and not little business with a lot of them. Unluckily for him he was himself caught in the wheels.

This job of working among people so as to make sales is a job that requires observation and coolness. But if you are forced to give too much attention to the books, you lose your poise.

I do want to know exactly how you are. Anyway, provided the impressionists produce good stuff end make friends, there is always the chance and the possibility of a more independent position for you later on. It's a pity that it cannot be from now on. No letter from Russell yet, but now that he has got the drawings, he is bound to reply. This restaurant where I am is very queer; it is gray all over; the floor is of gray bitumen like a street pavement, gray paper on the walls, green blinds always drawn, a big green curtain in front of the door which is always open, to stop the dust coming in. So it already has a Velasquez gray—like in the "Spinning Women"— and even the very narrow, very fierce ray of sunlight through a blind, like the one that slants across Velasquez's picture, is not wanting. Little tables of course, with white cloths. And behind this room in Velasquez gray you see the old kitchen, as clean as a Dutch kitchen, with floor of bright red bricks, green vegetables, oak chest, the kitchen range with shining brass things and blue and white tiles, and the big fire a clear orange. And then there are two women waitresses, both in gray, a little like that picture of Prevost's you have in your place-—you could compare it point for point.

In the kitchen, an old woman and a short, fat servant also in gray, black, white. I don't know if I describe it clearly enough for you, but it's here, and it's pure Velasquez.

In front of the restaurant there is a covered court, paved with red brick, and on the walls wild vine, convolvulus and creepers.

It is still the real old Provenal, whereas the other restaurants are so much modeled on Paris that even when they have no kind of concierge whatever, there's his I lodge just the same and the notice "Apply to the Concierge!"

It isn't all brilliant here. I saw a stable with four coffee-coloured cows, and a calf of the same colour. The stable bluish-white hung with spiders' webs, the cows very clean and very beautiful, and a great green curtain in the doorway to keep out flies and dust.

Gray again—Velasquez's gray.

There was such quiet in it—-the cafe-au-lait and tobacco colours of the cows' hides, with the soft bluish gray-white of the walls, the green hanging and the sparkling sunny golden-green outside to make a startling contrast. So you see there's something still to be done, quite different from anything I have done so far.

I must go to work. I saw another very quiet and lovely thing the other day, a girl with a coffee-tinted skin, if I remember correctly, ash-blonde hair, gray eyes, a print bodice of pale pink under which you could see the breasts, shapely, firm and small. This against the emerald leaves of some fig trees. A woman as simple as the herds, every line of her virgin.

It isn't altogether impossible that I shall get her to pose in the open air, and her mother too—-a gardener's wife—-earth colour, dressed just then in soiled yellow and faded blue.

The girl's coffee-tinted complexion was darker than the pink of her bodice.

The mother was amazing, the figure in dirty yellow and faded blue standing out in strong sunlight against a square of brilliant snow-white and citron-yellow flowers. A perfect Van der Meer of Delft, you see.

It's not a bad place, the South.

Ever yours, Vincent

521

Excerpts from Vincent Van Gogh's Letters 

Van Gogh to his brother Theo, 21 July 1882

"Art is jealous, she doesn't like taking second place an indisposition. Hence I shall humor her. ... What I want and have as my aim is infernally difficult to achieve, and yet I don't think I am raising my sights to high. I want to do drawings that touch some people."

Van Gogh to Theo, 20 August 1882

"What I find such a pleasant surprise about painting is that you can, with the same effect you put into a drawing, take something home with you that conveys the impression much better and is much more pleasing to look at. And at the same time more accurate, too. In a word, it is more rewarding than drawing. But it is absolutely essential to be able to draw the proportions correctly and to position the objects fairly confidently before you start. If you make a mistake here, it will all come to nothing."

