The Letters of Vincent van Gogh Read online

  THE LETTERS OF VINCENT VAN GOGH

  ‘Van Gogh’s letters… are one of the greatest joys of modern literature, not only for the inherent beauty of the prose and the sharpness of the observations but also for their portrait of the artist as a man wholly and selflessly devoted to the work he had to set himself to’ - Washington Post

  ‘Fascinating… letter after letter sizzles with colorful, exacting descriptions … This absorbing collection elaborates yet another side of this beuiling and brilliant artist’ - The New York Times Book Review

  ‘Ronald de Leeuw’s magnificent achievement here is to make the letters accessible in English to general readers rather than art historians, in a new translation so excellent I found myself reading even the well-known letters as if for the first time… It will be surprising if a more impressive volume of letters appears this year’ — Observer

  ‘Any selection of Van Gogh’s letters is bound to be full of marvellous things, and this is no exception’ — Sunday Telegraph

  ‘With this new translation of Van Gogh’s letters, his literary brilliance and his statement of what amounts to prophetic art theories will remain as a force in literary and art history’ — Philadelphia Inquirer

  ‘De Leeuw’s collection is likely to remain the definitive volume for many years, both for the excellent selection and for the accurate translation’ - The Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Vincent’s letters are a journal, a meditative autobiography… You are able to take in Vincent’s extraordinary literary qualities … Unputdownable’ - Daily Telegraph

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR, EDITOR AND TRANSLATOR

  VINCENT WILLEM VAN GOGH was born in Holland in 1853. He became an assistant with an international firm of art-dealers and in 1881 he went to Brussels to study art. After an unsuccessful love affair with his cousin he returned to Holland and in 1885 he painted his first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters, a haunting scene of domestic poverty. A year later his brother Theo, an art dealer, enabled him to study in Paris, where he met Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Seurat, who became very important influences on his work. In 1888 he left Paris for the Provencal landscape at Aries, the subject of many of his best works, including Sunflowers and The Chair and the Pipe. It was here Van Gogh cut off his ear, in remorse for threatening Gauguin with a razor during a quarrel, and he was placed in an asylum for a year. On 27 July 1890 Van Gogh shot himself at the scene of his last painting, the foreboding Cornfields with Flight of Birds, and he died two days later.

  RONALD DE LEEUW has been the director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam since 1986. He trained as an art historian at the universities of Los Angeles, California, and of Leiden, The Netherlands. As a specialist in nineteenth-century painting, he has been responsible for numerous exhibitions in The Netherlands and abroad, including the 1990 Vincent Van Gogh Centennial retrospective in Amsterdam. Since 1990 Ronald de Leeuw has also directed the Museum Mesdag in The Hague, known for its fine Barbizon and Hague School holdings. In 1994 he was appointed professor extraordinary in the history of collecting at the Free University of Amsterdam.

  ARNOLD POMERANS was born in 1920 and was educated in South Africa. He emigrated to England in 1948, and from 1948 to 1955 taught physics in London. In 1955 he became a full-time translator and has had just under two hundred major works issued by leading British and US publishers. Among the authors translated by him are Louis de Broglie, Anne Frank, Sigmund Freud, George Grosz, Jan Huizinga, Jean Piaget and Jules Romain.

  THE LETTERS OF

  VINCENT VAN GOGH

  Selected and Edited by Ronald de Leeww

  Translated by Arnold Pomerans

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 1996

  Published in Penguin Books 1997

  15

  This collection cpytxt © Ronald de Leeuw, 1996

  This translation cpytxt © Sdu Publishers, 1996

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted

  Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  Contents

  About This Edition

  Translator’s Note

  Introduction

  Biographical Outline

  Early Letters

  Ramsgate and Isleworth

  Dordrecht

  Amsterdam

  The Borinage

  Etten

  The Hague

  The Hague, Drenthe and Nuenen

  From Nuenen to Antwerp

  Paris

  Aries

  Saint-Rémy

  Auvers-sur-Oise

  Bibliography

  Index

  For Gerlof

  About This Edition

  The text of this selection of letters is based on De Brieven van Vincent van Gogh (The Letters of Vincent van Gogh), edited by Han van Crimpen and Monique Berends-Albert and published in 1990 by the Van Gogh Museum in collaboration with Sdu (the Netherlands state publishing house). The translation of letters originally written in French is based on a new transcription specially prepared for this edition. The letters D, F and E in square brackets indicate whether a particular letter was originally written in Dutch, French or English.

  Van Gogh’s letters have come down to us largely undated. In most cases, however, the correct sequence and date have been determined satisfactorily, though some problems with dates remain, especially in letters from the Aries period. In all these cases the dates given in the Sdu edition have been provisionally retained.

