The Letters of Vincent van Gogh Page 2

  In 1973 the opening of the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh in Amsterdam was the occasion for a reissue of the Verzamelde Brieven. For it was here that Dr Vincent Willem van Gogh’s former collection — and thus the great majority of the originals of Vincent’s letters to Theo and Wil - found their final destination, as the property of the Vincent van Gogh Foundation, established in 1960. On the basis of this material, Douglas Cooper, in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum and the Vincent van Gogh Foundation, went on to publish forty-five letters by Gauguin to Vincent, to Theo and to Johanna van Gogh in 1983.

  A fully revised Dutch edition was prepared in 1990, under the auspices of the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, by Han van Crimpen and Monique Berends-Albert, and published on the centenary of Vincent van Gogh’s death. It comprises a greatly revised, more comprehensive and newly transcribed edition in four volumes. Recently discovered letters have been added, and numerous passages, left out of the first edition for reasons of discretion, have been restored. In her 1914 edition Johanna van Gogh had, for obvious reasons, omitted references to such incidents as Pastor Van Gogh’s threats to have his son locked up in a mental asylum. Similarly she carried out some thorough pruning of the numerous passages, especially in the early letters, filled with religious outpourings, possibly fearing that their long-windedness might deter early readers from persevering with the letters. The countless poems Van Gogh copied out for Theo and various friends, which were also omitted from, or severely cut in, the early editions, were included in full in the 1990 edition.

  Innumerable selections of letters have preceded the present one. The most important published recently was that compiled by Jan Hulsker, who aimed to provide a nearly complete picture of the main events in Van Gogh’s life through letters and extracts from letters. Although the selection offered here is scarcely less extensive, its purpose is entirely different. The present book is an attempt to present complete letters whenever possible, the better to convey a full picture of their tone and structure. The desire to follow Van Gogh’s train of thought has informed this attempt, rather than the wish to present all the relevant details. The selection is spread as evenly as possible over the various periods of his life. His great humanitarian, religious and artistic passions, whether they revolved around God, love or the painter’s Muse, have taken precedence over the chronicling of facts. Thus several letters bearing witness to Van Gogh’s desperate courtship of his cousin Kee Vos are included virtually uncut, not to present the sequence of events as such, but to show how an ill-fated obsession was exorcized.

  In the passages linking successive groups of letters I have tried to keep the reader informed of what was preoccupying Vincent during the intervening periods, not least by quoting from the correspondence. Only when these quotations contain too much miscellaneous material concerning irrelevant subjects have small cuts, indicated by […], been made.

  One problem for readers of a selection of letters such as this is that it fails to depict the author’s paramount concern - the paintings. In this respect the early letters, which demand less familiarity with the pictures, are somewhat easier to follow than the later ones. However, readers can take comfort from the fact that even Theo had yet to see the paintings and drawings mentioned in the letters and had to make do with pen-and-ink sketches of them. All such sketches incorporated in the relevant letters and all drawings enclosed in them are, wherever possible, reproduced in full in this selection.

  The letters as Vincent’s and Theo’s joint work of art

  To the art historian Van Gogh’s letters naturally constitute a vital source for identifying and dating the majority of the paintings, and also give insights into their genesis and background. Thus the letters make it clear that Van Gogh’s later paintings must be placed against the background of a broader conception of his oeuvre as a coherent whole. What is striking is the continuity of ideas, the consistency with which Van Gogh, on the various halts in his pilgrimage — for those are the terms in which he viewed his life from the 1870s onwards - faced up to the world and to art. If ever a painter knew where he was going and how to present his progress, that painter was Vincent van Gogh.

  From our point of view Theo was, of course, an ideal correspondent Thanks to his position in Goupil & Cie, a firm of leading international art dealers, he was extremely well informed about what was happening in the contemporary art world. Vincent, with his own experiences in the picture trade, used the same frame of reference, so that the brothers needed no more than a hint to be able to communicate with each other, the geographic distance between them proving no obstacle. Theo, in turn, was receptive enough to Vincent’s ideas to make his brother’s contacts among the younger Parisian avant-garde his own - after some initial differences of opinion. Although in social respects the brothers’ lives drew increasingly apart, the artistic bond between them remained close.