Van Gogh to Theo, 3 September 1882

"I said to myself while I was doing it: don't let me leave before there is something of the autumnal evening in it, something mysterious, something important. However -- because this effect doesn't last -- I had to paint quickly, putting the figures in all at once, with a few forceful strokes of a firm brush. It had struck me how firmly the saplings were planted in the ground -- I started on them with the brush, but because the ground was already impasted, brush strokes simply vanished into it. Then I squeezed roots and trunks in from the tube and modelled them a little with the brush.
     Well, they are in there now, springing out of it, standing strongly rooted in it.
     In a way I am glad that I never learned painting. In all probability I would then have learned to ignore such effects as this. Now I can say to myself, this is just what I want. If it is impossible, it is impossible, but I'm going to try it even though I don't know how it ought to be done."

Van Gogh to Theo, 22 October 1882

[editor's note: Van Gogh was writing of figures versus landscape, looking at a Daumier drawing]

"What impressed me so much at the time was something so stout and manly in Daumier's conception, something that made me think it must be good to think and to feel like that and to overlook or ignore a multitude of things and to concentrate on what makes us sit up and think and what touches us as human beings more directly and personally than meadows or clouds."

"What is drawing? How does one come to it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How is one to get through that wall -- since pounding at it is of no use? In my opinion one has to undermine that wall, filing through it steadily and patiently."

Van Gogh to Anton van Rappard, March 1884

"I certainly forsee that as I gain more of what I shall call expressive force, people will say not less but even more than they do now that I have no technique." ... "Do you really think I don't care about technique or that I don't try for it? Oh, but I do, although only inasmuch as it allows me to say what I want to say (and if I cannot do that yet, or not yet perfectly, I am working hard to improve), but I don't give a damn whether my language matches that of the rhetoricians..."

Van Gogh to Theo, October 1884

"You don't know how paralysing that is, that stare of a blank canvas, which says to the painter: you can't do a thing." ... "Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of 'you can't' once and for all."

Van Gogh to Theo, c. 30 April 1885

"When weavers weave that cloth which I think they call cheviot, or those curious multicoloured Scottish tartan fabrics, then they try, as you know, to get strange broken colours and greys into the cheviot -- and to get the most vivid colours to balance each other in the multicoloured chequered cloth -- so that instead of the fabric being a jumble, the effect produit of the pattern looks harmonious from a distance.
     A grey woven from red, blue, yellow, off-white & black threads -- a blue broken by a green and an orange, red or yellow thread -- are quite unlike plain colours, that is, they are more vibrant, and primary colours seem hard, cold and lifeless beside them.
     Yet the weaver, or rather the designer, of the pattern or the colour combination does not always find it easy to make an exact estimate of the number of threads and their direction -- no more than it is easy to weave brush strokes into a harmonious whole."

Van Gogh to Theo, July 1885

"All academic figures are put together in the same way, and, let us admit, 'on ne peut mieux' -- impeccably -- faultlessly. You will have gathered what I am driving at -- they do not lead us to any new discoveries."
     "... a Parisian who has learned his drawing at the academy, will always convey the limbs and the structure of the body in the ame way -- sometimes charming, accurate in proportion and anatomical detail. But when Israls, or say, Daumier or Lhermitte, draw a figure, one gets much more of a sense of the shape of the body, and yet -- and that's the very reason I'm pleased to include Daumier - the proportions will sometimes be almost arbitrary, the anatomy and structure often anything but correct in the eyes of the academicians. But it will live. And Delacroix too, in particular."
     "... if one were to photograph a digger, he would certainly not be digging then. ... I long most of all to learn how to produce those very inaccuracies, those very aberrations, reworkings, transformations of reality, as may turn it into, well -- a lie if you like -- but truer than the literal truth."

Van Gogh to Theo, 3 September 1888

"...suffering as I am, I cannot do without something greater than myself, something which is my life -- the power to create.
     And if, deprived of the physical power, one tries to create thoughts instead of children, one is still very much part of humanity. And in my pictures I want to say something consoling, as music does. I want to paint men and women with a touch of the eternal, whose symbol was once the halo, which we try to convey by the very radiance and vibrancy of our colouring."