Original subtitles

My dear brother, Theo

your brother has preached for the first time.

Last Sunday, in God's dwelling of which is written

in this place I give peace,

your brother was indeed deeply moved,

when he stood at the foot of the pulpit

and bowed his head and prayed:

Father, in thy name be our beginning.

I am a stranger on the earth.

Hide not thy commandments from me.

It is an old belief and it is a good belief

that our life is a pilgrim's progress.

We are pilgrims on the earth and strangers.

We come from afar and we are going far.

The journey of our life

goes from the loving breast of our mother on earth

to the arms of our Father in heaven.

Everything on earth changes.

We have no abiding city here.

It is God's will that we should part with what is dearest on earth.

We ourselves change in many respects.

We are not what we once were.

We shall not remain what we are now.

The face that once had the early dew of the morning

gets its wrinkles.

The eyes speak of sadness.

The hair turns grey or we lose it.

Ah indeed, we only pass through the earth.

We only pass through life.

I once saw a very beautiful picture.

It was a landscape at evening.

Through the landscape, a road leads to a high mountain far, far away.

On the top of that mountain is a city

whereon the setting sun casts a glory.

On the road walks a pilgrim.

He has been walking for a good, long while already

and he is very tired.

And now, he meets a woman or a figure in black.

That angel of God has been placed there

to encourage the pilgrims and to answer their questions.

And the pilgrim asks her:

"Does the road then go uphill all the way?"

And the answer is: "Yes to the very end".

And he asks again:

"And, will the journey take all day long?"

And the answer is: "From morn till night, my friend".

Has not man a strife on earth?

And when each of us goes back to the daily things and daily duties,

let us not forget that things are not what they seem.

But God, by the things of daily life teacheth us higher things.

That our life is a pilgrim's progress,

and that we are strangers on the earth.

But that we have a God and Father who preserveth strangers,

and that we are all brethren.

Amen.

Dear Theo,

there are some intriguing things in other countries.

But last Sunday, I walked alone

and I thought how good it was

to feel the Dutch soil under my feet again.

I recall all our childhood memories.

How often we walked with father in those last days of February,

and heard the lark of the black fields;

the radiant blue sky with the white clouds over it;

and then the stony path with the beech trees.

Who knows...

We may walk together near the sea sometime.

We must always remain good friends.

Let us have as few secrets as possible from each other.

Brothers should not have any.

Try to be patient and gentle,

and do not mind being eccentric.

It is good to love flowers and ivy and fir trees and hawthorn hedges.

They have been with us from the very beginning.

My conscience tells me that there is something greater in the future,

that we're not what other people are.

You know what I desire to be?

If I may become a clergyman and fill the position

so that my work resembles that of our father,

then, I shall thank God.

Our aim must be to find a steady profession

to which we can devote ourselves entirely.

And I also believe, that we especially must have the end in mind;

and that the victory achieved after a whole life of work and effort,

will be better than one gain sooner.

I must become a good clergyman who has something to say

that is right, and maybe of use in the world.

If one keeps on loving faithfully,

one will gradually get more light and grow stronger.

Only if I could, I should like to skip a few years.

I think one only gets some peace

after one has accomplished something.

When I think of the future, of almost invincible difficulties;

when I think of the many watching me

who will know where the fault is if I do not succeed;

when I think of all this, of all the difficulties and cares

that do not lessen as we advance in life;

then I wish I were far away from everything.

Yet, I shall reach the aim I am striving for.

And if God wills it, find favour in the eyes of some I love,

and of those who will come after me.

The days fly by.

I'm four years older than you are

and probably they seem to go more swiftly to me than to you.

But I fight against it by stretching them a little

in the morning and evening.

Now and then, when I am writing,

I instinctively make a little drawing.

It is nothing special.

But, I see it all so vividly before me.

Dear Theo,

at present I'm collecting Latin and Greek exercises,

and all kinds of writings about history and religion.

I must keep courage with God's help.