  Theo van Gogh was the kind of man who saved even the smallest scrap of paper, and it is to this trait that we owe the almost complete series of more than 600 letters from Vincent. We remain relatively uninformed about the Parisian period alone, for at that time the brothers were sharing an apartment and had no need to correspond. There are other gaps in the correspondence as well, but these pale into insignificance when compared to the almost total absence of letters from Theo. Only about forty or so of these, written after October 1888, have come down to us. In Vincent’s letters we now possess a mere echo of Theo’s, and ‘What Theo really thought about Vincent’, as an article by Jan Hulsker puts it, is something we can at best only vaguely surmise.

  We know that Vincent thought highly of Theo’s observations and that he now and then lauded the merits of his brother’s letters. It has been suggested that in their correspondence Vincent and Theo modelled themselves on the de Goncourt brothers. As Vincent often took the lives of other artists as his model, it would not be surprising to find that as a letter-writer also he should have wanted to follow an illustrious example. The notion is an appealing one since it reflects Vincent’s cherished dream to be joined with his brother in a ‘work of art’. Towards the end of December 1885, Vincent referred to ‘what the de Goncourts went through - and of how, at the end of their lives, they were pessimistic, yes — but also sure of themselves, knowing that they had done something, that their work would last. What fellows they were! If only we got on together better than we do now, if only we too could be in complete accord - we could be the same, couldn’t we?’

  When Vincent tried during his Drenthe period to persuade Theo to turn his back on the art trade and to opt for the artist’s life, he used these French naturalist writers as an example, and, referring to what he had read about their diary (then not published), he wrote,’… I wish that we too might walk together somewhere at the end of our lives and, looking back, say, “Et d’un” [firstly] we have done this, “et de deux” [and secondly] that, “et de trois” [and thirdly]…’ The acquisition of their joint collection of Japanese prints, too, may well have been partly inspired by the ‘maison d’artiste’ set up by the de Goncourts, whose love of Japanese art was proverbial.

  Nevertheless, Vincent seemingly failed to keep Theo’s letters. This suggests that much as Theo played a part in the creation of the drawings and paintings through his role as art dealer, so he participated in the creation of the letters by being their principal and ideal recipient However, it would no doubt have given the brothers great satisfaction to discover that their correspondence, besides being an autobiographical document, now also serves as an exemplary source for anyone seeking to reach to the very heart of late nineteenth-century artistic life, thus playing much the same role in art as the diaries of the de Goncourts play in literature.

  Literary features

  Among the literary qualities that have earned Van Gogh’s letters their place in world literature, power of expression and integrity take pride of place. The letters convince because they are fashioned by inner compulsion and broach subjects of existential concern to the artist. From the
outset the letters strike an authentic note. When he addresses his brother or colleagues, for whom a hint was enough in matters of art, Van Gogh’s tone is naturally different from the one he adopts to address his parents or Wil. The companionable and humorous sides of his personality come out most strongly in his letters to such fellow artists as Bernard and Van Rappard. The tone is further influenced by his passions of the moment. During the periods of his involvement with Kee Vos and Sien Hoornik he is sometimes wound up to fever pitch. At his moments of religious fanaticism a pedagogic and sermonizing tone alternates with the intense passions of the zealot. During his later years in France his language grows appreciably less exalted. The descriptions of landscapes, for instance, are less elaborate and have less of a literary veneer than those from his English and Borinage periods. It would seem that the shorthand of Impressionism also rendered his prose more concise.

