853 To Albert Aurier. Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Sunday, 9 or Monday, 10 February 1890.

metadata

No. 853 (Brieven 1990 854, Complete Letters 626a)
From: Vincent van Gogh
To: Albert Aurier
Date: Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Sunday, 9 or Monday, 10 February 1890

Source status

Original manuscript

Location

Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (gift of Mr. and Mrs. Cheung Chung Kiu), inv. no. b9119 S/2019

Additional

Enclosed with letter 854 to Theo.

The annotations written in another hand on the manuscript can be explained in part by preparations for the publication of G.-Albert Aurier, Oeuvres posthumes. Paris 1893, pp. 265-268.

Ongoing topic

Entry for the Les Vingt exhibition in Brussels (792)

original text

1r:1

[C]her Monsieur Aurier,

Merci beaucoup de votre article dans le Mercure de France,1 lequel m’a beaucoup surpris. Je l’aime beaucoup comme oeuvre d’art en soi, je trouve que vous faites de la couleur avec vos paroles; enfin dans votre article je retrouve mes toiles mais meilleures qu’elles ne le sont en réalité, plus riches, plus significatives.– Pourtant je me sens mal à l’aise lorsque j’y songe que plutôt qu’à moi ce que vous dites reviendrait à d’autres.– Par exemple à Monticelli surtout. Parlant de “il est – que je sache – le seul peintre qui perçoive le chromatisme des chôses avec cette intensité, avec cette qualité métallique, gemmique”2– s’il vous plait d’aller voir, chez mon frère, certain bouquet de Monticelli – bouquet en blanc, bleu myosotys & orangé3 – alors vous sentirez ce que je veux dire. Mais depuis longtemps les meilleurs, les plus étonnants Monticelli sont en Ecosse, en Angleterre.4 Dans un musée du nord – celui de Lille – je crois – il doit cependant encore y avoir une merveille de lui,5 autrement riche et certes non moins Français que le départ pour Cythère de Watteau.6 Actuellement M. Lauzet est en train de reproduire une trentaine de Monticelli.7 Voici –, à ce que je sache, il n’y a pas de coloriste venant aussi droit et directement de Delacroix; et pourtant est-il probable, à mon avis, que Monticelli ne tenait que de seconde main les théories de la couleur de Delacroix; notamment il les tenait de Diaz et de Ziem.8 Son tempérament d’artiste à lui, Monticelli, cela me semble être juste celui de l’auteur du Decamerone – Boccace – Un mélancolique, un malheureux assez résigné, voyant passer la noce du beau monde, les amoureux de son temps, les peignant, les analysant, lui – le mis de côté.9 Oh! il n’imite pas Boccace, pas davantage que Henri Leys n’imita les primitifs.–10 Eh bien, c’était donc pour dire que sur mon nom paraissent s’égarer des chôses que vous feriez mieux de dire de Monticelli, auquel je dois beaucoup. Ensuite je dois beaucoup à Paul Gauguin avec lequel j’ai travaillé durant quelques mois à Arles et que d’ailleurs je connaissais déjà à Paris.

Gauguin, cet artiste curieux, cet étranger duquel l’allure et le regard rappellent vaguement le portrait d’homme de Rembrandt à la galerie Lacaze,11 cet ami qui aime à faire sentir qu’un bon tableau doit être l’équivalent d’une bonne action, non pas qu’il le dise, mais enfin il est difficile de le fréquenter sans songer à une certaine responsabilité morale.– Quelques jours avant de nous séparer, alors quea la maladie m’a forcée d’entrer dans une maison de Santé, j’ai essayé de peindre “sa place vide”.

