1r:1
My dear Theo,
Since I wrote to you I’m feeling better, and whilst I don’t know if it’ll last I don’t want to wait any longer to write to you again.
Thanks once again for that beautiful etching after Rembrandt. I’d very much like to get to know the painting and know in which period of his life he painted it.1 All this goes with the Rotterdam portrait of Fabritius,2 the traveller in the La Caze gallery,3 into a special category in which the portrait of a human being is transformed into something luminous and consoling.
And how very different this is from Michelangelo or Giotto, although the latter however comes close to it, and Giotto thus forms a sort of possible hyphen between the school of Rembrandt and the Italians.

[sketch A]

Yesterday I started working again a little – a thing I see from my window – a field of yellow stubble which is being ploughed, the opposition of the purplish ploughed earth with the strips of yellow stubble, background of hills.4  1v:2
Work distracts me infinitely better than anything else, and if I could once really throw myself into it with all my energy that might possibly be the best remedy.
The impossibility of having models, a heap of other things, prevent me from managing it however. Anyway, I really must try to take things a little passively and be patient.
I often think of our pals in Brittany,5 who are certainly doing better work than I am. If, with the experience I’m having at present, it was possible for me to begin again, I wouldn’t go and look around the south.
Were I independent and free, I would nevertheless have retained my enthusiasm, for there are some really beautiful things to do.
Such as the vineyards, the fields of olive trees. If I had confidence in the management here, nothing would be better and simpler than to put all my furniture here at the hospital and quietly continue.6 If I were to recover, or in the intervals, I could sooner or later come back to Paris or Brittany for a time. But first they’re very expensive here, and then I’m afraid of the other patients at the moment.7 Anyway, a heap of reasons mean that I don’t think I’ve been lucky here either.
I’m perhaps exaggerating in the sadness I feel at being knocked down by illness again – but I feel a kind of fear. You’ll tell me what I tell myself too, that the fault must be inside me and not in the circumstances or other people. Anyway, it isn’t fun.  1v:3
Mr Peyron has been kind to me and he has long experience, I shan’t scorn what he says or considers good.
But will he have a firm opinion, has he written anything definite to you?? And possible?
You can see that I’m still in a very bad mood, it’s because things aren’t going well. Then I consider myself imbecilic to go and ask doctors for permission to make paintings. Besides, it’s to be hoped that if I recover sooner or later, up to a certain point it’ll be because I’ve cured myself by working, which fortifies the will and consequently allows these mental weaknesses less hold.
My dear brother, I wanted to write to you better than this, but things aren’t going very well. I have a great desire to go into the mountains to paint for whole days, I hope they’ll allow me to in the coming days.
You’ll soon see a canvas of a hut in the mountains8 which I did under the influence of that book by Rod.9 It would be good for me to stay on a farm for a while, at least I might do some good work there.
I must write to Mother and to Wil in the next few days. Wil asked to be sent a painting, and I’d very much like to give one to Lies as well on the same occasion, who doesn’t have any yet as far as I know.10
What do you say about Mother going to live in Leiden? I think she’s right in this sense, that I can understand that she’s pining for her grandchildren.11 And then there’ll be none of us left in Brabant.
Speaking of that – not very long ago in Arles I was reading a book, I can’t remember which one, by Henri Conscience. It’s excessively sentimental if you like, what with his peasants, but speaking of Impressionism do you know that it  1r:4 contains descriptions of landscape with colour notes of accuracy, feeling and primitiveness of the first order. And it’s always like that. Ah my dear brother, those heaths in the Kempen12 were something though. But anyway, that won’t come back, and onward we go.
He – Conscience – described a brand-new little house with a bright red slate roof in the full sunshine, a garden with dock and onions, potatoes with dark foliage, a beech hedge, a vineyard, and further on the pine trees, the broom all yellow.13 Don’t be afraid, it wasn’t like a Cazin,14 it was like a Claude Monet. Then there’s originality even in the excess of sentimentality.
And as for me, who feels it and can’t damned well do anything, isn’t that sickening.