But, Greek lessons in the heart of Amsterdam

on a very close and sultry summer afternoon,

with the feeling that many difficult examinations await you,

I can tell you, they make one feel more oppressed than the Brabant cornfields

which are beautiful on such a day.

I feel it necessary to work as hard as I can.

The days are full of evil.

One must arm oneself and try to be filled

with as much goodness as possible

in order to be prepared and be able to resist.

As you know, it is not a small undertaking,

and we do not know the result.

But at all events, I will try to fight the good fight.

What is the use of a beautiful body?

Animals have it too.

Perhaps, even more than men.

But the soul, as it lives in the people,

that's what animals never have.

Is not life given us to become richer in spirit?

One sees so many who live in horror and misery.

But, in the evening one sees

all kinds of black figures wandering about,

in whom the terror of the night is personified.

And, whose misery one must class among the things

that have no name in any language.

The only thing I want to do

is give peace to poor creatures

and reconcile them to their existence here on earth.

Dear Theo,

the Flemish training school does not require that you quite finish the course

before you can apply for a place as an evangelist.

The three-month probation demanded of me have almost passed.

Some Paul was in Arabia for three years before he began to preach.

If I could work quietly for about three years,

always learning and observing,

then I should not come back without having something to say

that was really worth hearing.

I say this in all humility,

and yet, with confidence.

I enclose a hasty little sketch.

I should like to begin making rough sketches

of some of the many things that I meet on my way.

But, as it would probably keep me from my real work,

it's better not to start.

I visited the cemetery here.

In front of it is a little wood where it is very peaceful,

especially when the sun shines through the leaves in the evening.

There are many beatiful graves and all kinds of evergreens,

and roses and forget-me-nots.

I walked on, past a forest and took a side path

leading to a little, old ivy-covered church,

at the side of the sunken road

with twisted and gnarled stumps and tree roots.

Fantastic!

Like those Albrecht D�rer etched in "Ritter, Tod und Teufel" (Knight, Death and the Devil).

How rich art is!

If only one can remember what one has seen,

one is never without food for thought, or truly lonely.

Never alone.

My dear brother,

the three months probation have elapsed.

They have told me that I cannot attend the school on the same conditions

as the native Flemish peoples.

It would not be easy to live without faith in God.

Without it, one would lose one's courage.

Dear Theo,

I'm sure you realise that here, in the Borinage, there are no pictures.

If with God's blessing, I get a permanent appointment here,

I shall be very very happy.

Often I draw far into the night

to keep some souvenir, and to strengthen the thoughts raised involuntarily

by the aspects of things here.

Like everyone else, I feel the need of family and friendship,

of affection, a friendly intercourse.

I'm not made of stone or iron.

So, I cannot miss these things without being conscious of a void,

and feeling a lack of something.

Involuntarily, I have become, more or less,

a kind of impossible and suspect personage in the family.

So, how could I in any way be of any use to anybody?

Therefore, above all,

I think the best and the most reasonable thing for me to do

is to go away and keep a convenient distance,

so that I cease to exist for all of you.

Most of the miners are thin and pale from fever.

They look tired and emaciated,

weather-beaten and aged before their time.

Most of them cannot read.

But at the same time, are intelligent and quick at their different works.

Brave and frank, with melancholy deep-set eyes.

They have an innate, deep-rooted hatred

and a strong mistrust of anyone who is domineering.

The villages here look desolate and dead, and forsaken.

Life goes on underground instead of above.

As moulting time, when they change their feathers, is for birds

so adversity or misfortune is the difficult time for us human beings.

One can stay in it. One can also emerge renewed.

But anyhow, it must not be done in public.

Therefore, the only thing to do is to hide oneself.

When I was in other surroundings,

in the surroundings of pictures and works of art,

I had a violent passion for them, reaching the highest pitch of enthusiasm.

And I'm not sorry about it.

For even now, far from that land,

I am often homesick for the land of pictures.

Now, for more than five years, I have been without employment.

It is true that I have lost the confidence of many.

It is true that my financial affairs are in a bad state.

