What I think you might do one of these days - without delay -is to write to our future friend, the doctor in question, ‘My brother greatly desires to make your acquaintance, and preferring to consult you before prolonging his stay in Paris, hopes that you will approve of his coming and spending a few weeks in your village in order to do some studies; he has every confidence in reaching an understanding with you, believing that his illness will abate with a return to the north, whereas his condition would threaten to become more acute if he stayed any longer in the south.’
There, you write him something like that, we can send him a telegram the day after I arrive in Paris, or the day after that, and he would probably meet me at the station.
The surroundings here are beginning to weigh me down more than I can say - heavens above, I’ve been patient for more than a year - I need some air, I feel overwhelmed by boredom and grief.
Also the work is pressing, and I should be wasting my time here. Why then, I ask you, are you so afraid of accidents? That’s not what should be frightening you. Heavens above, every day since I’ve been here I’ve watched people falling down, or going out of their minds - what is more important is to try and take misfortune into account.
I assure you that it’s quite something to resign oneself to living under surveillance, even if it is sympathetic, and to sacrifice one’s liberty, to remain outside society with nothing but one’s work as distraction.
This has given me wrinkles which will not be smoothed out in a hurry. Now that things are beginning to weigh me down too heavily here, I think it only fair that they should be brought to an end.
So please ask M. Peyron to allow me to leave, let’s say by the 15 th at the latest. If I wait, I shall be letting the favourable period of calm between two attacks go by, and by leaving now, I should have the time I need to make the acquaintance of the other doctor. Then if the illness does come back in a little while, it would not be unexpected, and depending upon how serious it is, we could see if I can continue to be at liberty, or if I must settle down in a lunatic asylum for good. In the latter case - as I told you in my last letter, I would go into a home where the patients work in the fields & the workshop. I’m sure I’d find even more subjects to paint there than here.
So remember that the journey costs a lot, that it is pointless [to provide an escort], and that I have every right to change homes if I wish. I am not demanding my complete liberty.
I have tried to be patient up till now, I haven’t done anybody any harm, is it fair to have me accompanied like some dangerous animal? No, thank you, I protest. If I should have an attack, they know what to do at every station, and I should let them get on with it.
But I’m sure that my nerve will not desert me. I am so distressed at leaving like this that the distress will be stronger than the madness. So I’m sure I shall have what nerve it takes.
M. Peyron won’t commit himself, because he doesn’t want to take the responsibility, he says, but that way we’ll never, ever, get to the end of it, the thing will drag on and on, and we’ll end up by getting angry with each other. As for me, my dear brother, my patience is at an end, quite at an end, I cannot go on, I must make a change, even if it’s only a stopgap.
However, there really is a chance that the change will do me good - the work is going well, I’ve done 2 canvases of the newly cut grass in the grounds, one of which is extremely simple. Here is a hasty sketch of it - a pine trunk, pink and purple, and then the grass with some white flowers and dandelions, a little rose bush and some other tree trunks in the background right at the top of the canvas. I shall be out of doors over there. I’m sure that my zest for work will get the better of me and make me indifferent to everything else, as well as put me in a good humour. And I shall let myself go there, not without thought, but without brooding over what might have been.
They say that in painting one should look for nothing more and hope for nothing more than a good picture and a good talk and a good dinner as the height of happiness, and ignore the less brilliant digressions. That may well be true, so why shouldn’t one seize the hour, particularly if in so doing one steals a march on one’s illness?
A good handshake for you and Jo. I think I shall do a painting for myself after the portrait, it may not be a resemblance, but anyway I’ll try.
See you soon, I hope - and come on now, spare me this imposed travel companion.
