1r:1
Sunday

My dear Theo,
Yesterday I at last got around to reading a book by Murger, namely Les buveurs d’eau.1 I find something of the same charm in it as in, say, the drawings of Nanteuil, Baron,2 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).3 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.4 And they aren’t the ones who make up the core of the body of artists.  1v:2
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.5 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,6 and one immediately feels that sense of being absolutely gripped by the book.
Take the Victor Hugo by Bonnat7 — 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:

And I, I was silent —
As one sees a blackcock keep silent on the heath.8

Don’t you think that little figure on the heath is splendid? Isn’t it as vivid as a little general of 93 by Meissonier9 — 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.10
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.  1v:3
It’s Sunday again. This morning I was on Rijswijkseweg.11 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,12 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.

 1r:4
Monday
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,13 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 mirror14 — that it seems to me that one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of ‘something on high’15 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.16
Israëls has done it so very beautifully.17 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

Let cares like a wild deluge come,
And storms of sorrow fall,
May I but safely reach my home,
My god, my Heaven, my All.18

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.  2r:5
Just as I get back from the printer’s I receive your letter. I think your Montmartre19 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.20 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.21 If that work — as in the case of Millet, Dupré, Israëls &c. — is something intended to bring peace, to say sursum corde 22 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.  2v:6 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, Degroux23 — 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.24 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  2v:7 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 93,25 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.  2r:8
Yet this is the time to combine and to speak.
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.26 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