If you get opportunities for lithographs of Delacroix, Rousseau, Diaz &c., ancient and modern artists, Galeries modernes &c., I can’t advise you too strongly to hold onto them, for you’ll see that they’ll become rare. Yet it was really the way to popularize beautiful things, those 1-franc sheets of those days, those etchings &c. back then. Very interesting the Rodin – Claude Monet brochure. How I’d have liked to see that. Pointless to say that nevertheless I don’t agree when he says that Meissonier is nothing and that T. Rousseau isn’t much.15 Meissoniers and Rousseaus are something highly interesting for those who like them and try to discover what the artist was feeling. It isn’t possible for everyone to be of that opinion, because one has to have seen and looked at them, and you don’t find that on every corner. Now a Meissonier, if you look at it for a year there’s still enough in it to look at the next year, never fear. Not to mention that he’s a man who had his days of happiness, of perfect finds. Certainly I know, Daumier, Millet, Delacroix have another way of drawing – but Meissonier’s execution,  2r:5 that something essentially French above all, although the old Dutchmen would find nothing to fault in it, and yet it’s something other than them and it’s modern; one has to be blind to believe that Meissonier isn’t an artist and – one of the first rank.
Have many things been done that give the note of the 19th century better than the portrait of Hetzel?16 When Besnard did those two very beautiful panels, primitive man and modern man, which we saw at Petit’s, in making the modern man a reader he had the same idea.17
And I’ll always regret that in our times people believe in the incompatibility of the generation of, say, 48 and the present one. I myself believe that the two hold their own all the same, though I can’t prove it.
Let’s take good Bodmer for example. Was he not able to study nature as a hunter, a savage, did he not love it and know it with experience of an entire long manly life – and do you think that the first Parisian to come along who goes to the suburbs knows as much or more about it because he’ll do a landscape with harsher tones? Not that it’s bad to use pure and clashing tones, not that from the point of view of colour I’m always an admirer of Bodmer, but I admire and I like the man who knew all the forest of Fontainebleau, from the insect to the wild boar and from the stag to the lark. From the tall oak and the lump of rock to the fern and the blade of grass.
Now a thing like that, not anyone who wants to can feel it or find it.  2v:6
And Brion – oh a maker of Alsatian genre paintings people will tell me. That’s fine, he has indeed done the Engagement meal, the Protestant wedding &c.18 which are indeed Alsatian. When no one is up to illustrating Les Misérables, he however does it in a manner unsurpassed up to now, and he isn’t mistaken in his types.19 Is it a small thing to know people so well, the humanity of that period, so well that one scarcely makes a mistake in expression and type?
Ah – the rest of us would have to get old working hard, and that’s why we then get despondent when things don’t go right.
I think that if you see the Bruyas museum in Montpellier one day, I think that then nothing will move you more than Bruyas himself, when one realizes from his purchases what he sought to be for artists. It’s a little disheartening when one sees from certain portraits of him how heartbroken and obviously frustrated his face is.20 If one doesn’t succeed in the south there still remains he who suffered all his life for that cause.
The only serene portraits are the Delacroix21 and the Ricard.22
For example, by a great chance the one by Cabanel is accurate and most interesting as an observation, at least it gives an idea of the man.23  2v:7
I’m pleased that Jo’s mother has come to Paris. Next year it will perhaps be a little different and you’ll have a child, and that brings a fair few petty vexations of human life24 – but as certain great miseries of spleen etc. will disappear for ever, that’s certainly how it should go.
I’ll write to you again soon, I’m not writing to you as I would have wished, I hope that all is well at your place and will continue to go well. Am very, very pleased that Rivet has rid you of the cough, which really worried me a bit too.
What I had in my throat is starting to disappear,25 I’m still eating with some difficulty, but anyway it has got better.
Good handshake to you and to Jo.

Ever yours,
Vincent.