Ever yours,
Vincent
Auvers-sur-Oise
In Paris, Van Gogh met his sister-in-law for the first time. Johanna van Gogh herself later described their meeting. ‘I had expected a sick man, but here was a sturdy, broad-shouldered man, with a healthy colour, a smile on his face, and a very resolute appearance.’ Van Gogh’s own impressions of Johanna were also very positive (‘charming and very simple and nice’). Both brothers were moved as they stood side by side over little Vincent’s cradle. Despite far from ideal storage conditions for his old canvases, it did Vincent good to see the work again, both at Theo’s and also at Pére Tanguy’s ‘flea pit’. However, he was no longer used to the commotion of city life. After three days, on 20 May 1890, ‘taking fright at the noise and bustle of Paris’, he left for what was to be the last stop on his pilgrimage. In Auvers he took lodgings at the Auberge Ravoux, opposite the town hall in the place de la Mairie. Dr Gachet, to whose care he was now entrusted, was a homoeopathic doctor and psychiatrist who had written a thesis on neurosis in artists. Gachet, however, was not only an eccentric but seemed to be at least as neurotic as the afBiaed artist, which caused Van Gogh to observe, ‘Now when one blind man leads another blind man, don’t they both end up in the ditch?’
Van Gogh’s output during the two months he was granted in Auvers was impressive. His first paintings were of old houses with moss-covered thatched roofs, of the kind he had loved in Brabant and had also painted in Saint-Rémy in his Souvenir du nord. His famous painting of the little church in Auvers must be considered another example of a new approach to an old subject, recalling as it did the church tower he had done in Nuenen. He now found a willing model in Adeline Ravoux, his landlord’s daughter, of whom three small portraits in deep blue and yellow are known. In view of his yearning to renew his ties with the traditions of northern painting, he was intrigued to find that the widows of Daubigny and Daumier, two artists he so greatly admired, were living in Auvers: ‘At least, I’m sure that the former still does.’ In order to maintain the quality of his draughtsmanship, he asked Theo to send him Bargue’s book Les exercises au fusain.
A letter Van Gogh wrote on 25 May 1890 to the Dutch painter Joseph Isaacson was in many respects a sequel to his letter to Albert Aurier. Isaacson, too, was about to write an enthusiastic article devoted to Van Gogh’s work and Vincent was worried about its possible tenor. His tone was once again unassuming, but he had a very concrete objective, namely that Isaacson should stress the importance of the series of olive orchards done in Saint-Rémy. Much as he had stood up for Monticelli in his letter to Aurier, so he now held up Puvis de Chavannes as the most important painter of his day. In particular, that artist’s Inter Artes et Naturam, a canvas shown at the world exhibition on the Champ de Mars, had made a great impression on Van Gogh during his visit to Paris.
‘His canvas now at the Champ de Mars seems, among other things, to allude to an equivalence, to a strange and providential meeting between far distant antiquities and the crude modern age. Because his recent canvases are, if anything, even vaguer and more prophetic than the work of Delacroix, they fill you with the sense of being present at the continuation of all that went before, an inevitable but benevolent renaissance. But it seems better not to dwell on this point as one stands musing in gratitude before as perfect a painting as Le sermon sur la montagne. Oh, he ought to be doing them, the olive trees of the south - he, the Seer. I must tell you as a friend, that faced with such natural force I feel impotent, my northern spirit having fallen prey to nightmares in those peaceful surroundings, because I felt that I
ought to be doing better with them. And yet I did not want to leave without making any effort at all - but that was confined to the depiction of those two things: cypresses and olive trees. Let others who may be better and more capable than I, convey their symbolic language. Millet is the voice of the wheat, and so is Jules Breton. Well, let me assure you that I can no longer think of Puvis de Chavannes without the presentiment that he, or perhaps someone else, will one day interpret the olive trees for us. I can see from this distance that a new art of painting may perhaps be on the horizon [...].’
To Wil, too, Vincent wrote about Puvis de Chavannes’s painting, enclosing a small sketch he had made of it for her. He went on to confide his anxiety about Theo’s deteriorating health and his hope that he might be able to persuade Theo and his family to go and live outside Paris in the healthy air of the countryside. To Theo and Johanna he wrote, ‘I see in it, or think I see, a Puvis de Chavannes-like peace, no factories, but a profusion of lovely, well-tended greenery.’
