But all the same it astonishes me that you tell me about them and their frame (costing, if I remember rightly, 2,000 francs), but that you don’t say a single word about what there was in that frame, nor a single word about what they’ve done in paintings.

It’s perhaps that you believe that I might have heard of it, but I declare to you that I’m hearing about this business and even about themselves for the first time. So I’m not yet au courant, and would thus like to know: ‘all well and good about the frame, but what was in it, and what are they doing at present?’2

After that I’ll surely be in a better position to give myself an idea of what their conversations with you and Pissarro were like, once I’m au courant with what they themselves are doing.

In any case, it proves one thing: it’s that Dutch artists spoke of you as being the dealer in Impressionist paintings, something we mustn’t lose sight of.  1v:2

And what did they have to say about Dutch art, about Breitner, Rappard, about others, and lastly, what do they say about Tersteeg?

Gauguin writes that he’s already sent his trunk and promises to come around the 20th of this month, in a few days, therefore. Which I’ll be very pleased about, because I dare believe that it will do us both good.

So write me with details of your new friends’ painting soon, and if they’re really painters who are trying to make more progress in something that’s completely new, boldly recommend the south to them. I believe that a new colourist school will take root in the south, seeing increasingly that those from the north rely more on skill with the brush and the so-called picturesque effect than on the desire to express something through colour itself.  1v:3

It gave me great pleasure to have your news, but it astonishes me so much not to know what there was in that frame.

Here, under the stronger sun, I have found what Pissarro said to be true, and moreover what Gauguin wrote me, the same thing. The simplicity, the bleaching-out, the solemnity of great effects of sunlight.3

In the north one will never suspect what it’s like. And if these artists of the monstrous frame seriously wish to see something new, let them go to Bing and then to the south.

As for me, I already get palpitations over ordering my deal frames at 5 francs. It’s like what I said to Russell about his house,4 that the one here would cost several times less in hundred-franc notes than his would in thousands, and that nevertheless we were working for Gauguin even without R.

Have they seen any Seurats, these gentlemen with the frame? I think I’d prefer Seurat’s frame5 to theirs, for inventiveness.  1r:4

Yes, speaking of Seurat — have you seen him again yet?

As far as selling goes, of course I think you’re right not to look for it deliberately, of course I myself would prefer never to sell if the thing could be done.

But if we were nevertheless forced to it, after what has happened we no longer have an alternative, of course, if it should indeed become necessary one day, we could do no better than not be hasty.

I shake your hand firmly, and I hope you’ll tell me what there actually was in the frame. And to our new friends, warm regards and good luck, which I wish them.

If they want to see something new, certainly, let them go to the south or Africa or to Sicily if it’s winter. But it’s only — if they have originality — the real south that will show them something different from Holland. I hope you’ll write to me again before long. Good handshake

In any case it gives me great pleasure that you’ve met these Dutchmen. It could just be the case that in fact I’d heard of this large painting after all, but not of the frame. Rappard once told me a story (praising the painting and the painter), and I’ll easily see if it was the same painting that was involved when you’ve told me about what they’re doing.

In any event, my dear brother, look, if you complain of having nothing in your noddle as far as of being able to produce good things goes, just look, so much the more must I myself also feel the same melancholy. I could do nothing whatsoever without you, and there you are, let’s not get worked up over what the two of us produce together this way, but on the contrary, let’s smoke our pipes in peace without tormenting ourselves too much to the point of melancholy for not producing separately and with less pain.  2v:6

Certainly, from time to time I’d like to be able to do a little business for a change, and by doing so earn some money on my own account.

But since we can change nothing about it for the moment, let’s accept this inevitable fact, that you’ll always be condemned to trade, without rest or variation, and I that mine is also without rest, constant work that’s really tiring and absorbing for the mind.

I hope that in a year you’ll feel that the two of us have created an artistic thing.

This bedroom is something like that still life of French novels with yellow, pink, green covers,7 you’ll recall. But I believe that the execution is simpler and more virile.

No stippling, no hatching, nothing; the tints flat, but in harmony. I don’t know what I’ll undertake afterwards, because my sight’s still tired.  2v:7

And at those moments, just after hard work, and the harder it is, I feel my noddle empty too, you know. And if I wanted to let myself give in to that, nothing would be easier for me than to hate what I’ve just done and kick it, like père Cézanne.8 But after all, why kick it — let’s leave the studies alone, and only if we see nothing in them, fine, if we see in them what people call good, well then, so much the better.

Anyway, let’s not think too deeply about good and bad, that always being very relative.

It’s precisely a failing of the Dutch to call one thing absolutely good and another absolutely bad, when it’s nowhere near as inflexible as that.  2r:8

You know, I’ve read Richepin’s Césarine too; there are good things in it — the march of the soldiers in flight, how you feel their weariness — let’s not march in life without also being soldiers sometimes.

The quarrel of the son and the father is really heartbreaking,9 but it’s like the same Richepin’s ‘La glu’,10 I find that it leaves no hope, while Guy de Maupassant, who has written things that are certainly just as sad, makes things turn out more humanely in the end. Look at Monsieur Parent,11 look at Pierre et Jean,12 they don’t end in happiness but anyway, the people are resigned and go on all the same. It doesn’t end in so much blood and gore, does it now? I much prefer Guy de Maupassant to Richepin, for being more consoling. At present I’ve just read Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet. The story of a miserly peasant.13 More soon, I hope.