  Drawings have been included only when the letters selected here were illustrated by the artist himself

  The greatly improved and enlarged 1990 edition of the Letters is still obtainable only in Dutch, so the numbering of the letters used here is based on the 1914/1953/1973 edition, which has been the basis of all translations to date. As a result, this book can be used in conjunction with the existing Van Gogh literature, in which that numbering is commonly found.

  The letters to Van Rappard bear an R-number, those to Émile Bernard a B-number and those to his sister Wil a W-number. The recently discovered letter from Wil van Gogh to her girlfriend Line Kruysse, which is quoted here at some length, was first published in the Bulletin van bet Van Gogh Museum (1992/3, Vol. 7).

  This edition is not primarily intended for readers well versed in art history, so no attempt has been made to relate the pictures mentioned in the text to the oeuvre catalogues of Baart de la Faille and Jan Hulsker. Dates of birth and death of the dramatis personae are
given in the Index.

  Translator’s Note

  Quotations from letters Van Gogh wrote in French that appear in the linking text and in the Introduction have been translated from the Dutch, unless the letters in question are included in this book. Quotations from Johanna van Gogh-Bonger appear in her English. Translations of French words or phrases used by Van Gogh in his Dutch letters have been provided in notes, except where they are already familiar in English.

  Introduction

  Nothing annoyed Van Gogh more than ‘acting as a pedestal for something you do not know’; being misused for an end he himself did not pursue. Although the circumstances of his life often gave him good cause, he stated emphatically that’… on no account would I choose the life of a martyr. For I have always striven for something other than heroism, which I do not have in me …’

  The story of any artist’s rise to fame makes fascinating reading and none is more fascinating than Van Gogh’s. His contemporaries’ alleged failure to appreciate his talent, the claim that he sold only a single painting in his lifetime and his death under intriguing and not yet fully explained circumstances have all fired the imagination.

  In 1913, when Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, the widow of Van Gogh’s brother Theo, put the finishing touches to the first complete edition of Vincent van Gogh’s letters to her husband, she did so with some trepidation. In her Introduction she expressed the wish that the letters should be read ‘with consideration’; at the same time she hoped that his dramatic life would not obscure the perception of his oeuvre. For the serious reader and the art historian, the publication of these letters added a fresh dimension to the understanding of Van Gogh’s artistic achievement, an understanding granted us by virtually no other painter.

  Van Gogh himself was an avid reader of artists’ biographies, devouring whatever he could find on the lives of painters he admired - Delacroix, Corot, Millet and Monticelli - and he expected conduct from artists in keeping with the character of their art. At the beginning of his own artistic career, he treated Alfred Sensier’s biography of Millet, La vie et l’œuvre de J.-F. Millet, published in 1881, almost as if it were Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. He could hardly have imagined that his own letters to Theo would in their turn fulfil a similar role for a host of readers, and countless artists in particular.

  The century that has passed since Van Gogh’s suicide in July 1890 in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise in northern France has brought, in addition to posthumous acclaim, a distortion of many of the ideas and values Van Gogh upheld as an artist. A Van Gogh mythology - and Johanna van Gogh feared just that - has become an impediment to direct access to Van Gogh’s creative work. Irving Stone’s book Lust for Life, followed later by the film version and the world-wide dissemination of Van Gogh reproductions, has in one respect fulfilled his ambition to be a people’s artist, albeit in an ironical sense. However, it has also served to isolate him once more from other artists by placing him in a special position.

  One year before his death Van Gogh himself discerned in the — positive - critiques of Albert Aurier and J. J. Isaacson the first symptoms of a misrepresentation of his work. The emphasis his early critics placed on his obsession, if not his madness, eclipsed the message he himself wanted to convey. His ambition to become known as a painter of peasant life and as ‘the painter of modern portraits’ is at odds with the prevailing image of a madman who died a martyr to art. That a painting such as The Bedroom, intended as a welcome to Gauguin and a homage to Seurat, in which he strove to convey an image of rest and simplicity, should nowadays be considered a model of colour enhancement and distorted perspective is something that would have astonished him. His paintings have an expressive force that not even the most confident disclaimers in his own letters can fully gainsay. For the serious reader, Van Gogh’s correspondence nevertheless provides appropriate material for refuting most, if not all, of the myths surrounding his work. As against the clichè of Van Gogh the impulsive and frenetic painter who plants his easel in the Provenç;al landscape and flings his impressions on to canvas while battling against the mistral, the letters reveal a more complex and captivating personality. Familiarity with the Vincent of the letters, moreover, leads irrevocably to sympathy for, if not identification with, this struggling seeker after God, for this toiling artist who set himself such high ethical standards.

