Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters

During his time in the Borinage, Vincent had become estranged not only from Theo, but also from his parents. As early as 1875 they had discussed Vincent’s ‘otherness’ and worried about his religious fanaticism. When he was rejected for the training course to become an evangelist, they urged him to take a different path and try a practical occupation. In their eyes he remained ‘obstinate and pigheaded’, however, and refused to take their advice. Vincent dreaded returning home, but he nevertheless paid two short visits to his parents. They found his behaviour so alarming that his father talked openly about having him committed to the hospital for the mentally ill in Geel in Belgium, but this idea met with fierce resistance from Vincent.

Now that their eldest son had been found wanting, it was Theo’s responsibility to uphold the family honour. In November 1879 he had been given a permanent position with Goupil & Cie in Paris, so he was now able to contribute to his brother’s upkeep. Vincent received his first allowance from Theo in March 1880. He had been doing more drawing, and Theo began urging him to make art his profession. Vincent decided to give it a try; this choice proved definitive.

Vincent threw himself passionately into a self-devised programme of study. Hoping to earn a living as an illustrator, he turned his full attention to drawing. Because he knew that he had to start from scratch, learning as much as possible about materials, perspective, proportion and anatomy, he read handbooks and worked from morning to night, making copies after prints by famous masters, such as Jean-François Millet, and from the examples in the drawing course Theo had sent him.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Anton Mauve, date of photograph unknown; Kee Vos-Stricker and her son Jan, c. 1881; Anthon van Rappard, c. 1880

Vincent was living with a miner’s family in Cuesmes, and in July 1880 he rented a small atelier in the house next door where he could work. This was far from ideal as a studio, however. The lack of space and a growing need to be near museums and artists prompted him to move to Brussels, where he found lodgings at 72 boulevard du Midi. Among the artists he met in Brussels was an acquaintance of Theo’s, Anthon van Rappard, a Dutch artist who allowed Van Gogh to work in his spacious studio. It was the beginning of a friendship that would last throughout Van Gogh’s stay in the Netherlands and which fulfilled his longing to exchange ideas with a fellow artist.

On the advice of the painter Willem Roelofs – whom Theo had advised him to visit – Van Gogh enrolled as a student at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts for the course ‘Drawing from the Antique’. After a month he had had enough: no doubt he had been forced to endure much criticism of his under-developed technique and limited knowledge of anatomy and perspective. As a result of that experience, Vincent was filled with loathing for academic instruction – a subject that would crop up often in his letters – and believed even more strongly that an artist’s means of expression was more important than technique.

On 1 February 1881 Theo was appointed manager of Goupil’s branch on the boulevard Montmartre in Paris (later taken over by Boussod, Valadon & Cie), and from then on he decided to shoulder all Vincent’s living expenses.

Lack of money and of a convenient studio space forced Van Gogh to return at the end of April 1881 to his parents’ house in Etten, where he would remain until Christmas. He worked and slept in a room in the annex beside the house. In these months he worked increasingly on figure studies, often out of doors, modelled on locals who posed for him. Anthon van Rappard visited him in mid-June, and they spent almost a fortnight there painting and drawing landscapes.

During a short stay in The Hague, Van Gogh visited museums and exhibitions – not for the first time, but now as an artist – and received welcome advice from Anton Mauve, a successful painter of The Hague School who was married to Van Gogh’s cousin, Jet Carbentus. Vincent was in his element; upon his return to Etten he went back to drawing peasant figures with renewed energy, and quoting a phrase used by Mauve, he observed with satisfaction that ‘the factory is in full swing’ (172).

In the summer of 1881, Kee Vos, the widowed daughter of Uncle Stricker, came to stay with the family at the parsonage. Van Gogh fell passionately in love with her, although he did not mention this in his letters to his brother until November. She was adamant from the beginning that she could never return his feelings, yet Van Gogh persisted relentlessly in his pursuit of her, unshakable in his conviction that she could, and would, come to love him; he even made her a proposal of marriage. His reckless desire for her deeply embarrassed his parents, who considered him to be shaming the family, and his father warned Vincent that he risked breaking family ties with his ‘indelicate and untimely’ behaviour. Vincent, however, grew ever more hostile to his family’s opinions and sensitivities. By the end of the year the situation reached breaking point.

At Christmas, after an angry row during which he told his clergy-man father he wanted nothing more to do with religion, Vincent was asked to leave the house. Furious, he left that same day for The Hague.

Van Gogh set himself up in a modest studio at Schenkweg 138, at the edge of the city. He was still suffering from the negative reactions to his love for Kee, and abhorred his family’s shortsightedness. Although Theo accused Vincent of making their parents’ lives ‘miserable and nearly impossible’, he continued to support him. Theo, who made a good living throughout Vincent’s artistic career, gave some fifteen per cent of his income to his brother. Vincent’s tendency to spend money too easily was a habit inseparable from his unrelenting passion for work: he was always running out of drawing and painting materials; he needed models, who had to be paid to pose; and he was determined to find adequate living and working quarters every time he moved house.

His early days in The Hague, then the cultural capital of the Netherlands, started off well: he received advice and support from Tersteeg, his former boss at Goupil’s, and Mauve, who introduced him at the painters’ society Pulchri Studio, the ideal place to draw from a model and meet other artists. Within just a few months, however, relations between Van Gogh and both these men begun to sour as their disapproval of his lifestyle and attitudes mounted. They disapproved in particular of Van Gogh’s relations with Sien Hoornik, a pregnant former prostitute who became his regular model. Sien’s mother and daughter also posed for him frequently, at first for a fee, and later, when he and Sien became lovers, for free.

Vincent made contact with other artists in The Hague, among them George Breitner, and produced many drawings, as well as two series of cityscapes for his Uncle Cor. His favourite subjects were workers and impoverished people. He hoped that his art would reach ordinary folk; he wanted to make figures ‘from the people for the people’ (294). Still thinking of becoming an illustrator, he collected hundreds of illustrated magazines. The prints in these magazines – wood engravings made by professional engravers after drawings by well-known artists – moved him with their realism, immediacy and unpolished technique.

Vincent exchanged prints with Van Rappard, and their letters contained long discussions about artistic and technical questions. At this time he also read Alfred Sensier’s La vie et l’oeuvre de Jean-François Millet (published in English as Jean-François Millet, Peasant and Painter), a highly romanticized biography of the Barbizon painter who led a simple life among peasants which would become of crucial importance to his views about the role of the artist.

In June Van Gogh spent several weeks in hospital being treated for venereal disease. During this time a reconciliation came about between him and his parents. Learning of Vincent’s condition, his father travelled to The Hague to visit him. On leaving hospital, Vincent moved to a better and more spacious studio farther down the street. Two weeks later he was joined by Sien, her five-year-old daughter, Maria and her newborn son, Willem. When he broke this news to Theo, Vincent tried to deflect criticism by citing Michelet’s ethical and didactic books about women, love and marriage, and went on to defend his relationship with Sien repeatedly and vehemently in the face of strong condemnation, especially from Tersteeg and the conservative Van Gogh family. Vincent’s letters reveal his version of reality: a man is duty-bound to help a fallen woman, and it stands to reason that this will cost money. His idea of respectability was obviously very different from that of most people of his social background. He dressed like a member of the working class, to the dismay of Theo and the rest of the family.

Once Vincent was established in his new studio, he settled into a rare period of relative calm that enabled him to focus more intently on his art. He made landscape studies in watercolours and oils and many drawings of working men and women, and also started to experiment with lithography and a large variety of drawing materials. He sent Theo drawings of folk types, town views and landscapes; his letters are full of exuberant and lyrical descriptions of colour.

In August 1883, Vincent began making plans to leave for the rural province of Drenthe, recommended to him by his artist friends for the beauty of its countryside. He was anxious to leave as soon as possible to capture the autumn colours and to start work on rustic scenes in the vein of the Barbizon and Hague School artists. In an atmosphere of growing mistrust, his relationship with Sien ended, but he worried about leaving her since he was sure that her family would lead her back into prostitution.

Brussels, Monday, 1 November 1880

First of all, that I went to see Mr Roelofs the day after I received your letter, and he told me that his opinion was that from now on I should concentrate on drawing from nature, i.e. whether plaster or model, but not without guidance from someone who understands it well. And he, and others too, seriously advised me definitely to go and work at a drawing academy, at least for a while, here or in Antwerp or anywhere I could, so I think I should in fact do something about getting admitted to that drawing academy, although I don’t particularly like the idea. Tuition is free here in Brussels, I hear that in Amsterdam, for example, it costs 100 guilders a year, and one can work in an adequately heated and lighted room, which is worth thinking about, especially for the winter.

I’m making headway with the examples of Bargue, and things are progressing. Moreover, I’ve recently drawn something that was a lot of work but I’m glad to have done it. Made, in fact, a pen drawing of a skeleton, rather large at that, on 5 sheets of Ingres paper.

I was prompted to do it by a manual written by Zahn, Esquisses anatomiques à l’usage des artistes. And it includes a number of other illustrations which seem to me very effective and clear. Of the hand, foot &c. &c.

And what I’m now going to do is complete the drawing of the muscles, i.e. that of the torso and legs, which will form the whole of the human body with what’s already made. Then there’s still the body seen from the back and from the side.

So you see that I’m pushing ahead with a vengeance, those things aren’t so very easy, and require time and moreover quite a bit of patience.

To be admitted to the drawing academy one must have permission from the mayor and be registered. I’m waiting for an answer to my request.

I know, of course, that no matter how frugally, how poorly even, one lives, it will turn out to be more expensive in Brussels than in Cuesmes, for instance, but I shan’t succeed without any guidance, and I think it possible — if I only work hard, which I certainly do — that either Uncle Cent or Uncle Cor will do something, if not as a concession to me at least as a concession to Pa.

It’s my plan to get hold of the anatomical illustrations of a horse, cow and sheep, for example, from the veterinary school, and to draw them in the same way as the anatomy of a person.

There are laws of proportion, of light and shadow, of perspective, that one must know in order to be able to draw anything at all. If one lacks that knowledge, it will always remain a fruitless struggle and one will never give birth to anything.

That’s why I believe I’m steering a straight course by taking matters in hand in this way, and want to try and acquire a wealth of anatomy here this winter, it won’t do to wait longer and would ultimately prove to be more expensive because it would be a waste of time.

If I should be able to find some steady work here, all the better, but I don’t dare count on it yet, because I must first learn a great many things.

Also went to see Mr Van Rappard, who now lives at rue Traversière 64, and have spoken to him. He has a fine appearance, I’ve not seen anything of his work other than a couple of small pen drawings of landscapes. But he lives rather sumptuously and, for financial reasons, I don’t know whether he’s the person with whom, for instance, I could live and work. But in any case I’ll go and see him again. But the impression I got of him was that there appears to be seriousness in him.

In Cuesmes, old boy, I couldn’t have stood it a month longer without falling ill with misery. You mustn’t think that I live in luxury here, for my food consists mainly of dry bread and some potatoes or chestnuts which people sell on the street corners, but I’ll manage very well with a slightly better room and by eating a slightly better meal from time to time in a restaurant if that were possible. But for nearly 2 years I endured one thing and another in the Borinage, that’s no pleasure trip. But it will easily amount to something more than 60 francs and really can’t be otherwise. Drawing materials and examples, for instance, for anatomy, it all costs money, and those are certainly essentials, and only in this way can it pay off later, otherwise I’ll never succeed.

I had great pleasure lately in reading an extract from the work by Lavater and Gall. Physiognomie et phrénologie. Namely character as it is expressed in facial characteristics and the shape of the skull.

Drew The diggers by Millet after a photo by Braun that I found at Schmidt’s and which he lent me with that of The evening angelus. I sent both those drawings to Pa so that he could see that I’m doing something.

Write to me again soon. Address 72 blvd du Midi. I’m staying in a small boarding-house for 50 francs a month and have my bread and a cup of coffee here, morning, afternoon and evening. That isn’t very cheap but it’s expensive everywhere here.

The Holbeins from the Modèles d’apres les maitres are splendid, I notice that now, drawing them, much more than before. But they aren’t easy, I assure you.

That Mr Schmidt was entangled in a money matter which would involve the Van Gogh family and for which he, namely Mr S., would be justly prosecuted, I knew not the slightest thing about all that when I went to see him, and I first learned of it from your letter. So that was rather unfortunate, though Mr Schmidt received me quite cordially all the same. Knowing it now, though, and matters being as they are, it would perhaps be wise not to go there often, without it being necessary deliberately to avoid meeting him.

I believe that the longer you think about it the more you’ll see the definite necessity of more artistic surroundings for me, for how is one supposed to learn to draw unless someone shows you? With the best will in the world one cannot succeed without also coming into and remaining in contact with artists who are already further along. Good will is of no avail if there’s absolutely no opportunity for development. As regards mediocre artists, to whose ranks you think I should not want to belong, what shall I say? That depends on what one calls mediocre. I’ll do what I can, but in no way do I despise the mediocre in its simple sense. And one certainly doesn’t rise above that level by despising that which is mediocre, in my opinion one must at least begin by having some respect for the mediocre as well, and by knowing that that, too, already means something and that one doesn’t achieve even that without much effort. Adieu for today, I shake your hand in thought. Write again soon if you can.

Etten, mid-September 1881

Even though I wrote to you only a short while ago, this time I have something more to say to you.

Namely that a change has come about in my drawing, both in my manner of doing it and in the result.

Prompted as well by a thing or two that Mauve said to me, I’ve started working again from a live model. I’ve been able to get various people here to do it, fortunately, one being Piet Kaufmann the labourer.

The careful study, the constant and repeated drawing of Bargue’s Exercices au fusain has given me more insight into figure drawing. I’ve learned to measure and to see and to attempt the broad outlines &c. So that what used to seem to me to be desperately impossible is now gradually becoming possible, thank God. I’ve drawn a peasant with a spade no fewer than 5 times, ‘a digger’ in fact, in all kinds of poses, twice a sower, twice a girl with a broom. Also a woman with a white cap who’s peeling potatoes, and a shepherd leaning on his crook, and finally an old, sick peasant sitting on a chair by the fireplace with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees.

And it won’t stop there, of course, once a couple of sheep have crossed the bridge the whole flock follows.

Diggers, sowers, ploughers, men and women I must now draw constantly. Examine and draw everything that’s part of a peasant’s life. Just as many others have done and are doing. I’m no longer so powerless in the face of nature as I used to be.

I brought Conté in wood (and pencils as well) from The Hague, and am now working a lot with it.

I’m also starting to work with the brush and the stump. With a little sepia or indian ink, and now and then with a bit of colour.

It’s quite certain that the drawings I’ve been making lately don’t much resemble anything I’ve made up till now.

As regards landscape, I maintain that that should by no means have to suffer on account of it. On the contrary, it will gain by it. Herewith a couple of little sketches to give you an idea of them.

Of course I have to pay the people who pose. Not very much, but because it’s an everyday occurrence it will be one more expense as long as I fail to sell any drawings.

But because it’s only rarely that a figure is a total failure, it seems to me that the cost of models will be completely recouped fairly soon already.

For there’s also something to be earned in this day and age for someone who has learned to seize a figure and hold on to it until it stands firmly on the paper. I needn’t tell you that I’m only sending you these sketches to give you an idea of the pose. I scribbled them today quickly and see that the proportions leave much to be desired, certainly more so than in the actual drawings at any rate. I’ve had a good letter from Rappard who seems to be hard at work, he sent me some very nice sketches of landscapes. I’d really like him to come here again for a few days.

[sketch A] This is a field or stubble field which is being ploughed and sown, I have a rather large sketch of it with a storm brewing.

[sketch B] The other two sketches are poses of diggers. I hope to make several more of these.

It would give me tremendous pleasure to have a woman pose with a seed basket in order to find that figure that I showed you last spring and which you see in the foreground of the first sketch.