Dr Gachet had meanwhile become a second brother to Van Gogh. As Theo had written, they even resembled each other in character and appearance. Johanna van Gogh was later to compare Gachet’s house to ‘the workshop of an alchemist of the Middle Ages’. And Van Gogh’s account bore her out:’[…] his house is as full as an antique shop, full to bursting with things that are not always worth bothering about, awful, even. But the good thing about it is that there is always something for arranging flowers or for still lifes.’ Moreover, Gachet himself and his daughter Marguérite sat for new portraits. It seemed Van Gogh had still not given up his ambitions as a painter of the modern portrait.
W22 [F] [letter from Vincent to Wil]
[3 June 1890]
My dear sister,
I should have replied long ago to your two letters, which I received while still at St Rèmy, but the journey, the work, and a great many new emotions made me put off writing from one day to the next until now. I was very interested to learn that you had been nursing patients at the Walloon hospital. That is certainly the way to learn a great deal, the best & the most useful things one can learn, and I for one regret that I know nothing, or at any rate not enough, about it all.
It gave me great joy to see Theo again, and to make the acquaintance of Jo and the little one. Theo’s cough was worse than when I last saw him more than 2 years ago, but in talking to him and seeing him close at hand, I certainly found him, all things considered, changed somewhat for the better, and Jo is full of good sense and good will. The little one isn’t sickly, but he isn’t strong either. If one lives in a big city, it is a good system for the wife to go to the country for her confinement and to stay there with the baby for the first few months. But seeing that the first confinement is especially difficult they certainly could not have done better or otherwise than they did. I am hoping that they will come here to Auvers soon fòr a few days.
As for me, the journey & everything else have gone well so far, and coming back north has taken my mind off things a great deal. And then I have found a perfect friend in Dr Gachet, something like another brother - so alike are we physically, and mentally, too. He is very nervous and most odd himself and has been a great friend & help, so far as he was able, to the artists of the new school. I did his portrait the other day and am also going to do one of his daughter, who is 19 years old. He lost his wife some years ago, which was the main reason for his being laid low. We became instant friends, so to speak, and I shall go and stay with him one or two days every week to work in his garden, of which I have already painted two studies, one with plants of the south, aloes, cypresses, marigolds, and the other with some white roses, a vine and a figure, and then a clump of ranunculus. As well as that, I’ve done a larger picture of the village church - with an effect in which the building appears purplish-blue against a sky of deep & simple blue, pure cobalt. The stained-glass windows appear as patches of ultramarine, the roof is purple and partly orange. In the foreground a little greenery in bloom and some pink sunlit sand. Again, it’s very similar to the studies I did in Nuenen of the old tower and the churchyard. Only now the colour is probably more expressive, more sumptuous. But towards the end at St Rémy I was still working like one possessed, especially on bunches of flowers, roses and purple irises.
I brought back quite a large picture for Theo and Jo’s little one - which they have hung above the piano - white almond blossom - large branches against a sky-blue background, and they’ve also got a new portrait of the Arlesienne in their apartment. My friend Dr Gachet is decidedly enthusiastic about this last portrait of the Arlesienne, of which I have also kept a copy for myself, and about a self-portrait, and I was pleased about that, as he’s persuading me to do some figure painting and will be finding me some interesting models to do, I hope. What fascinates me much, much more than it does all the others in my trade - is the portrait, the modern portrait. I am attempting it with colour, and am certainly not alone in attempting it this way. I should like - you see, I’m far from saying that I can, but I’m going to try anyway - I should like to do portraits which will appear as revelations to people in a hundred years’ time. In other words, I am not trying to achieve this by photographic likeness but by rendering our impassioned expressions, by using our modern knowledge and appreciation of colour as a means of rendering and exalting character. So the portrait of Dr Gachet shows you a face the colour of an overheated brick, burnt by the sun, with red hair and a white cap, against a landscape with a background of blue hills. His clothes are ultramarine, which brings out his face and makes it look pale even though it is brick-coloured. His hands, the hands of an obstetrician, are paler than his face. In front of him on a red garden table are yellow novels and a dark red foxglove flower. My self-portrait is done in almost the same way, but the blue is a delicate southern blue, and the clothes are pale lilac. The portrait of the Arlesienne has a colourless and matt flesh tone, the eyes are calm and very simple, the clothing is black, the background pink, and she is leaning on a green table with green books. But in the copy that Theo has, the clothing is pink, the background yellowy-white, and the front of the open bodice is muslin in a white that merges into green. Among all these light colours, only the hair, the eyelashes and the eyes form black patches.
