Back to site

665 To Emile Bernard. Arles, on or about Tuesday, 21 August 1888.

metadata
No. 665 (Brieven 1990 669, Complete Letters B15)
From: Vincent van Gogh
To: Emile Bernard
Date: Arles, on or about Tuesday, 21 August 1888

Source status
Original manuscript

Location
Collection Anne-Marie Springer

Date
This letter was written in reply to one from Bernard that Van Gogh mentions in letter 664 to Theo of 19 or 20 August. Both these letters must have been written at about the same time, but because the one to Theo says nothing about the plan for a sunflower series outlined here (ll. 58-60), we assume that the letter to Bernard is the later of the two, and we have therefore dated it on or about Tuesday, 21 August 1888.
The letter is the first of a series that were written during the period when Van Gogh was working on his decoration. The dating of some of the letters is somewhat arbitrary, but the sequence of letters 665 to 671 is definite.
Van Gogh must have embarked on his sunflower series around 20 August. The plan is mentioned for the first time in the present letter, and work has only just started; he is also working on a study of thistles. Sunflowers and thistles are also mentioned in letter 666, but there Van Gogh refers to a letter he had had from Gauguin, which is not mentioned in this one. Letter 666 must therefore have been written after the present one (though probably not long after), so we have dated it Tuesday, 21 or Wednesday, 22 August. Letter 667 was enclosed with 666 and has consequently been given the same date.
In letter 668 there is no further mention of the thistles and Van Gogh is working on a fourth painting of sunflowers. This letter must have preceded letter 669 because in that one the fourth and – for the time being – last in the series appears to be finished or nearly so. Van Gogh says in letter 668 that he expects to be strapped for cash by the end of the week (l. 51), which implies that the letter was written before the weekend; we have therefore dated it Thursday, 23 or Friday, 24 August.
In letter 669 Van Gogh confirmed receipt of 50 francs, the fourth instalment of his allowance for August, so it can be dated on or about Sunday, 26 August (it emerges from letter 672 that the money arrived on Saturday); letter 670 has been given the same date on the assumption that it was enclosed with it. Letter 671, lastly, was written shortly before the end of the month, and must date from Wednesday, 29 or Thursday, 30 August 1888. By then Van Gogh was working on other studies.

original text
 1r:1
Mon cher Bernard,
je veux faire de la figure, de la figure & encore de la figure, c’est plus fort que moi, cette serie de bipedes à partir du bebe jusqu’à Socrate1 et de la femme noire de chevelure à peau blanche jusqu’à la femme aux cheveux jaunes et le visage couleur de brique hâlé par le soleil.–
En attendant je fais surtout autre chôse.
Merci de ta lettre, cette fois ci j’écris bien à la hâte et bien éreinté.
Cela m’a fait grand plaisir que tu ayes rejoint Gauguin.2
Ah j’ai tout de même une nouvelle figure3 qui est absolument une continuation de certaines etudes de têtes faites en Hollande, je te les ai un jour montrees avec un tableau de ce temps-là, des mangeurs de pommes de terre.4 Je voudrais pouvoir te le montrer.
 1v:2
C’est toujours une étude où la couleur joue un tel rôle que le blanc & noir du dessin ne saurait le rendre.
J’ai voulu t’en envoyer un dessin tres grand et très soigné.
Bon – cela devenait tout autre chôse tout en etant correct.5
Car encore une fois la couleur est suggestive de l’air embrasé de la moisson du plein midi en pleine canicule et sans cela c’est un autre tableau. J’oserais croire que Gauguin et toi le comprendraient, mais comme ils vont trouver cela laid.
Vous autres vous savez ce que c’est qu’un paysan, combien cela sent le fauve lorsqu’on trouve quelqu’un de race.6
J’ai aussi un déchargeur d’un bateau de sable. c.à.d. il y a deux bateaux, rose violacé, dans une eau verte véronese avec du sable gris jaune, des brouettes, des planches, un petit bonhomme bleu et jaune.
 1v:3
Tout cela vu d’en haut d’un quai surplombant le tout à vol d’oiseau. Pas de ciel. Ce n’est qu’une esquisse ou plutôt une pochade faite en plein mistral.7
Ensuite, je cherche des chardons poussiereux avec grand essaim de papillons tourbillonnant dessus.8 Oh le beau soleil d’ici en plein été, cela tape à la tête et je ne doute aucunément qu’on en devienne toqué. Or l’étant déja auparavant je ne fais qu’en jouir.
J’y songe de decorer mon atelier d’une demi douzaine de tableaux de Tournesols.9
Une décoration où les chrômes crûs ou rompus éclateront sur des fonds divers bleus depuis le véronèse le plus pâle jusqu’au bleu de roi, encadrés de minces lattes peintes en mine orange.
Des espèces d’effets de Vitraux d’eglise Gothique.10
 1r:4
Ah mes chers copains,11 nous autres toqués, jouissons nous tout de même de l’oeil n’est ce pas.
Hélas la nature se paye sur la bête et nos corps sont méprisables et une lourde charge parfois. Mais depuis Giotto, souffreteux personnage,12 il en est ici.13
Ah et tout de même quelle jouissance de l’oeil et quel rire que le rire edenté du vieux lion Rembrandt, la tête coiffé d’un linge, la palette à la main.14 Que j’aimerais à pouvoir passer ces jours ci à Pont Aven mais enfin je m’en console en ravisant des tournesols.
Je te serre bien la main, à bientôt.