172A–C (top to bottom). Storm clouds over a field; Digger; Figure of a woman

172D. Digger

Remember that Ingres paper, if you will, of the colour of unbleached linen, the stronger kind if possible. In any case, write to me soon if you can, and accept a handshake in thought.

172E. Man leaning on his spade

172F. Man sitting by the fireplace (‘Worn out’)

172G–K (LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM). Woman near a window; Woman near a window; Man with a winnow; Woman with a broom; Sower

172L. Sower with a sack

Etten, Friday, 18 November 1881

When I sent my letter to you this morning, meaning when I put it in the post-box, I had a feeling of relief. For a moment I’d hesitated, should I tell him or not? But thinking it over later it seemed to me that it really wasn’t unwarranted. I’m writing to you here in the little room that’s now my studio because the other is so damp. When I look round it’s full of all kinds of studies that all relate to one and the same thing, ‘Brabant types’.

So that is work started, and if I were wrenched from this environment I’d have to start all over again doing something else and this would come to a standstill, half-finished! That mustn’t happen! I’ve now been working here since May, I’m getting to know and understand my models, my work is progressing, though it’s taken a lot of hard work to get into my stride. And now that I’ve got into my stride, should Pa say, because you’re writing letters to Kee Vos, thereby causing difficulties between us (because this is the fundamental cause, and no matter what they might say: that I don’t obey the ‘rules of decorum’ or whatever, it’s all just idle talk), so because difficulties have arisen I curse you and drive you out of the house.

That’s really too bad, after all, and it would indeed be ridiculous to stop working for such a reason on a project that’s already started and progressing well.

No, no, one can’t just let that happen. Anyway, the difficulties between Pa and Ma and myself aren’t so terrible, aren’t at all of the kind that would keep us from staying together. But Pa and Ma are getting old, and sometimes they get a little angry, and they have their prejudices and old-fashioned ideas that neither you nor I can share any more.

If, for example, Pa sees me with a French book by Michelet or V. Hugo in my hand, he thinks of arsonists and murderers and ‘immorality’. But that’s just too silly, and of course I don’t let idle talk of that kind upset me. I’ve already said so often to Pa: just read a book like this, even if only a couple of pages, and you’ll be moved by it. But Pa stubbornly refuses to do so. Just now, when this love was taking root in my heart, I read Michelet’s books L’amour and La femme again, and so many things became clear to me that would otherwise remain a mystery. I also told Pa frankly that in the circumstances I valued Michelet’s advice more than his, and had to choose which of the two I should follow. But then they come with a story about a great-uncle who had become obsessed with French ideas and had taken to drink, thus insinuating that such will be my career in life. What misery!

Pa and Ma are extremely good to me inasmuch as they do what they can to feed me well &c. I appreciate that very much, but that doesn’t alter the fact that eating and drinking and sleeping isn’t enough, that one yearns for something nobler and higher, indeed, one simply can’t do without it.

That higher thing I can’t do without is my love for Kee Vos. Pa and Ma reason, She says no, nay, never, so you must remain silent.

I can’t accept that at all, on the contrary. And if I write to her or something like that then there are ugly words like ‘coercion’ and ‘it won’t help anyway’ and ‘you’ll spoil things for yourself’. And then they’re surprised if someone doesn’t just resign himself to finding his love ‘indelicate’! No, truly not! In my opinion, Theo, I must stay here and quietly go on working and do everything in my power to win Kee Vos’s love and to melt the no, nay, never. I can’t share Pa and Ma’s view that I shouldn’t write or speak either to her or to Uncle Stricker; indeed, I feel the exact opposite. And I’d rather give up the work started and all the comforts of this house than resign myself one iota to leaving off writing to her or her parents or you. If Pa curses me for it, then I can’t prevent His Hon. from doing so. If he wants to throw me out of the house, so be it, but I’ll continue to do what my heart and mind tell me to do with respect to my love.

Be assured, Pa and Ma are actually against it, because otherwise I can’t explain why they went so far this morning, so it now seems to me that it was a mistake for me ever to think that they didn’t care one way or the other. Anyhow, I’m writing to you about it because, where my work is involved, that is definitely your concern, since you’re the one who has already spent so much money on helping me to succeed. Now I’ve got into my stride, now it’s progressing, now I’m starting to see something in it, and now I tell you, Theo, this is hanging over me. I’d like nothing better than simply to go on working, but Pa seems to want to curse me and put me out of the house, at least he said so this morning. The reason is that I write letters to Kee Vos. As long as I do that, at any rate, Pa and Ma will always find something to reproach me with, whether that I don’t obey the rules of decorum or that I have an indelicate way of expressing myself or that I’m breaking ties or something of the kind.

A forceful word from you could perhaps straighten things out. You will understand what I tell you, that to work and be an artist one needs love. At least someone who strives for feeling in his work must first feel and live with his heart.

But Pa and Ma are harder than stone on the point of ‘a means of subsistence’, as they call it.

If it were a question of marrying at once, I’d most certainly agree with them, but NOW it’s a question of melting the no, nay, never, and a means of subsistence can’t do that.

That’s an entirely different matter, an affair of the heart, for to make the no, nay, never melt, she and I must see each other, write to each other, speak to each other. That’s as clear as day and simple and reasonable. And truly (though they take me to be a weak character, ‘a man of butter’), I won’t let anything in the world deter me from this love. May God help me in this.

No putting it off from today to tomorrow, from tomorrow to the next day, no silent waiting. The lark can’t be silent as long as it can sing. It’s absurd, utterly absurd, to make someone’s life difficult for this reason. If Pa wants to curse me for it, that’s his business – my business is to try and see Kee Vos, to speak to her, to write to her, to love her with everything in me.

You’ll understand that a father shouldn’t curse his son because that son doesn’t obey the rules of decorum or expresses himself indelicately or other things, assuming this were all true, though I think it’s actually very different.

But unfortunately it’s something that happens all too often in many families, that a father curses his son because of a love the parents disapprove of.

THAT’S the rub, the other — rules of decorum &c., expressions, the tone of my words — those are just pretexts. What should we do now?

Wouldn’t it be foolish, Theo, not to go on drawing those Brabant folk types, now that I’m making progress, just because Pa and Ma are vexed by my love?

No, that mustn’t happen. Let them accept it, for God’s sake, that’s what I think. It really would be mad to expect a young man to sacrifice his energy to the prejudice of an old man. And truly, Pa and Ma are prejudiced in this.

Theo, I still haven’t heard one word of love towards her, and to tell you the truth that is what bothers me more than anything else.

I don’t think that Pa and Ma love her deep down, at any rate in the mood they’re in now they can’t think of her with love. But I hope this will change in later and better days. No, no, no, there’s something wrong with them, and it can’t be good that they curse me and want me out of the house at this very time. There are no grounds for it and it would thwart me in my work. So it can’t be allowed to happen for no good reason.

What would she think if she knew what happened this morning? How would she like it, even though she says no, nay, never, if she heard that they called my love for her indelicate and spoke of ‘breaking ties’ &c. No, Theo, if she’d heard Pa cursing me, she wouldn’t have approved of his curse. Ma once called her ‘such a poor wee thing’ in the sense of so weak, so nervous or whatever.

But be assured that lurking in ‘that poor wee thing’ is strength of mind and pride, energy and resoluteness that could change the minds of many towards her, and I maintain that sooner or later one might see things from ‘that poor wee thing’ that very few now expect! She’s so good and friendly that it pains her deeply to say one single unfriendly word, but if such as her, so gentle, so tender, so loving, rebel — piqued to the quick — then woe betide those they rebel against.

May she not rebel against me, then, dear brother. I think that she is beginning to see that I’m not an intruder or bully, but rather quieter and calmer on the inside than I seem on the surface. She didn’t realize that immediately. At first, for a time, she really had an unfavourable opinion of me, but lo and behold, I don’t know why, while the sky clouds over and darkens with difficulties and curses, light rises up on her side. Pa and Ma have always passed for such gentle, quiet people, so kindly and good. But how can I reconcile that with this morning’s scene or that matter of Geel last year?

They really are good and kindly, but even so, they have prejudices they want to impose. And if they want to act as the ‘wall of partition’ between me and her, I doubt whether it will do them any good.

Now, old chap, if you send me some ‘travelling money’ you’ll soon receive 3 drawings, ‘Mealtime’, ‘the fire-lighter’ and ‘an almsman’. So send the travelling money, if you can, for the journey won’t be completely in vain! If I have but 20 or 30 francs, at least I can see her face once again. And write a word or two, if you will, about that certain (terrible?) curse and that banishment, because I’d like so much to go on working quietly here, that’s what I’d like best. I need her and her influence to reach a higher artistic level, without her I am nothing, but with her there’s a chance. Living, working and loving are actually one and the same thing. Now, adieu with a handshake,

A word from you ‘from Paris’! That would possibly carry some weight, even against prejudices.

That matter of the asylum happened last year ‘out of a conscientious conviction’, as they call it, now it’s another ‘conscientious conviction’ that’s forbidding me to write to Kee Vos. But that’s simply a ‘conscientious conviction’ based on very slight grounds, one that doesn’t hold water. No, it can’t be allowed to happen for no good reason!

And if one asks Pa, ‘Explain to me the basis of your conviction’, he answers, ‘I don’t owe you an explanation’, ‘it’s not fitting to ask your father such a question’. That, however, is no mode of reasoning!

Another mode of reasoning that I don’t understand either is Ma’s: You know that we’ve been against it from the beginning, so stop going on about it! No, listen to me, brother, it would really be too bad if I had to leave my field of work here and waste a lot of money elsewhere, where it’s much more expensive, instead of gradually earning some ‘travelling money’!

That matter of Geel last year, when Pa wanted to have me put in an asylum against my will!!! taught me to be on the qui vive. If I didn’t watch out now, Pa would ‘feel compelled to do’ a thing or two.

Etten, on or about Friday, 23 December 1881

Sometimes, I fear, you throw a book away because it’s too realistic. Have compassion and patience with this letter, and read it through, despite its severity.

As I already wrote to you from The Hague, I have some things to discuss with you now that I’m back here. It’s not without emotion that I look back on my trip to The Hague. When I went to see M. my heart was beating rather hard, because I was thinking to myself, will he too try and fob me off or will I find something else here? And well, what I experienced with him was that he instructed and encouraged me in all manner of kind and practical ways. Though not merely by always approving of everything I did or said, on the contrary. But if he tells me, this or that isn’t good, then it’s because he’s saying at the same time ‘but try it this way or that way’, and that’s entirely different from criticizing for the sake of criticizing. Or if someone says ‘you’re ill with this or that’, that doesn’t help much, but if someone says ‘do this or that and you’ll get better’, and his advice isn’t deceit, look, that’s the real thing, and – and – it naturally helps. Now I’ve come from him with a few painted studies and a couple of watercolours. Of course they aren’t masterpieces and yet I truly believe there’s something sound and real in them, more at least than in what I’ve made up to now. And so I now consider myself to be at the beginning of the beginning of making something serious. And because I now have a few more technical resources at my disposal, namely paint and brush, all things are made new again, as it were.

But – now we have to put it into practice. And the first thing is that I must find a room large enough to be able to take a sufficient distance. Mauve just said to me, when he saw my studies, ‘you’re too close to your model’.

In many cases this makes it next to impossible to take the necessary measurements for the proportions, so this is certainly one of the first things I have to watch out for. Now I must arrange to rent a large room somewhere, be it a room or a shed. And that won’t be so terribly expensive. A labourer’s cottage in these parts costs 30 guilders a year to rent, so it seems to me that a room twice as large as that in a labourer’s cottage would cost something like 60 guilders.

And that isn’t insurmountable. I’ve already seen a shed, though it has too many inconveniences, especially in the winter. But I’d be able to work there, at least when the weather is milder. And here in Brabant, moreover, there are models to be found, I believe, not only in Etten but also in other villages, if difficulties were to arise here.

Still, though I love Brabant very much, I also have a feeling for other figures than the Brabant peasant types. Scheveningen, for example, I again found unspeakably beautiful. But after all I’m here, and it would very probably be cheaper to stay here. However, I’ve definitely promised M. that I’ll do my utmost to find a good studio, and now I must also use better paint and better paper.

Nevertheless, Ingres paper is excellent for studies and scratches. And it’s much cheaper to make sketchbooks in all formats from it oneself than to buy ready-made sketchbooks. I still have a small supply of Ingres paper, but you’d be doing me a big favour if you could send some more of the same kind when you send back those studies. Not pure white, though, but the colour of unbleached linen, no cold shades.

Theo, what a great thing tone and colour are! And anyone who doesn’t acquire a feeling for it, how far removed from life he will remain! M. has taught me to see so many things I didn’t see before, and when I have the opportunity I’ll try and tell you about what he’s told me, because perhaps there are still one or two things that you don’t see properly either. Anyway, we’ll talk about artistic matters sometime, I hope.

And you can’t imagine the feeling of relief I’m beginning to get when I think of the things M. said to me about earning money. Just think of how I’ve slogged away for years, always in a kind of false position. And now, now there’s a glimmer of real light.

I do wish that you could see the two watercolours I’ve brought with me, because you would see that they’re watercolours just like any other watercolours. There may be many imperfections in them, be that as it may, I’d be the first to say that I’m still very dissatisfied with them, and yet, it’s different from what I’ve done up to now, and it looks fresher and sounder. All the same, it must become much fresher and sounder, but one can’t do what one wants all at once. It comes gradually. I need those couple of drawings myself, however, to compare with what I’ll be making here, because I have to do them at least as well as what I did at M.’s.

But even though Mauve tells me that if I continue to slog away here for a couple of months and then go back to him again in March, for instance, I’ll then be able to make saleable drawings on a regular basis, I’m nevertheless going through a rather difficult period. The cost of models, studio, drawing and painting materials are multiplying, and there are no earnings as yet.

Admittedly, Pa said that I needn’t be afraid of the inevitable expense, and Pa is pleased with what M. himself said to him, and also with the studies and drawings I brought back. But I do find it utterly, utterly wretched that Pa should suffer by it. Of course we hope that things will turn out well later, but still, it weighs heavily on my heart. Because since I’ve been here Pa really hasn’t profited from me, and more than once he’s bought a coat or trousers, for example, which I’d actually rather not have had, even though I really needed it, but Pa shouldn’t suffer by it. The more so if the coat and trousers in question don’t fit and are only half or not at all what I need. Anyway, still more petty vexations of human life. And, as I’ve told you before, I find it absolutely terrible not to be free at all. Because even though Pa doesn’t ask me to account for literally every penny, still, he always knows exactly how much I spend and what I spend it on. And now, although I don’t necessarily have any secrets, I don’t really like people being able to look at my cards. Even my secrets aren’t necessarily secrets to those for whom I feel sympathy.

But Pa isn’t the kind of man for whom I can feel what I feel for you, for example, or for Mauve. I really do love Pa and Ma, but it’s a very different feeling from what I feel for you or Mauve. Pa cannot empathize or sympathize with me, and I cannot settle in to Pa and Ma’s routine, it’s too constricting for me — it would suffocate me.

Whenever I tell Pa anything, it’s all just idle talk to him, and certainly no less so to Ma, and I also find Pa and Ma’s sermons and ideas about God, people, morality, virtue, almost complete nonsense. I also read the Bible sometimes, just as I sometimes read Michelet or Balzac or Eliot, but I see completely different things in the Bible than Pa sees, and I can’t agree at all with what Pa makes of it in his petty, academic way. Since the Rev. Ten Kate translated Goethe’s Faust, Pa and Ma have read that book, because now that a clergyman has translated it, it can’t be all that immoral (??? what is that?). Yet they don’t see anything in it but the catastrophic consequences of an unchaste love.

