The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

by Vincent Van Gogh

  In the same way I think that everything that is really good and beautiful, the inner, moral, spiritual and sublime beauty in men and their works, comes from God, and everything that is bad and evil in the works of men and in men is not from God, and God does not approve of it.

  But I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things. Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road to understanding Him better, that is what I keep telling myself. But you must love with a sublime, genuine, profound sympathy, with devotion, with intelligence, and you must try all the time to understand Him more, better and yet more. That will lead to God, that will lead to an unshakeable faith.

  To take an example, one man will love Rembrandt, genuinely, and that man will surely know there is a God, he will really believe it. Another will make a thorough study of the French Revolution - he will not be an unbeliever, he will see that there is a supreme authority that manifests itself in great affairs. Yet another has recently attended a free course of lectures at the great university of sorrow and has heeded the things he saw with his eyes and heard with his ears, and has reflected upon them. He too will come to believe in the end and will perhaps have learned more than he can tell.

  Try to grasp the essence of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces, and you will again find God in them. One man has written or said it in a book, another in a painting. Just read the Bible and the Gospel, that will start you thinking, thinking about many things, thinking about everything, well then, think about many things, think about everything, that will lift your thoughts above the humdrum despite yourself. We know how to read, so let us read!

  Now then, you may well have bouts of being a little absent-minded, a little dreamy, indeed there are some who become a little too absent-minded, a little too dreamy. That may indeed have happened with me, but all in all that is my own fault, maybe there was a reason for it, perhaps I was lost in thought for one reason or another, anxious, worried, but one gets over that in the end. The dreamer sometimes falls into the doldrums, but is said to emerge from them again. And the absent-minded person also makes up for it with bouts of perspicacity. Sometimes he is a person whose right to exist has a justification that is not always immediately obvious to you, or more usually, you may absent-mindedly allow it to slip from your mind. Someone who has been wandering about for a long time, tossed to and fro on a stormy sea, will in the end reach his destination. Someone who has seemed to be good for nothing, unable to fill any job, any appointment, will find one in the end and, energetic and capable, will prove himself quite different from what he seemed at first.

  I am writing somewhat at random, writing whatever flows from my pen. I should be very happy if you could see in me something more than a kind of ne’er-do-well. For there is a great difference between one ne’er-do-well and another ne’er-do-well. There is someone who is a ne’er-do-well out of laziness and lack of character, owing to the baseness of his nature. If you like, you may take me for one of those. Then there is the other kind of ne’er-do-well, the ne’er-do-well despite himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action, who does nothing because his hands are tied, because he is, so to speak, imprisoned somewhere, because he lacks what he needs to be productive, because disastrous circumstances have brought him forcibly to this end. Such a one does not always know what he can do, but he nevertheless instinctively feels, I am good for something! My existence is not without.reason! I know that I could be a quite different person! How can I be of use, how can I be of service? There is something inside me, but what can it be? He is quite another ne’er-do-well. If you like you may take me for one of those.

  A caged bird in spring knows perfectly well that there is some way in which he should be able to serve. He is well aware that there is something to be done, but he is unable to do it. What is it? He cannot quite remember, but then he gets a vague inkling and he says to himself, ‘The others are building their nests and hatching their young and bringing them up,’ and then he bangs his head against the bars of the cage. But the cage does not give way and the bird is maddened by pain. ‘What a ne’er-do-well,’ says another bird passing by - what an idler. Yet the prisoner lives and does not die. There are no outward signs of what is going on inside him, he is doing well, he is quite cheerful in the sunshine.

  But then the season of the great migration arrives: an attack of melancholy. He has everything he needs, say the children who tend him in his cage - but he looks out, at the heavy thundery sky, and in his heart of hearts he rebels against his fate. I am caged, I am caged and you say I need nothing, you idiots! I have everything I need, indeed! Oh, please give me the freedom to be a bird like other birds.

  That kind of ne’er-do-well of a person resembles that kind of ne’er-do-well of a bird. And people are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don’t know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh, such terrible cage.

  I do know that there is a release, the belated release. A justly or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, disastrous circumstances, misfortune, they all turn you into a prisoner. You cannot always tell what keeps you confined, what immures you, what seems to bury you, and yet you can feel those elusive bars, railings, walls. Is all this illusion, imagination? I don’t think so. And then one asks: my God, will it be for long, will it be for ever, will it be for eternity?

  Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But wherever affection is revived, there life revives. Moreover, the prison is sometimes called prejudice, misunderstanding, fatal ignorance of one thing or another, suspicion, false modesty.

  But to change the subject - if I have come down in the world, you have in a different way come up in it. And if I have forfeited sympathy, you have gained it. I am glad of that, I say that in all sincerity, and it will always give me pleasure. If you lacked seriousness or consideration, I would be fearful that it might not last, but since I think that you are very serious and very considerate, I tend to believe it will!