t. à t.
Vincent

translation
 1r:1
My dear Bernard,
I want to do figures, figures and more figures, it’s stronger than me, this series of bipeds from the baby to Socrates1 and from the black-haired woman with white skin to the woman with yellow hair and a sunburnt face the colour of brick.
Meanwhile, I mostly do other things.
Thanks for your letter; this time I’m writing in great haste and really worn out.
I’m very pleased that you’ve joined Gauguin.2
Ah, I do have a new figure all the same,3 which is absolutely a continuation of certain studies of heads done in Holland; I showed you them once, with a painting from that time, potato eaters.4 I wish I could show it to you.  1v:2
Again it’s a study in which colour plays a role that the black and white of a drawing couldn’t convey.
I wanted to send you a very large and very carefully finished drawing of it.
Well — it turned into something entirely different, while still being correct.5
Because once again the colour suggests the scorched air of harvest time at midday in the blistering heat, and without that it’s a different painting. I would dare to believe that you and Gauguin would understand it, but how ugly they’ll find it! You fellows know what a peasant is, how much of the wild animal there is when you come across somebody pure-bred.6
I also have a man unloading a sand boat. That is, there are two boats, purplish pink, in Veronese green water, with yellow-grey sand, wheelbarrows, planks, a little blue and yellow man.  1v:3
All of it seen from the top of a quay overhanging everything in a bird’s-eye view. No sky. It’s just a sketch, or rather, a rough sketch done out in the mistral.7
Next, I’m attempting to do dusty thistles with a great swarm of butterflies swirling above them.8 Oh, the beautiful sun down here in high summer; it beats down on your head and I have no doubt at all that it drives you crazy. Now being that way already, all I do is enjoy it.
I’m thinking of decorating my studio with half a dozen paintings of Sunflowers.9
A decoration in which harsh or broken yellows will burst against various blue backgrounds, from the palest Veronese to royal blue, framed with thin laths painted in orange lead.
Sorts of effects of stained-glass windows of a Gothic church.10  1r:4
Ah, my dear pals,11 we crazy ones, let’s anyway enjoy with our eyes, shall we?
Alas, nature gets paid in kind, and our bodies are despicable and sometimes a heavy burden. But since Giotto, a sickly character,12 that’s the way things are.13
Oh, and nevertheless, what delight of the eye and what laughter, the toothless laughter of Rembrandt the old lion, his head covered in a cloth, his palette in his hand.14 How I’d like to spend these present days in Pont-Aven, but anyway, I console myself by reconsidering the sunflowers.
I shake your hand firmly; more soon.