  Although the letters are full of shrewd observations and crisply formulated images, Van Gogh was no coiner of the apercu. The expressive force of his prose lies more in the accumulation of arguments by which he attempts to ward off the threats of this world than in short, brilliant sayings. Much as he never considered a quick sketch in oils as an end in itself but aimed at a fully rounded picture, so he never considered a subject closed in his letters until it had been lit up from all sides. Not infrequently he returns to the same subject in various passages of one and the same letter, or develops the thoughts that preoccupy him over a series of letters. This can sometimes make for long-windedness, but at inspired moments the result reads like a beguiling ‘variation on a theme’.

  Long before Van Gogh aspired to a career as an artist, his letters contained passages of great intrinsic beauty. Although it is well known that his father was no inspired preacher, the word of the Bible must have formed Vincent’s first literary training. His letters from the late 1870s - that is, from his intensely religious period - seem at times like so many exercises in the writing of sermons. They are riddled with the biblical texts Vincent had made his own, and with passages from religious tracts which he applied to the most diverse situations. He had a good memory and often quoted long passages by heart, as well as many poems.

  Van Gogh’s landscape descriptions during his English period (1873—6) betray an eye already schooled in the art trade. While he developed as an artist, he also learned to express his ideas more succinctly and pithily in his letters, with the same telling effect we find in his sketches and rough drawings. His descriptions of landscapes, people or situations fascinate by their colourfully drawn comparisons, as when he portrays the Zouave as ‘a young man with a small face, a bull neck, the eyes of a tiger’, or when he writes of the Night Cafe: ‘I have tried to depict man’s terrible passions with red and green. The room is blood red and dull yellow, a green billiard table in the middle and four lemon-yellow lamps radiating orange and green. There is a clash and a contrast throughout, between the most diverse reds and greens, in the figures of the little sleeping tramps, in the bleak empty room, in purple and blue.’

  Van Gogh’s special talent lay in his creative imagination, his powers of association being the most essential component of his literary repertoire. Even at times of crisis in his relations with Theo he prefers to resort to metaphor. Thus he compares their conflicting views to the actions of soldiers firing at one another from behind barricades, because they, too, belonged to distinct camps - artists and art dealers. Because of their private frame of reference, a simple allusion to a novel both brothers had read sufficed. Thus when Vincent informed Theo of the attempted suicide of Margot Begemann in Nuenen, he compared her to ‘the first Madame Bovary’

  The Bible, history and literature yielded a host of such references, but the true heroes and martyrs of their mythology were painters, living or dead. Van Gogh’s idols were Millet and Delacroix, and - in later letters — Monticelli and Puvis de Chavannes.

  That the act of reading itself was turned into a metaphor in some of Van Gogh’s paintings can be seen from the frequency with which books appear in his work, from the Still Life with Bible, in which Zola’s La Joie de vivre forms an ironic commentary on the open Bible representing the world of his father, and from his homage in the Romans parisiens to the naturalists, to his never-realized dream of painting the display window of a bookshop as the main motif of a triptych.

  The illness

  Against all expectations, the symptoms of Van Gogh’s mental illness are conspicuous by their almost complete absence from his letters. Much as he chose not to paint before he had fully recovered from one of his attacks, so he refrained from writing at times of crisis. Throughout his life, admittedly, his letters bear witness to a man possessed, frequently agitated, enraged, dejected, obsessed, but never deranged, or emotionally or intellectually unstable. We learn about his crises after the event -through the analyses he himself was wont to give of them. Whether describing his stay in the hospital in The Hague, where he was being treated for a venereal disease, or in the hospital in Aries, or in the institution in Saint-Remy, he writes clearly, rationally and with a marked lack of sentimentality about his illness. And though he is familiar with the prevailing views on the supposed borderland between genius and madness and sometimes flirts with them, he studiously refuses to grant mental illness any positive influence on artistic creation. When, after an attack, he feels that he is not yet well enough to live a normal life, he keeps his letters short and tries to come to terms with the condition that was to remain his mortal foe. Whenever there is mention of madness in artists - a subject on which he is remarkably well informed - Van Gogh contends that the main cause lies in society’s rejection of painters, which forces them into isolation and treats them ‘as madmen, and because of this treatment [they] actually [go] insane, at least as far as their social life is concerned’.

