Back to site

628 To Emile Bernard. Arles, on or about Tuesday, 19 June 1888.

metadata
No. 628 (Brieven 1990 630, Complete Letters B7)
From: Vincent van Gogh
To: Emile Bernard
Date: Arles, on or about Tuesday, 19 June 1888

Source status
Original manuscript

Location
New York, Thaw Collection, The Morgan Library & Museum

Date
Vincent told Theo on 21 June that he had received a letter from Bernard (see letter 629). Because he says in the present letter that he is replying to Bernard’s letter immediately (l. 2), it must precede letter 629. He has also progressed further with The sowerthan he could report in letter 627, which was written around 17 June, and he mentions a new wheatfield. This suggests that a couple of days must have passed since he wrote that letter, so we have dated the present one on or about Tuesday, 19 June 1888.

Ongoing topics
Bernard’s military service (575)
Theo’s Monet exhibition (625)

Sketches

  1. Sower with setting sun (F - / JH 1472), letter sketch. Notations: in the sky on the left: ‘Jaune’ (yellow); in the sun: ‘jaune.’; in the sky on the right: ‘jaune’; on the sower’s trousers: ‘blanc’ (white); on his smock: ‘bleu’ (blue); outside the border on the left, in line with the land in the background, in a box: ‘jaune / rompu / vieil or’ (yellow / broken / old gold); diagonally in the foreground below the sower, in very large letters: ‘Violet’
  2. Wheatfield with setting sun (F - / JH 1474), letter sketch.
  3. Leg of an easel with a ground spike (F - / JH -), letter sketch

original text
 1r:1
mon cher Bernard
Pardonne moi si j’écris bien à la hâte, je crains que ma lettre ne sera point lisible mais je veux te répondre tout de suite.
Sais tu que nous avons été très bêtes, Gauguin, toi et moi, de ne pas aller dans un même endroit. Mais lorsque Gauguin est parti moi j’etais pas encore sûr de pouvoir partir. Et lorsque toi tu es parti il y avait cet affreux argent du voyage et les mauvaises nouvelles que j’avais à donner des frais ici qui l’ont empeché. Si nous étions parti tous ensemble vers ici ce n’aurait pas été si bête car à trois nous eussions fait le ménage chez nous. Et maintenant que je suis un peu mieux orienté je commence à entrevoir des avantages ici. Pour moi, je me porte mieux ici que dans le nord – je travaille même en plein midi en plein soleil sans ombre aucune dans les champs de blé et voilà, j’en jouis comme une cigale. Mon dieu si à 25 ans j’eusse connu ce pays au lieu d’y venir à 35 – à cette epoque j’etais enthousiasmé pour le gris ou l’incolore plutôt. Je revais toujours de Millet et puis j’avais des connaissances en Hollande dans la catégorie de peintres Mauve, Israels.1

[sketch A]
Voici croquis d’un semeur.2
Grand terrain de mottes de terre labourés, franchement violet en grande partie.
Champ de blé mûr d’un ton d’ocre jaune avec un peu de carmin.
Le ciel jaune de chrome I presque aussi clair que le soleil lui-meme qui est jaune de chrome I avec un peu de blanc tandis que le reste du ciel est jaune de chrome 1 et 2 melangés, très jaune donc.
la blouse du semeur est bleue et son pantalon blanc. toile de 25 carrée. il y a bien des rappels de jaune dans le terrain, des tons neutres, résultantes du mélange du violet avec le jaune, mais je me suis un peu foutu de la vérité de la couleur. faire des images naives d’almanach plutôt – de vieil almanach de campagne où la grêle, la neige, la pluie, le beau temps sont représentés d’une façon tout à fait primitive. ainsi qu’Anquetin avait si bien trouvé sa moisson.3
Je ne te cache pas que je ne déteste pas la campagne – y ayant été elevé, des bouffées de souvenirs d’autrefois, des aspirations vers cet infini dont le Semeur, la gerbe sont les symboles, m’enchantent encore comme autrefois.4
 1v:2
Mais quand donc ferai je le ciel étoilé, ce tableau qui toujours me préoccupe5 – helas, helas, c’est bien comme dit l’excellent copain Cyprien dans “en ménage” de J. K. Huysmans: les plus beaux tableaux sont ceux que l’on rêve en fumant des pipes dans son lit mais qu’on ne fait pas.6 S’agit pourtant de les attaquer quelqu’incompétent qu’on se sente vis à vis des ineffables perfections de splendeurs glorieuses de la nature.
Mais comme je voudrais voir l’étude que tu as fait au bordel.7 je me fais des reproches à n’en pas finir de ne pas encore avoir fait de figures ici.