And they certainly understand the Bible just as little. Take Mauve, for instance, when he reads something deep he doesn’t immediately say, that man means this or that. Because poetry is so deep and intangible that one can’t simply define it all systematically, but Mauve has a refined sensibility and, you see, I find that sensibility to be worth so much more than definition and criticism. And oh, when I read, and I actually don’t read so much and even then, only one-and-a-half writers, a couple of men whom I accidentally found, then I do so because they look at things more broadly and milder and with more love than I do, and are better acquainted with reality, and because I can learn something from them. But all that drivel about good and evil, morality and immorality, I actually care so little about it. For truly, it’s impossible for me always to know what is good, what is evil, what is moral, what is immoral.

Morality or immorality coincidentally brings me to K.V. Ah! I’d written to you that it was beginning to seem less and less like eating strawberries in the spring. Well, that is of course true. If I should lapse into repetition, forgive me, I don’t know if I’ve already written to you about what happened to me in Amsterdam. I went there thinking, who knows whether the no, nay, never isn’t thawing, it’s such mild weather. And so one evening I was making my way along Keizersgracht, looking for the house, and indeed found it. And naturally I rang the bell and heard that the family were still at table. But then I heard that I could come in all the same. And there they were, including Jan, the very learned professor, all of them except Kee. And they all still had a plate in front of them, and there wasn’t a plate too many. This small detail caught my eye. They wanted to make me think that Kee wasn’t there, and had taken away her plate, but I knew she was there, I thought it so much like a comedy or game.

After a while I asked (after chatting a bit and greeting everyone), But where’s Kee? Then J.P.S. repeated my question, saying to his wife, Mother, where’s Kee? And the missus said, Kee’s out. And for the time being I didn’t pursue the matter but talked a bit with the professor about the exhibition at Arti he’d just seen. Well, the professor disappeared and little Jan Vos disappeared, and J.P.S. and the wife of the same and yours truly remained alone and got ourselves into position. J.P.S., as priest and Father, started to speak and said he’d been on the point of sending a certain letter to yours truly and he would read that letter aloud. However, first I asked again, interrupting His Hon. or the Rev., Where’s Kee? (Because I knew she was in town.) Then J.P.S. said, Kee left the house as soon as she heard you were here. Well, I know some things about her, and I must say that I didn’t know then and still don’t know with certainty whether her coldness and rudeness is a good or bad sign. This much I do know, that I’ve never seen her so seemingly or actually cool and callous and rude towards anyone but me. So I didn’t say much in reply and remained dead calm. Let me hear that letter, I said, or not, I don’t really care either way. Then came the epistle. The writing was reverent and very learned and so there wasn’t really anything in it, though it did seem to say that I was being requested to stop corresponding and I was given the advice to make vigorous attempts to forget the matter. At last the reading of the letter was over. I felt exactly as though I were hearing the minister in the church, after some raising and lowering of his voice, saying amen – it left me just as cold as an ordinary sermon. And then I began, and I said as calmly and politely as I could, well yes, I’ve already heard this line of reasoning quite often, but now go on – and after that? But then J.P.S. looked up… he even seemed to be somewhat amazed at my not being completely convinced that we’d reached the extreme limit of the human capacity to think and feel. There was, according to him, no ‘after that’ possible. We went on like this, and once in a while Aunt M. put in a very Jesuitical word, and I got quite warm and finally lost my temper. And J.P.S. lost his temper too, as much as a clergyman can lose his temper. And even though he didn’t exactly say ‘God damn you’, anyone other than a clergyman in J.P.S.’s mood would have expressed himself that way. But you know that I love both Pa and J.P.S. in my own way, despite the fact that I truly loathe their system, and I changed tack a bit and gave and took a bit, so that at the end of the evening they said to me that if I wanted to stay at their house I could. Then I said, thank you. If Kee walks out of the house when I come, then I don’t think it’s the right moment to stay here, I’m going to my boarding-house. And then they asked, where are you staying? I said, I don’t know yet, and then Uncle and Aunt insisted on bringing me themselves to a good, inexpensive boarding-house. And heavens, those two old dears came with me through the cold, misty, muddy streets, and truly, they showed me a very good boarding-house and very inexpensive. I didn’t want them to come at all but they insisted on showing me. And, you see, I thought that rather humane of them and it calmed me down somewhat. I stayed in Amsterdam two more days and talked with J.P.S. again, but I didn’t see Kee, she made herself scarce each time. And I said that they ought to know that although they wanted me to consider the matter over and done with, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. And they continued to reply firmly: ‘Later on I would understand it better’. Now and then I also saw the professor again, and I have to say he wasn’t so bad, but – but – but – what else can I say about that gentleman? I said I hoped that he might fall in love one day. Voilà. Can professors fall in love? Do clergymen know what love is?

I recently read Michelet, La femme, la religion et le prêtre. Books like that are full of reality, yet what is more real than reality itself, and what has more life than life itself? And we who do our best to live, why don’t we live even more!

I walked around aimlessly those three days in Amsterdam, I felt damned miserable, and that half-kindness on the part of Uncle and Aunt and all those arguments, I found them so tedious. Until I finally began to find myself tedious and said to myself: would you like to become despondent again? And then I said to myself, Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed. And so it was on a Sunday morning that I last went to see J.P.S. and said to him, Listen, my dear Uncle, if Kee Vos were an angel she would be too lofty for me, and I don’t think that I would stay in love with an angel. Were she a devil, I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her. In the present case, I see in her a real woman, with womanly passions and whims, and I love her dearly, that’s just the way it is, and I’m glad of it. So long as she doesn’t become an angel or a devil, the case in question isn’t over. And J.P.S. couldn’t say very much to that, and spoke himself of womanly passions, I’m not really sure what he said about them, and then J.P.S. left for the church. No wonder one becomes hardened and numb there, I know that from my own experience. And so as far as your brother in question is concerned, he didn’t want to let himself be overwhelmed. But that didn’t alter the fact that he felt overwhelmed, that he felt as though he had been leaning against a cold, hard, whitewashed church wall for too long. Oh well, should I tell you more, old chap? It’s rather daring to remain a realist, but Theo, Theo, you too are a realist, oh bear with my realism! I told you, even my secrets aren’t necessarily secrets. Well, I won’t take those words back, think of me as you will, and whether you approve or disapprove of what I did is less important.

I’ll continue – from Amsterdam I went to Haarlem and sat very agreeably with our dear sister Willemien, and I took a walk with her, and in the evening I went to The Hague, and I landed up at M.’s around seven o’clock.

And I said: listen M., you were supposed to come to Etten to try and initiate me, more or less, into the mysteries of the palette. But I’ve been thinking that that wouldn’t be possible in only a couple of days, so now I’ve come to you and if you approve I’ll stay four weeks or so, or six weeks or so, or as long or as short as you like, and we’ll just have to see what we can do. It’s extremely impertinent of me to demand so much of you, but in short, I’m under a great deal of pressure. Well, Mauve said, do you have anything with you? Certainly, here are a couple of studies, and he said many good things about them, far too many, at the same time voicing some criticism, far too little. Well, and the next day we set up a still life and he began by saying, This is how you should hold your palette. And since then I’ve made a few painted studies and after that two watercolours.

This is a summary of my work, but there’s more to life than working with the hands and the head.

I remained chilled to the marrow, that’s to say to the marrow of my soul by that aforementioned imaginary or not-imaginary church wall. And I didn’t want to let myself be overwhelmed by that deadening feeling, I said. Then I thought to myself, I’d like to be with a woman, I can’t live without love, without a woman. I wouldn’t care a fig for life if there wasn’t something infinite, something deep, something real. But, I said to myself in reply: you say ‘She and no other’ and should you go to a woman? But surely that’s unreasonable, surely that goes against logic? And my answer to that was, Who’s the master, logic or I? Is logic there for me or am I there for logic, and is there no reason and no understanding in my unreasonableness or my stupidity? And whether I act rightly or wrongly, I can’t do otherwise, that damned wall is too cold for me, I’ll look for a woman, I cannot, I will not, I may not live without love. I’m only human, and a human with passions at that, I need a woman or I’ll freeze or turn to stone, or anyway be overwhelmed. In the circumstances, however, I struggled much within myself, and in that struggle some things concerning physical powers and health gained the upper hand, things which I believe and know more or less through bitter experience. One doesn’t live too long without a woman without going unpunished. And I don’t think that what some call God and others the supreme being and others nature is unreasonable and merciless, and, in a word, I came to the conclusion, I must see whether I can’t find a woman. And heavens, I didn’t look so very far. I found a woman, by no means young, by no means pretty, with nothing special about her, if you will. But perhaps you’re rather curious. She was fairly big and strongly built, she didn’t exactly have lady’s hands like K.V. but those of a woman who works hard. But she was not coarse and not common, and had something very feminine about her. She slightly resembled a nice figure by Chardin or Frère or possibly Jan Steen. Anyhow, that which the French call ‘a working woman’. She’d had a great many cares, one could see that, and life had given her a drubbing, oh nothing distinguished, nothing exceptional, nothing out of the ordinary.

Every woman, at every age, if she loves and if she is kind, can give a man not the infinite of the moment but the moment of the infinite.

Theo, I find such infinite charm in that je ne sais quoi of withering, that drubbed by life quality. Ah! I found her to have a charm, I couldn’t help seeing in her something by Feyen-Perrin, by Perugino. Look, I’m not exactly as innocent as a greenhorn, let alone a child in the cradle. It’s not the first time I couldn’t resist that feeling of affection, particularly love and affection for those women whom the clergymen damn so and superciliously despise and condemn from the pulpit. I don’t damn them, I don’t condemn them, I don’t despise them. Look, I’m almost thirty years old, and do you think I’ve never felt the need for love?

K.V. is older than I am, she also has love behind her, but she’s all the dearer to me for that very reason. She’s not ignorant, but neither am I. If she wants to subsist on an old love and if she wants to know nothing of new ones, that’s her business, but the more she perseveres in that and avoids me, the more I can’t just stifle my energy and strength of mind for her sake. No, I don’t want that, I love her, but I don’t want to freeze and deaden my mind for her sake. And the stimulus, the spark of fire we need, that is love and I don’t exactly mean mystic love.

That woman didn’t cheat me – oh, anyone who thinks all those sisters are swindlers is so wrong and understands so little.

That woman was good to me, very good, very decent, very sweet. In what way? That I won’t repeat even to my brother Theo, because I strongly suspect my brother Theo of having experienced something of this himself now and then. The better for him.

Did we spend a lot together? No, because I didn’t have much and I said to her, listen, you and I don’t have to get drunk to feel something for one another, just pocket what I can afford. And I wish I could have afforded more, because she was worth it.

And we talked about all kinds of things, about her life, about her cares, about her destitution, about her health, and I had a livelier conversation with her than with my learned professorial cousin Jan Stricker, for instance.

I’ve actually told you these things because I hope you’ll see that even though I perhaps have some feeling, I don’t want to be sentimental in a senseless way. That, no matter what, I want to preserve some warmth of life and keep my mind clear and my body healthy in order to work. And that I understand my love for K.V. to be such that for her sake I don’t want to set about my work despondently or let myself get upset.

You’ll understand that, you who wrote in your letter something about the matter of health. You talk of having been not quite healthy a while back, it’s very good you’re trying to get yourself straightened out.

Clergymen call us sinners, conceived and born in sin. Bah! I think that damned nonsense. Is it a sin to love, to need love, not to be able to do without love? I consider a life without love a sinful condition and an immoral condition. If there’s anything I regret, it’s that for a time I let mystical and theological profundities seduce me into withdrawing too much inside myself. I’ve gradually stopped doing that. If you wake up in the morning and you’re not alone and you see in the twilight a fellow human being, it makes the world so much more agreeable. Much more agreeable than the edifying journals and whitewashed church walls the clergymen are in love with. It was a sober, simple little room she lived in, with a subdued, grey tone because of the plain wallpaper and yet as warm as a painting by Chardin, a wooden floor with a mat and an old piece of dark-red carpet, an ordinary kitchen stove, a chest of drawers, a large, perfectly simple bed, in short, a real working woman’s interior. She had to do the washing the next day. Just right, very good, I would have found her just as charming in a purple jacket and a black skirt as now in a brown or red-grey frock. And she was no longer young, perhaps the same age as K.V., and she had a child, yes, life had given her a drubbing and her youth was gone. Gone? – there is no such thing as an old woman. Ah, and she was strong and healthy – and yet not rough, not common. Those who value distinction so very highly, can they always tell what is distinguished? Heavens! People sometimes look for it high and low when it’s close by, as I do too now and then.

I’m glad that I did what I did, because I think that nothing in the world should keep me from my work or cause me to lose my good spirits.

When I think of K.V., I still say ‘she and no other’, and I think exactly the same as I did last summer about ‘meanwhile looking for another lass’. But it’s not only recently that I’ve grown fond of those women who are condemned and despised and cursed by clergymen, my love for them is even somewhat older than my love for Kee Vos. Whenever I walked down the street – often all alone and at loose ends, half sick and destitute, with no money in my pocket – I looked at them and envied the people who could go off with her, and I felt as though those poor girls were my sisters, as far as our circumstances and experience of life were concerned. And, you see, that feeling is old and deeply rooted in me. Even as a boy I sometimes looked up with endless sympathy and respect into a half-withered female face on which it was written, as it were: life and reality have given me a drubbing. But my feelings for K.V. are completely new and something entirely different. Without knowing it, she’s in a kind of prison. She’s also poor and can’t do everything she wants, and you see, she has a kind of resignation and I think that the Jesuitisms of clergymen and devout ladies often make more of an impression on her than on me, Jesuitisms that no longer impress me for the very reason that I’ve learned a few tricks. But she adheres to them and couldn’t bear it if the system of resignation and sin and God and whatnot appeared to be a conceit. And I don’t think it occurs to her that perhaps God only actually begins when we say those words with which Multatuli closes his prayer of an unbeliever: ‘O God, there is no God’. Look, I find the clergymen’s God as dead as a doornail. But does that make me an atheist? The clergymen think me one – be that as it may – but look, I love, and how could I feel love if I myself weren’t alive and others weren’t alive? And if we live, there’s something wondrous about it. Call it God or human nature or what you will, but there’s a certain something that I can’t define in a system, even though it’s very much alive and real, and you see, for me it’s God or just as good as God. Look, if I must die in due course in one way or another, fine, what would there be to keep me alive? Wouldn’t it be the thought of love (moral or immoral love, what do I know about it?). And heavens, I love Kee Vos for a thousand reasons, but precisely because I believe in life and in something real I no longer become distracted as I used to when I had thoughts about God and religion that were more or less similar to those Kee Vos now appears to have. I won’t give her up, but that inner crisis she’s perhaps going through will take time, and I have the patience for it, and nothing she says or does makes me angry. But as long as she goes on being attached to the past and clinging to it, I must work and keep my mind clear for painting and drawing and business. So I did what I did, from a need for warmth of life and with an eye to health. I’m also telling you these things so that you don’t get the idea again that I’m in a melancholy or distracted, pensive mood. On the contrary, I’m usually pottering about with and thinking about paint, making watercolours, looking for a studio &c. &c. Old chap, if only I could find a suitable studio.

I sometimes wish that the three months between now and going back to M. were already over, but such as they’ll be, they’ll bring some good. Write to me, though, now and then. Are you coming again in the winter?

And listen, renting a studio &c., I’ll do it or I won’t, depending on what Mauve thinks of it. I’m sending him the floor plan as agreed, and perhaps he’ll come and have a look himself if necessary. But Pa has to stay out of it. Pa isn’t the right man to get mixed up in artistic matters. And the less I have to do with Pa in business matters, the better I’ll get along with Pa. But I have to be free and independent in many things, that goes without saying.

I sometimes shudder at the thought of K.V., seeing her dwelling on the past and clinging to old, dead notions. There’s something fatal about it, and oh, she’d be none the worse for changing her mind. I think it quite possible that her reaction will come, there’s so much in her that’s healthy and lively. And so in March I’ll go to The Hague again and – and – again to Amsterdam. But when I left Amsterdam this time, I said to myself, under no circumstances should you become melancholy and let yourself be overwhelmed so that your work suffers, especially now that it’s beginning to progress. Eating strawberries in the spring, yes, that’s part of life, but it’s only a short part of the year and it’s still a long way off.

And you should envy me because of this or that? Oh no, old chap, because what I’m seeking can be found by all, by you perhaps sooner than by me. And oh, I’m so backward and narrow-minded about so many things, if only I knew exactly why and what I should do to improve. But unfortunately we often don’t see the beams in our own eye. Do write to me soon, and you’ll just have to separate the wheat from the chaff in my letters, if sometimes there’s something good in them, something true, so much the better, but of course there’s much in them that’s wrong, more or less, or perhaps exaggerated, without my always being aware of it. I’m truly no scholar and am so extremely ignorant, oh, like many others and even more than others, but I can’t gauge that myself, and I can gauge others even less than I can gauge myself, and am often wide of the mark. But even as we stray we sometimes find the track anyway, and there’s something good in all movement (by the way, I happened to hear Jules Breton say that and have remembered that utterance of his). Tell me, have you ever heard Mauve preach?? I’ve heard him imitate several clergymen – once he gave a sermon on Peter’s barque (the sermon was divided into 3 parts: First, would he have bought it or inherited it? Second, would he have paid for it in instalments or parts? Third, did he perhaps (banish the thought) steal it?) Then he went on to preach on ‘the goodness of the Lord’ and on ‘the Tigris and the Euphrates’ and finally he did an imitation of J.P.S., how he had married A. and Lecomte.

But when I told him that I had once said in a conversation with Pa that I believed that one could say something edifying even in church, even from the pulpit, M. said, Yes. And then he did an imitation of Father Bernhard: God – God – is almighty – he created the sea, he created the earth and the sky and the stars and the sun and the moon, he can do everything – everything – everything – and yet – no, He’s not almighty, there’s one thing He cannot do. What is the one thing that God Almighty cannot do? God Almighty cannot cast away a sinner. Well, adieu, Theo, do write soon, in thought a handshake, believe me

The Hague, Thursday, 26 January 1882

I received your letter and the 100 francs enclosed in good order, and thank you very much for both. What I feared would happen when last I wrote to you has now truly come about, namely that I fell ill and spent three days or so lying in bed with fever and anxiety. Accompanied now and then by headache and toothache. It’s a wretched condition and comes from nervous exhaustion. Mauve came to see me and we agreed again to bear up bravely through it all.

But then I loathe myself so much for not being able to do what I’d like, and at such moments one feels as though one is bound hand and foot, lying in a deep, dark pit, powerless to do anything. Now it’s over, inasmuch as I got up last night and pottered around a bit, putting one thing and another in order, and when this morning the model came of her own accord to have a look, even though I only half expected her, together with Mauve I arranged her in a pose and tried to draw a little, but I can’t yet, and this evening I felt completely weak and miserable. But if I do as little as possible for a couple of days then it will be over for a good long time, and if I’m careful I needn’t be afraid that it will recur for the time being. I’m very sorry that you’re not well either. When I was in Brussels last winter, I had baths as often as I could, 2 or 3 times a week in the bathhouse, and I felt very well and shall start doing it again here. I don’t doubt but that it would also help you a lot if you were to keep it up for a while, because one gets what they call ‘radiation’ here, namely that the pores of the skin stay open and the skin can breathe, whereas otherwise it shrivels up a bit, especially in the winter.

And I tell you frankly that I definitely think you mustn’t be embarrassed about going to a girl now and then, if you know one you can trust and you can feel something for, of which there are many in fact. Because for someone whose life is all hard work and exertion it’s necessary, absolutely necessary, to stay normal and to keep one’s wits about one.

One doesn’t have to overdo that kind of thing and go to excess, but nature has fixed laws and it’s fatal to struggle against them. Anyway, you know everything you need to know about it.

It would be good for you, it would be good for me, if we were married, but what can one do?

I’m sending you a little drawing, but you mustn’t conclude from it that they’re all like that, this is fairly thin and washed quickly, but that doesn’t always work, especially with larger ones, in fact it seldom does.

Yet it will perhaps prove to you that it’s not a hopeless case, that I’m beginning to get the hang of it, rather.

When Mauve was last here he asked me if I needed any money. I could put on a brave face towards him and that’s going better, but you see that in an emergency he would also do something.

And so, although there will still be worries, I do have hope that we’ll muddle through. Especially if Mr Tersteeg would be kind enough, if it’s inconvenient for you, to give me some credit if it should prove absolutely necessary.

You speak of fine promises. It’s more or less the same with me. Mauve says it will go well, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the watercolours I’m making still aren’t exactly saleable. Well, I also have hope and I’ll work myself to the bone, but one is sometimes driven to desperation when one wants to work something up a bit more and it turns out thick. It’s enough to drive one to distraction, for it’s no small difficulty. And experiments and trials with watercolours are rather costly. Paper, paint, brushes and the model and time and all the rest.

Still, I believe that the least expensive way is to persevere without losing any time.

For one must get through this miserable period. Now I must learn not to do some things which I more or less taught myself, and to look at things in a completely different way. A great effort must be made before one can look at the proportion of things with a steady eye.

It’s not exactly easy for me to get along with Mauve all the time, any more than is the reverse, because I think we’re a match for each other as regards nervous energy, and it’s a downright effort for him to give me directions, and no less for me to understand them and to attempt to put them into practice.

But I think we’re beginning to understand each other quite well, and it’s already beginning to be a deeper feeling than mere superficial sympathy. He has his hands full with his large painting that was once intended for the Salon, it will be splendid. And he’s also working on a winter scene. And some lovely drawings.

I believe he puts a little bit of his life into each painting and each drawing. Sometimes he’s dog-tired, and he said recently, ‘I’m not getting any stronger’, and anyone seeing him just then wouldn’t easily forget the expression on his face.

This is what Mauve says to console me when my drawings turn out heavy, thick, muddy, black, dead: If you were already working thinly now, it would only be being stylish and later your work would probably become thick. Now, though, you’re struggling and it becomes heavy, but later it will become quick and thin. If indeed it turns out like that, I have nothing against it. And you see it now from this small one, which took a quarter of an hour to make from beginning to end, but – after I’d made a larger one that turned out too heavy. And it was precisely because I’d struggled with that other one that, when the model happened to be standing like this for a moment, I was later able to sketch this one in an instant on a little piece of paper that was left over from a sheet of Whatman.

This model is a pretty girl, I believe she’s mainly Artz’s model, but she charges a daalder a day and that’s really too expensive for now. So I simply toil on with my old crone.

The success or failure of a drawing also has a lot to do with one’s mood and condition, I believe. And that’s why I do what I can to stay clear-headed and cheerful. But sometimes, like now, some malaise or other takes hold of me, and then it doesn’t work at all.

But then, too, the message is to keep on working – because Mauve, for instance, and Israëls and so many others who are examples know how to benefit from every mood.

Anyway, I have some hope that as soon as I’m completely better things will go well, a little better than now. If I have to rest for a while I’ll do it, but it will probably be over soon.

All things considered, though, I’m not like I was a year or so ago, when I never had to stay in bed for a day, and now there’s something thwarting me at every turn, even if it isn’t so bad.

In short, my youth is past, not my love of life or my vitality, but I mean the time when one doesn’t feel that one lives, and lives without effort. Actually I say all the better, there are now better things, after all, than there were then. Bear up, old chap – it really is rather petty and mean of Messrs G&Cie that they refused you when you wanted to have some money. You certainly didn’t deserve that, that they were so cold-hearted towards you, because you do a lot of their dirty work and don’t spare yourself. So you have a right to be treated with some respect.

Accept a handshake in thought, I hope that I’ll soon have something better to tell you than I did today and recently, but you mustn’t hold it against me, I’m very weak. Adieu.

The Hague, Saturday, 11 March 1882

You will have received my letters, I’m answering yours, received this afternoon. In accordance with your request, I immediately sent Tersteeg 10 guilders, lent to me this week by His Hon. I wrote to you about C.M.’s order, this is what happened. C.M. appeared to have spoken to Tersteeg before he came to see me, at any rate began talking about things like ‘earning your bread’. My answer suddenly came to me, quickly and, I believe, correctly. Here’s what I said: earn my bread, what do you mean by that? — to earn one’s bread or to deserve one’s bread — not to deserve one’s bread, that is to say, to be unworthy of one’s bread, that’s what’s a crime, every honest man being worthy of his crust — but as for not earning it at all, while at the same time deserving it, oh, that! is a misfortune and A great misfortune. So, if you’re saying to me here and now: you’re unworthy of your bread, I understand that you’re insulting me, but if you’re making the moderately fair comment to me that I don’t always earn it because sometimes I’m short of it, so be it, but what’s the use of making that comment to me? It’s scarcely useful to me if it ends there. I recently tried, I continued, to explain this to Tersteeg, but either he’s hard of hearing in that ear or my explanation was a little confused because of the pain his words caused me.

The storm threatened again because I happened to mention the name Degroux in connection with expression. C.M. suddenly asked, But surely you know there was something untoward about Degroux’s private life?

You understand that there C.M. touched a tender spot and ventured on to thin ice. I really can’t let that be said about good père Degroux. So I replied, it has always seemed to me that when an artist shows his work to people he has the right to keep to himself the inner struggle of his own private life (which is directly and inextricably connected with the singular difficulties involved in producing a work of art) – unless he unburdens himself to a very intimate friend. It is, I say, indelicate for a critic to dig up something blameworthy from the private life of someone whose work is above criticism. Degroux is a master like Millet, like Gavarni.

(To anyone but C.M. I could have expressed myself more succinctly by saying: an artist’s work and his private life are like a woman in childbed and her child. You may look at her child, but you may not lift up her chemise to see if there are any bloodstains on it, that would be indelicate on the occasion of a maternity visit.)

I was already beginning to fear that C.M. would hold it against me – but fortunately things took a turn for the better. As a diversion I got out my portfolio with smaller studies and sketches. At first he said nothing – until we came to a little drawing that I’d sketched once with Breitner, parading around at midnight – namely Paddemoes (that Jewish quarter near the Nieuwe Kerk), seen from Turfmarkt. I’d set to work on it again the next morning with the pen.

Jules Bakhuyzen had also looked at the thing and recognized the spot immediately.

Could you make more of those townscapes for me? said C.M. Certainly, because I amuse myself with them sometimes when I’ve worked myself to the bone with the model – here’s Vleersteeg – the Geest district – Vischmarkt. Make 12 of those for me. Certainly, I said, but that means we’re doing a bit of business, so let’s talk straightaway about the price. My price for a drawing of that size, whether with pencil or pen, I’ve fixed for myself at a rijksdaalder – does that seem unreasonable to you?

No – he simply says – if they turn out well I’ll ask for another 12 of Amsterdam, provided you let me fix the price, then you’ll earn a bit more.

Well, it seems to me that that’s not a bad way to end a visit I had rather dreaded. Because I actually made an agreement with you, Theo, simply to tell you things like this in my own way, as it flows from my pen, I’m describing these little scenes to you just as they happen. Especially because in this way, even though you’re absent, you get a glimpse of my studio anyway.

I’m longing for you to come, because then I can talk to you more seriously about things concerning home, for instance.

C.M.’s order is a bright spot! I’ll try to do those drawings carefully and put some spirit into them. And in any case you’ll see them, and I believe, old chap, that there’s more of such business. Buyers for 5-franc drawings can be found. With a bit of practice, I’ll make one every day and voilà, if they sell well, a crust of bread and a guilder a day for the model. The lovely season with long days is approaching, I’ll make the ‘soup ticket’, i.e. the bread and model drawing, either in the morning or the evening, and during the day I’ll study seriously from the model. C.M. is one buyer I found myself. Who knows whether you won’t succeed in turning up a second, and perhaps Tersteeg, when he’s recovered from his reproachful fury, a third, and then things can move along.

I was at Pulchri this evening – Tableaux vivants and a kind of farce by Tony Offermans. I skipped the farce, because I can’t stand caricatures or the fug of an assembly hall, but I wanted to see the tableaux vivants, especially because one of them was done after an etching I gave Mauve as a present, Nicolaas Maes, the stable at Bethlehem. (The other was Rembrandt, Isaac blessing Jacob, with a superb Rebecca who watches to see if her ruse will succeed.) The Nicolaas Maes was very good in chiaroscuro and even colour – but in my opinion not worth tuppence as far as expression goes. The expression was definitely wrong. I saw it once in real life, not the birth of the baby Jesus, mind you, but the birth of a calf. And I still know exactly what its expression was like. There was a girl there, at night in that stable – in the Borinage – a brown peasant face with a white night-cap among other things, she had tears in her eyes of compassion for the poor cow when the animal went into labour and was having great difficulty. It was pure, holy, wonderfully beautiful like a Correggio, like a Millet, like an Israëls. Oh Theo – why don’t you let it all go hang and become a painter? Old chap – you could do it if you wanted to. I sometimes suspect you of keeping a great landscapist hidden inside you. It seems to me you’d be extremely good at drawing birch trunks and sketching the furrows of a field or stubble field, and painting snow and sky &c. Just between you and me. I shake your hand.

Israëls, an old man (if he weren’t a fisherman he’d be Tom Carlyle – the author of the French Revolution and Oliver Cromwell – for he definitely has that distinctive head of Carlyle), an old man sits in a hut by the fireplace in which a small piece of peat barely glows in the twilight. For it’s a dark hut the old man sits in, an old hut with a small window with a little white curtain. His dog, who’s grown old with him, sits beside him – those two old creatures look at each other, they look each other in the eye, the dog and the old man. And meanwhile the man takes his tobacco box out of his trousers pocket and he fills his pipe like that in the twilight. Nothing else – the twilight, the quiet, the loneliness of those two old creatures, man and dog, the familiarity of those two, that old man thinking – what’s he thinking about? – I don’t know – I can’t say – but it must be a deep, a long thought, something, though I don’t know what, surfacing from long ago, perhaps that’s what gives that expression to his face – a melancholy, satisfied, submissive expression, something that recalls that famous verse by Longfellow that always ends, But the thoughts of youth are long long thoughts. I’d like to see that painting by Israëls as a pendant to Millet’s Death and the woodcutter. I definitely know of no other painting than this Israëls that can stand up to Millet’s Death and the woodcutter, that one can see at the same time, on the other hand I know of no other painting that could stand up to this Israëls than Millet’s Death and the woodcutter, no other painting that one can see at the same time as this Israëls. Moreover, I feel in my mind an irresistible desire to bring together that painting by Israëls and that other by Millet and make them complement each other. It seems to me that what this Israëls lacks is having Millet’s Death and the woodcutter hanging close by, one at one end and the other at the other end of a long, narrow room, with no other painting in that gallery but those two and them alone.

It’s a fabulous Israëls, I couldn’t really see anything else, it made such a deep impression on me. And yet, there was another Israëls, a small one with 5 or 6 figures, I think, a labourer’s family at table.

There’s a Mauve, the large painting of the pink being dragged onto the dunes, it’s a masterpiece.

I’ve never heard a good sermon about resignation nor been able to imagine one, except for this painting by Mauve and the work of Millet. It is indeed resignation, but the true kind, not that of the clergymen. Those nags, those poor, sorry-looking nags, black, white, brown, they stand there, patiently submissive, willing, resigned, still. They’ll soon have to drag the heavy boat the last bit of the way, the job’s almost done. They stand still for a moment, they pant, they’re covered in sweat, but they don’t murmur, they don’t protest – they don’t complain – about anything. They’re long past that, years ago already. They’re resigned to living and working a while longer, but if they have to go to the knacker’s yard tomorrow, so be it, they’re ready for it. I find such a wonderfully elevated, practical, wordless philosophy in this painting, it seems to be saying,

to know how to suffer without complaining, that’s the only practical thing, that’s the great skill, the lesson to learn, the solution to life’s problem.

It seems to me that this painting by Mauve would be one of those rare paintings which Millet would stand in front of for a long time, mumbling to himself, he has a good heart, that painter.

