- in original text:
...C’est charmant.
Ah...Rembrandt... toute admiration pour Baudelaire à part – j’ose supposer surtout d’après ces vers-là.... qu’il ignorait Rembrandt à peu près complètement.– Je viens de trouver et d’acheter ici une petite eauforte d’après Rembrandt, une étude d’homme nu...
...l’est à Vélasquez.
Enfin, je le sais, Rembrandt et les Hollandais sont eparpillés dans les...
...peint des Jesus christ, bon dieu et autres. – Rembrandt pourtant – en effet, mais voila le seul...
...religieux, c’est une magie metaphysique.
Ainsi Rembrandt a peint des anges – il fait un...
...ainsi que Socrate et Mahomet avaient un genie familier, Rembrandt, derriere ce vieillard qui a une...
...ni de fantaisie.
Suis je illogique – non.– Rembrandt n’a rien inventé et cet ange et ce...
...dans un coin de firmament.
Rembrandt travaille avec les valeurs de la même façon que Delacroix avec les couleurs.
Or il y a loin entre le procedé de Delacroix et de Rembrandt et celui de tout le...
- in translation:
...yellow, brown. It’s charming.
Ah...Rembrandt... all admiration for Baudelaire aside — I venture to assume, especially on the basis of those verses.... that he knew more or less nothing about Rembrandt. I’ve just found and bought here a little etching after Rembrandt, a study of a nude man...
...pink is of Velázquez.
Anyway, I know, Rembrandt and the Dutch are scattered around museums...
...paint Jesus Christs, the Good Lord and others. Rembrandt though – indeed, but he’s the only one...
...painters; it’s a metaphysical magic.
So, Rembrandt painted angels — he makes a portrait of...
...but just as Socrates and Mohammed had a familiar genie, Rembrandt, behind this old man who bears a...
...imagination nor fantasy.
Am I illogical? No. Rembrandt invented nothing, and that angel and that...
...is in a corner of the firmament.
Rembrandt works with values in the same way as Delacroix with colours.
Now, there’s a gulf between the method of Delacroix and Rembrandt and that of all the rest of...
- in note 6:
...Rembrandt – sad hospital filled full with murmurings, Decorated only with a great crucifix Where the tearful prayer exhales from the filth, And brusquely traversed by a ray of winter. (Tout ceci provoqué par une citation admirative de ma part du beau quatrain des Phares, de Charles Baudelaire: Rembrandt triste hôpital tout rempli de murmures Et d’un grand crucifix décoré seulement, D’où la prière en pleurs s’exhale des ordures Et d’un rayon d’hiver traversé brusquement.) See Lettres à Bernard 1911, p. 99. The famous poem praising several artists is from Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (1857...
- in note 7:
...This print after an oil sketch attributed to Rembrandt (now in Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Museum; Bredius...
- in note 8:
Rembrandt, The slaughtered ox, 1655 (Paris, Musée du Louvre). Ill. 347.
- in note 14:
...make up an important part of Rembrandt’s oeuvre. In a footnote to this remark in the 1911 edition Bernard wrote: ‘Strange assertion!… The Pilgrims of Emmaus or the Good Samaritan, not much in Rembrandt’s oeuvre!…’ (Etrange assertion...Les Pèlerins d’Emmaüs ou le Bon Samaritain, peu de chose dans l’oeuvre de Rembrandt!...). See Lettres à Bernard 1911, p. 107. For Rembrandt’s Christ figure see also letter...
- in note 15:
...Rembrandt the old lion, his head covered in a cloth, his palette in his hand’), likewise written to Bernard, who was familiar with the collection in the Louvre, it is most likely that he is talking about Self-portrait at the easel, 1660? (Paris, Musée du Louvre), Ill. 1608, although Van Gogh may also have had in mind Self-portrait as Zeuxis, c. 1669 (Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum). Ill. 377. Van Gogh’s description contains echoes of Fromentin’s, where he remarks in Les maîtres d’autrefois that in difficult times Rembrandt depicted himself in ‘graver, more modest, more veracious garb...in dark garments with a handkerchief around his head, his face saddened, wrinkled, emaciated, his palette in his rugged hands’ (tenues plus graves, plus modestes, plus véridiques … en vestes sobres, avec un mouchoir en serre-tête, le visage attristé, ridé, macéré, la palette entre ses rudes mains) (see Fromentin 1902, chapter 16, p. 399)....
- in note 17:
Here Van Gogh is imagining the creation of Rembrandt’s The evangelist Matthew inspired by an angel, 1661...