Praeterita

From a letter dated July 24, 1890: “As far as I am concerned, I am giving my canvases my undivided attention. I am trying to do as well as some painters I have loved and admired.” Three days later, either in the grip of an attack or in fear at the onset of one, he went out into the wheat fields near Auvers in northern France and shot himself. He did not die immediately, but stumbled back to the house of Dr. Gachet, with whom he was supposedly recuperating from previous attacks. Theo rushed from Paris to be with his brother, and two days later, on July 29, Vincent Van Gogh died in his brother’s arms.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated June 3, 1890: “I should like to do portraits which will appear as revelations to people in a hundred years’ time. In other words, I am not trying to achieve this by photographic likeness but by rendering our impassioned expressions, by using our modern knowledge and appreciation of colour as a means of rendering and exalting character.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated May 4, 1890: “They say that in painting one should look for nothing more and hope for nothing more than a good picture and a good talk and a good dinner as the height f happiness, and ignore the less brilliant digressions. That may well be true, so why shouldn’t one seize the hour, particularly if in so doing one steals a march on one’s illness?”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Contrary to popular myth, Van Gogh was actually on the verge of public recognition at the time he died. A young, soon to be influential art critic called Aurier published a glowing essay about Van Gogh. The artist, showing that he was often his own worst enemy, replied thus in a letter dated February 10/11 1890: “You may realize now that your article would have been fairer and – it seems to me – consequently more powerful, if, when dealing with the question of the future of ‘tropical painting’ and the question of colour, you had – before speaking of me – done justice to Gauguin or Monticelli. For the role attaching to me, or that will be attached to me, will remain, I assure you, of very secondary importance .” [Van Gogh’s own underlining.]   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated c. November 20, 1889: “No matter how odious or burdensome painting may be at present, those who have chosen this profession – if only they pursue it with zeal – are dutiful, sound and faithful men. Society often renders our existence hard, and that is the source of our impotence and of the imperfection of our work. I believe that even Gauguin suffers greatly from this and cannot develop, thought he has it in him to do so.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated September 7 or 8, 1889: “My dear brother, you know that I came to the south and threw myself into work for a thousand reasons – looking for a different light, believing that observing nature under a brighter sky might give one a more accurate idea of the way the Japanese feel and draw. Wanting, finally, to see this stronger sun, because one has the feeling that unless one knows it one would not be able to understand the pictures of Delacroix, as far as execution and technique are concerned, and because one feels that the colours of the prism are veiled in the mists of the north… “What an odd thing the touch, the stroke of the brush, is. “In the open air, exposed to the wind, to the sun, to people’s curiosity, one works as best one can, one fills one’s canvas regardless. Yet that is how one captures the true and the essential – the most difficult part. But when, after some time, one resumes the study and alters the brushstrokes in keeping with the objects –...

Van Gogh, 'Portrait of Joseph Roulin', 1888 From a letter dated February 3, 1889: “When I came out of hospital with good old Roulin, I fancied there’d been nothing wrong with me, it was only afterwards I felt I’d been ill. Well, that’s only to be expected, I have moments when I am twisted with enthusiasm or madness or prophecy, like a Greek oracle on his tripod. I display great presence of mind then in my words, and speak like the Arlesiennes, but in spite of all that, my spirits are very low.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter written second half of December, 1888: “Gauguin and I discuss Delacroix, Rembrandt, etc., a great deal. The debate is exceedingly electric, and sometimes when we finish our minds are as drained as an electric battery after discharge… “In case you think that Gauguin or I get down to work effortlessly, let me tell you that work does not always come easily to us. And my wish for our Dutch friends, and for you as well, is that they should feel no more discouraged by their difficulties than we do.” After months of urging, Gauguin finally joined Van Gogh in Arles in October, 1888. Van Gogh had dreamed for years about an artists’ colony, a utopian dream that may have carried over from the few years when he attempted to become a Christian minister working with the poor. Van Gogh seems to have thought of this as a way for artists to share living and painting expenses, to exhibit together, and to exchange ideas in a collegiate atmosphere. Unfortunately, Van Gogh’s own mental i...