C’est une étude de son fauteuil en bois brun rouge sombre, le siège en paille verdâtre et à la place de l’absent un flambeau allumé et des romans modernes.12 Veuillez à l’occasion, en souvenir de lui, un peu revoir cette étude laquelle est toute entière dans des tons rompus verts et rouges. Vous vous apercevez donc peut-être que votre article eût été plus juste et – il me semblerait – en conséquence plus puissant – si traitant la question d’avenir “peinture des tropiques” et la question de couleur,13 vous y eussiez – avant de parler de moi – fait justice pour Gauguin et pour Monticelli. Car la part qui m’en revient ou reviendra demeurera, je vous l’assure, fort secondaire.–

Et puis, j’aurais encore autre chôse à vous demander. Mettons que les deux toiles de tournesols qui actuellement sont aux vingtistes14 ayent de certaines qualités de couleur et puis aussi que ça exprime une idée symbolisant “la gratitude” –15 Est-ce autre chôse que tant de tableaux de fleurs plus habilement peints et qu’on n’aprécie pas encore assez, les Roses trémières, les Iris Jaunes du père Quo[st]? [Les mag]nifiques bouquets de pivoines dont est prodigue Jeannin?–16 Voyez-[vous], [il me sem]ble si difficile de faire la séparation entre impressionisme et 1v:2 [autr]e chôse, je ne vois pas l’utilité d’autant d’esprit sectaire que nou[s] [avo]ns vu ces dernières années, mais j’en redoute le ridicule.–

[Et] en terminant je déclare ne pas comprendre que vous parliez d’infamies [d]e Meissonnier.17 C’est peutêtre de cet excellent Mauve que j’ai hérité pour Meissonnier une admiration sans bornes aucunes; Mauve était intarissable sur l’éloge de Troyon et de Meissonnier – combinaison étrange.–

Ceci pour y attirer votre attention jusqu’à quel point à l’étranger on admire sans faire le moindre cas de ce qui divise si souvent malencontreusement les artistes en France. Ce que Mauve répétait souvent était à peu près ceci, “si l’on veut faire de la couleur il faut aussi savoir dessiner un coin de cheminée ou d’intérieur comme Meissonnier.”–

Au prochain envoi que je ferai à mon frère j’ajouterai une étude de cyprès pour vous si vous voulez bien me faire le plaisir de l’accepter en souvenir de votre article. J’y travaille encore dans ce moment, désirant y mettre une figurine.–18 Le cyprès est si caractéristique au paysage de Provence et vous le sentiez en disant: “même la couleur noire”.19 Jusqu’à présent je n’ai pas pu les faire comme je le sens; les émotions qui me prennent devant la nature vont chez moi jusqu’à l’évanouissement et alors il en résulte une quinzaine de jours pendant lesquels je suis incapable de travailler. Pourtant, avant de partir d’ici, je compte encore une fois revenir à la charge pour attaquer les cyprès. L’étude que je vous ai destinée en représente un groupe au coin d’un champ de blé par une journée de mistral d’été. C’est donc la note d’un certain noir enveloppée dans du bleu mouvant par le grand air qui circule, et opposition fait à la note noire le vermillon des coquelicots.

Vous verrez que cela constitue à peu près l’assemblage de tons de ces jolis tissages écossais carrelés: vert, bleu, rouge, jaune, noir,20 qui à vous comme à moi dans le temps ont paru si charmants et qu’hélas aujourd’hui on ne voit plus guère.

Recevez en attendant, cher monsieur, l’expression de ma gratitude pour votre article. Si je venais à Paris au printemps je ne manquerais certes pas de venir vous remercier en personne.

Vincent v. Gogh

lorsque l’étude que je vous enverrai sera sèche à fond, aussi dans les empâtements, ce ne sera pas le cas avant un an – je croirais que vous feriez bien d’y donner un fort vernis. Et entretemps il faudra plusieurs fois la laver à grande eau pour faire évacuer complètement l’huile.21 Cette étude est peinte en plein bleu de Prusse, cette couleur de laquelle on dit tant de mal et de laquelle néamoins Delacroix s’est tant servi.22 Je crois qu’une fois les tons du bleu de Prusse bien secs, en vernissant vous obtiendrez les tons noirs très noirs nécessaires pour faire valoir les differents verts sombres.–

Je ne sais trop comment il faudrait encadrer cette étude mais y tenant que cela fasse penser à ces chères étoffes écossaises, j’ai remarqué qu’un cadre plat très simple, mine orange vif, fait l’effet voulu avec les bleus du fond et les verts noirs des arbres.– Sans cela il n’y aurait peutêtre pas assez de rouge dans la toile et la partie supérieure paraitrait un peu froide.

translation

1r:1

Dear Mr Aurier,

Thank you very much for your article in the Mercure de France,1 which greatly surprised me. I like it very much as a work of art in itself, I feel that you create colours with your words; anyway I rediscover my canvases in your article, but better than they really are — richer, more significant. However, I feel ill at ease when I reflect that what you say should be applied to others rather than to me. For example, to Monticelli above all. Speaking of ‘he is – as far as I know – the only painter who perceives the coloration of things with such intensity, with such a metallic, gem-like quality’2 – if you will please go and see a particular bouquet by Monticelli at my brother’s place – bouquet in white, forget-me-not blue and orange3 – then you will feel what I mean. But for a long time the best, the most astonishing Monticellis, have been in Scotland, in England.4 In a museum in the north however – the one in Lille I think, there must still be a marvel by him,5 far richer and certainly no less French than Watteau’s Departure for Cythera.6 At present Mr Lauzet is in the process of reproducing around thirty Monticellis.7 Here you have it, as far as I know there is no colourist who comes so straight and directly from Delacroix; and yet it is likely, in my opinion, that Monticelli only had Delacroix’s colour theories at second hand; in particular he had them from Diaz and Ziem.8 It seems to me that his, Monticelli’s, artistic temperament is exactly that of the author of the Decameron – Boccaccio – a melancholy man, an unhappy, rather resigned man, seeing high society’s party pass by, the lovers of his day, painting them, analyzing them, he – the outcast.9 Oh! He does not imitate Boccaccio any more than Henri Leys imitated the primitives.10 Well, this was to say that things seem to have strayed onto my name that you would do better to say of Monticelli, to whom I owe a great deal. Next I owe a great deal to Paul Gauguin, with whom I worked for a few months in Arles, and whom, besides, I already knew in Paris.

Gauguin, that curious artist, that stranger whose bearing and gaze vaguely recall Rembrandt’s Portrait of a man in the La Caze gallery,11 that friend who likes to make one feel that a good painting should be the equivalent of a good deed, not that he says so, but anyway it is difficult to spend time with him without thinking of a certain moral responsibility. A few days before we parted, when illness forced me to enter an asylum, I tried to paint ‘his empty place’.

It is a study of his armchair of dark, red-brown wood, the seat of greenish straw, and in the absent person’s place a lighted candlestick and some modern novels.12 If you have the opportunity, as a memento of him, please go and look a little at this study again, which is entirely in broken tones of green and red. You may perhaps then realize that your article would have been more accurate and – it would seem to me – thus more powerful – if in dealing with the question of the future ‘painting of the tropics’ and the question of colour,13 you had done justice to Gauguin and Monticelli before talking about me. For the share that falls or will fall to me will remain, I assure you, very secondary.

And then, I would also have something else to ask of you. Supposing that the two canvases of sunflowers that are presently at the Vingtistes14 have certain qualities of colour, and then also that they express an idea symbolizing ‘gratitude’.15 Is this any different from so many paintings of flowers that are more skilfully painted and which people do not yet sufficiently appreciate, père Quost’s Hollyhocks, Yellow Irises? The magnificent bouquets of peonies which Jeannin produces in abundance?16 You see, it seems to me so difficult to separate Impressionism from 1v:2 other things, I cannot see the point of so much sectarian thinking as we have seen these last few years, but I fear its absurdity.

