Charity for a poor fool

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Nuenen, c. 1 February 1884

I owe a great debt to you, however, and if I continued in exactly the same way, it would grow worse and worse. Now I want to make you a proposal for the future. Let me send you my work, and keep what you like for yourself, but I insist on considering the money I receive from you after March as money I have earned. And I quite approve of it being, in the beginning, less than I have received up to now. Toward the end of January or in the beginning of February I wrote you that, on my coming home, I was struck by the fact that the money I was in the habit of receiving from you was looked upon in the first place as something precarious, and secondly as what I will call charity for a poor fool. And I could establish the fact that this opinion was even communicated to people who had absolutely nothing to do with it - for instance, the respectable natives of this region - and I was asked at least three times in one week by absolute strangers, "Why is it that you never sell your work?" . . .

For my part, I say most decidedly that whatever you may think of what I have received from you up to now, I for my part consider it as a thing which I shall pay back if possible.

If I have some luck with my work, I shall most certainly pay it back. For the present, there can be no question of it, so we will not mention it.

Letter 360
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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