There were other paintings – I must say I scarcely looked at them, I had enough with the above-mentioned.

Listen Theo, wouldn’t you like to ponder whether there’s not a great landscapist in you? We should both of us quite simply become painters, we’d be able to make a living at it. For the figure one must be more of a draught ox or work-horse, more a man of hard labour. There’s a long long thought for you – old boy.

Theo, remain something better than HGT. When I first got to know him, HGT was better than now, he’d been a bigwig only a short time and was newly married. Now he’s been caught, he’s trapped. He’ll grow more and more to have secret regrets about many, many things and will be forced to conceal them. The thing is, Theo, my brother, not to let your hands be tied by anyone, especially not with a gilt chain. I have to say that the chain tying Tersteeg is very beautiful to look at, but anyone who thinks about it doesn’t envy his position. Be that as it may, artist is healthier – pecuniary difficulties are the greatest worry, I repeat, you, and you as a landscape painter, would surmount them sooner than I, though I, too, shall pull through some day. But, if you push off immediately, you’ll overtake me, because the figure is complicated, takes longer. You’ll understand that I speak in all seriousness.

The Hague, Sunday, 7 May 1882

I give you leave to say what you like to Mauve about the contents of this letter, but it doesn’t have to go any further.

Today I met Mauve and had a very regrettable conversation with him which made it clear to me that Mauve and I have parted ways for ever. Mauve has gone so far that he can’t retract it, or at least certainly wouldn’t want to. I asked him to come and see my work and talk things over afterwards. Mauve refused outright, ‘I certainly won’t come to see you, it’s over and done with’.

In the end he said, ‘you have a vicious character’. At that point I turned around – it was in the dunes – and walked home alone.

Mauve blames me for saying, I’m an artist – which I won’t take back, because those words naturally imply always seeking without ever fully finding. It’s the exact opposite of saying, ‘I know it already, I’ve already found it’. To the best of my knowledge, those words mean ‘I seek, I pursue, my heart is in it’. I do have ears, Theo – if someone says ‘you have a vicious character’, what should I do? I turned around and went back alone, but with great sorrow in my heart because Mauve dared to say that to me. I won’t ask him to explain such a thing to me, nor will I apologize.

And yet – and yet – and yet. I wish that Mauve regretted it. People suspect me of something… it’s in the air… I must be hiding something… Vincent is keeping something back that may not be divulged.. Well, gentlemen, I’ll tell you – you who set great store by manners and culture, and rightly so, provided it’s the real thing – what is more cultured, more sensitive, more manly: to forsake a woman or to take on a forsaken one?

This winter I met a pregnant woman, abandoned by the man whose child she was carrying.

A pregnant woman who roamed the streets in winter – who had to earn her bread, you can imagine how.

I took that woman as a model and worked with her the whole winter. I couldn’t give her a model’s full daily wage, but all the same, I paid her rent and have until now been able, thank God, to preserve her and her child from hunger and cold by sharing my own bread with her. When I met this woman, she caught my eye because she looked ill.

I made her take baths and as much fortifying remedies as I could afford, she’s become much healthier. I went with her to Leiden, where there’s a maternity hospital she’ll go to for her confinement. No wonder she was ill, the child was the wrong way round and she had to have an operation, which entailed turning the child with forceps. Still, there’s a good chance that she’ll come through it all right. She’ll have the baby in June.

It seems to me that any man worth the leather his shoes are made of would have done the same in such circumstances. I find what I did so simple and natural that I thought I could keep it to myself. She found posing difficult, but she learned it anyway. I’ve progressed with my drawing by having a good model. This woman is now attached to me like a tame dove – for my part, I can marry only once, and when would be a better time to do it than with her, because only by doing so can I continue to help her, and otherwise hardship will make her take the same road that ends in the abyss. She has no money, but she helps me to earn money in my work. I’m full of enthusiasm and ambition for my profession and work, if I left off painting and making watercolours for a while, it’s because I was so shaken by Mauve’s forsaking me, and if he really were to reconsider, I’d begin again with courage. As it is, I can’t even look at a brush, it makes me nervous.

I wrote: Theo, can you enlighten me as to Mauve’s attitude – perhaps this letter will enlighten you. You’re my brother, it’s natural that I speak to you about private matters, but someone who says to me, you have a vicious character, I stop speaking to him from that very moment.

I couldn’t do otherwise, I did what the hand found to do, I worked. I thought I would be understood without words. I was in fact thinking of another woman for whom my heart beats – but she was far away and didn’t want to see me, and this one – there she was, ill, pregnant, hungry – in the winter. I couldn’t do otherwise. Mauve, Theo, Tersteeg, you all have my livelihood in your hands, will you leave me penniless or turn your backs on me – now I’ve spoken and shall wait to hear what’s said to me.

I’m sending you a couple of studies, because perhaps you’ll see from them that she helps me greatly by posing.

Considering, however, that in a year, when I’ll probably be working very differently, I’ll have to base myself on the studies I’m making now as conscientiously as I possibly can, I’d like to have these three back in any case. You see that they’ve been made with care. If I later have an interior or a waiting room or some such thing, these will be of use to me because I’ll have to consult them for the details.

But I thought it might be good for you to know how I spend my time. These studies demand a rather dry technique, if I’d concentrated here on the effect they’d be less useful to me later on.

But I think you’ll understand this yourself. The paper I’d actually like to have most is the kind on which the female figure is drawn bending forwards, but if possible of the colour of unbleached linen. I have no more of it in that thickness, I believe one calls it double Ingres. I can’t get any more of it here. When you see how that drawing is done, you’ll understand that the thin kind can barely take it. I wanted to include a small figure in black merino, but I can’t roll it. The chair by the large figure isn’t finished because I’d like to put an old oak chair there.

The Hague, on or about Thursday, 8 June 1882

Should you come here towards the end of June, I hope you’ll find me back at work, but at present I’m in hospital, although I’ll only be here for about a fortnight. For some 3 weeks I’d been suffering a good deal from sleeplessness and chronic fever, and felt pain on passing water. And now it turns out that I’ve got a very mild case of what’s known as ‘a dose of the clap’. So I have to stay quietly in bed, swallow a lot of quinine tablets and from time to time have instillations of pure water or alum water, thus as harmless as could be. There’s no reason for you to be in the least concerned about this, but as you know one has to take this sort of thing seriously and act immediately, because neglect can make it incurable or exacerbate matters. Take the case of Breitner, who’s still here, though in another ward, and will probably leave soon — he doesn’t know I’m here.

I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention this, because people sometimes think it’s terribly serious or make it sound serious by telling exaggerated tales. Of course I’m telling you exactly what it is, and you needn’t keep silent if someone asks you directly, and in any event you needn’t worry. Naturally I had to pay for a fortnight in advance, 10.50 guilders for nursing costs. There’s no difference in food or treatment between those whose nursing is paid for by poor relief and those who pay the 10.50 guilders themselves. There are 10 beds in a ward, and I must say that the treatment is very good in every respect. I’m not bored, and the rest and proper, practical medical treatment are doing me good.

If it’s convenient, be so good as to send around 20 June to the above address, but NOT by registered letter, 50 francs without registering the letter. As you know, I received 100 francs on 1 June, so I’m taken care of in any event. If I have to stay longer, I’ll pay the extra and stay on, and otherwise I’ll have enough to carry on with.

I’d prefer to get back to work in a fortnight, of course, and I’ll be dying to go back to the dunes in a fortnight.

Sien comes to see me on visiting days and is keeping an eye on the studio. Now I must tell you that the day before I came here I received a letter from C.M. in which he writes a good deal about the ‘interest’ that he takes in me and which, he says, Mr Tersteeg has shown, but, he continues, he didn’t approve of how ungrateful I was for H.G.T.’s interest. So be it. I’m lying here completely calmly and quietly now, but I assure you, Theo, that I would be put in a very bad mood if someone again dished me up with the same sort of interest as H.G.T. on certain occasions. And when I think how His Hon. took that interest to the point of daring to compare me to an opium smoker, I’m still amazed that for my part I didn’t show my interest by telling him to go to hell.

Talking of smoking opium, the comfort and luxury, the sort of glory in which H.G.T. moves and the fairly strong doses of flattery that his visitors bring for him — those are things that perhaps befuddle His Hon. now and again more than he realizes.

In short, with all his superficially refined politeness, with his superficially civilized manners, his smart clothes and so on and so on, on consideration and also looking back on it, I find something malicious in His Hon.’s character. I wish it weren’t so, but I can’t say otherwise. I don’t doubt for a moment that His Hon. is a clever man, but another question comes first before I can respect him: is he a good man? Namely someone who doesn’t deliberately and on principle cultivate hatred, rancour, bickering and sarcasm inside himself. That is the question.

I haven’t replied to C.M.’s last letter, nor shall I. I appreciate His Hon.’s telling me that he’ll also take something else later, no doubt out of interest too, but especially if he means it, which time will tell.

Another reason for not regretting lying here quietly for a few days is that, should I need it, I can get an official statement from the doctor here that I’m absolutely not the sort of person who should be sent to Geel or made a ward of court.

And if that isn’t enough, I can also get another, if I make an effort, from the professor in charge of the lying-in clinic in Leiden.

But perhaps those people who might possibly get it into their heads to declare that the family or society would be so much better off if someone like me were to be declared mad or made a ward of court are so extraordinarily brilliant that in such cases they know far better than, for example, the doctor here.

Sien is getting ready to leave. I think of her a great deal — I expect her again later. May she come through it safely.

I resisted as long as I could and carried on working, but in the end I realized I needed to see a doctor urgently. But he told me just this morning that I would soon be rid of it. Did you get the two little drawings?

Adieu with a handshake, and wishing you as much good fortune as anyone could deal with.

I must tell you again that the precedent of Geel, at which time they were minded to make me a ward of court on physical grounds, makes it difficult for the family suddenly to change their story now and look for financial rather than physical reasons. Such arguments won’t hold water. Again, I hope they won’t go that far.

You do understand, Theo, that I don’t discuss family matters with the doctor here or the professor in Leiden — but because I’m being treated by the former and Sien by the latter, it will only take a word from me in the last resort to secure the testimony of these two gentlemen to set against any possible statements by a few people of which you spoke.

The Hague, Monday, 31 July 1882

Just a word to say welcome before you come here. And to report the safe arrival of your letter and the enclosure, and to thank you very much.

As regards black in nature, we are of course in complete agreement, as I understand it. Absolute black doesn’t in fact occur. Like white, however, it’s present in almost every colour and forms the endless variety of greys — distinct in tone and strength. So that in nature one in fact sees nothing but these tones or strengths.

From these are obtained the endless variations of grey by adding black and some white — red-grey, yellow-grey, blue-grey, green-grey, orange-grey, violet-grey.

It’s impossible to say how many different green-greys there are for example — the variation is infinite.

But the whole chemistry of colours is no more complicated than those simple few fundamentals. And a good understanding of them is worth more than 70 different shades of paint — given that more than 70 tones and strengths can be made with the 3 primary colours and white and black. The colourist is he who on seeing a colour in nature is able to analyze it coolly and say, for example, that green-grey is yellow with black and almost no blue, &c. In short, knowing how to make up the greys of nature on the palette.

To make notes out of doors, however, or make a small scratch, a highly developed feeling for the outline is absolutely essential, as it is for working it up later.

This doesn’t come of its own accord, but firstly through observation, and then above all through persistent hard work and seeking. Some study of anatomy and perspective is also required.

Hanging beside me is a landscape study by Roelofs, a pen sketch, but I can’t tell you how expressive that simple outline is. Everything is in there.

Another, even more telling example is the large Shepherdess woodcut by Millet which you showed me last year, and which has remained in my memory. Also, for example, the pen sketches by Ostade and Peasant Bruegel.

When I see such results, I feel the cardinal importance of the outline most clearly. And you know from Sorrow, for example, that I take great trouble to make myself better in that respect.

But you’ll see when you come to the studio that besides seeking the outline I certainly also have a feeling, like anyone else, for the strengths.

And that I also have nothing against making watercolours — but they’re founded on drawing first, and then from the drawing springs not only the watercolour but all kinds of other shoots that will develop in due course in me as in anyone else working with love.

I’ve attacked that old giant of a pollard willow, and I believe it has turned out the best of the watercolours. A sombre landscape — that dead tree beside a stagnant pond covered in duckweed, in the distance a Rijnspoor depot where railway lines cross, smoke-blackened buildings — also green meadows, a cinder road and a sky in which the clouds are racing, grey with an occasional gleaming white edge, and a depth of blue where the clouds tear apart for a moment.

In short, I wanted to make it like how I imagine the signalman with his smock and red flag must see and feel it when he thinks: how gloomy it is today.

I get a lot of pleasure out of work these days, though now and again I still clearly feel the after-effects of my illness.

As to the drawings I’m going to show you now, I think only this: that they will, I hope, serve as evidence that I’m not stuck on one level but am moving in a direction that is reasonable. As for the commercial value of my work, I have no pretensions other than that I would be very surprised if in time my work doesn’t sell as well as that of others. Whether that happens now or later, well, I’m not bothered about that too much. Just working faithfully from nature and with persistence seems to me a sure way, and one that can’t end up with nothing. The feeling for and love of nature always strike a chord sooner or later with people who take an interest in art. The duty of the painter is to study nature in depth and to use all his intelligence, to put his feelings into his work so that it becomes comprehensible to others. But working with an eye to saleability isn’t exactly the right way in my view, but rather is cheating art lovers. The true artists didn’t do that; the sympathy they received sooner or later came because of their sincerity. I know no more than that, and don’t believe I need to know any more. Making an effort to find art lovers and arouse their love is something else, and of course permissible. But it mustn’t become a speculation that might well go wrong and would certainly waste time that ought to be spent on work.

Of course you’ll find things in my present watercolours that should be taken out, but that must improve with time.

But you should know that I’m a long way from having a system or anything like that to keep up and lock myself into. That sort of thing exists in H.G.T.’s imagination, for example, rather than in reality. As for H.G.T., you understand that I have a personal reason for my opinion of him, and that I don’t in the least intend to press you, for example, to take the same view of him as I am forced to do. As long as he thinks and says of me the kind of things you know of, I can’t regard him either as a friend or as someone of use to me in any way, but quite the opposite. And I fear that his opinion of me is too firmly rooted ever to change, all the more so because, as you say yourself, he won’t take the trouble to reconsider some things and to change.

When I see how several painters I know here struggle with their watercolours and paintings, unable to find the answer, I sometimes think, friend, your drawing is where the trouble lies. I don’t for a moment regret not moving straight on to watercolour and painting. I know for sure that I’ll catch up if I keep hacking away at it, so that my hand doesn’t hesitate in drawing and perspective. But when I see young painters composing and drawing off the top of their head — then daubing on all sorts at random, also off the top of their head — then holding it at a distance and putting on a very profound, sombre expression to find out to what in God’s name it might bear some resemblance, and finally, still off the top of their head, making what they can of it, it makes me feel feeble and faint, and I find it truly tedious and heavy going.

Yet these gentlemen regularly ask me — not without a certain patronizing air — ‘whether I’ve started painting yet’.

Now I also sometimes find myself playing, so to speak, at random on a piece of paper, but I attach no more value to this than to a rag or cabbage leaf.

And I hope you’ll understand that if I go on just drawing, I do that for two reasons. Because at all costs I want to acquire a sure hand when drawing above all else and, second, because painting materials and watercolours entail considerable expense for which there’s no return in the early stage — and these costs are multiplied twice and ten times if you work on the basis of a drawing that isn’t yet sufficiently correct.

And if I got into debt or surrounded myself with canvases and papers daubed all over with paint without being sure of my drawing, my studio would quickly become a kind of hell, like a studio I once saw that seemed like that to me.