798

Br. 1990: 799 | CL: 602 / 602a
From: Vincent van Gogh
To: Theo van Gogh
Date: Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, on or about Monday, 2 September 1889
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1. Theo had sent the etching by Courtry after The archangel Raphael [344] (then attributed to Rembrandt); see letter 781, n. 4.
[344]
2. For Carel Fabritius’s Self-portrait [1885], see letter 155, n. 18, first paragraph.
[1885]
3. For the portrait Young man with a walking stick [2159] (no longer attributed to Rembrandt), see letter 536, n. 9.
[2159]
4. The letter sketch Field with a ploughman (F - / JH 1769) was made after the painting of the same name F 625 / JH 1768 [2825].
[2825]
a. Read: ‘possiblement’.
5. Gauguin and De Haan were staying in Brittany; see letter 774, nn. 15 and 16.
6. Van Gogh’s lack of faith in the asylum was undoubtedly connected with his disappointment at the recurrence of his illness. In letter 787 he wrote very optimistically about Peyron’s offer to store his furniture in the asylum.
7. Theo paid 100 francs a month for board and lodging for Vincent (FR b1059). With regard to the other patients in the asylum, see letter 776, nn. 21 and 22 and letter 777, n. 2.
8. The Alpilles with a hut (F 622 / JH 1766 [2823]).
[2823]
9. Regarding Rod’s Le sens de la vie, see letter 797, n. 13.
10. Van Gogh intended seven canvases for his mother and Willemien; see letter 803, n. 4. Lies van Gogh had long had in her possession the small Nuenen painting The old tower in the snow (F 87 / JH 600), and after Vincent’s death received a number of Paris works as well (FR b2002). As far as we know, she received no works from Saint-Rémy.
[364]
11. Mrs van Gogh and Willemien moved on 2 November 1889 from Breda to Herengracht 100 in Leiden. Van Gogh’s sister Anna, her husband Joan van Houten and their daughters, Sara and Annie, also lived in Leiden.
12. ‘La Campine’ (de Kempen) is a region in the north of Belgium.
13. Van Gogh’s description of the little house does not come from Le conscrit, which he refers to in letter 800, but was probably inspired by the little blue house in Borgerhout (Antwerp), as described in the novel La maison bleue by Henri Conscience: ‘From either side of its door climbed a vine whose intertwined branches surrounded the windows with festoons, and covered the blue-painted façade and the red roof tiles so completely that one would think one was looking at a cradle of greenery.
When, in late autumn, the two vines showed their white and blue grapes through the bright green foliage, we would stop, every child, on the road to school, in front of the pretty little house’ (De chaque côté de sa porte grimpait une vigne dont les rameaux entrelacés entouraient les fenêtres de festons, et couvraient si complétement la façade peinte en bleu et les tuiles rouges du toit, qu’on eût cru voir un berceau de verdure.
Lorsque, dans l’arrière-saison, les deux vignes montraient leurs raisins blancs et bleus à travers le feuillage d’un vert éclatant, nous nous arrêtions, tout enfant, sur le chemin de l’école, devant la jolie maisonnette) (ed. Paris 1882, pp. 1-2). The description of the surroundings is something that Van Gogh himself might have penned.
14. The French landscape painter Jean-Charles Cazin began his career as a realistic painter, but later came under the influence of Impressionism. In the 1880s and ’90s, he was seen as Monet’s rival. See Thomson, ‘Theo van Gogh’ 1999, p. 203, n. 144.