From a letter dated October 24, 1888: “I realize, to the point of being morally crushed and physically drained by it, that taking it all in all, I have absolutely no other means of ever recovering what we have spent. “I cannot help it that my pictures do not sell. “The day will come, however, when people will see they are worth more than the price of the paint and my living expenses, very meager on the whole, which we put into them. “As far as money or finances are concerned, what I want and what I am interested in is to have no debts in the first place. “But, my dear brother, my debt is so great that by the time I have paid it off, which I’, still sure I’ll succeed in doing, the strain of producing pictures will have taken my whole life, and it will seem to me that I haven’t lived."   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated September 24, 1888: “If we study Japanese art, we discover a man who is undeniably wise, philosophical and intelligent, who spends his time—doing what? Studying the distance from the earth to the moon? No! Studying the politics of Bismarck ? No! He studies … a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw all the plants—then the seasons, the grand spectacle of landscapes, finally animals, then the human figure. That is how he spends his life, and life is too short to do everything. “So come, isn’t what we are taught by these simple Japanese, who live in nature as if they themselves were flowers, almost a true religion? “And one cannot study Japanese art, it seems to me, without becoming merrier and happier, and we should turn back to nature in spite of our education and our work in a conventional world.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated September 24, 1888: "(Tolstoy's book 'My Religion') must be a very interesting one, it seems to me. In the end, we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and will want to live—more musically. How will this come about, and what will we discover? It would be nice to be able to prophesy, but it is even better to be forewarned, instead of seeing absolutely nothing in the future other than the disasters that are bound to strike the modern world and civilizations like so many thunderbolts, through revolution, or war, or the bankruptcy of worm-eaten states.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated c. September 17, 1888: “Tomorrow I am going to draw until the paint arrives. But I am now resolved not to draw any more pictures with charcoal. It serves no purpose, you must tackle drawings with colour if you want to draw well.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated August 11, 1888: “The only choice I have myself is being a good painter or a bad one. I choose the first. But the needs of painting are like those of a ruinously expensive mistress, one can do nothing without money, and one never has enough of it. Painting should thus be done at public expense instead of overburdening the artist. But there, we should keep our own counsel, because no-one is forcing us to work , indifference towards painting being inevitably pretty general, pretty well permanent.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated July 31, 1888: “Why do you say Degas can’t get it up properly? Degas lives like some petty lawyer and doesn’t like women, knowing very well that if he did like them and bedded them frequently, he’d go to seed and be in no position to paint any longer. The very reason why Degas’s painting is virile and impersonal is that he has resigned himself to being nothing more than a petty lawyer with a horror of kicking over the traces. He observes human animals who are stronger than him screwing and f—ing away and he paints them so well for the very reason that he isn’t all that keen on it himself.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated c. July 23, 1888: “… a Greek statue, a peasant by Millet, a Dutch portrait, a female nude by Courbet or Degas, these calm and perfectly modeled representations are the reason why very many other things, the primitives no less than the Japanese, give me the impression of having been composed with the pen. I find that immensely interesting, but anything complete and perfect renders infinity tangible, and the enjoyment of any beautiful thing is like coitus, a moment of infinity.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter date c. July 17, 1888: “Moreover, the material problems of the painter’s life make it desirable that painters should collaborate and unite (much as they did in the days of the Guilds of St. Luke). If only they would ensure their material well-being, and love one another like friends instead of making one another’s life hell, painters would be happier, and in any case less ridiculous, less foolish and less culpable."   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated June 23, 1888: “Yet our own life is a modest one indeed, our life as painters, languishing under the back-breaking yoke of the problems of a calling that is almost too hard to practise on this ungrateful planet, where ‘love of art drives out true love.’ “   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Warning to readers prone to fits of nervous fainting: this quotation contains a dodgy un-PC simile. From a letter written in summer 1888: “Painting is like keeping a mistress of ill-repute who does nothing but spend money and more money and never has enough.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter dated c. June 18, 1888: “Alas, alas, it is just as the excellent fellow Cyprien says in J.K. Huysman’s ‘En menage’: the most beautiful paintings are those which you dream about when you lie in bed smoking a pipe, but which you never paint. “Yet you have to make a start, no matter how incompetent you feel in the face of inexpressible perfection, of the overwhelming beauty of nature . . . “The symbol of St. Luke, the patron saint of painters, is, as you know, an ox. So you must be patient as an ox if you want to work in the artistic field. Still, bulls are lucky not to have to work at that foul business of painting.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

From a letter date June 12-13, 1888: “What an artist! A man like him [Wagner] in painting would be quite something, and one will come . . . “I must try to achieve the solidity of colour I got in that picture which slays all the rest. I remember Portier used to say that his Cezannes, seen on their own, looked like nothing on earth, but that when placed next to other canvases they wiped the colour out of all the rest.”   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader