What days these are

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 17 September 1888

What days these are, not for what happens in them, but I feel so strongly that both you and I are neither in our decadence nor done for yet, nor shall we ever be.

But you know, I do not contradict the critics who will say that my pictures are not - finished.

Letter 539
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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I only ask for time to study

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 17 September 1888

It is true that in impressionism I see the resurrection of Eugene Delacroix, but the interpretations of it are so divergent and in a way so irreconcilable that it will not be impressionism which will give us the final doctrine.

That is why I myself remain among the impressionists, because it professes nothing, and binds you to nothing, and as one of the comrades I need not declare my formula.

Good Lord, how you have to mess about in life. I only ask for time to study, and do you yourself really ask for anything but that? But I think that you also, like me, must long to have the quiet necessary to study without prejudice.

And I am so afraid of taking it away from you by my demands for money.

Letter 539
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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Ambition and fame

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 17 September 1888

Oh - the exhibition at the Revue Independante - good, but once and for all, we are too good smokers to put the wrong end of the cigar into our mouths. We shall be forced to try to sell in order to do the things we sell over again, and better. That's because we are in a bad trade, but let's try something different from the fun of the fair that's the pest of the house.

This afternoon I had a select public - four or five hooligans and a dozen street arabs, who were especially interested in seeing the paint come out of the tubes. Well, that same public - it meant fame, or rather I mean to laugh at ambition and fame, as I do at those street arabs, and at the loafers on the banks of the Rhone and in the Rue du Pont d'Arles.

Letter 539
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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The painter never says anything

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 17 September 1888

Some time ago I read an article on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Giotto and Botticelli. Good Lord! it did make an impression on me reading the letters of those men. . . .

Giotto moved me most - always in pain, and always full of kindness and enthusiasm, as though he were already living in a different world from ours.

And besides, Giotto is extraordinary. I understand him better than the poets Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.

I always think that poetry is more terrible than painting, though painting is a dirtier and a much more worrying job. And then the painter never says anything, he holds his tongue, and I like that too.

Letter 539
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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I am so happy

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 17 September 1888

As long as you can manage to bear the burden of all this paint and canvas and all the money that I spend, keep on sending it. Because the stuff I am getting ready will be better than the last batch, and I think we shall make something on it instead of losing. If only I can manage to do a coherent whole. That is what I am trying to do. . . .

I am so happy in the house and in my work that I even dare to think that this happiness will not always be limited to one, but that you will have a share in it and good luck to go with it.

Letter 539
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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Never thinking of a single rule

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 17 September 1888

I wrote to you already, early this morning, then I went away to go on with a picture of a garden in the sunshine. Then I brought it back and went out again with a blank canvas, and that also is finished. And now I want to write you again.

Because I have never had such a chance, nature here being so extraordinarily beautiful. Everywhere and all over the vault of heaven is a marvelous blue, and the sun sheds a radiance of pale sulfur, and it is soft and as lovely as the combination of heavenly blues and yellows in a Van der Meer of Delft. I cannot paint it as beautifully as that, but it absorbs me so much that I let myself go, never thinking of a single rule. . . .

I am beginning to feel that I am quite a different creature from what I was when I came here. I have no doubts, no hesitation in attacking things, and this may increase.

Letter 539
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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An artist's house

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 16 September 1888

I expect to go to live in the house tomorrow, but as I have bought some more things and have still more to add to them, and I am only speaking of what is strictly necessary - you must again send me 100 francs instead of 50.

I am convinced that in the end we shall do well by furnishing the studio. And I already feel freer in my work, and less harried by unnecessary annoyances than I have been.

Without changing anything in this house either now or afterward, I want all the same to make it an artist's house through the decorations. That will come.

Letter 537
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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My revenge

Vincent van Gogh to Wilhelmina van Gogh, from Arles, 16 September 1888

My dear sister, it is my belief that it is actually one's duty to paint the rich and magnificent aspects of nature. We need gaiety and happiness, hope and love.

The more ugly, old, mean, ill, poor I get, the more I want to take my revenge by producing a brilliant color, well arranged, resplendent. Jewelers too get old and ugly before they learn how to arrange precious stones properly. And arranging the colors in a painting in order to make them vibrate and to enhance their value by their contrasts is something like arranging jewels properly or designing costumes. You will see that by making a habit of looking at Japanese pictures you will love to make up bouquets and to do things with flowers all the more.