And, in closing, I declare that I do not understand that you spoke of Meissonier’s infamies.17 It is perhaps from that excellent fellow Mauve that I have inherited a boundless admiration for Meissonier; Mauve was endless in his praise for Troyon and Meissonier – a strange combination.

This is to draw your attention to how much people abroad admire, without attaching the slightest importance to what unfortunately so often divides artists in France. What Mauve often repeated was something like this, ‘if you want to do colour you must also know how to draw a fireside or an interior like Meissonier’.

I shall add a study of cypresses for you to the next consignment I send to my brother, if you will do me the pleasure of accepting it as a memento of your article. I am still working on it at the moment, wanting to put in a small figure.18 The cypress is so characteristic of the landscape of Provence, and you sensed it when saying: ‘even the colour black’.19 Until now I have not been able to do them as I feel it; in my case the emotions that take hold of me in the face of nature go as far as fainting, and then the result is a fortnight during which I am incapable of working. However, before leaving here, I am planning to return to the fray to attack the cypresses. The study I have intended for you depicts a group of them in the corner of a wheatfield on a summer’s day when the mistral is blowing. It is therefore the note of a certain blackness enveloped in blue moving in great circulating currents of air, and the vermilion of the poppies contrasts with the black note.

You will see that this constitutes more or less the combination of tones of those pretty Scottish checked cloths: green, blue, red, yellow, black,20 which once appeared so charming to you as they did to me, and which alas one scarcely sees any more these days.

In the meantime, dear sir, please accept my grateful thanks for your article. If I were to come to Paris in the spring I shall certainly not fail to come and thank you in person.

Vincent van Gogh

When the study I send you is dry right through, also in the impasto, which will not be the case for a year – I should think you would do well to give it a good coat of varnish. And between times it should be washed several times with plenty of water to get out the oil completely.21 This study is painted in full Prussian blue, that colour about which people say so many bad things and which nevertheless Delacroix used so much.22 I think that once the Prussian blue tones are really dry, by varnishing you will obtain the dark, the very dark tones needed to bring out the different dark greens.

I do not quite know how this study should be framed, but as I really want it to make one think of those dear Scottish fabrics, I have noticed that a very simple flat frame, bright orange lead, creates the desired effect with the blues of the background and the dark greens of the trees. Without this there would perhaps not be enough red in the canvas, and the upper part would appear a little cold.

notes

1. For Aurier, ‘Les isolés: Vincent van Gogh’, see letter 845, n. 2.

2. Here Van Gogh quotes verbatim from the end of Aurier’s article (p. 29).

3. For Monticelli’s Vase of flowers , see letter 578, n. 4.

4. Monticelli did not receive recognition in France until well after his death in 1886, but in England and Scotland his work had been sought after by collectors for some time. Van Gogh had undoubtedly heard this from Reid, one of the Scottish dealers in Monticelli’s work. See Fowle 2000 and letter 578, n. 3.

5. In 1869 the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille had acquired two paintings by Monticelli: Landscape with fence and Scene from the Decameron. The comparison with Watteau and the reference to Boccaccio indicate that Van Gogh is referring to the second painting, a landscape with female figures. Ill. 2312 .

6. Jean-Antoine Watteau, Embarkation for Cythera, 1717 (Paris, Musée du Louvre). Ill. 1417 .

7. Lauzet eventually made twenty lithographs for the publication Adolphe Monticelli; see letter 825, n. 7.

8. Diaz and Ziem were Monticelli’s teachers. He received lessons from Ziem as an incipient artist in Marseille, and he painted a lot with Diaz in 1855-1856 in the latter’s Paris studio and in the woods of Fontainebleau. During the last fifteen years of his life, Monticelli worked frequently in Ziem’s studio in Martigues, to the west of Marseille.