[sketch B]
Voici encore un paysage.8 Soleil couchant? lever de lune? Soir d’eté en tout cas.
Ville violette, astre jaune, ciel bleu vert, les blés ont tous les tons: vieil or, cuivre, or vert, or rouge, or jaune, bronze jaune, vert, rouge. toile de 30 carrée.
je l’ai peint en plein mistral. mon chevalet etait fixé en terre avec des piquets de fer, procédé que je te recommande.

[sketch C]
On enfouit les pieds du chevalet et puis on enfonce à coté un piquet de fer long de 50 centimètres. on attache le tout avec des cordes, vous pouvez ainsi travailler dans le vent.
Voici ce que j’ai voulu dire pour le blanc et le noir.9 prenons le Semeur. le tableau est coupé en deux, une moitie est jaune, le haut, le bas est violet. eh bien le pantalon blanc repose l’oeil et le distrait10 au moment où le contraste simultané11 excessif de jaune et de violet l’agacerait. Voilà ce que j’ai voulu dire.

 2r:3
Je connais ici un sous-lieutenant des zouaves nommé Milliet. je lui donne des leçons de dessin – avec mon cadre perspectif12 – et il commence à faire des dessins – ma foi j’ai vu bien pire que ça et il a du zèle pour apprendre, a été au Tonkin &c. Celui-là va partir mois d’octobre pour l’Afrique.13 Si tu étais dans les zouaves il te prendrait avec lui et te garantirait une large marge de liberté relative pour faire de la peinture si toutefois tu l’aiderais un peu dans ses manigences artistiques à lui. Cela peut il t’être de quelqu’utilité. En cas qu’oui fais le moi savoir aussitôt possible.14