15. Theo had sent Vincent the catalogue of the exhibition of works by Monet and Rodin held at Georges Petit’s (see letter 797, n. 10). Vincent discusses the following passage in Octave Mirbeau’s article ‘Claude Monet’: ‘M. Meissonier, in his garden at Poissy, scattering flour in order to represent the snow in which the French soliders died during the retreat from Russia, and painting this flour with the conscientiousness we know, plies a trade of some sort, inferior to that of the cabinet-maker who fits a drawer precisely onto its runners ... Théodore Rousseau, to mention but him, does not stand up to even superficial study. The air that he paints is unbreathable, his sweet chestnuts and oaks may well have solid forks, his depictions of the ground a weighty and robust structure, but they are devoid of life; his foliage shines, but the air does not circulate through this crude, coarse masonry; no sap runs beneath this inert and desiccated vegetation, with its concistency of metal’ (M. Meissonier, semant, dans son jardin de Poissy, de la farine pour figurer la neige où moururent les soldats français, pendant la retraite de Russie, et peignant cette farine avec la conscience que l’on sait, fait un métier quelconque, inférieur à celui du menuisier qui emboîte exactement un tiroir sur ses coulisses ... Théodore Rousseau, pour ne parler que de lui, ne résiste pas à une analyse, même superficielle. L’atmosphère qu’il peint est irrespirable; ses châtaigniers et ses chênes ont beau avoir de solides embranchements, ses terrains une lourde et robuste ossature, ils ne vivent point; ses feuillages luisent, mais l’air ne circule pas à travers ce maçonnage grossier et canaille; aucune sève ne court sous ces végétations inertes et desséchées, aux consistences de métal’. See exhib. cat. Paris 1889-6, p. 13.
16. Ernest Meissonier, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, 1879 (Meudon, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de la Ville de Meudon). Ill. 1136 [1136].
[1136]
17. Albert Besnard, Modern man, c. 1884-1886 (Beauvais, Musée départemental de l’Oise) and Prehistoric man, c. 1887 (private collection). Ill. 578 [578]- 471 [471]. The works are on canvas, not on panel; they are preparatory studies for decorative paintings in the Ecole de Pharmacie in Paris. Van Gogh saw them in 1887 at the exhibition held at Georges Petit’s. Cf. Exposition internationale de peinture et de sculpture. Sixième année. Paris (Galerie Georges Petit), 8 May - 8 June 1887, p. 3, cat. nos. 1-2.
[578] [471]
18. Van Gogh was possibly mistaken about the title The engagement meal and actually meant The wedding dinner (engraving by Joel Ballin), at which the wedding guests arrive in an upstairs room to be seated at table (Bordeaux, Musée Goupil). Ill. 650 [650]. Cf. René Ménard, L’art en Alsace-Lorraine. Paris 1876, pp. 126, 132. Ménard speaks of the intimate emotions of the ‘fiançailles’ (betrothal), portrayed so well by Brion. The print was also available as a ‘Carte-Album’. See Cat. Goupil 1877, pp. 11, 75, no. 774.
The Protestant marriage (1869) by Brion was shown at the 1869 Salon. It was known through its reproduction in the following publications: Album Boetzel. Le Salon 1869; at Paul Mantz, ‘Salon de 1869 (2me et dernier article)’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 11 (1869), 2nd series, vol. 2, pp. 5-23, ill. between pp. 6-7, engraved by Paul Adolphe Rajon, Ill. 648 [648]; in Musée Universel 6 (17 November 1877), 1e semestre, vol. 11, no. 268, p. 100; and in The Graphic 6 (10 October 1872), p. 361. The painting was sold on 13 October 1994 at Christie’s in New York.
[650] [648]
19. Regarding Brion’s illustrations to Victor Hugo’s Les misérables, see letter 333, n. 14.
20. For the Maecenas Bruyas and his collection in the Musée Fabre at Montpellier, see letter 726, n. 1.
21. For Delacroix’s Alfred Bruyas [76], see letter 726, n. 2.
[76]
22. For Ricard’s Alfred Bruyas [1272], see letter 726, n. 3.
[1272]
23. For Cabanel’s Alfred Bruyas [666], see letter 726, n. 5.
[666]
24. Regarding the origin of this expression deriving from the book Petites misères de la vie humaine by Old Nick and Grandville, see letter 178, n. 6.
25. Van Gogh had written in his previous letter that he had a sore throat. It had probably been caused by the filth he had eaten during his attack, as well as by the paint and turpentine with which he had attempted to poison himself (see letter 797, n. 6). This behaviour was no doubt connected with the ‘ideas of suicide’ mentioned by Dr Peyron (see Documentation, On or about 2 September 1889).