  But if you could see me as something other than a ne’er-do-well of the bad sort, I should be very happy.

  For the rest, if I can ever do anything for you, be of some use to you, know that I am at your disposal. Now that I have accepted what you have given me, you are, should I be able to render you some service, in a position to ask me. It would make me happy and I should take it as a sign of trust. We have moved rather far apart and may in certain respects have different views, but some time, some day, one of us may be of service to the other.

  For now I shake your hand, thanking you once again for having been so good to me. If, one of these days, you feel like writing, my address is, chez Ch. Decrucq, Rue du Pavilion 8, Cuesmes, near Mons, and know that it will do me good to hear from you.

  Yours

  Vincent.

  Van Gogh must have taken the decision to turn his back on preaching and to make his living as an artist as early as 1879. Theo promised him financial support. Having made up his mind to become an artist, his next step was to obtain the necessary professional training. Although Van Gogh did a lot of copying from anatomy and perspective textbooks and from Bargue’s Cours de dessin, he felt a strong need for personal tuition. To that end he first consulted the Dutch landscape painter, Willem Roelofs, who was working in Brussels, and then, on Theo’s advice, he called on the young Dutch artist Anthon van Rappard, a contact that was later to develop into a close friendship. As far as his artistic training was concerned, however, Vincent remained in essence an autodidact.

  He found the Borinage no less picturesque than Venice or Arabia, but now looked upon the miners, to whom he had previously wanted to bring the Gospel, more as ‘types’ than as his flock. Painting having ousted religion as his vocation, he made a pilgrimage on foot to the village of Courriéres, the home
of the painter Jules Breton, whom he revered. Though he lacked the means to stay in the art centres, Paris or Barbizon, he was determined to cling to his muse, and this decision is reflected memorably in his letter of 24 September 18 80, which reads like a credo.

  136 [F]

  Cuesmes, 24 Sept. 1880

  Dear Theo,

  Your letter has done me good and I thank you for having written to me in the way you have.

  The roll with a new selection of etchings & various prints has just arrived. First and foremost the masterly etching, Le buisson, by Daubigny/Ruysdael. Well! I propose to make two drawings, in sepia or something else, one after that etching, the other after Le four dans les Landes by Th. Rousseau. Indeed, I have already done a sepia of the latter, but if you compare it with Daubigny’s etching you will see that it contrasts feebly, although considered on its own the sepia may betray some tone & sentiment. I shall have to return to it & tackle it again.

  I am still working on Bargue’s Cours de dessin & intend to finish it before I go on to anything else, for both my hand and my mind are growing daily more supple & strong as a result, & I cannot thank Mr Tersteeg enough for having been so kind as to lend it to me. The models are outstanding. Meanwhile I am reading one book on anatomy & another on perspective, which Mr Tersteeg also sent me. These studies are demanding & sometimes the books are extremely tedious, but I think all the same that it’s doing me good to study them.

  So you see that I am working away hard, though for the moment it is not yielding particularly gratifying results. But I have every hope that these thorns will bear white blooms in due course & that these apparently fruitless struggles are nothing but labour pains. First the pain, then the joy.

  You mention Lessore. I think I remember some very elegant watercolour landscapes by him in a blond tone, worked with an apparent ease & a light touch, yet with accuracy & distinction, & a somewhat decorative effect (that is not meant badly, but on the contrary, in a favourable sense). So I know a little about his work & you mention someone not entirely unknown to me.

  I admire the portrait of Victor Hugo. It is done very conscientiously with the evident intention of portraying the truth without straining after effect. That is precisely what makes it so effective.

  Last winter I pored over some of Hugo’s works, Le dernier jour d’un condamné & an excellent book on Shakespeare. I first started studying this writer long ago. He is just as splendid as Rembrandt. Shakespeare is to Charles Dickens or V. Hugo what Ruysdael is to Daubigny, & Rembrandt to Millet.

  What you say in your letter about Barbizon is perfectly true & I can tell you one or two things that will make it clear how much I share your view. I haven’t been to Barbizon, but though I haven’t been there, I did to go Courriéres last winter. I went on a walking tour in the Pas-de-Calais, not the English Channel but the department, or province. I had gone on this trip in the hope of perhaps finding some sort of work there, if possible - I would have accepted anything - but in fact I set out a bit reluctantly, though I can’t say exactly why. But I had told myself, you must see Courriéres. I had just 10 francs in my pocket and because I had started out by taking the train, that was soon gone, & as I was on the road for a week, it was a rather gruelling trip.