Une raison de travailler c’est que les toiles valent de l’argent. tu me diras que d’abord cette raison est bien prosaïque, puis que tu doutes que cela soit vrai. C’est pourtant vrai. Une raison de ne pas travailler c’est que les toiles & couleurs ne font que nous coûter des sous en attendant. Les dessins cependant ne nous coûtent pas cher.
Gauguin s’embête aussi à Pont Aven, se plaint comme toi de l’isolement. Si tu allais le voir – mais je n’en sais rien s’il y restera et suis porté à croire qu’il a l’intention d’aller à Paris. il dit qu’il croyait que tu serais venu à Pont Aven.
Mon dieu si nous étions ici tous les trois. Tu me diras que c’est trop loin. Bon, mais en hiver puisqu’ici on peut travailler dehors toute l’année.– Voilà ma raison pour aimer ce pays ci, d’avoir moins à redouter le froid, qui en empêchant mon sang de circuler m’empêche de penser, de faire quoi que ce soit. Tu pourras en juger lorsque tu seras soldat.– Ta mélancolie s’en ira, laquelle pourrait rudement bien venir de ce que tu as trop peu de sang – ou le sang vicié, ce que je ne pense pourtant pas. C’est ce sacré sale vin de Paris et la sale graisse des biftecks qui vous font cela – mon dieu j’etais arrivé à un etat de chôses que chez moi le sang ne marchait plus du tout, mais ce qu’on appelle point du tout à la lettre. Seulement, au bout de 4 semaines d’icia cela s’est remis en marche, mais mon cher copain à cette même époque j’ai eu une attaque de mélancolie comme la tienne, de laquelle j’eusse autant souffert que toi si ce n’etait que je la saluais avec grand plaisir comme signe que j’allais guerir – ce qui est aussi arrivé.
 2v:4
Au lieu donc de retourner à Paris, restes en pleine campagne car tu as besoin de forces pour sortir comme il faut de cette épreuve d’aller en Afrique. Or plus que tu te fais du sang et du bon sang avant, mieux c’est car là-bas dans la chaleur on s’en fabrique peutêtre plus difficilement. Faire de la peinture et baiser beaucoup est pas compatible, le cerveau s’en affaiblit, voilà ce qui est bien emmerdant.15
Le symbole de Saint Luc, le patron des peintres, est comme tu sais un boeuf, il faut donc être patient comme un boeuf16 si l’on veut labourer dans le champ artistique. Mais les taureaux sont bien heureux de ne pas avoir à travailler dans la sale peinture. Mais ce que je voulais dire est ceci. après la période de mélancolie tu seras plus fort17 qu’auparavant, ta santé reprendra – et tu trouveras la nature environnante tellement belle que tu n’auras plus d’autre désir que de faire de la peinture. Je crois que ta poesie changera encore aussi dans le même sens qu’en peinture. tu es après des choses excentriques arrivé à en faire qui ont un calme egyptien et une grande simplicité.
  “Que l’heure est donc brève C’est pas du Baudelaire18 cela, je ne sais même pas de qui c’est, ce sont les paroles d’une chanson dans le Nabab de Daudet,19 voilà où je l’ai pris – mais est-ce que cela ne dit pas la chôse comme un haussement d’épaule de vraie Dame.
  Qu’on passe en aimant –
– C’est moins qu’un instant –
– Un peu plus qu’un rêve – :
– Le temps nous enlève
– notre enchantement.–”
J’ai lu de ces jours ci Madame Chrysantème de Pierre Loti, cela donne des notes intéressantes sur le Japon.20 Mon frère a dans ce moment une exposition de Claude Monet, je voudrais bien les voir. Entre autres Guy de Maupassant21 y était venu et a dit que dorénavant il reviendrait souvent au Boulevard Montmartre.
Je dois aller peindre donc je finis – probablement je t’écrirai de nouveau sous peu. Je te demande mille pardons de n’avoir pas suffisamment affranchi la lettre, je l’avais pourtant affranchie à la poste et ce n’est pas la première fois que cela m’arrive ici d’avoir, en demandant à la poste même, en cas de doute,b été trompé en affranchissant.
Tu ne te fais pas d’idée du laisser aller, de la nonchalance des gens ici. Enfin, tu verras sous peu tout cela de tes propres yeux en Afrique. merci de ta lettre, j’espère t’écrire bientôt à un moment où je serai moins pressé. Poignée de main.

t. à t.
Vincent

translation
 1r:1
My dear Bernard,
Forgive me if I write in great haste; I fear that my letter won’t be at all legible, but I want to reply to you right away.
Do you know that we’ve been very foolish, Gauguin, you and I, in not all going to the same place? But when Gauguin left, I wasn’t yet sure of being able to leave. And when you left, there was that dreadful money for the fare, and the bad news I had to give about the expenses here, which prevented it. If we’d all left for here together it wouldn’t have been so foolish, because the three of us would have done our own housekeeping. And now that I’ve found my bearings a little more, I’m beginning to see the advantages here. For myself, I’m in better health here than in the north — I even work in the wheatfields at midday, in the full heat of the sun, without any shade whatever, and there you are, I revel in it like a cicada. My God, if only I’d known this country at 25, instead of coming here at 35 — in those days I was enthusiastic about grey, or rather, absence of colour. I was always dreaming about Millet, and then I had acquaintances in Holland in the category of painters like Mauve, Israëls.1

[sketch A]