It seems to me that the painters here have a way of reasoning as follows. They say, you must do this or that — if you don’t do it, or not immediately or exactly, or if you object, the reply is: ‘So you know better than I do, do you?’ Thus immediately, sometimes within 5 minutes, there’s a conflict between you. And the situation is such that neither side can move forwards or backwards. The least odious outcome of this is if one of the two parties has the presence of mind to keep silent and in one way or another quickly slip away through some opening. And would almost say, Sapristi, the painters are a family too. That’s to say, an ill-fated association of people with conflicting interests, each one at odds with the rest, two or more of whom share the same feelings only when they join forces to obstruct another member. I hope, my dear brother, that this definition of the word ‘family’ doesn’t always apply, especially not in the case of the painters or our own family. I hope with all my heart that peace will reign in our family, and I remain with a handshake,

[The top part of the next sheet is missing; the following text is crossed out]

not to be afraid [xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] to make it difficult for them if they’d rather not see me.

I refused, even when they asked me lately whether I wouldn’t come sometime, so that they’d clearly see that I didn’t want to make it difficult for them in any way. But I also expect that they, for their part, won’t meddle in my affairs. While I care about the good will of those at home, Princenhage matters much less to me. Would you and can you be so good as not to talk about one thing and another, so much the better, if, though, it is talked about and that can’t be avoided — too bad, but what do I care?

Well, as I said, I want nothing so much as to keep the peace, nothing is as necessary for my work as that very peace. So I’m grateful to you for everything you can do to reassure those at home and to keep them calm. I hope that you’ll have pleasant days there and breathe in plenty of Brabant air. I still think of Het Heike so often, and have again been busy these last few days with a study from there, cottages with mossy roofs under the beech trees.

must take. This is just about the effect of the pollard willow, but in the watercolour itself there’s no black except in a mixed state.

[sketch A] Where the black is darkest in this little sketch is where the greatest strengths are in the watercolour — dark green, brown, dark grey. Well, adieu, and believe me that I sometimes laugh heartily at how people suspect me (who am really just a friend of nature, of study, of work — and of people chiefly) of various acts of malice and absurdities which I never dream of. Anyway — goodbye for now, with a handshake.

252A. Pollard willow

The Hague, Sunday, 3 September 1882

I’ve just received your very welcome letter and want to reply immediately, since today I’m having a bit of a rest anyway. I thank you for it, and for the enclosure and for one or two things you say in it.

And for your description of the scene with the workmen in Montmartre, which I found most interesting, because you give the colours as well so that I can see it — many thanks.

I’m glad you’re reading the book about Gavarni. I thought it very interesting, and have become doubly attached to G. because of it.

Paris and its surroundings may be beautiful, but we can’t complain here either. This week I painted something which I believe may give some idea of the impression of Scheveningen as we saw it when we walked there together. A large study of sand, sea, sky — a big sky of delicate grey and warm white through which an occasional spot of soft blue shines — the sand and the sea light — so that the whole becomes blond, though enlivened by the bold and distinctively coloured figures and pinks, which take on tone. The subject of the sketch I made of it is a pink weighing anchor. The horses stand ready to be hitched to the pink before pulling it into the sea. I enclose a scratch of it. I really laboured over it — I wish I’d painted it on panel or canvas. I tried to get more colour into it, namely depth, firmness of colour.

It certainly is curious how you and I often seem to have the same thoughts. Yesterday evening, for example, I came back with a study of the woods, and this week in particular, especially then, I was very absorbed in the question of depth of colour. And would have liked to discuss it with you, particularly in connection with the study I had made — and lo and behold, in your letter of this morning you happen to remark on how you were struck in Montmartre by the very pronounced colours, which nonetheless remained harmonious. I don’t know if it was exactly the same thing that struck us, but I’m absolutely sure you would also have felt what particularly struck me and probably seen it in the same way. I’ll begin by sending you a scratch of the subject and telling you what the problem was.

The woods are already getting really autumnal — there are colour effects which I only rarely see depicted in Dutch paintings.

Yesterday evening I was occupied with an area of woodland with a slight upward slope covered in rotting and dead beech leaves. The ground was lighter and darker red-brown, all the more so because of the cast shadows of trees that threw bands across, weaker or stronger, half blotted out. The problem, and I found it to be most difficult, was to get the depth of colour — the enormous strength and fixity of that area — and yet it was only while painting that I noticed how much light there still was in that darkness. To keep it light and yet keep the glow, the depth of that rich colour, for there’s no carpet imaginable as splendid as that deep brown-red in the glow of an autumnal evening sun, although tempered by the wood.

Out of the ground shoot young beech trees that catch the light on one side — are brilliantly green there — and the shaded side of those trunks a warm, strong black-green. Beyond these trunks, beyond the brown-red ground, is a sky, a very delicate blue-grey, warm — almost not blue — sparkling. And set against this is another hazy edge of greenness and a network of slender trunks and yellowish leaves. A few figures gathering wood move about like dark masses of mysterious shadows. The white cap of a woman who bends over to pick up a dry branch suddenly stands out against the deep red-brown of the ground. A skirt catches the light — a cast shadow falls — a dark silhouette of a fellow appears on top of the undergrowth against the brushwood fence. A white cap, bonnet, shoulder, bust of a woman set off against the sky. These figures — they’re large and full of poetry — appear in the half-light of the deep shadow tone like huge terracottas being made in a studio. I’m describing nature to you — to what extent I conveyed it in my sketch I’m not sure myself — but I do know that I was struck by the harmony of green, red, black, yellow, blue, brown, grey. It was very Degroux-like, an effect similar, for example, to that sketch of the conscript’s departure formerly in the Palais Ducal.

Painting it was hard graft. There are one and a half large tubes of white in the ground — yet that ground is very dark — in addition red, yellow, brown ochre, black, terra sienna, bistre, and the result is a red-brown that varies from bistre to deep wine-red and to pale, blond reddish. Then there are also mosses and an edge of fresh grass that catches the light and sparkles brightly and is very difficult to get. There at last you have a sketch which — whatever may be said about it — I maintain has some meaning, says something.

While making it I said to myself: let me not leave before there’s something of an autumn evening in it, something mysterious, something with seriousness in it.

However, because this effect doesn’t last, I had to paint quickly. The figures were done with a few vigorous strokes with a firm brush — in one go. I was struck by how firmly the slender trunks stood in the ground — I began them using a brush, but because of the ground, which was already impasted, one brushstroke simply disappeared. Then I squeezed roots and trunks into it from the tube, and modelled them a little with the brush. Yes, now they stand in it — shoot up out of it — stand firmly rooted in it. In a sense I’m glad that I’ve never learned how to paint. Probably then I would have LEARNED to ignore effects like this. Now I say, no, that’s exactly what I want — if it’s not possible then it’s not possible — I want to try it even though I don’t know how it’s supposed to be done. I don’t know myself how I paint. I sit with a white board before the spot that strikes me — I look at what’s before my eyes — I say to myself, this white board must become something — I come back, dissatisfied — I put it aside, and after I’ve rested a little, feeling a kind of fear, I take a look at it — then I’m still dissatisfied — because I have that marvellous nature too much in mind for me to be satisfied — but still, I see in my work an echo of what struck me, I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me and that I’ve written it down in shorthand. In my shorthand there may be words that are indecipherable — errors or gaps — yet something remains of what the wood or the beach or the figure said — and it isn’t a tame or conventional language which doesn’t stem from nature itself but from a studied manner or a system.

Herewith also a scratch from the dunes. Standing there were small bushes whose leaves are white on one side and dark green on the other, and which constantly move and sparkle. Behind them dark wood.

As you see, I’m immersing myself in painting with all my strength — I’m immersing myself in colour — I’ve held back from that until now, and don’t regret it. If I hadn’t drawn I would never have felt or tackled a figure that looks like an unfinished terracotta. But now, I feel I’m on the high seas — painting must proceed with all the strength that we can muster.

If I work on panel or canvas, the costs go up again — everything is so expensive — paint is expensive too, and is used up so quickly. Well, these are drawbacks that all painters face — we must see what’s possible. I know for sure that I have a feeling for colour that will develop more and more, that painting is in my very marrow. I appreciate it enormously that you support me so loyally and strongly. I think of you so often — I would so much like my work to be substantial, serious, manly, and for it to give you pleasure as soon as possible.

I want to bring one thing to your attention as important. Wouldn’t it be possible to get paint, panels, brushes, &c. for the net price? At present I have to pay the retail price. Are you in touch with Paillard or someone like that? If so, it seems to me it would work out considerably cheaper to buy paint, for example, in larger quantities, such as white, ochre, terra sienna, and we could come to an arrangement as to the money. It would of course be cheaper. Think about it, if you will. Good painting doesn’t consist in using a great deal of paint, but to give a ground true strength, to make a sky bright, sometimes one mustn’t worry about a tube more or less.

Sometimes the subject requires that one paints thinly, sometimes the material, the nature of the things, makes it self-evident that they must be impasted. At Mauve’s — who paints very soberly in comparison with J. Maris, and even more so in comparison with Millet or Jules Dupré — in the corners of the studio there are nevertheless cigar boxes with the remains of tubes as numerous as the empty bottles in the corners of rooms at a soirée or meal such as Zola describes, for example. Now, if this month a little extra is possible, that would be wonderful. If not, then not. I’ll work as far as I can. You enquire after my health, but how’s yours? I believe that my remedy could also be yours. Being outdoors, painting. I’m well. I’m still troubled when I’m tired, but it’s getting better rather than worse. I believe that it’s also beneficial that I live as frugally as possible, but painting is my chief remedy. I hope with all my heart that you have some happiness and will find much more.

As you see, in the scratch of the seascape there’s a blond, soft effect, and in the woods a more sombre, serious mood. I’m glad that both of these exist in life. [sketch A]

260A. View of the beach at Scheveningen

The Hague, Sunday, 22 October 1882

Your letter and the enclosure gave me very great pleasure, I don’t need to tell you that. It’s just what was needed and is a mighty help to me.

It’s still autumnal weather here — rainy and chilly, but full of atmosphere — especially good for figures, which show a range of tones on the wet streets and roads in which the sky is reflected. It’s what Mauve, above all, does so beautifully time and again.

As a result I’ve been able to do some more to the large water-colour of the crowd of people in front of the lottery office, and I’ve also just started another of the beach, of which this is the composition. [sketch A] I can agree entirely with what you say about times one occasionally has when one seems to be deadened to the things of nature, or when nature no longer seems to speak to us.

274A. Beach with people strolling and boats

I, too, often have that, and sometimes it helps if I turn to something very different. If I’m dead to landscape or effects of light, I tackle figures, and vice versa. Sometimes there’s nothing to be done except wait for it to pass, but on many occasions I manage to get rid of the unresponsiveness by changing the subjects I’m concentrating on. I’m becoming more and more fascinated by figures though. I remember having had a time in the past when the feeling for landscape was very strong within me, and I was much more struck by a painting or drawing in which a light effect or the mood of a landscape was well expressed than by figures. In general, the figure painters even inspired in me a kind of fairly cool respect rather than warm sym-pathy. However, I well remember being particularly struck at the time by a drawing by Daumier, an old man under the chestnut trees in the Champs Elysées (an illustration for Balzac), although the drawing wasn’t that important. But I remember that it struck me so forcefully that there was something so firm and manly in Daumier’s approach that I thought: it must be good to feel and think like that and overlook or ignore a mass of things so as to concentrate on something that’s thought-provoking and appeals to a human being as a human being more directly than meadows or clouds.

And similarly the figures of either the English draughtsmen or the English writers, on account of their Monday morning-like sobriety and deliberate austerity and prose and analysis, continue to attract me as something solid and firm which gives one something to hold onto on days when one is feeling weak. And those of Balzac and Zola among the French writers just as much. As yet I don’t know the books by Murger you write about, but I hope to become acquainted with them.

Did I write to you before that I read Daudet’s Les rois en exil? I thought it rather beautiful.

The titles of those books sound very attractive, La bohème among others. How far we have strayed in our age from la bohème of Gavarni’s day! It seems to me that things were a little warmer then, and more good-humoured and livelier than now. But I don’t know, and there’s also much that’s good in the present, or would be more than is actually the case if there were rather more joining together.

At the moment a wonderful effect can be seen from the window of my studio. The city with its towers and roofs and smoking chimneys stands out as a dark, sombre silhouette against a horizon of light. The light, though, is only a broad strip; above it hangs a heavy shower, more concentrated below, above torn by the autumn wind into great tufts and clumps that float off. But that strip of light makes the wet roofs glisten here and there in the sombre mass of the city (in a drawing you would lift it with a stroke of body-colour), and ensures that, although the mass all has the same tone, you can still distinguish between red tiles and slates.

Schenkweg runs through the foreground as a glistening line through the wet, the poplars have yellow leaves, the banks of the ditch and the meadow are deep green, figures are black.

I would draw it, or rather try to draw it, if I hadn’t spent the whole afternoon toiling at figures of peat carriers which are still too much in my mind for there to be room for something new, and must remain there.

I do so often long for you and think of you so much. What you write about some characters in Paris, about artists who live with women, are less petty-minded than others perhaps, try desperately to stay young, seems well observed to me. Such people exist there and here. It’s perhaps even more difficult there than here for a person to keep some freshness in domestic life, because that’s almost more of an uphill struggle there. How many have become desperate in Paris — calmly, rationally, logically and rightly desperate? I read something along these lines about Tassaert, among others, whom I like very much, and was pained by what happened to him.

All the more, all the more, I think every attempt in this direction is worthy of respect. I also believe that it may happen that one succeeds and one mustn’t begin by despairing; even if one loses here and there, and even if one sometimes feels a sort of decline, the point is nevertheless to revive and have courage, even though things don’t turn out as one first thought. Moreover, don’t think that I look with contempt on people such as you describe because their life isn’t founded on serious and well-considered principles. My view on this is as follows: the result must be an action, not an abstract idea. I think principles are good and worth the effort only when they develop into deeds, and I think it’s good to reflect and to try to be conscientious, because that makes a person’s will to work more resolute and turns the various actions into a whole. I think that people such as you describe would get more steadiness if they went about what they do more rationally, but otherwise I much prefer them to people who make a great show of their principles without making the slightest effort to put them into practice or even giving that a thought. For the latter have no use for the finest of principles, and the former are precisely the people who, IF they ever get round to living with willpower and reflection, will do something great. For the great doesn’t happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.

What is drawing? How does one get there? It’s working one’s way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? — since hammering on it doesn’t help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently. And behold, how can one remain dedicated to such a task without allowing oneself to be lured from it or distracted, unless one reflects and organizes one’s life according to principles? And it’s the same with other things as it is with artistic matters. And the great isn’t something accidental; it must be willed. Whether originally deeds lead to principles in a person or principles lead to deeds is something that seems to me as unanswerable and as little worth answering as the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg.

But I believe it’s a positive thing and of great importance that one should try to develop one’s powers of thought and will.

I’m very curious about what you’ll think of the figures I’m doing at present, when you see them sooner or later. It’s the same with them as with the question of the chicken and the egg: should one make figures for a composition one has done first, or combine the figures made separately so that the composition flows from them? I believe it comes down to the same thing. Just as long as one works. I end with that with which you close your letter — that we have in common a liking for seeing behind the scenes or, in other words, are inclined to analyze things. Now this, I believe, is exactly the quality one must have in order to paint — one must exercise this power when painting or drawing. It may be that there has to be something innate in us, to some extent (but that too you have, and so do I — for that we may have to thank our childhood in Brabant and a background that helped, much more than is usually the case, to teach us to think), but above all, above all, it’s only later that the artistic sense develops and ripens through working. How you might become a very good painter I don’t know, but I certainly believe that it is in you and will come out.

I have the stove in place already — old chap, how I wish we could look at drawings and sketches for an evening sometime — and woodcuts. I have some more splendid ones.

This week I hope to have orphan boys to pose, then I may be able to rescue the drawing of orphan children after all.