It is true that even my studies are in a rather sad and hopeless condition.

And that my needs are greater, infinitely greater than my possessions.

But, I must continue on the path I've taken now.

But you will ask: What is your definite aim?

That aim will stand out, slowly and surely,

as the rough draft becomes a sketch, and the sketch becomes a picture.

Do our inner thoughts ever show outwardly?

There may be a great fire in our soul,

yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it.

And the passersby see only a wisp of smoke coming through the chimney,

and go along their way.

I think that everything which is really good and beautiful, comes from God.

And all which is bad and wrong in men and in their works,

is not of God.

But, the best way to know God is to love many things.

Love's a friend, a wife, something, whatever you like.

But, one must love

with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy

with strength and intelligence.

And, one must always try to know deeper, better and more.

Sometimes I draw small sketches, almost against my will.

But, it is a hard and difficult struggle to draw well.

Dear Theo,

I am glad I came home.

Everyday, I go out into the fields.

My drawing has changed.

The technique as well as the results.

I have learnt to measure and to observe, and seek for broad lines.

So, what seemed imposible before, is gradually becoming possible now.

There's something I must tell you.

A deep love has grown in my heart for our cousin Kee.

And when I told her this, she answered that to her, past and future remained one.

So, she could never return my feelings.

I hope not to leave a single thing undone which brings me nearer to her,

for love is something so positive, so strong, so real,

that it is impossible for one who loves to take back that feeling.

Life has become very dear to me.

And, I am very glad that I love.

My life and my love are one.

Should I accept her 'no, never never',

or should I keep some hope and not give up?

When it happened, it was at first as terrible a blow as a death sentence,

and for a moment, crushed me to the ground.

Then, in that inexpressible anguish of soul, I arose,

not resigning the believing,

and had no other thought than 'she and no other'.

I want to go through the joys and sorrows of domestic life

in order to paint it from my own experience.

She refuses to read my letters.

But the frost and the winter cold are too bitter to last very long.

I send you a few drawings

because I thought you might find someting of Brabant in them.

Now tell me, why dont they sell?

For now and then, I should like to earn some money for a railroad ticket

so as to visit that no never never land.

Without her, I am nothing. But with her, there was a chance.

I need a woman. I cannot, I will not live without love.

I am a man, and a man with passions. I must go to a woman.

Otherwise, I shall freeze or turn to stone.

Oh dear me, I hadn't far to look!

I found a woman.

That woman was very good to me.

Very kind.

When you wake up in the morning and find yourself not alone,

but see there a fellow creature beside you,

it makes the world look so much more friendly.

Much more friendly than religious diaries and whitewashed church walls.

Theo, as you can imagine

I have a great many cares and worries.

But still, it gives me a feeling of satisfaction

to have come so far that I cannot go back.

And though the path may be different,

I now see it clearly before me.

If you occasionally send me what you can spare

without inconveniencing yourself, I would be most grateful.

There is safety in the midst of danger.

What would life be if we hadn't courage to attempt anything?

How will my work be, a year from now?

If I could only express what I feel!

My dear brother,

last winter I met a pregnant woman

deserted by the man whose child she carried.

A pregnant woman who had to earn her bread by walking the streets.

I took this woman for a model, and have worked with her all winter.

I couldn't pay her the full wages of a model,

but that did not prevent me paying her rent.

And so far, I have been able to protect her and her child

from hunger and cold by sharing my own bread with her.

It seems to me that every man worth a straw

would have done the same in such a case.

I can only marry once,

and how can I do better than marry her?

Misery would force her back into her old ways.

I had not forgotten another woman for whom my heart was beating.

But she was far away, and refused to see me.

And this one walked the streets in winter, sick, pregnant, hungry.

I couldn't do otherwise.

Christine and I understand each other.

We don't have to pay attention to what people say.

Of course, we don't pretend to maintain any social standing

familiar as I am, with the prejudices of the world.

She knows what poverty is.

So do I.

Poverty has advantages and disadvantages.