Here’s croquis of a sower.2
Large field with clods of ploughed earth, mostly downright violet.
Field of ripe wheat in a yellow ochre tone with a little crimson.
The chrome yellow 1 sky almost as bright as the sun itself, which is chrome yellow 1 with a little white, while the rest of the sky is chrome yellow 1 and 2 mixed, very yellow, then.
The sower’s smock is blue, and his trousers white. Square no. 25 canvas. There are many repetitions of yellow in the earth, neutral tones, resulting from the mixing of violet with yellow, but I could hardly give a damn about the veracity of the colour. Better to make naive almanac pictures — old country almanacs, where hail, snow, rain, fine weather are represented in an utterly primitive way. The way Anquetin got his Harvest so well.3
I don’t hide from you that I don’t detest the countryside — having been brought up there, snatches of memories from past times, yearnings for that infinite of which the Sower, the sheaf, are the symbols, still enchant me as before.4  1v:2
But when will I do the starry sky, then, that painting that’s always on my mind?5 Alas, alas, it’s just as our excellent pal Cyprien says, in ‘En ménage’ by J. K. Huysmans: the most beautiful paintings are those one dreams of while smoking a pipe in one’s bed, but which one doesn’t make.6 But it’s a matter of attacking them nevertheless, however incompetent one may feel vis-à-vis the ineffable perfections of nature’s glorious splendours.
But how I’d like to see the study you did at the brothel.7 I reproach myself endlessly for not having done figures here yet.

[sketch B]

Here’s another landscape.8 Setting sun? Moonrise? Summer evening, at any rate.
Town violet, star yellow, sky blue-green; the wheatfields have all the tones: old gold, copper, green gold, red gold, yellow gold, green, red and yellow bronze. Square no. 30 canvas.
I painted it out in the mistral. My easel was fixed in the ground with iron pegs, a method that I recommend to you.

[sketch C]

You shove the feet of the easel in and then you push a 50-centimetre-long iron peg in beside them. You tie everything together with ropes; that way you can work in the wind.
Here’s what I wanted to say about the white and the black.9 Let’s take the Sower. The painting is divided into two; one half is yellow, the top; the bottom is violet. Well, the white trousers rest the eye and distract it10 just when the excessive simultaneous contrast11 of yellow and violet would annoy it. That’s what I wanted to say.

 2r:3
I know a second lieutenant of Zouaves here called Milliet. I give him drawing lessons — with my perspective frame12 — and he’s beginning to make drawings – my word, I’ve seen a lot worse than that, and he’s eager to learn; has been to Tonkin, &c. He’s leaving for Africa in October.13 If you were in the Zouaves he’d take you with him and would guarantee you a wide margin of relative freedom to paint, provided you helped him a little with his own artistic schemes. Could this be of some use to you? If so, let me know as soon as possible.14

One reason for working is that canvases are worth money. You’ll tell me that first of all this reason is very prosaic, then that you doubt that it’s true. But it’s true. A reason for not working is that in the meantime canvases and paints only cost us money. Drawings, though, don’t cost us much.
Gauguin’s bored too in Pont-Aven; complains about isolation, like you. If you went to see him — but I have no idea if he’ll stay there, and am inclined to think that he intends to go to Paris. He said that he thought you would have come to Pont-Aven.
My God, if all three of us were here! You’ll tell me it’s too far away. Fine, but in winter — because here one can work outside all year round. That’s my reason for loving this part of the world, not having to dread the cold so much, which by preventing my blood from circulating prevents me from thinking, from doing anything at all. You can judge that for yourself when you’re a soldier. Your melancholy will go away, which may darned well come from the fact that you have too little blood — or tainted blood, which I don’t think, however. It’s that bloody filthy Paris wine and the filthy fat of the steaks that do that to you — dear God, I had come to a state in which my own blood was no longer working at all, but literally not at all, as they say. But after 4 weeks down here it got moving again, but, my dear pal, at that same time I had an attack of melancholy like yours, from which I would have suffered as much as you were it not that I welcomed it with great pleasure as a sign that I was going to recover — which happened too.  2v:4
Instead of going back to Paris, then, stay out in the country, because you need strength to get through this ordeal of going to Africa properly. Now the more blood, and good blood, that you make yourself beforehand, the better, because over there in the heat it’s perhaps harder to produce it. Painting and fucking a lot aren’t compatible; it weakens the brain, and that’s what’s really damned annoying.15
The symbol of Saint Luke, the patron of painters, is, as you know, an ox; we must therefore be as patient as an ox16 if we wish to labour in the artistic field. But bulls are pretty glad not having to work in the filthy business of painting. But what I wanted to say is this. After the period of melancholy you’ll be stronger17 than before, your health will pick up — and you’ll find the surrounding nature so beautiful that you’ll have no other desire than to do painting. I believe that your poetry will also change, in the same way as in your painting. After some eccentric things you have succeeded in making some that have an Egyptian calm and a great simplicity.