  Literature as inspiration

  Frequent reference has been made to the dominant role of literary inspiration in the genesis of Van Gogh’s paintings. Apart from providing a key to the meaning he attached to the subjects he depicted, an analysis of his reading also explains much of his writing style.

  Whether and to what extent the writers with whose work Van Gogh was familiar helped form that style has been, incidentally, the subject of very few studies. But even without thorough analysis it seems likely that his long familiarity with literature — in his parental home and later in Amsterdam and again as an apprentice preacher, associating with clergymen — had a profound influence on his outlook. His letters from the time clearly reflect the influence of religious texts and his attendance at several sermons every Sunday. The influence of Dutch literature, by contrast, seems relatively slight, not least because Van Gogh had learned French, German and English at high school (the Hogere Burgerschool) in Tilburg and because all his friends and acquaintances read a great deal of foreign literature. His move to the London branch of Goupil in 1873 increased his familiarity with English writers. In George Eliot and Dickens he discovered ‘plastic’ qualities ‘just as powerful as, for instance, a drawing by Herkomer, or Fildes or Israels’.

  He was at first drawn particularly to Balzac and the historian Michelet among the French writers, until he discovered the French naturalists, especially Zola and the de Goncourts, in the 1880s. What humour he missed in these ‘bitter’ naturalists, he made up for with the more congenial Daudet, Voltaire (whose Pangloss in Candide was one of his favourite characters) and Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pecuchet. How sensitive he was to linguistic nuances, even in foreign languages, may be seen from his praise of the style of Ernest Renan, a writer of a French that nobody else speaks. A French in which one hears, in the sound of the words, the blue sky, the soft rustling of the olive trees …’

  Van Gogh’s frequent comparison of people to animals has been linked to Zola’s similarly inventive imagery. Thus Zola’s Germinal may well have inspired Van Gogh’s description of a woman mine worker as having the ‘expression of a lowing cow’. He compared himself to a ‘tired coach horse’, or, lad
en with painting gear, to a ‘porcupine’. His metaphors became grimmer during his stay at the Saint-R6my institution, when he likened the ‘continuous horrible screaming and screeching’ of the inmates to that ‘of animals in a zoo’.

  Characteristic of his way of thinking, writing and painting is the habit of generalizing highly personal experiences and turning the specific into the typical, sometimes with philosophical overtones. Under his pen and brush Madame Ginoux becomes the Arlesienne, his friend Boch the poet and the soldier Milliet the lover. Van Gogh discovered the same approach in Victor Hugo’s Les Misèrables. In common with many ‘realists’ of his generation, he went to extraordinary lengths to depict the bare facts of everyday life, without gloss. Beyond that, he felt that his subjects, humble and commonplace though they might be, must carry a symbolic charge, often underlined with a literary reference. In this way he managed to effect a reconciliation or, as he put it under the influence of Puvis de Chavannes’s picture Inter Artes et Naturam, to arrange ‘a strange and happy meeting of far distant antiquities and crude modernity’. For the most part this layer of meaning cannot be gleaned from the pictures alone but must be reconstructed with the help of the letters.

  The unknown Van Gogh

  Anyone familiar with the drawings and paintings Van Gogh produced during his short, intense life will discover that the letters highlight many facets of his personality that are suggested by his work as a visual artist. From the Antwerp period onwards, the letters reflect his love of Japanese art, a love borne out by the use of colour, the composition and the stylized presentation found in many of his paintings. His enthusiasm for English literature and woodcuts is reflected in his drawings and paintings, from the peasant heads produced at Nuenen and inspired by the ‘Heads of the People’ in English magazines to the painting entitled, in English, At Eternity’s Gate. Now and then, however, the letters afford us glimpses of an ‘unknown Van Gogh’, whose interests cannot be directly linked to particular paintings and drawings, or to particular literary creations.