The Hague, Sunday, 26 and Monday, 27 November 1882

Yesterday I at last got around to reading a book by Murger, namely Les buveurs d’eau. I find something of the same charm in it as in, say, the drawings of Nanteuil, Baron, Roqueplan, Tony Johannot, something witty, something lively. Yet it’s highly conventional, or at least so this book seems to me (I haven’t yet read any others by him), and in my view there’s the same difference between him and Alph. Karr and Souvestre, for example, as between an Henry Monnier and Compte-Calix and the above artists. I’m trying to take all the people I compare from the same era.

It breathes that age of la bohème (though the reality of that period is papered over in the book) and that’s why it interests me, but in my view it lacks originality and honesty of sentiment. It may be, though, that his books in which there are no painter characters are better than this one — it appears that writers are always unfortunate with painter characters, Balzac among them (his painters are fairly uninteresting). Even Zola might be right in his Claude Lantier — Claude Lantiers certainly exist — but still one would like to see Zola doing a kind of painter different from Lantier for once, who it seems to me is drawn from life by Zola after someone or other, and certainly not the worst, from the movement that was known as Impressionists, I believe. And they aren’t the ones who make up the core of the body of artists.

Conversely, I know of few good drawn or painted portraits of writers. On this point most painters also lapse into the conventional and make of a writer a man who simply sits at a table full of papers, or don’t even go that far and make him a gentleman with a collar and tie, and moreover a face without any particular expression.

There’s a painter by Meissonier that I find beautiful; it’s that figure seen from behind, bending forwards, with the feet on the cross-bar of the easel, I believe. All one sees is a pair of knees drawn up, a back, a neck and the back of a head, and just a glimpse of a fist with a pencil or something like that. But the fellow does it well, and the action of concentrated attention is caught, just like in a certain figure by Rembrandt where a little fellow sits reading, also huddled up, with his head resting on his fist, and one immediately feels that sense of being absolutely gripped by the book.

Take the Victor Hugo by Bonnat — beautiful, really beautiful — but even more beautiful in my view is the Victor Hugo described in words by Victor Hugo himself, nothing else than just this:

Don’t you think that little figure on the heath is splendid? Isn’t it as vivid as a little general of 93 by Meissonier — about 1 centimetre or so in size?

There’s a portrait of Millet by Millet that I find beautiful, no more than a head with a kind of shepherd’s cap on top.

But the looking — with half-closed eyes — the intense looking of a painter — how beautifully that’s caught, and that cockerel-like quality, if I may put it like that.

It’s Sunday again. This morning I was on Rijswijkseweg. The meadows are partly flooded so that there was an effect of tonal green and silver with the rough, black and grey and green trunks and branches of old trees twisted by the wind in the foreground, a silhouette of the village with its spire against the light sky in the background, here and there a fence, or a dung-heap with a flock of crows picking at it.

How you would feel something like that — how well you would paint it if you wanted to.

It was extraordinarily beautiful this morning, and it did me good to go for a long walk, for with all the drawing and the lithographs I’d hardly been out of doors this week.

As to the lithography, I hope to get a proof tomorrow of an old man. I hope it turns out well. I did it with a kind of crayon that’s specially intended for this process, but I fear that the ordinary lithographic crayon will turn out to be the best after all, and I’ll be sorry I didn’t use that. Well, we’ll see how it turns out.

Tomorrow I hope to learn various things about printing that the printer’s going to show me. I would love to learn how to print myself. I think it quite possible that this new method will revive lithography. I believe that a way could be found of uniting the advantages of the new with the old method. One can never predict anything for certain, but who knows whether it might not lead to new magazines being founded again.

That was as far as I got yesterday evening — this morning I had to go to the printer’s with my old man. Now I’ve followed everything: the transfer to the stone, the preparation of the stone, the actual printing. And I have a better understanding of what I can change by retouching. Herewith the first impression, not counting one that went wrong.

I hope to do it better in time. I myself am very far from satisfied with this but, well, getting better must come through doing it and through trying. It seems to me that a painter has a duty to try to put an idea into his work. I was trying to say this in this print — but I can’t say it as beautifully, as strikingly as reality, of which this is only a dim reflection seen in a dark mirror — that it seems to me that one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of ‘something on high’ in which Millet believed, namely in the existence of a God and an eternity, is the unutterably moving quality that there can be in the expression of an old man like that, without his being aware of it perhaps, as he sits so quietly in the corner of his hearth. At the same time something precious, something noble, that can’t be meant for the worms.

Israëls has done it so very beautifully. Perhaps the most wonderful passage in Uncle Tom’s cabin is the one where the poor slave, sitting by his fire for the last time and knowing that he must die, remembers the words

This is far from all theology — simply the fact that the poorest woodcutter, heath farmer or miner can have moments of emotion and mood that give him a sense of an eternal home that he is close to.

Just as I get back from the printer’s I receive your letter. I think your Montmartre is splendid, and I would certainly have shared the emotion that it evoked in you. I believe, by the way, that Jules Dupré or Daubigny also often tried to arouse those thoughts in their work. Sometimes there’s something indescribable in those effects — it’s as if the whole of nature is speaking — and when one goes home one has the same feeling as when one has just finished a book by Victor Hugo, for example. For my part I can’t understand that not everyone sees and feels it — after all, nature or God does it for everyone who has eyes and ears and a heart to perceive. I think that a painter is happy because he’s in harmony with nature as soon as he can depict, to some extent, what he sees.

And that’s a great deal. One knows what one has to do; there’s an abundance of subjects and Carlyle rightly says, Blessed is he who has found his work. If that work — as in the case of Millet, Dupré, Israëls &c. — is something intended to bring peace, to say sursum corde or ‘lift up your hearts’, then it’s doubly encouraging. One is also less alone then, because one thinks: I may be here on my own, but while I’m here holding my tongue my work may be speaking to my friend, and whoever sees it won’t suspect me of being cold-hearted. Understand, however, that the dissatisfaction about poor work, the failure of things, the technical difficulties can make one terribly melancholy.

I assure you that when I, for my part, think of Millet, of Israëls, Breton, Degroux — so many others, Herkomer among them — I can be terribly despondent. One only knows what those fellows are when one is at work. Now, to stomach that despondency and melancholy as one is, to be patient with oneself, not to take a rest but to toil despite a thousand shortcomings and faults and the precariousness of the victory — that’s why a painter is also not happy: the battle with himself, improving himself, renewing his energy. All this complicated by the material difficulties.

That painting by Daumier must have been beautiful. It’s puzzling that something that speaks as clearly as that, for example, isn’t understood, or at least that the position is that, as you say, it isn’t certain a buyer will be found, even at a low price.

For many a painter this is something intolerable, or almost intolerable, at least. One wants to be an honest man, and one is, one works just as hard as a porter, and yet one falls short, one has to give the work up, one sees no chance of carrying it out without spending more on it than one will get back for it. One has a feeling of guilt, of falling short, of not keeping promises, one isn’t honest as one would be if the work was paid for at its natural, fair price. One is afraid to make friends, one is afraid to stir, one would like to call out to people from a distance like one of the old lepers: Don’t come too close, for contact with me will bring you sorrow and harm. With this whole avalanche of cares in one’s heart, one must set to work with a calm, everyday face, without moving a muscle, carry on with daily life, try things out with the models, with the man who comes to collect the rent, in short, with all and sundry. One must cool-headedly keep one hand on the tiller to continue the work, and with the other hand try to ensure that one does no harm to others. And then come storms, things one hadn’t foreseen; one doesn’t know what to do, and one has a feeling that one may hit a rock at any moment.

One can’t present oneself as somebody who can be of benefit to others or who has an idea for a business that’s bound to be profitable — no, on the contrary, it’s to be expected that it will end with a deficit and yet, yet, one feels a power seething inside one, one has a task to do and it must be done.

One would like to speak like the men of 93, we must do this and that, first those, then those, then the last will die, it’s a duty so it goes without saying, and nothing more need be added.

Or is it rather that, given that many have fallen asleep and don’t wish to be woken up, one must try to confine oneself to things that one can finish alone, which one faces alone and has sole responsibility for? So that those who sleep can go on sleeping and rest. Now you see that this time I too am expressing more intimate thoughts than normally; you’re to blame for this, because you did the same.

Concerning you, this is what I think: you are after all one of those on watch, not one of the sleepers. Would you not rather keep watch while painting than while selling paintings? I say this coolly, not even adding: this or that would be preferable in my view, and trusting to your own insight into things. That one runs a high risk of going under oneself, that being a painter is like being a forward sentry, this and other things — that goes without saying. You mustn’t think I’m so very afraid; painting the Borinage would be something, for instance. That would be so difficult, so dangerous even, as is needed for a life in which rest and pleasure are quite a long way off. All the same, I would undertake something like that if I could undertake it, that is if I couldn’t foresee for certain, as I do now, that the costs would exceed my means. If I found others interested in this or a similar enterprise, I would risk it. Precisely because at the moment it’s really only you who cares what I do, for the time being it’s in the dark and must remain there. So I’ll find things to do in the meantime. But I’m not leaving it in order to spare myself or anything like that. I hope it’ll be possible for you to send something again not later than 1 Dec. Well, old chap, I thank you right heartily for your letter, and a warm handshake in thought, believe me

The Hague, on or about Thursday, 7 June 1883

Today I received a letter from home and I wanted to talk to you about it, although Pa doesn’t mention you in the letter, because in the circumstances you might perhaps like to know something about their state of mind, above and beyond what they may write to you directly. And my impression is that for the present you may be entirely at ease on that score.

The letter in question is Pa’s first since his visit and is very amiable and cordial and was accompanied by a package containing a coat, a hat, a packet of cigars, a cake, a money order.

In the letter was the outline of a sermon, by far the best part of which I thought was the biblical text, and which made less of an impression on me than a few words about the funeral of a farm labourer later on.

Well, the reason I’m telling you this at such length is so that you’ll see from it that there’s no particular tension or anything abnormal; rather, I got the impression that Pa’s mood was more passive or resigned, tending towards good-natured melancholy, more so than one would expect if one were to go only by the expressions of objections you wrote to me about.

So I think those words were intended more as advice or warning (advice that in the end has no solid grounds in my view, and doesn’t hold water) and less as a sign of definite resistance or opposition to your firm decision.

They may think that you haven’t yet made up your mind, or they may believe that you haven’t given it enough thought.

Because in my last letter I disapproved so strongly of what Pa had said — and still disapprove of it now, being decidedly of the opposite opinion inasmuch as I don’t consider it appropriate in this case to raise objections to do with money and religion — I wanted to soften my words, in the sense that I believe that it’s a question here of a fault (at any rate a fault in my view) that lies more in Pa’s words than in his heart and mood.

And I have in mind to talk to you about how Pa is an old man and so deeply fond of you, and you’ll find, I believe, that he’ll accept your view if there’s no alternative, even if it conflicts with his own, yet couldn’t possibly accept estrangement from you or having less contact, etc.

And adopting a humane point of view, I take back my opinion: ‘by saying that, they have shown they are unworthy of your trust and in my eyes you needn’t confide in them any further’, or something similar that I wrote then, I don’t remember exactly. But don’t misunderstand me, not because I disapprove less of what they said, but because I believe that in this case one shouldn’t take it too seriously, and there’s no pressing need to take up arms against it as long as it remains only words.

Cutting it short by saying something like, for example, ‘You take a rather gloomy view of the future’ and ‘can hardly demand from me that I act as if the end of the world were imminent’ is wiser in this case, I believe, than taking their words very seriously.

It seems to me that Pa’s a little melancholy, though, and is perhaps fretting a little about you and imagining gloomy things — but again Pa writes not a syllable about it directly, and said not a word about it at the time of his visit. But not talking about it is in fact also rather abnormal. Anyway — I, too, know Pa quite well, and believe I can see signs of some melancholy.

If you want to help him, write quite lightly and cheerfully, and write about your visit this summer as though it’s certain you’ll see them again soon (even though you may not know yourself yet how you’ll fit your visit in as regards the time).

For perhaps, perhaps Pa himself is conscious of having gone a little too far, or worried about how you’ll take it, or afraid that you won’t come.

Of course I don’t know how matters stand and am only guessing, but I do think this, Pa is an old man and deserves to have people cheer him up if they can.

You know well enough that in my view you ought to be loyal to the woman; there’s no question of my saying anything less about that than I did, but do what’s right and don’t blame Pa if he’s mistaken. That’s what I wanted to say. Don’t even refer to the fact that he’s mistaken unless he keeps going on, perhaps he’ll retract of his own accord.

Today I asked for permission to draw sketches in the old men’s and old women’s home, namely the men’s ward, the women’s ward and the garden. I was there today. From the window I sketched an old gardener by a crooked apple tree, and the workshop of the home’s carpenter, where I drank tea with two orphan men.

I can go into the men’s ward as a visitor. It was very real, inexpressibly real.

A small chap with a long, thin neck in a chair on rollers, among others, was priceless.

In the carpenter’s workshop, with a view of the cool, green garden with those two old boys, it was just like the scene in, for example, that photo by Bingham after that small painting by Meissonier, the two priests sitting drinking. Perhaps you know the one I mean. Whether I’ll get permission isn’t, however, entirely certain, and has to be applied for from the assistant deacon, which I’ve done and have to go back for the answer.

Apart from that, I’m working out how to draw the dung-heap. I wrote to you that I had hopes of getting a Scheveningen cape, well, I’ve got it, and an old hat thrown in which isn’t particularly beautiful, but the cape is superb and I immediately started working with it. Am just as pleased with it as I was with the sou’wester before.

And I’ve got as far with the sketch of the dung-heap as more or less getting into it that sheep-shed effect of inside against outside — the light under the dark sheds — and the group of women emptying their dustbins is beginning to develop and take shape.

Now the wheelbarrows going up and down and the rag-pickers with dung forks, that grubbing about under the sheds, has still to be expressed without losing the effect of light and shade of the whole. On the contrary, it must be strengthened as a result.

I believe you’ll have your own, similar view of Pa’s words, and so I’m not telling you anything new, but because I spoke so sharply about it I wanted you to know at the same time that I don’t do such a thing with pleasure but with regret, and would be glad if peace could be kept with a little geniality.

This winter Pa was pretty much against my being with the woman just as much as now, yet he sent a warm coat ‘in case I could make use of it’, not specifying what for but obviously with the idea ‘she may be cold’. Well, you see, that is right after all, and for one such deed I would gladly put up with a deluge of words.

Because I myself am not one of those who don’t fail in words either — such people would be perfect — and don’t make the slightest claim to perfection.

And wanted to point out to you that in any case Pa objects to my being with the woman, MUCH MORE SO indeed than with you, and despite that last winter he still no doubt thought something like: ‘that wretched woman — but she shouldn’t suffer from the cold’. Now, probably the same in your case: ‘that poor papist woman shouldn’t be alone even so’, or something like that. So don’t be concerned, be of good heart, and put their minds at ease.

The Hague, Monday, 2 July 1883

Your letter and the enclosure were not a little welcome, and the message that you’ll write again at greater length no less welcome. I hope you’ll write to me in detail about the hundred masterpieces; it must be good to have seen something like that. And when one remembers — at the time there were some people who were rather suspect as regards their character, intentions and genius, according to public opinion, people of whom the most absurd things were said, Millet, Corot, Daubigny, etc., who were regarded more or less the way the village constable regards a stray shaggy dog or a tramp without a passport, and time passes and lo and behold ‘the hundred masterpieces’, and if a hundred isn’t enough, then innumerable. Let alone what becomes of the village constables. Little remains of them except some notes of the testimony as a curiosity. Yet it remains a drama, I believe, the history of the great men — given too that they not only had to deal with village constables during their lifetimes, since usually they’re no longer with us when their work is publicly recognized, and during their lifetimes they were under some pressure for a long time because of the opposition and the difficulty of struggling through life. And so whenever I hear of the public recognition of the merits of some people, I think all the more of the quiet, slightly sombre figures of those who had few personal friends, and in their simpliity I find them even greater and more poignant like that.