  ‘How short is the hour That’s not Baudelaire,18 I don’t even know who it’s by, they’re the words of a song in Daudet’s Le Nabab,19 that’s where I took it from — but doesn’t it say the thing like a real Lady’s shrug of her shoulder?
  We spend loving —
— It’s less than an instant —
— A little more than a dream — :
— Time takes away
— Our spell.
These last few days I read Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème; it provides interesting remarks about Japan.20 At the moment my brother has an exhibition of Claude Monet, I’d very much like to see them. Guy de Maupassant21, among others, had been there, and said that from now on he would often revisit boulevard Montmartre.
I have to go and paint, so I’ll finish — I’ll probably write to you again before long. I beg a thousand pardons for not having put enough stamps on the letter; and yet I did stamp it at the post office and this isn’t the first time that it’s happened here, that when in doubt, and asking at the post office itself, I’ve been misled about the postage.
You can’t imagine the carelessness, the nonchalance of the people here. Anyway, you’ll see that shortly with your own eyes in Africa. Thanks for your letter, I hope to write to you soon at a moment when I’m in less of a hurry. Handshake.

Ever yours,
Vincent
notes
1. Van Gogh regarded Israëls’s work as the counterpart of Millet’s. Nothing is known about any contacts between Van Gogh and Israëls, although they very probably met when Vincent was working in the Goupil gallery in The Hague (in July 1883 he quoted something Israëls said; see letter 361). Israëls sold much of his work through Goupil.
2. The letter sketch Sower with setting sun (F - / JH 1472) was done after the painting of the same name (F 422 / JH 1470 ). Van Gogh described and sketched it at an earlier stage; he worked on it again soon afterwards (see letter 634).
3. Louis Anquetin, The harvest (The mower at noon), 1887 (private collection). Ill. 508 . Bernard described it as one of Anquetin’s ‘Japanese abstractions’ (abstractions Japonaises), and regarded it as one of the first experiments with Cloisonnism. The painting hung in the exhibition staged by Van Gogh in Restaurant du Chalet, and in the offices of the Revue Indépendante in January 1888. See Bernard 1994, vol. 1, pp. 64, 241, and letter 575, n. 9. Van Gogh’s Arles seen from the wheatfields (F 545 / JH 1477 ) followed the lead set by Anquetin’s painting.
Van Gogh likens Anquetin’s painting to ‘naive almanac pictures – old country almanacs’. Edouard Dujardin had made a similar link between Anquetin’s work and the ‘images d’Epinal’ (cheap, coloured, popular prints) in his article in La Revue Indépendante to which Van Gogh referred in letter 620.
4. Van Gogh is referring here to his Nuenen period from late 1883 to late 1885, when he tried to express the symbolism of the countryside and peasant life.
5. Van Gogh had written to Bernard about this subject before (see letter 596).
6. In Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel En ménage (1881), the character Cyprien remarks: ‘– And what about the paintings? – The painter scratched his beard with his long fingers. The paintings, pah, he said, it’s sometimes good to muse about those you will never do, in bed, of an evening, when you’re not asleep!’ (– Alors les tableaux? – Le peintre se frotta la barbe de ses longs doigts. Les tableaux, peuh, dit-il, c’est quelquefois bon de songer à ceux qu’on ne fera jamais, au lit, le soir, quand on ne dort pas!) (see 3rd ed. Paris 1881, chapter 16, p. 346). The novel is set in an artistic milieu, and revolves around a broken marriage, the day-to-day worries of an old bachelor, the loneliness of the search for love, the need for a woman – in short the desolateness of life. Cf. Sund 1992, p. 253 (n. 27).