Fishermen know that the sea is dangerous,

but they have never found these dangers sufficient to keep them ashore.

You have my bread in your hands.

Will you take it from me?

At present, money is what the right of the strongest used to be.

My life or death depends on your help.

If I succeed in making you understand what I suspect you don't understand yet,

then Christine, her child and myself will be safe.

To express my feelings for Kee, I said resolutely, 'she and no other'.

And her 'no, never never' was not strong enough to make me give her up.

But, I could find no rest.

The strain became unbearable because she was always silent.

Then I felt that love died within me.

A void, an infinite void came in its stead.

You know I believe in God. I did not doubt the power of love.

But then I felt something like 'my God, my God why hast thou forsaken me'?

And everything became a blank. Oh God! There is no God!

I am no criminal!

To forget,

I lie down in the sand by an old tree trunk, and make a drawing of it.

Smoking a pipe and looking at the blue sky, or the moss or the grass

and I am a thousand miles away from everything, and much happier.

Let the storm rise, the night descend.

Which is worse, danger or the fear of danger?

Personally, I prefer reality.

The danger itself.

I have finished two larger drawings.

First, "Sorrow", only the figure without any surroundings.

The other, "The Roots", show some tree roots on sandy grounds.

I try to put the same sentiment into the landscape as I put into the figure.

Convulsive, passionate, clinging to the earth,

and yet being half torn up by the storm.

I wanted to express something of the struggle for life

in that pale slender woman's figure,

as well as in the black, gnarled and knotted roots.

I want to do drawings which touch some people.

Something straight from my own heart.

In either figure or landscape, I should wish to express

not sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow.

I want to progress so far that people will say of my work:

He feels deeply. He feels tenderly.

What am I in most people's eyes?

A non-entity or an eccentric and disagreeable man.

Somebody who has no position in society, and never will have.

In short, the lowest of the low.

Very well, if this were true, then I should want my work to show

what is in the heart of such an eccentric, of such a nobody.

This is my ambition, which is inspite of everything,

founded less on anger than on love;

more on serenity than on passion.

It is true that I am often in the greatest misery.

But, still there is a calm, pure harmony and music inside me.

I have made some experiments with painting.

I write you just this little word, to tell you I have made a beginning,

and I am sure no one could tell you that they are my first painted studies.

Painting is such a joy to me!

It is now just two years since I began to draw in the Borinage.

This week, I have painted some rather large studies in the wood.

The one which I believe succeeded best,

is of nothing but a piece of dug up earth after a pouring rain.

The other study in the wood is of some large green beech trunks

on a stretch of ground covered with dry sticks

and the little figure of a girl in white.

The difficulty was to make it so that one can breathe and walk around in it,

and smell the fragrance of the wood.

For two weeks now, I have painted from early morning till late at night.

If I continue this way, it would be too expensive as long as I don't sell.

But, I no longer stand helplessly in front of nature.

In the woods yesterday, towards evening,

I was busy painting some rather sloping ground

covered with dry, molded beech leaves.

This ground was light and dark reddish brown

made more so by the shadows of trees

casting, more or less, dark streaks over it.

The problem was, and I found it very difficult,

to get the depth of colour,

the enormous force and solidity of that ground.

And while painting it, I perceived for the very first time,

how much light there still was in that dusk.

To keep that light, and at the same time,

the glow and depth of that rich colour.

Behind that brownish red soil,

is a sky, very delicate, bluish grey, warm, hardly blue, all aglow.

And against it all, is a holy border of green

and a network of little stems.

A few figures of wood gatherers

are wandering about like dark masses of mysterious shadows.

The white cap of a woman bending to reach a dry branch

stands out suddenly against the deep red-brown of the ground.

A shirt catches the light.

A shadow is cast.

A dark silhouette of a man appears above the underbrush.

A white bonnet, a cap, a shoulder,

the bust of a woman moulds itself against the sky.

Those figures are large and full of poetry.