I’m not managing to do a very good sketch of it.
There is a superb picture by Puvis de Chavannes at the exhibition.1 The figures are dressed in bright colours, and one cannot tell if they are present-day costumes or clothes from olden times. On one side two women in simple long gowns are talking, on the other side men who look like artists, and in the centre a woman with a child in her arms is picking a flower from an apple tree in blossom. One figure is forget-me-not blue, another bright lemon yellow, another soft pink, another white, another violet. They are shown on a meadow dotted with little white and yellow flowers. The far distance is blue, with a white town and a river. All humanity, all nature simplified, as they might be, if they are not already so.
This description tells you nothing, but on seeing the picture, and looking at it for a long time, you might think you are present at a renaissance, inevitable but benevolent, of all things in which one has believed, which one has longed for, a strange and happy meeting of far distant antiquities with crude modernity.
I was also pleased to see Andr6 Bonger again, who appeared strong and calm, and argued, upon my word, with much soundness about art.
I was delighted that he came while I was in Paris.
Thank you again for your letters, goodbye for now, I embrace you in thought,
Ever yours,
Vincent
The brothers’ correspondence reflected a guarded optimism that Vincent’s change of surroundings might prove salutary. After a visit to Auvers by Theo, Johanna and little Vincent, Van Gogh wrote, ‘It is as if the nightmare had lifted completely.’ Theo missed no opportunity of telling his brother about the growing esteem in which his work was being held by fellow artists. The Neo-Impressionist painter Leo Gausson wanted to ex
change a work with him, and through Theo, Eugene Boch exchanged a canvas of the Borinage for Van Gogh’s Mountain Landscape, done in Saint-Rémy. Albert Aurier was very taken with The Cypress, which Van Gogh had sent him by way of thanks, and Gauguin wrote to say how much he admired the portrait of Mme Ginoux: ‘Despite your illness you have never before done such well-balanced work, without sacrificing any feeling or any of the inner warmth demanded by a work of art, and this at a time when art has turned into a business ruled by cold calculation.’ Gauguin himself was thinking of going to Madagascar, staying in a mud hut amidst ‘gentle people who have no money and who live on what the soil yields’. Such conditions, he hoped, might beget the John the Baptist of the new art.
From Aries, Van Gogh received the warm regards of the Ginoux family. He also drew comfort from his closer ties with his mother and the spontaneous letters of his sister Wil. In his penultimate letter to his mother, tenderness and longing for Brabant went hand in hand with reflections on the transitory nature of life. Referring to 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, he wrote to the pastor’s widow about death and loneliness.
To his sister he once again revealed his ambition of becoming a landscape painter and a modern portraitist.
641a [D] [letter from Vincent to his mother]
[c. 12 June 1890]
Dear Mother,
I was struck by what you say in your letter about having been to Nuenen. You saw everything again, ‘with gratitude that once it was yours’ - and are now able to leave it to others with an easy mind. As through a glass, darkly - so it has remained; life, the why or wherefore of parting, passing away, the permanence of turmoil - one grasps no more of it than that.
For me, life may well continue in solitude. I have never perceived those to whom I have been most attached other than as through a glass, darkly.
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh Page 52