Ever yours,
Vincent

288

Br. 1990: 290 | CL: 248
From: Vincent van Gogh
To: Theo van Gogh
Date: The Hague, Sunday, 26 and Monday, 27 November 1882
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1. The title of Henri Murger’s novel Les buveurs d’eau (1854) refers to a group of (fictional) artists in Paris’s Quartier Latin who have taken this as their name. They believe that genius is something divine, and that an artist is forbidden to earn money through works of art. This is symbolized by an initiation ceremony that ends with the drinking of a glass of water. Each of the three chapters in the book deals with an episode in the life of a painter. The first, Francis, wants to join the ‘Buveurs d’eau’ but is found to be too bourgeois; he is destined to become a mediocre artist. The painter Antoine renounces his love for a young woman in favour of art. The painter Lazare in the last chapter also thinks he must choose between love and vocation, but here the open ending implies that a serious relationship is possible after all.
2. Given that the context is the bohemian life, Van Gogh is more likely to mean the genre painter Henri Charles Antoine Baron than the landscape painter Théodore Baron.
3. There are various painters among the characters in the novels of Honoré de Balzac. The most important are: Joseph Bridau in La rabouilleuse (1842), Pierre Grassou in Pierre Grassou (1839), Dubourdieu and Léon de Lora in Les comédiens sans le savoir (1846), Hippolyte Schinner in La bourse (1832), Théodore de Sommervieux in La maison du chat-qui-pelote (1830), Frenhofer in Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (1831), and Servin in La vendetta (1830). See Wingfield Scott 1936, pp. 8-13, 275.
4. Claude Lantier is a character in Zola’s novel Le ventre de Paris (1873), which Van Gogh had read a few months before (see letters 245 and 250). Later he is the protagonist in Zola’s L’oeuvre (1886).
Van Gogh’s suspicion that the painter was done ‘from nature’ was right: the figure was partly based on Paul Cézanne. Lantier lives entirely for his work and aspires to a new, contemporary art in which things are shown in their true light. This is the first time that Van Gogh uses the term ‘Impressionism’. Both here and in several later Dutch letters (e.g. 450, 467 and 495) it is evident that he has not yet fully understood the exact meaning of the term. It was only when he moved to Paris that he became aware of the latest developments in painting. After that he used the term in a broader sense than normal; see letter 569, n. 2.
5. Meissonier did several studio scenes in which a painter or draughtsman is seen from behind. Van Gogh probably means The painter (1855), The Cleveland Museum of Art. Ill. 252 [252]. This painting was well known through Bingham’s photo, reproduced in Burty 1866, p. 86 (cf. letter 38, n. 9).
[252]
6. Van Gogh must mean A scholar reading, c. 1630 (Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum). Ill. 2011 [2011]. It is doubtful whether this is an authentic Rembrandt; the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum attributes the panel to Gerard Dou. See Bruyn 1986, vol. 1, pp. 533-538, no. C15. Van Gogh may have known the scene from the etching De geleerde (The scholar) by William Unger after Rembrandt, which had been in the Kunstkronijk 12 (1871), NS, between pp. 58 and 59. There are two copies of this in the estate (Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, inv. nos. p135 and p136).
[2011]
7. Léon Bonnat, Victor Hugo, 1879 (Versailles, Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon). Ill. 604 [604]. The portrait was extremely well known and was reproduced several times both separately and in magazines; cf., for example, the print by Valette in Le Monde Illustré 23 (2 August 1879), pp. 72-73.
[604]
8. These lines most probably go back to Victor Hugo’s poem La légende des siècles (1859), in which the following passage occurs: ‘I watched him in the funereal mists / As one might see a blackcock keep silent in the gloom’ (Je le considérais dans les vapeurs funèbres / Comme on verrait se taire un coq dans les ténèbres). Ed. Paris 1950, p. 735 (chapter 60). It is not known whether Van Gogh read La légende des siècles; it is possible that he knew these lines – whether or not in the divergent form he quotes – via an intermediate source. He cites the words again in letter 397.
9. The phrase ‘a little general of ’93’ refers to Napoleon Bonaparte, who was made a general in 1793. Van Gogh may be making an allusion to one of the depictions of Napoleon that Meissonier painted, including 1814, The French campaign, 1860-1864 (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) – in the estate there is a typogravure after this (t*866) – and Napoleon i in 1814, 1862 (Baltimore, Walters Art Museum), of which there is also a grisaille. See exhib. cat. Lyon 1993, pp. 200-203, cat. nos. 106-108.
[439] [440]
10. Millet’s charcoal drawing Autoportrait à la casquette de laine (Self-portrait with a woollen cap), 1847-1848, included in Sensier’s La vie et l’oeuvre de J.-F. Millet. Ill. 297 [297]. He speaks of a coachman’s cap and describes the portrait as follows: ‘A brownish, dirty-grey jacket; a dense beard; long hair, topped by a woollen cap like a coachman’s, stamped his physiognomy with a character that was immediately astonishing, and recalled the painters of the Middle Ages’ (Un paletot brun, couleur de muraille; une barbe épaisse; de longs cheveux surmontés d’un bonnet de laine comme celui des cochers, imprimaient à sa physionomie un caractère qui étonnait d’abord et qui rappelait les peintres du moyen âge). Sensier 1881, pp. 100-101.
[297]
11. For this Rijswijkseweg, see letter 11, n. 15.
12. For this ‘Copal crayon’, see letter 287, n. 12.
13. Seven impressions of the lithograph ‘At eternity’s gate’ (F 1662 / JH 268 [2417]) are known. Two were in Theo’s estate; it is not known which one was enclosed with this letter. Cf. Van Heugten and Pabst 1995, pp. 52-56, 93, cat. no. 5.
[2417]
15. This expression may derive from the phrase ‘And that something on high has been disturbed’ (Et qu’on a dérangé quelque chose là-haut) from the poem ‘Patrie’ in L’art d’être grand-père (1877) by Victor Hugo. See Hugo 1972, vol. 2, p. 559. Van Gogh uses the expression again in letters 294, 333, 396, 397, 401, 403 and 405. For the related expression ‘un rayon d’en haut’, see letter 143, n. 5.
16. The words ‘At the same time... the worms’ were added later by Van Gogh.
17. Van Gogh probably means Jozef Israëls, Old friends [192], which he cited earlier in connection with Millet: see letter 211, n. 13.
[192]
18. The song of the slave in Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s cabin. See Harriet Beecher Stowe, La cabane de l’oncle Tom, ou la vie des nègres en Amérique. Translated by Alfred Michiels. Paris 1853, p. 440 (‘La victoire’, chapter 38). The book was available in several French translations. Soth thinks it ‘almost certain’ that Van Gogh knew the translation by Louis Enault (Paris, Hachette 1853). See Soth 1994, pp. 156-162, especially pp. 156-157.
19. Theo had sent a description of Montmartre before, to which Vincent responded enthusiastically several times: see letters 260-262. He returns to the present description in letter 295.
21. Borrowed from Thomas Carlyle, Past and present. Ed. London 1897, p. 197 (‘Labour’, chapter 11). Also cited in letters 294 and 327 (in translation).
22. Read: ‘corda’. For this expression, see letter 143, n. 49.
24. In his letter Theo must have acceded to Vincent’s request in letter 283 to return to a work by Daumier mentioned previously (not identified) which, the rest of the letter suggests, was for sale.
25. Those who suppressed the royalist rising in 1793, about which Van Gogh had recently read in Victor Hugo’s Quatre-vingt-treize; see letter 286, n. 9.