  Rarely are readers welcomed as wholeheartedly and intimately into the process of creation of truly great art as they are through Van Gogh’s letters. It is thanks to their accessibility that Van Gogh, among all the fathers of modern art - Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat - has become the most universally loved. His letters are also virtually the only ones of their kind with sufficient intrinsic appeal to be read outside the professional circles of art historians.

  That Van Gogh’s range of ideas is not seen as dated, as the musings of an historical figure, a hundred years after his death is in part due to the fact that he made no concession to the anecdotal or modish, to the temporal nature of things. Although he frequented metropolitan centres such as Paris and London, and associated with the great artists of his day, he never became a chronicler of outward appearances like the de Goncourt brothers. Whether his particular concern was religious or artistic, he invariably cultivated his inner universe and confidently sought the eternal in the temporal. In his art no less than in his letters he aimed at the greatest possible authenticity of form, because ‘[when] the object represented is, as far as style is concerned, in harmony with and at one with the manner of representation, isn’t it just that which gives a work of art its quality?’

  As a result of his hunger for friendship and contact with fellow artists, Van Gogh came to know many of them in the course of his life. Small wonder, then, that so many memories of Van Gogh were recorded after his death. Whatever the value of these often conflicting character sketches, they are a warning against accepting the artist’s own view of himself as the last word. Even so, the world knows Van Gogh’s outward appearance mainly from his self-portraits, and his personality from the image that emerges from his correspondence. Although Van Gogh himself realized that ‘it is difficult to know oneself - but it isn’t easy to paint oneself either’, the picture that emerges from his letters has proved infinitely more subtle and hence more powerful than those his contemporaries have left us. It must, however, be borne in mind that Van Gogh’s version, too, cannot be considered a complete and true reflection of his life. Moreover, if we had more of his letters to such fellow artists as Bernard and Gauguin, then we might well have discovered other facets of his personality. What he wanted to share with Theo, or intended for Theo in particular, was bound to be subject to certain constraints. It is as well to remember that the letters to his brother were not so much written as an autobiographical record as for a very specific purpose -namely to maintain good relations with one who supported him financially all his life. The phrases at the beginning of so many letters, acknowledging receipt of his brother’s last remittance and thanking him for it, have the sound of an incantation. Beyond that, Van Gogh himself knew perfectly well that one and the same individual can provide material for the most divergent portraits, and in his relations with Theo he stressed the artistic aspect.

  Only through Theo could he hope to convince the world of his merit. Far from being objective, the letters thus constitute an eloquent apologia in which Van Gogh pleads his own cause. The critical reader will now and then discover contradictions in his argument, but like every good writer Van Gogh ultimately forces us to accept the world on his own terms and succeeds in persuading quite a few to share his ideals.

  Publication history

  ‘When as Theo’s young wife I entered in April, 1889, our flat in the Cite Pigalle in Paris, I found in the bottom of a small desk a drawer full of letters from Vincent, and week after week I saw the soon familiar yellow envelopes with the characteristic hand-writing increase in number’ (from the Preface, written by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, to the first edition of The Comp
lete Letters of Vincent van Gogb, in the English version published by Thames & Hudson in London in 1958, Vol. 1, p. xiii). The publication of these letters became Johanna van Gogh-Bonger’s life’s work. After Vincent’s death, Theo himself had cherished the notion of publishing a selection of the letters and asked the critic Albert Aurier to write a book about Vincent based on them. Theo’s own death, on 25 January 1891, followed by that of Aurier in 1892, thwarted these plans, and it was not until January 1914 that the letters were published almost in full - thanks to the efforts of Theo’s widow. In the intervening years it was largely through the translation and publication of extracts by such artists as Emile Bernard and Henry van de Velde that the existence of the letters became more widely known. From an early stage, critics in France, the Netherlands and Belgium used quotations from the letters to throw light on various paintings. In 1893, Van Gogh’s colleague and friend Èmile Bernard was the first to publish a selection of letters addressed to himself, in the journal Mercure de France. In 1905 the Dutch critic Albert Plasschaert published sixteen letters to Van Gogh’s colleague Van Rappard. Not long after the artist’s death, therefore, the letters began to be instrumental in shaping Van Gogh’s reputation.

  The 1914 edition, published partly in Dutch and partly in French -that is to say, in the languages in which the letters had been written -was quickly followed by a German edition, and somewhat later by editions in English and other languages. Over the years, moreover, other groups of letters addressed to his fellow artists and friends Emile Bernard and Anthon van Rappard and to his sister Wil were added to the Verzamelde Brieven (Collected Letters). Dr Vincent Willem van Gogh (18 90–197 8) Johanna and Theo’s son, played an important part in encouraging the publication of later editions, not least in an editorial capacity.