The Hague
21 July 1882
Dear brother,
It is already late, but I felt
like writing to you again anyway. You are not here but I need you
and sometimes feel that we are not far away from each other.Today I promised
myself something, that is, to treat my illness, or rather what remains
of it, as if it didn't exist. Enough time has been lost, work must go on.
So, well or not well, I am going back to drawing regularly from morning
until night. I don't want anybody to be able to say
to me again, "Oh! but those are only old drawings."
I drew a study
today of the baby's little cradle with a
few touches of colour in it. I am also at work on one like one of
those meadows I sent you recently . My hands have become a little too white
for my liking, but that' too bad. I'm going to go back outdoors again,
a possible relapse matters less to me than staying away from
work any longer. Art is jealous, she does not like taking second place
to an illness. Hence I shall humour her. So you will, I hope, be receiving
a few more reasonably acceptable things shortly.
People like me really should not be ill. I would like to make it perfectly
clear to you how I look at art. To get to the essence of things one must
work long and hard.What I want and have as my aim is infernally difficult
to achieve, and yet I don't think I am raising my sights too high. I want
to make drawings that touch some people."Sorrow" is a small beginning
perhaps such little landscapes as the "Meerdervoort Avenue," the
"Rijswijk
Meadows," the "Fish-Drying Barn," are also a small beginning.
There is at least something straight from my own heart in them. What I
want to express, in both figure and landscape, isn't anything sentimental
or melancholy, but deepanguish. In short, I want to get to the point where
people say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels keenly. In
spite of my so-called coarseness do youunderstand? perhaps even because
of it. It seems pretentious to speak this way now, but that is the reason
why I want to put all my energies into it What am I in the eyes of
most people a nonentity, an eccentric or an unpleasant person somebody
who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest
of the low.
All
right, then even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like
to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.
That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love malgré
tout [in spite o everything], based more on a feeling of serenity
than on passion.
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure
harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest
cottages, in the dirtiest comers. And my mind is driven towards these things
with an irresistible momentum.Other things increasingly lose their hold
on me, and the more they do so the more quickly my eye lights on
the picturesque. Art demands dogged work, work in spite of everything and
continuous observation. By dogged, I mean in the first place incessant
labour, but also not abandoning one's views upon the say so of this person
or that.I am not without hope, brother, that within a few year's time,
or perhaps even now, little by little you will be seeing things I have
done that will give you some satisfaction after al your sacrifices.
I have had very little contact with other painters lately. I haven't been
the worse for it. Itisn't the language of painters so much as the language
of nature that one should heed. I can understand better now than I could
six months ago why Mauve said: don't talk to me about Dupré, I'd
rather you talked about the bank of that ditch, or something of that sort.That
may sound a bit strong, and yet it is absolutely right. The feeling for
things themselves, for reality, is of greater importance than the feeling
for painting; anyway itis more productive and more inspiring.
Because I now have such a broad, such an expansive feeling for art and
for life itself, ofwhich art is the essence, it sounds so shrill and false
when people like Tersteeg donothing but harry one.
For
my own part, I find that many modern pictures have a peculiar charm which
the old ones lack. To me, one of the highest and noblest expressions of
art will always be thatof the English, for instance Millais and Herkomer
and Frank Holl. What I would say with respect to the difference between
old and present day art is perhaps the modern artists are deeper thinkers.
There
is a great difference in sentiment between, for instance, Chill October
by Milla and Bleaching Ground at Overveen by Ruysdael. And equally
between Irish Emigrantsby Holl and the women reading from the Bible by
Rembrandt. Rembrandt and Ruysdae are sublime, for us as well as for their
contemporaries, but there is something in the moderns that seems to us
more personal and intimate. It is the same with Swain's woodcuts and those
of the old German masters.
And
so it was a mistake when the modern painters thought it all the rage to
imitate theold ones a few years ago. That's why I think old Millet is right
to say, Il me semble absurde que les hommes veuillent paraître autre
chose que ce qu'ils sont. [It seemsabsurd to me that people want to seem
other than they are.] That may seem trite, a yet it is as unfathomably
deep as the ocean, and personally I am all for taking it to heart.
I just wanted to tell you that
I am going to get back to working regularly again, and must do so quand
même [ at that and I'd just like to add that I look forward so much
for a letter and for the rest, I bid you goodnight. Goodbye, with a handshake,
Ever yours,
Vincent
Please remember the thick Ingres if you can, enclosed is another sample.
I still have a supply of the thin kind. I can do watercolour washes on
the thick Ingres, but on the sans fin, for instance, it always goes blurry,
by no fault of mine. I hope that by keeping hard at it I shall draw the
little cradle another hundred times, besides what I did today.