Letter W07
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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Created from day to day

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 12 September 1888

Ideas for my work are coming to me in swarms, so that though I'm alone, I have no time to think or to feel, I go on painting like a steam engine. I think there will hardly ever be a standstill again. And my view is that you will never find a live studio ready-made, but that it is created from day to day by patient work and going on and on in one place.

Letter 535
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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Common cause

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 11 September 1888

If we had a common purse and make common cause, I think myself that after a few years' working in common we should all profit.

Because if the combination were arranged this way, you yourself would feel, I do not say happier, but a better artist, and more productive than with me alone.

Both Gauguin and I will feel strongly that we must succeed because the honor of all three of us is at stake, and that each is not working for himself alone. That's how it looks to me. And I believe that even if collapse is in the nature of things and bound to come, we must still act in the same way. But more and more I reject the idea of this collapse, when I think of the serenity you see on the faces in the Frans Halses and the Rembrandts, such as the portrait of old Six, or his self-portrait, or those Frans Halses in Haarlem that we know so well: pictures of old men and women.

It is better to have serenity than to be too timorous.

Letter 536
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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Bright sunshine or a starry sky

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 9 September 1888

Someday or other you shall have a picture of the little house itself in bright sunshine, or else with the window lit up, and a starry sky.

Henceforth you can feel that you have your country house in Arles. For I am very anxious to arrange it so that you will be pleased with it, and so that it will be a studio in an absolutely individual style; that way, if say a year from now you come here and to Marseilles for your vacation, it will be ready then, and the house, as I intend it, will be full of pictures from top to bottom.

The room you will have then, or Gauguin if he comes, will have white walls with a decoration of great yellow sunflowers.

In the morning, when you open the window, you see the green of the gardens and the rising sun, and the road into the town.

Letter 534
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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Color to suggest some emotion

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 8 September 1888

It is color not locally true from the point of view of the trompe d'oeil realist, but color to suggest some emotion of an ardent temperament.

When Paul Mantz saw at the exhibition the violent and inspired sketch by Delacroix that we saw at the Champs Elysees - the "Bark of Christ" - he turned away from it, exclaiming in his article: "I did not know that one could be so terrible with a little blue and green."

Hokusai wrings the same cry from you, but he does it by his line, his drawing; as you say in your letter - "the waves are claws and the ship is caught in them, you feel it."

Well, if you make the color exact or the drawing exact, it won't give you sensations like that.

Letter 533
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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Thirty-five

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 8 September 1888

But whether Gauguin comes or not, if I were to get some furniture, henceforth I should have, whether in a good spot or a bad one is another matter, a pied à terre, a home of my own, which frees the mind from the dismalness of finding oneself in the streets. That is nothing when you are an adventurer of twenty, but it is bad when you have turned thirty-five.

Letter 533
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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Partnership

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 4 September 1888

As for Gauguin, perhaps he is letting himself drift with the current, not thinking of the future. And perhaps he thinks that I shall always be here and that he has our word. But it is not too late to withdraw, and really I am strongly tempted to do so, because failing him, I should naturally think of another partnership, whereas at present we are bound. All the same, if Gauguin can find enough to live on, have we the right to bother him? . . .

He and I both are really behaving like fools. Is it true or not? Certainly the truth is still more serious. If it is not necessary for him to alter his way of life, he has either a lot more money than I or considerably better luck. Being ruined costs more than being successful, and certainly it is our own fault if we do not have more peace.

Letter 532
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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The urgent necessity of helping

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 4 September 1888

Neither Gauguin nor Bernard has written again. I think that Gauguin doesn't care a damn about it, because it isn't going to be done at once, and I for my part, seeing that Gauguin has managed to muddle along by himself for six months, am ceasing to believe in the urgent necessity of helping him.

So let's be prudent. If it does not suit him here, he may be forever reproaching me with, "Why did you bring me to this rotten country?" And I don't want any of that.

Naturally we can still remain friends with Gauguin but I see only too clearly that his mind is elsewhere. So I say, let's behave as if he were not there; then if he comes, so much the better - if he doesn't, so much the worse.