Ever yours,
Vincent
notes
1. Van Gogh is referring here to the type of old man he had recorded in his portraits of the postman Joseph Roulin; see letter 652, n. 7. Van Gogh also hoped to paint Roulin’s newborn daughter Marcelle. This passage is probably an allusion to the famous riddle from classical mythology that the sphinx of Thebes posed to Oedipus: ‘What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at midday, and three feet in the evening? Man’.
2. See letter 664, n. 2, for Bernard’s stay in Pont-Aven.
3. Van Gogh is referring to the portrait of a gardener that he had painted about a week before, Patience Escalier (‘The peasant’) (F 443 / JH 1548 ).
4. In Nuenen in the first months of 1885, Van Gogh had drawn and painted dozens of heads of peasants in preparation for what he regarded as his ‘master piece’, The potato eaters (F 82 / JH 764 ).
5. If Van Gogh did send a drawing, it has not survived. The only known drawing after the portrait, Patience Escalier (‘The peasant’) (F 1460 / JH 1549 ), was sent to Theo with letter 663. Bernard probably did, though, get the drawing Patience Escalier (‘The peasant’) (F 1461 / JH 1564), since its provenance goes back to Ambroise Vollard, who bought many works by Van Gogh from Bernard between 1894 and 1905. However, that drawing was made after the second portrait of Escalier (F 444 / JH 1563 ) which dates from later in August (see letter 671) and so cannot be the one referred to here. Pickvance’s theory that that drawing was sent with a letter from Van Gogh to Bernard of about 5 September that is now lost is therefore plausible. See exhib. cat. New York 1984, p. 167.
6. There is a comparable notion about the similarity between a peasant and a wild animal in Sensier’s biography of Millet, which Van Gogh knew well. Writing of Millet’s attempts to depict the ‘type’, Sensier says: ‘He was not at all afraid to make room in his rustic compositions for figures that were rough-looking, whose individual nature was somewhat crude or at least unpolished, with an expression that seems to admit that the human being is not always so very superior to the animal’ (Il ne craignait point de donner place dans ses compositions rustiques à des figures d’un aspect rude, d’une individualité quelque peu grossière ou du moins mal dégrossie, d’une expression qui semble avouer que l’être humain n’est pas toujours prodigieusement au-dessus de l’animal). Sensier 1881, p. 355. Cf. exhib. cat. Paris 1998, p. 50.
Van Gogh wrote ‘race’ without an accent, but he could equally well have meant ‘racé’ (distinguished).
7. Quay with sand barges (F 449 / JH 1558 ). The ‘purplish pink’ in the painting has probably discoloured.
8. This study is not known. It is not Thistles (F 447 / JH 1550 ), which does not have ‘a great swarm of butterflies’. See also letter 659, n. 6. There could be a connection with the drawing Thistles by the roadside (F 1466 / JH 1552), although there is no swarm of butterflies there either.
Dorn identified the study described here as Grass and butterflies (F 460 / JH 1676 ). See Dorn 1999, p. 44 (n. 7). However, there are no thistles in that painting, which Van Tilborgh anyway places in the Paris period. See cat. Amsterdam 2011.
9. In his idea for a decorative scheme Van Gogh may have been influenced in part by Bernard, who had done something similar for his studio. See letter 596, n. 1. Van Gogh worked on his decoration for the studio and other rooms in the Yellow House from mid-August until the end of December 1888, starting with a series of paintings of sunflowers. He bore in mind the possibility that this integrated series (he spoke of an ‘ensemble’ and ‘a whole’) could be shown outside the Yellow House, and considered exhibiting it in the offices of the Revue Indépendante. He bought frames for a number of the paintings, see letter 673, n. 16, and framed the sunflower canvases himself with strips of wood (see letter 776). See Dorn 1990 for a reconstruction of the evolution of the decoration and possible sources of inspiration for it.
10. Here Van Gogh cites one of Bernard’s sources of inspiration in order to lend weight to his argument.
11. This form of address tells us that Van Gogh counted on Bernard’s showing the letter to Gauguin (and possibly other people too). See also letter 632, n. 24.
12. Van Gogh based his description of Giotto as ‘a sickly character’ on Henry Cochin, ‘Boccace d’après ses oeuvres et les témoignages contemporains’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 58 (15 July 1888), 3rd series, vol. 88, pp. 373-413. Cochin described Giotto as ‘ugly and sickly’ (laid et chétif) (p. 378). Cf. also letter 683, n. 18.
13. The sense of this sentence is not entirely clear. It is possible that Van Gogh intended to write ‘ainsi’ (so) instead of ‘ici’ (here), and it is also conceivable that he didn’t finish the sentence.
14. See letter 649, n. 15, for Rembrandts Self-portrait at the easel .