9. Van Gogh could have derived his ideas about Boccaccio’s temperament from the article ‘Boccace d’après ses oeuvres et les témoignages contemporains’ by Henry Cochin, which he had read in August 1888 (see letter 665, n. 12). Cochin writes that Boccaccio had a ‘jovial complexion’ (complexion joviale), but at the same time ‘that anxious inclination to grumble, which always made his fits of sadness alternate with the wildest bursts of gaiety’ (cette inquiète disposition à se plaindre, qui fit toujours alterner ses accès de tristesse avec ses plus folles boutades de gaîté) (p. 374). He was proud, suspicious and quick-tempered, but ‘his anger is brief and infrequent. As long as his sensitive pride has not been wounded, he is the most peaceable of men. With a smile, he lets everything go by, with the result that people have been able to accuse him of indifference’ (sa colère est courte et rare. Tant que son sensible orgueil n’a pas été atteint, il est le plus pacifique des hommes. Il laisse tout passer en souriant, si bien qu’on a pu lui reprocher de l’indifférence) (p. 381).

Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-1353) is a frame story in which a company consisting of three men and seven women withdraw to the countryside to escape plague-ridden Florence. In ten days they tell one another 100 stories, alternating with songs sung by the women.

10. An allusion to something Théophile Gautier said about Henri Leys; see letter 28, n. 7.

11. For the portrait Young man with a walking stick , now no longer considered a Rembrandt, see letter 536, n. 9. Van Gogh had previously compared the man in the portrait with Gauguin; see letter 726.

a. Read: ‘quand’.

12. Gauguin’s chair (F 499 / JH 1636 ). Van Gogh painted it around 19 November, at which time he described it as a ‘rather funny’ study (see letter 721). That he painted it several days before Gauguin’s departure as a symbol of his empty seat is an interpretation given here with hindsight.

13. Van Gogh is referring here to the following passage from Aurier’s article: ‘For a long time, he delighted in imagining a renovation of art, made possible by displacing the centre of civilization: an art of the tropical regions ... Wouldn’t he, the intense and fantastic colourist, grinder of golds and precious stones, in fact have been the worthiest painter of these lands of radiance, of dazzling suns and blinding colours, rather than the Guillaumets, the insipid Fromentins and the muddy Gérômes?’ (Longtemps, il s’est complu à imaginer une rénovation d’art, possible par un déplacement de civilisation: un art des régions tropicales ... N’eût-il pas été, en effet, lui, l’intense et fantatisque [read: fantastique] coloriste broyeur d’ors et de pierreries, le très digne peintre, plutôt que les Guillaumet, que les fadasses Fromentin et que les boueux Gérôme, de ces pays des resplendissances, des fulgurants soleils et des couleurs qui aveuglent?) (p. 28).

14. Sunflowers in a vase (F 454 / JH 1562 ) and Sunflowers in a vase (F 456 / JH 1561 ).

15. This remark about the sunflowers as a symbol of gratitude must be seen in the context of Van Gogh’s idea to have his Berceuse flanked by two canvases of sunflowers, just as Icelandic fishermen had in their cabins images of the Virgin Mary flanked by bouquets of flowers. See letters 739 and 776.

16. With regard to Quost and Jeannin, cf. letter 850, nn. 7 and 8.

17. Aurier says that it is unlikely that Van Gogh’s paintings will ever be sold ‘at the price fetched by the little infamies made by Mr Meissonier’ (p. 29).

18. The work intended for Aurier is Cypresses (F 620 / JH 1748 ), which Van Gogh painted in June 1889 (see letter 783) and worked on again later after deciding to give it to Aurier.

19. Van Gogh is referring to a line from a poem quoted by Aurier at the beginning of his article. See letter 850, n. 19.

20. Van Gogh had made the same comparison with Scottish tartans in letter 497, in connection with his Potato Eaters and Blanc’s colour theory.

21. For this technique of ‘washing with lots of water’, see letter 662, n. 8.

22. On Delacroix’s use of Prussian blue, see letter 595, n. 14.