Letter 532
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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A real painter's career

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 4 September 1888

I am writing you as I wait for Bock, the Belgian, who is leaving early this morning. He is already thirty-three; he has spent ten years in Paris and in traveling; his sister is older than he is. Although so far he hasn't been up to much as a painter, if on his return to his own country he can at last shake off his slackness, brought about by the enervating influence of Paris and hanging about with slackers, he will be fairly on the threshold of a real painter's career.

Letter 532
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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In hope of making a discovery

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 3 September 1888

So I am always between two currents of thought, first the material difficulties, turning round and round to make a living; and second, the study of color. I am always in hope of making a discovery there, to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone against a somber background.

To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is nothing in that of trompe d'oeil realism, but isn't it something that actually exists?

Letter 531
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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Something of the eternal

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 3 September 1888

Oh, my dear boy, sometimes I know so well what I want. I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life - the power to create.

And if, defrauded of the power to create physically, a man tries to create thoughts in place of children, he is still very much part of humanity.

And in a picture I want to say something comforting as music is comforting. I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to confer by the actual radiance and vibration of our colorings.

Ah! portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.

Letter 531
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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Fame

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 3 September 1888

I have finished L'Immortel by Daudet. I rather like the saying of the sculptor Vedrine, that to achieve fame is something like ramming the lighted end of your cigar into your mouth when you are smoking.

Letter 531
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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The emptiness of the civilized world

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 1 September 1888

At the moment I am reading Daudet's L'Immortel, which I find very beautiful, but not particularly heartening. I think I shall have to read a book on elephant hunting, or of absolute lies about adventures which are categorically impossible, like Gustave Aimard for instance, to get rid of the heartbreak that L'Immortel is going to leave me with. It is exactly because it is so beautiful and so true that it makes you feel the emptiness of the civilized world.

Letter 530
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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The cost of colors

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 1 September 1888

It is a constant grief to me that comparatively I can do so little with the money I spend.

My life is disturbed and restless, but then if I make a change and move about much, I shall perhaps only make things worse. . . .

Often now I hesitate before planning a picture because of what the colors would cost us. You see all the same this is rather a pity, for the simple reason that we may have the power to work today, but we do not know if it will hold out till tomorrow.

Letter 530
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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Preparing a new road

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Arles, 1 September 1888

I feel that even so late in the day I could be a very different painter if I were capable of getting my own way with the models, but I also feel the possibility of going to seed and of seeing the day of one's capacity for artistic creation pass, just as a man loses his virility in the course of his life.

That is inevitable, and naturally in this as in the other, the one thing to do is to be of good heart and strike while the iron is hot.

And I often get downhearted. But Gauguin and so many others are in exactly the same position, and above all we must seek the remedy within ourselves, in good will and patience, and at the same time struggle to be something more than mediocrities. Perhaps we shall be preparing a new road while we do this.

Letter 530
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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By heart

Vincent van Gogh to Anthon van Rappard, from Nuenen, September 1885

Then I read somewhere else, "When Delacroix paints - it's like a lion devouring a piece of meat." . . . .

Another thing about Delacroix. He had a discussion with a friend about the question of working absolutely after nature, and he said on this occasion that one must get one's studies from nature but that the ultimate picture ought to be made from memory. That friend was walking with him on the boulevard when they were having this discussion - which had already become pretty vehement. When they parted company, the other one still wasn't entirely convinced. Delacroix let him toddle on for a bit after he took his leave, and then (using his two hands as a speaking trumpet) he roared after him in a lusty voice, to the consternation of the respectable citizens passing by, "By heart! By heart!"

Letter R58
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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Even at the risk of my own life

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Nuenen, September 1885

But tonight I am much too occupied with Lhermitte's drawings to go on writing about other things. When I think of Millet or of Lhermitte, I find modern art as great as Michelangelo and Rembrandt - ancient art is infinite, modern art infinite too - the ancient masters are geniuses - the modern ones are geniuses too. A person like Chenavard does not think so perhaps. But I, for my part, am convinced that in this respect one can have faith in modern art.

The fact that I have a definite belief about art makes me sure of what I want in my own work, and I shall try to reach it even at the risk of my own life.

Letter 423
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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"The excellent always escapes them"

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Nuenen, September 1884

Just listen, Theo, as to that barricade, you know there was a time in my life when I also stood with the Guizots, etc.