7. Bernard sent him a drawing of a brothel soon afterwards, which Vincent sent on to Theo, saying: ‘it’s probable that he has a more finished painted study of it’ (letter 630). Bernard’s drawing Brothel scene (see letter 630, n. 4) was thus probably based on that study of a brothel. However, no such painted version is known today.
8. The letter sketch Wheatfield with setting sun (F - / JH 1474) is after the painting of the same name F 465 / JH 1473 .
9. This is a subject that Van Gogh had raised in his previous letter to Bernard (622), who had presumably asked him to explain it in more detail.
10. This form of words is similar to that used by Charles Blanc in his Grammaire des arts du dessin when he wrote that, when using bold colours, white can serve ‘to rest the eye, to refresh it, by moderating the dazzling brilliance of the whole spectacle’ (à reposer l’oeil, à le rafraîchir, en modérant l’éblouissant éclat du spectacle entier). See Blanc 1870, p. 609. Van Gogh later made the trousers blue.
11. See letter 536, n. 28 for the concept of simultaneous contrast.
12. For Van Gogh’s knowledge and use of a perspective frame, see letter 235, n. 10.
13. Paul Eugène Milliet was due to leave for Guelma in Algeria on 1 November 1888. Cf. letters 714 and 716.
14. Van Gogh drew a box around ll. 85-93.
a. Read: ‘ici’.
15. Van Gogh was preoccupied with the relationship between social or artistic ambitions and creativity on the one hand, and sexual activity and procreation on the other. He admired men who were very active sexually or who had families, but believed that he himself had to forgo these benefits in the interests of his art.
16. The notion that a painter had to have the patience of an ox was based on a saying (unsourced) of Gustave Doré’s, as we learn from letter 400.
17. Van Gogh originally wrote ‘plus boeuf’ (more of an ox) after ‘seras’.
18. Van Gogh mentions the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire because he knew that he was an important figure for Bernard, with his aspiration to become a poet. Bernard’s veneration of Baudelaire, which Van Gogh did not share, is very apparent in his correspondence with his mother, who also wrote poetry. With thanks to Fred Leeman.
19. Taken from Alphonse Daudet, Le Nabab (chapter 22), where it is described as ‘a melancholy Lied’ (un lied mélancolique). Van Gogh writes ‘un instant’ where Daudet has ‘un moment’. Daudet took the lines from a poem by Armand Silvestre that Jules Massenet set to music in his cycle Poème d’avril (1866). See Daudet 1986-1994, vol. 2, pp. 804, 1395.
20. Pierre Loti’s novel Madame Chrysanthème (1888) is set in Nagasaki. A French officer marries the Japanese Kikou-san, or Madame Chrysanthème. In reality the marriage is a paid, temporary concubinage. The Frenchman has no real feelings of love for her; it is more a question of his amazement at how doll-like she is. Loti describes the setting and the customs. The underlying message is that it is difficult for Europeans to penetrate the mysterious closed nature and morals of the Japanese, or the artificial refinement of objects.
Van Gogh probably read an illustrated version that he borrowed from Milliet. The way in which he portrayed himself in Self-portrait (F 476 / JH 1581 ) could derive from an illustration of bonzes in the edition of Madame Chrysanthème published in Paris in 1888 by Calmann-Lévy. See Kōdera 1990, p. 56. It emerges from letter 718 that Milliet gave Gauguin this copy of the book in November 1888 in exchange for a drawing.
21. Theo had written to tell Vincent about his meeting with Guy de Maupassant. See letter 625, n. 7.
b. Read: ‘ayant un doute’.