In the twilight of that deep, shadowy tone,

they appear as enormous terracottas being modelled in a studio.

While painting it, I said to myself:

I must not go away before there is something of an autumn evening in it.

Something mysterious, something serious.

But, as this effect does not last long, I had to paint quickly.

The figures were put in at once with a few strong strokes of a firm brush.

It struck me how sturdily those little stems were rooted in the ground.

I began painting them with a brush,

but because the surface was already so heavily covered,

a brushstroke was lost in it.

Then, I squeezed the roots and trunks in from the tube,

and modelled it a little with a brush.

Yes, now they stand there, rising from the ground, strongly rooted in it.

And I am glad I haven't learned painting.

Because, then I might have learnt to pass by such effects as this.

The laws of colour are utterly beautiful,

just because they are not accidental.

In the same way that people nowadays

no longer believe in fantastic miracles;

no longer believe in a god,

who capriciously and despotically flies from one thing to another;

they begin to feel more respect, and admiration for, and faith in nature.

My greatest desire is to make beautiful things.

But, making beautiful things

cost trouble, and disappointment and perserverence.

And I don't want that beauty to come from the material,

but from within myself.

I regret that the woman with whom I live understands neither books nor art.

If I did not look for art in reality, I should probably find her stupid.

Sometimes, I cannot believe that I am only thirty years old.

I feel so much older.

One begins to see more clearly that life is only a kind of sowing time.

And the harvest is not here.

The money from you is absolutely indispensable for me

as long as I haven't found employment.

For the moment, my entire supply of ready cash consists of a postal order

for one guilder and twenty-three and a half cents torn in two

which has already been refused once.

If we could only find somebody who would buy my work!

I must start painting again.

I can't do without colours and colours are expensive!

The sea which I love enormously, must be brushed in oil,

otherwise one cannot get hold of it.

I hope to keep courage.

And I hope that perhaps a certain frenzy and rage for work

may carry me through, like a ship is sometimes

thrown over a cliff by a wave, and can make use of a storm

to save herself from wrecking.

If I fail, what does my loss mean?

I don't care so much after all.

But, one generally tries to make one's life bear fruit

instead of letting it wither.

I do not intend to spare myself,

nor to avoid emotions or difficulties.

I don't care much whether I live a longer or shorter time.

I see it all from afar

like a dark shadow.

I am carrying out my plans of going to Drenthe,

whether the woman goes with me or not.

With all her damned faults, she will always be good in my eyes.

and though, I do not doubt for a moment that I have the same kind of faults,

I hope I shall not change in this respect,

that when I see a poor woman with a swollen belly,

I shall always try to do what I can to help her.

The right thing would have been to marry her.

But I admit, that she herself makes it impossible.

She is not nice. She is not good

But neither am I.

And, there was a serious affection, just the way we were,

notwithstanding everything.

Dear Theo,

we have gloomy, rainy days here.

I have worked and economised,

and yet, I have not been able to avoid getting into debt.

I have been faithful to the woman, and yet I had to leave her.

I have hated intrigues, and yet I have neither credit nor any money.

I cannot help asking myself if I must not tell you,

Leave me to my fate. There is no help for it.

It is too much for one person.

As long as the weather was fine, I did not mind the troubles

because I saw so many beautiful things here.

But now that it has been pouring incessantly,

I see more clearly how I have got stuck here,

and how handicapped I am.

I came here in too much of a hurry,

and only now I feel what I lack.

Now that I acted rather harshly, but what else could I do?

I feel inexpressibly melancholy without my work to distract me,

and I must work, and work hard.

I must forget myself in my work.

Otherwise, it will crush me.

One finds the most wonderful types of non-conformist clergymen

with pig faces and three-cornered hats in this naive, desolate moor.

Theological discussions are held with the farmers.

How is it possible for such absurdities to exist in a country like this?

Why couldn't they look out of the window or smoke their pipes,

or at least behave reasonably, as for instance, there are pigs

which make no disturbance whatever though they are pigs,

and are in place in these surroundings, and in harmony with them.