There’s an etching by Legros — Carlyle in his study — which often comes to mind when I want to imagine Millet or anyone else as he was.

What V. Hugo says about Aeschylus: ‘They killed the man and then they say: “let us put up a bronze statue of Aeschylus”’; something of that is always in my mind when I hear of an exhibition of someone’s work. So I don’t look much at ‘the bronze statue’. Not because I disapprove of something being publicly honoured, but because of the association, they killed the man. Aeschylus was simply banished, but here too banishment was a death sentence, as it often is.

Theo, when you come to the studio I’ll be able to show you some things that you’ll most certainly not be able to see all together anywhere else.

I could show you some things that one might call the hundred masterpieces of modern wood engraving. Work by people whose names, even, are totally unknown to most art lovers.

Who knows of Buckman, who knows of the two Greens, who knows of Régamey’s drawings? Only a few. Seeing them all together, one is astonished by that steadiness of the drawing, that personal character, that seriousness of approach, and that fathoming and presentation of the most everyday figures and subjects found on the street, on the market, in a hospital or orphanage.

I already had some last year, but what I’ve found since goes far beyond my expectations.

It’s agreed, isn’t it, that your visit to the studio when you come won’t be too brief?

I’ve worked on the potato grubbers since writing to you. And begun a second one of the same subject with a single figure of an old man.

I’m also working on a sower on a large field with clods of earth, which I believe is better than the other sowers I tried before. I have at least 6 studies of the figure himself, but now I’ve placed him in the space more specifically as the drawing proper, and carefully studied the land and sky as well.

And then I have studies for the burning of weeds and stalks, and of a chap with a sack of potatoes on his back. And one with a wheelbarrow.

If I now reflect with all possible good will (in order to see things differently, supposing I was wrong) on Tersteeg’s opinion that I should do watercolours, then I can’t understand how these figures of the chap with a sack, of the sower, of the old potato grubber, of the wheelbarrows, of the weed burner could keep their personal character if I attacked them with watercolour. The result would be something very mediocre, of the sort of mediocre which I don’t care to go into in depth. Now at least they have character, something that’s in harmony — though distantly — with what Lhermitte, for instance, is seeking. Watercolour isn’t the most sympathetic means for anyone who particularly wants to express the boldness, the robustness and the force of the figures.

If one is looking more exclusively for tone or colour, then it’s rather different, then watercolour lends itself excellently to that. Now I do admit that one could do different studies of those same figures in reality from a different point of view (namely tone and colour), done with a different intention — yet I ask, if my frame of mind and personal feeling makes me notice first of all the character, the structure, the action of the figures, will I be blamed if, following this emotion, I arrive not at a watercolour but at a drawing in black and brown only?

Yet there are watercolours in which the outlines are very forcefully expressed, such as those by Régamey, those by Pinwell and Walker and Herkomer, which I certainly think about sometimes (those of the Belgian Meunier), but even if I sought that, Tersteeg would still not be content with it. Keep on saying, it isn’t saleable and the saleable must be your no. 1.

For my part I see in that in plainer terms ‘you’re a mediocrity and you’re pretentious in not submitting yourself and not making small mediocre things; you make yourself ridiculous with your so-called seeking, and don’t work.’ This is implied in what Tersteeg said to me the year before last and last year, and I’m still faced with it. To me Tersteeg will I think remain ‘the everlasting NO’.

Not only I but almost all who seek their own way have something like this behind or beside them as a perpetual discourager. Sometimes one is burdened by it and feels wretched and, so to speak, overwhelmed.

But, as said, it’s the everlasting no. Against that, one finds an everlasting yes in the example of men of character, and sees collier’s faith in them.

It is so, however, that life sometimes becomes sombre and the future dark when working costs money and one feels oneself going ever deeper into the ground the harder one works, instead of work helping one to stay above water and one being able to overcome the difficulties and costs by making a greater effort.

I’m making progress with my figures, but financially I’m losing ground and can’t keep up.

And of late I’ve sometimes thought of moving to the country, either on the seashore or somewhere where work on the land is real. Because I believe it would save some money. I could do what I want here as well if I could earn some more — go here and there now and again to get studies. And the advantage here is that my studio is good, and one isn’t completely outside the art world, after all. In any event, one can hardly do entirely without some measure of contact, seeing and hearing something now and again.

I sometimes think of going to England — in London a new magazine of importance has been established, The Pictorial News, of the same standing as L. News and The Graphic, perhaps there may be work and a salary there. But what can one say about it for sure? I hope you’ll come soon, a year is a long time not to have seen each other while thinking of each other all the time.

I haven’t asked you for details about the woman recently because I’m confident that you two love each other, and that’s the main thing, and if one knows that there’s no need to ask about details.

Our little man is now just one year old, since 1 July, and is the most cheerful, most agreeable child you can imagine, and I believe it’s an important point gained as regards the recovery and complete cure of the woman herself that this child is doing well and keeps her busy and draws her thoughts towards him. I sometimes think that otherwise it might be good for her to spend some time in the country and not see the city and be away from her family; this could help to bring about a radical improvement. For she is improved now, but still, the influence of her family obstructs a great deal at times, I wanting to have simplicity and she being urged to intrigue and be two-faced. Well, she’s what one might call a child of her time, and her character has been influenced by her circumstances, so that the remnants will always persist in the form of a certain dejection and indifference and lack of a firm belief in one thing and another. I’ve already thought of country life for her many, many times. But moving also means spending a large amount in one go. And I’d also like to be married before I moved, if it came to going to the country or to London.

Here I miss the necessary friction with others, and I don’t see how that will get any better. In the end, one place or another will do for me, and I prefer to move as little as possible.

Write to me above all as soon as you can decide anything about when you’re coming. Lately I’ve been in two minds about various things, and consequently under strain, and that will continue until we’ve seen each other again and talked about the future.

I recently read articles about Holland by Boughton. They were written to accompany illustrations by him and by Abbey in which there are splendid things.

I made a note of something from it — a description of the island of Marken — it makes me want to go there. When one had once got round to settling somewhere where it was very beautiful, who knows how happy one would feel about it? But in that sort of situation one needs at least one point of contact with the art world, because of course the fishing folk know nothing about it, and one has to live.

Above all write the promised letter about the one hundred masterpieces &c., and should you do well in business and if a little extra is possible, it wouldn’t be untimely. As for living in the country — I find nature beautiful, and yet there are many things tying me to the city, the magazines especially, the opportunities for reproduction. I wouldn’t mind not seeing locomotives, but never seeing a printing press again would be harder to take. Adieu, old chap, with a handshake and thanks again for what you sent.

I read ‘Mes haines’ by Zola — there are strong things in it, although in my view he is greatly mistaken, not even mentioning Millet in his general reflections. I do think this is true: note that what pleases the PUBLIC is always what’s most banal, what we’re accustomed to seeing every year; we’re used to insipidities of that kind, to such pretty lies, that we reject powerful truths with all our might.

The Hague, Sunday, 22 July 1883

I thank you for your letter, and for the enclosure, although I can’t suppress a feeling of sadness over what you say, ‘as for the future, I can give you little hope’. If you mean that only in relation to financial matters, I wouldn’t be downcast, but if I’m to take it as applying to my work, I really don’t see how I deserve that. It just so happens that I can now send you the prints of photos after a few of my recent drawings, which I promised you earlier but couldn’t manage because I was flat broke.

I don’t know how you intended those words, nor can I know. Your letter is too brief, but it gave me an unexpected blow right in the chest.

But I would like to know what the position is, whether you noticed something in me, that I wasn’t making progress or something.

As for financial matters, you’ll remember writing to me months ago about bad times. My answer was: very well, a reason for us to do our very best on both sides; see that you send me the absolutely essential, I’ll get on with making more progress so that perhaps we can place something with the illustrated magazines. I’ve since made a start on various large compositions in which there was more of a subject than in studies of single figures.

So now my first consignment of photos to be shown to someone or other if needed coincides with your ‘as for the future, I can give you little hope’. Is there something in particular???

I’m rather nervous about this. You must write again soon. Well, as you see, the photos are SOWER — POTATO GRUBBERS — PEAT DIGGERS. I’ve now done some more, SAND QUARRY, WEED BURNERS, DUNG-HEAP, POTATO GRUBBER 1 figure, COAL LOADERS, and at Scheveningen this week I worked on MENDING NETS (Scheveningen fishermen’s wives).

And two larger compositions of Dune workers (one of which I showed to Tersteeg again) which, although they’ll require a lot more labour, are still what I’d most like to complete.

Long rows of diggers — poor fellows set to work by the city — in front of a piece of dune land that’s to be dug over. But to do that is terribly difficult.

Peat diggers gives you a first idea of it. I wouldn’t be so melancholy about it, brother, if you hadn’t added something that worries me. You say ‘let’s hope for better times’.

You see, that’s one of the things one must be careful about, in my view. Hoping for better times mustn’t be a feeling but a doing something in the present.

My doing depends on your doing, in the sense that if you were to reduce what you send I couldn’t go on and would be desperate.

Precisely because I felt the hope of better times alive within me, I continued to throw myself into it with all my strength — into the work of THE ‘PRESENT’ — without thinking about that future other than to trust that work would bring its reward, although the spending on food, drink, clothes had to be reduced again and again, week after week, more and more. I was faced by the question of going to Scheveningen, the question of painting. I thought: come, press ahead. But now I wish I hadn’t begun, old chap, for it means extra expenses and I don’t have it. The weeks passed, many, many weeks and months of late, when each time the expenses were slightly more than I could keep up with, even with all the fretting and worrying and economizing. So when the money arrives from you, not only do I have to manage on it for 10 days but I immediately have to pay out so much that in those 10 days that lie ahead one couldn’t be in a more meagre situation from the outset. And the woman must breastfeed the child, and the child is strong and growing, and she’s often worried because there’s no milk.

I, too, have an enormous feeling of faintness at times in the dunes or elsewhere, because there’s nothing coming in.

Everyone’s shoes patched and worn out and other petty vexations that give one wrinkles. Anyway — it would be nothing, Theo, if only could hold on to the thought: it will work all the same, just press on. But now to me your words ‘as for the future, I can give you little hope’ are like ‘the hair that breaks the camel’s back at last’. The burden is sometimes so heavy that one hair more makes the animal fall to the ground.

Well, what to do? I’ve seen and spoken to Blommers twice already in Scheveningen, and he saw a few things of mine and asked me to call on him sometime.

I did some painted studies there, a bit of sea, a potato field, a field with women mending nets, and here at home a chap in the potato field planting cabbage in the empty spaces between the potato leaves, and then I’m working on the large drawing of beeting the nets, as they call it. But I feel my enjoyment fading, one needs a fixed point somewhere. You see, the fact that you say to me, just have hope for the future, is as if you yourself no longer have any hope for me. Is that so? I can’t help it, I feel unwell because of the worry, and I just wish you were here.

You say that the effect of the autographs is rather meagre. That doesn’t surprise me in the least when I consider that someone’s physical state influences his work, and my life is too dry and too meagre. Honestly, Theo, for the sake of the work we ought to have eaten a little better, but we couldn’t afford it and things will stay like that if I don’t get a little more leeway by one means or another. So do show the photos to Buhot or someone if you can’t arrange it yourself, and try to find a market through him, if you can.

I almost regret starting to paint again, for if I can’t make any progress I would rather I had given it up. It can’t be done without paint, and paint is dear, and because I still owe Leurs and Stam some money I can’t run up a bill. And I like painting so much. Now that I was doing it again I took more pleasure in things from last year, and have hung painted things in the studio again. The sea, which I love very dearly, needs to be attacked with painting, otherwise one has no grip on it.

Look, Theo, I just hope that you aren’t losing heart, but truly, if you’re going to talk about ‘giving no hope for the future’ then I feel sad, for you must have the courage and the energy to send, otherwise I’ll be stuck and powerless to move forward, for those who could be friends have become hostile, and appear to want to stay like that.

Consider the fact that, after all, I’ve done nothing that could justify this, at any rate not explain why Mauve, say, or Tersteeg or C.M. are so cool as not to want to see anything or say a word. I find it human that a coolness may arise over one thing or another, but to maintain the coolness now that more than a year has passed, and after repeated attempts at reconciliation, is not kind.

Thus I end for today with the question, Theo, when in the beginning you spoke to me about painting, and if we could have foreseen then the work now, would we have hesitated to think it was right that I should become a painter (or draughtsman then, what difference does it make?)? I don’t believe that we’d have hesitated to press ahead if we could have foreseen these photos, for instance, would we?, for a painter’s hand and eye are needed after all if one wants to create such a scene in the dunes in one form or another. But now I often feel so wretched when I see people remaining so apathetic and cold that I lose heart. Well, then I recover again and go back to work and smile about it, and because I work in the present and don’t let a day go by without working, I believe that I do indeed have hope for the future, although it doesn’t feel like that because, as I say, there’s no room left in my brain for philosophizing about the future, either to upset me or to console me. Holding on to the present and not letting it pass by without managing to get something out of it — now that’s what I believe duty is.

So you should also try to hold on to the present with respect to me, and let’s persevere with what we can persevere with, preferably today rather than tomorrow.

But you needn’t spare me, Theo, if it’s just a question of money, and if you, as friend and brother, retain some sympathy for the work, saleable or unsaleable. As long as that’s the case, that I still retain your sympathy in this respect, then it matters precious little to me, and we must confer calmly and coolly. Then, if there’s no hope for the future financially, I would propose a move to the country, saving half the rent in a village deep in the country, and for the same amount of money that one pays here for bad food getting good, healthy food, which is needed for the woman and the little ones, and for me too in fact. Also having advantages perhaps for models.

As you know, last summer I painted — now I’ve hung up several studies again, because when I was doing new ones I saw that there was something in them after all. Painting helped me indirectly with my drawing during the winter months and the spring, and I worked that up right until these recent drawings. Now, though, I feel it would be good to paint again for a while, and I need that to become richer in tone, in the drawings too. I had planned to paint the women sitting in the grass mending the nets in a fairly large format, but after what you said I’ll wait until I’ve spoken to you.

I’ve received small prints of the autographs, but weak ones, yet the man tells me he ought really to have put on more ink and that he’ll give me better ones. No matter, I’ve experimented with doing a croquis in a small format as if for an illustrated magazine. Oh, Theo, I could make much more progress if I was a little better off.

But I can’t think of a way out, I come up against expenses on all sides. When I read the life story of one painter or another, I see that in fact they all needed money, and were miserable when they couldn’t carry on.

Write soon, for I’m not well and in two minds as to whether I dare go ahead with Scheveningen, which will involve the costs of painting materials.

I had hoped that you would have been able to send something — well, in any event, especially if you have no money, you must write to me soon, for it’s quite a feat to keep one’s spirits up in the circumstances.

I think the drawings from which the photos have been taken aren’t yet deep enough in tone, not yet depicting the emotion nature evokes sufficiently, but if you compare this with what I began with, the earlier figures, I believe I’m not mistaken in seeing signs of progress and we mustn’t let go of that advance, so let us toil on.

I don’t think it right, Theo, to spend more than one receives — but if it’s a question of stopping or carrying on working, I’m for carrying on to the end. Millet and other predecessors carried on right up to the bailiff, and some went to prison or had to move hither and thither, yet I don’t see in them that they stopped. And with me it’s still only the beginning, but I see it in the distance like a dark shadow, and it sometimes makes working sombre.

I’ve spoken to Breitner again, about those three compositions in progress. It was indeed so that he had done them in a moment when he was out of sorts. He told me that he regretted doing them like that, and showed me an altered composition of the drunkard and studies of low street women that were infinitely better. And I also saw some watercolours in the making and a painting of a farrier’s that were done with a calmer and more correct hand and head. I read a book he lent me, Soeur Philomène by De Goncourt, who wrote Gavarni. The story is set in a hospital, very good.

Beginning as an Artist

Brussels, Etten, The Hague, November 1880–September 1883