I want to be myself

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Antwerp, 28 December 1884

I think you value the truth enough for me to speak freely to you. For much the same reasons that if I paint peasant women I want them to be peasant women - so I want to get a whore's expression when I paint whores.

That is precisely why a whore's head by Rembrandt struck me so forcefully. Because he had caught that mysterious smile in such an infinitely beautiful way, with a gravity of his very own - the magician of magicians.

This is something new for me, and I want to achieve it at all costs. Manet has done it and Courbet - well, sacrebleu, I've the same ambition too, the more so as I've felt the infinite beauty of the study of women by the giants of literature - Zola, Daudet, de Goncourt, Balzac - in the very marrow of my bones.

Well, be that as it may - I want to get on at all costs, and - I want to be myself. I am feeling obstinate, too, and no longer care what people say about me or about my work.

Letter 442
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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