But, before the clergymen of the type I saw here,

reach the cultural and rational level of ordinary pigs,

they must improve considerably.

I do not say far, very far, be it for me to say,

that I myself have the 'rayon blanc'

but I am not ashamed to say that it exists.

This white light,

and that I seek it,

and only this do I consider simplicity.

My dear brother,

for several reasons, I made up my mind to go home for a while.

Drenthe is splendid.

But, one's being able to stay there depends on

whether one is able to stand the loneliness.

I am sick at heart about the fact that coming back after a two-year absence,

though the welcome home was kind and cordial in every respect,

basically there has been no change whatever.

Not the slightest.

And, what I must call the most extreme blindness and ignorance

as to the insight in our mutual position.

Father does not know remorse like you and me,

and any man who is human.

Father believes in his own righteousness.

Whereas, you and I and other human creatures

are imbued with the feeling that we consist of the errors and efforts

of the lost souls.

The good within father, is wrongly applied,

so that it acts like evil.

Because, the light within him is black,

and spreads darkness.

My very grief over so much proves to me

that I myself have definitely down with the systems in question

I have suffered from them.

But in my heart of hearts, I no longer belong to that side of life.

Our youth was gloomy and frustrating.

In the future,

let us seek that soft light, for which I know no better name,

than the white ray of light or the good.

It is dreary outside.

The fields, a mass of lumps of black earth and some snow,

with mostly days of mist and mire

in between the red sun in the evening and in the morning.

Crows, withered grass and faded, rotting green-black shrubs,

and the branches of the poplars and willows, rigid like wire

against the dismal sky.

This is what I see in passing and it is quite in harmony with the interiors.

Very gloomy, these dark winter days.

It is also in harmony with the physiognomy

of the peasants and the weavers here.

A weaver who works steadily, makes a net profit of four and a half guilden a week.

And when he takes it to the manufacturer, he is often told

that he cannot take another piece home for a few weeks.

So, not only are wages low, but work is pretty scarce too.

Consequently, there's something agitated and restless about these people.

I am a peasant painter.

I am content with the food, drink, clothes and board

which the peasants themselves are content with.

Everyday, I am more convinced that people who do not first wrestle with nature,

never succeed.

I personally know no other way than to wrestle with nature

long enough for her to tell me her secret.

I have no other wish than to live

deep, deep, in the heart of the country and to paint rural life.

Painting is a faith,

and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

In painting, one conquers by perseverence

and not by making concessions.

I intend to make a series of scenes from rural life.

In short, peasants at home.

Painting peasant life is a serious thing,

and I should reproach myself if I did not try to make pictures

which will rouse various thoughts

in those who seriously think about art and life.

One must paint the peasants as being one of them,

as feeling, thinking as they do.

I feel a power in me which I must develop.

A fire that I may not quench, but must keep ablaze,

though I don't know to what end it will lead me.

I shouldn't be surprised if it were a gloomy one.

I am working on The Potato Eaters.

What I am trying to do most is bring life into it.

Yes, I have tried to emphasise that those people,

eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth

with those very hands they put in the dish,

and so it speaks of manual labour,

and how they have honestly earned their food.

I have wanted to give the impression

of a way of life so different from us so-called civilized people.

Therefore, I am not at all anxious for anyone to like it or admire it at once.

It might prove to be a real peasant picture.

I know it is.

One of the most beautiful things to do is to paint darkness,

which nevertheless, has light in it.

Accustoming oneself to poverty,

seeing how a soldier or a labourer lives and thrives in wind and weather,

with ordinary people's fare and dwelling,

is just as practical as earning a few guilden more a week.

After all, one is not in the world for one's own comfort,

and one does not need to be better off than one's neighbour.

I feel that the future will probably make me more ugly and rough,

and I foresee that a certain poverty will be my fate.

But, I shall be a painter.

I shall be poor.

I shall remain human.

But I am making progress,

and I firmly believe, that with perseverence,

I shall win.