  Anyway, I saw Courrières & the outside of M. Jules Breton’s studio. The outside of the studio was a bit of a disappointment, seeing that it is a brand-new studio, recently built of brick, of a Methodist regularity, with an inhospitable, stone-cold & forbidding aspect, just like C. M.’s Jovinda, which, between ourselves, I am none too keen on either, for the same reason. If I could have seen the inside, I am quite certain that I should have given no further thought to the outside, but there you are, I could not see the inside because I dared not introduce myself and go in. Elsewhere in Courriéres I looked for traces of Jules Breton or any other artist. All I was able to find was a portrait of him at a photographer’s & a copy of Titian’s Entombment in a corner of the old church which looked very beautiful to me in the darkness & masterly in tone. Was it by him? I don’t know because I was unable to make out any signature.

  But of any living artist, no trace, just a café called the Café des Beaux Arts, also of new, inhospitable, stone-cold, repulsive brick - the café was decorated with a kind of fresco or mural depicting episodes from the life of that illustrious knight, Don Quixote.

  To tell the truth, the frescos seemed to me rather poor consolation and fairly mediocre at the time. I don’t know who did them.

  But anyway I did see the country around Courrières then, the haystacks, the brown farmland or the marled earth, almost coffee-coloured (with whitish spots where the marl shows through), which seems somewhat unusual to people like us who are used to a blackish soil. And the French sky looked to me much finer & brighter than the smoky & foggy sky of the Borinage. What’s more, there were farms & barns that, God be praised, still retained their mossy thatched roofs. I also saw the flocks of crows made famous by the pictures of Daubigny & Millet. Not to mention, as I ought to have done in the first place, the characteristic & picturesque figures of all manner of workmen, diggers, woodcutters, a farmhand driving his wagon & a silhouette of a woman with a white cap. Even in Courrières there was still a coal mine or pit, I saw the day shift come up at nightfall, but there were no women workers in men’s clothes as in the Borinage, just the miners looking tired & careworn, black with coal dust, dressed in ragged miners’ clothes, one of them in an old army cape.

  Although this trip nearly killed me & though I came back spent with fatigue, with crippled feet & in a more or less depressed state of mind, I do not regret it, because I saw some interesting things and the terrible ordeals of suffering are what teach you to look at things through different eyes.

  I earned a few crusts here and there en route in exchange for a picture or a drawing or two I had in my bag. But when my ten francs ran out I tried to bivouac in the open the last 3 nights, once in an abandoned carriage which was completely white with hoarfrost the next morning, not the best accommodation, once in a pile of faggots, and once, & that was a slight improvement, in a haystack that had been opened up, where I succeeded in making myself a slightly more comfortable little hideaway, though the drizzle did not exactly add to my enjoyment.

  Well, even in these depths of misery I felt my energy revive & said to myself, I shall get over it somehow, I shall set to work again with my pencil, which I had cast aside in my deep dejection, & I shall draw again, & ever since I have had the feeling that everything has changed for me, & now I am in my stride & my pencil has become slightly more willing & seems to be getting more so by the day. My over-long & over-intense misery had discouraged me so much that I was unable to do anything.

  I saw something else during the trip - the weavers’ villages.

  The miners & the weavers still form a race somehow apart from other workers & artisans and I have much fellow-feeling for them & should consider myself fortunate if I could draw them one day, for then these as yet unknown, or virtually unknown, types would be brought out into the light of day.

  The man from the depths, from the abyss, ‘de profundis’, that is the miner. The other with the faraway look, almost daydreaming, almost a sleepwalker, that is the weaver. I have been living among them now for nearly 2 years & have learned a little of their special character, in particular that of the miners. And increasingly I find something touching & even pathetic in these poor, humble workers, the lowest of the low in a manner of speaking, and the most despised, who, owing to a possibly widely held but quite baseless and inaccurate presumption, are usually considered a race of knaves & scoundrels. Knaves, drunkards & scoundrels may be found here, of course, just as elsewhere, but the real type is nothing at all like that.

  You refer vaguely in your letter to my coming sooner or later to Paris or its environs, if it were possible & if I wanted to. It is of course my eager & fervent wish to go either to Paris or to Barbizon, or somewhere else, but how can I, when I do not earn a cent and when, though I wor
k hard, it will still be some time before I reach the point at which I can give any thought to something like going to Paris. For honestly, to be able to work properly I need at least a hundred francs a month. You can certainly live on less, but then you really are hard up, much too hard up in fact!

  Poverty stops the best minds in their tracks, the old Palizzi saying goes, which has some truth in it & is entirely true if you understand its real meaning and import. For the moment I do not see how it could be feasible, and the best thing is for me to stay here & work as hard as I can, & after all, it is cheaper to live here.

  At the same time I must tell you that I cannot remain very much longer in the little room where I live now. It is very small indeed, and then there are the two beds as well, the children’s & my own. And now that I am working on Bargue’s fairly large sheets I cannot tell you how difficult it is. I don’t want to upset these people’s domestic arrangements. They have already told me that I couldn’t have the other room in the house under any circumstances, not even if I paid more, for the woman needs it for her washing, which in a miner’s house has to be done almost every day. In short, I should like to rent a small workman’s cottage. It costs about 9 francs a month.