As regards my certainly feeling the lack of a studio in Antwerp, yes, that’s so. But I have to choose between a studio without work here, and work without a studio there. I took the latter. And with pleasure that’s actually so great that it feels to me like a return from exile. After all, I’ve been out of the world of painting altogether for a long time. And in the meantime my powers have matured somewhat, so that I feel more independent of the usual intrigues to chuck someone out. I mean that in The Hague I was weaker than the rest with a brush, I don’t say in my drawing, and by attacking me on the painting and colour, I was more easily confounded than will prove possible now.

As for Rubens, I’m very much looking forward to him, but — don’t you often find that in terms of conception,  1v:2 in terms of the sentiment in his religious subjects, Rubens is theatrical, even badly theatrical? Look here — take Rembrandt — Michelangelo — take Michelangelo’s Pensieroso.2 Meant to be a thinker, isn’t he? But — his feet are small and swift, but — his hand has something of the lightning speed of a lion’s paw, and — that thinker is at the same time a man of action, one sees that his thinking is concentration, but — in order to leap up and to act in one way or another. Rembrandt does it differently, his Christ in the Pilgrims at Emmaus is above all a — soul in a body that is anyway not the same as a torso by Michelangelo, but yet — the gesture of persuasion, there’s something powerful in it3 that — well, just put a Rubens next to it, one of the many figures of meditative people — and they become folk who’ve retired into a corner for the purposes of aiding their digestion.

Thus with everything religious or philosophical he is flat and hollow, but what he can do is — women — like Boucher and better — it’s precisely there that he  1v:3 gives one most to think about and is deepest. What he can do — colour combinations — what he can do is — paint a queen, a statesman, well analyzed, just as they are.

But the supernatural, where magic begins, no — unless it’s putting a certain something infinite into a woman’s expression, which isn’t dramatic, though.4

I found a passage about Gainsborough that has once more encouraged me to work in one go — look.5

I found the enclosed sonnet by Jules Breton in a Revue.6

Again, as regards my relatively sudden departure from here, if I hadn’t had any trouble with the models, I would have spent the winter here. But in practice, continuing to work with models here didn’t so much run up against opposition from the priest,7 which would have been neutralized by being absolutely ignored on my part right away, had that been all there was to it, but the wretched thing is that, although I have the courage to oppose him, the people hesitate and are more frightened than I’d expected. And I won’t undertake it unless I can be sure that they have the courage. If I go away for a few months now, that might help, and if it doesn’t help, then none of those I paid something for it every week last winter will earn anything from it this winter. Regards.