But as soon as I had enough of it, you know how I turned away with energy and persistence.

The younger people now do not want me, however; all right, I don't care; as men, and as painters, I like the generation of about '48 better than those of '84; but from those of '48, not the Guizots, but the revolutionaries, Michelet - and also the peasant painters of Barbizon. . . .

I believe that Millet and Daumier were ignored by practically all art dealers. Once an art lover said of the way the dealers acted with Corot's studies the excellent always escapes them. And this remark is shrewd.

Letter 380
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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A certain barricade

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Nuenen, September 1884

I always regret, Theo, that I am standing on one side of a certain barricade, you on the other, which barricade is not actually visible any more as a structure of paving stones, but which certainly does exist socially, and will continue to do so.

In that lithograph by Daumier or Lemud, whichever it may be, the principal subject is a person whose story I remember.

There were two brothers, and they were standing on the same side, and both were killed one after the other, for the same cause.

That might have occurred in our case, but now I am almost sure it will never happen. I, for my part, know well enough that the future will always remain very difficult for me, and I am almost sure that in the future I shall never be what people call prosperous.

Letter 380
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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I am almost paralyzed

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Nuenen, September 1884

I intended to have twelve photographs taken - a series of Brabant scenes, including the six I am making for Hermans.

I intended to send them to some illustrated papers, to try to get some work, or at least to become known. . . .

However, I will have another photo taken of the weavers in carte-de-visite size only, because being so far away from the illustrated papers here, I must find a means to get connections in another way than by words. . . .

Recently I have been working very hard; I believe, what with other emotions, I have even overworked myself. For I am in a melancholy mood, and all these things have combined to upset me in such a way that there are many days when I am almost paralyzed.

I cannot eat, and I cannot sleep - that is to say, not enough, and that makes one weak.

Letter 380
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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Be daring like a young man

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Nuenen, September 1884

If only a number of Mourets would come forward, who would buy and sell in a way different from the old routine, it would be excellent - then there would be more and more work to do. But if no Mourets came forward, then the trade may undergo a complete change because the painters themselves might put it on a new basis by starting permanent exhibitions without the old intermediary. I so much wish you knew and felt how young you are still, if only you would act and be daring like a young man.

If you are no artist in painting then try to be an artist as a dealer like Mouret. As for myself - though at present I am on ne peut plus hard up - yet I feel that within a few years I shall blithely dare to undertake running up much bigger bills for colors and other things. I want to have a lot of work to do - believe me - and I don't intend to be bored - do a great deal or drop dead.

Letter 379
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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An underhand expedient

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Nuenen, September 1884

It was mere chance that recently I happened to be asked to do a drawing or a painted study for 20 guilders. I acceded to this request, but seeing that I suspected (a suspicion which, on investigation, proved to be well founded) that Margot Begemann was behind it all, and that indirectly she wanted to make me a present of the money, I most resolutely refused to accept payment, but not to do the drawing, which I sent. It is no easy matter, when one is sorely pressed for money, to refuse it. But it would have been a pons asinorum, and underhand expedient - so - instead of such underhand expedients - is there nothing better to do? I am convinced of it. For your sake as well as mine, and for the sake of many others, I wish that we had Mourets in the art trade, who would know how to create a new and larger buying public.

Letter 379
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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I, as revolutionist or rebel

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Nuenen, September 1884

I could not phrase my last letter differently than I did. But I want you to know that it always strikes me as being a difference between you and me imposed by fate, rather than one for which we ourselves are to blame. . . .

Now Quinet or Michelet, for instance, or Victor Hugo (later), was the difference between them and their opponents very great? Yes, but seen superficially one would not have said so. I myself have formerly admired at one and the same time a book by Guizot and a book by Michelet. But in my case, as I got deeper into it, I found difference and contrast, which is stronger still.

In short, that the one comes to a dead end and disappears vaguely, and the other, on the contrary, has something infinite. Since then much has happened. But my opinion is, if you and I had lived in 1848, you would have been on the Guizot side, and I on the side of Michelet. And both of us remaining set in our outlooks, with a certain melancholy, we might have stood as direct enemies opposite each other, for instance on such a barricade, you before it as a soldier of the government, I behind it, as revolutionist or rebel.

Letter 379
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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