You know those three oaks at the bottom of the garden at home?

I have persevered and plodded on them for the fourth time.

The difficulty was to model them, and give them form, colour and tone.

Then in the evening, I took it to an acquaintance of mine

where we put it on the wall.

Well, never before was I so convinced that I shall succeed

in calculating my colours so that it is in my power to get the right effect.

Though that man has money and he liked it,

I felt such a glow of courage when I saw that it was good,

that I could not sell it.

But, as he liked it very much, I gave it to him, and he accepted.

Van Gogh is such an impossible name for many foreigners to pronounce!

If it should happen that my pictures found their way to France or England,

then the name would certainly be murdered.

Whereas, the whole world can pronounce the name "Vincent" correctly.

Dear Theo,

I am in Antwerp and have already seen a few things.

The museum of old pictures and the museum of modern art.

It will never hurt knowing Antwerp a bit.

It will probably prove to be, like everything else, namely disillusioning,

but with its own atmosphere.

Tomorrow, I shall start working in the Academy's painting class.

It is an attempt to come into contact with people.

To paint a great deal from the model, that is what I have to do.

And, it is the only thing that seriously helps to make progress.

When I compare a study of mine with those of other fellows,

it is curious to see that they have absolutely nothing in common.

But when I compare myself with them,

I find something stiff and awkward about me

as if I've been in prison for ten years.

and the cause of this is that I have had a difficult and harassed life.

Much care and sorrow, and no friends.

I must change my outward appearance somewhat.

I'm having my teeth seen to.

There are at least ten teeth that I have either lost or may lose,

and that is too many and too troublesome.

And besides, it makes me look over forty, which is not to my advantage.

But anyway, painting has the secret of being able to give one a second youth.

I do not intend to spare myself,

nor to avoid emotions or difficulties.

I don't care much whether I live a longer or shorter life.

The world concerns me only in so far as I feel

a certain indebtedness and duty towards it,

because I have walked this earth for thirty years.

And, out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir

in the shape of drawings or paintings.

not made to please a certain taste in art,

but to express sincere human feeling.

Theo, do not be cross with me for having suddenly arrived like this.

I have thought about it so much, and I believe in this way we shall save time.

I won't say that an artist can get on here in Paris,

notwithstanding the many obstructions and diversions.

There's much to be seen, and much to experience.

In Antwerp, I did not know what the Impressionists were.

Now I have seen them. And though, not being one of the club,

I have much admired certain Impressionist pictures.

I have made a series of colour studies in painting.

I am trying to render intense colour, and not a grey harmony.

I have plenty of canvases. Anton Guy was very good to me.

But, his witch of a wife got wind of what was going on and opposed it.

And so, I am struggling with my life and progress in art.

My only anxiety is, how can I be of use in this world?

At times, I feel old and broken;

and yet, still enough of a lover not to be a real enthusiast of painting.

One must have ambition in order to succeed;

and ambition seems to me absurd.

I don't know what will come of it.

Above all, I should like to be less of a burden to you.

That is not impossible in the future.

For I hope I will make such progress,

that you will be able to show my work boldly, without compromising yourself.

Then I will take myself off somewhere down south,

to get away from the sight of so many painters that disgust me as men.

How does one become mediocre?

By compromising and making concessions;

today in this matter, tomorrow in another,

according to the dictates of the world;

by never contradicting the world; and by always following public opinion.

It seems to me almost impossible to work in Paris, unless one has

some place of retreat where one can recuperate,

and get one's tranquility and poise back.

Yes, I may be going to the south of France.

The land of blue tones and gay colours.

I am not an adventurer by choice, but by fate.

My dear brother, during the journey I thought of you at lease as much

as I did of the new country I was seeing.

I believe in the ultimate victory.

But will the artists themselves gain any advantages from it?

And will they see less troubled days?

I feel as though I was in Japan.

I say no more than that.

And mind you, I haven't seen anything in its usual splendour yet!

It is my constant hope that I'm not working for myself alone.

I believe in the absolute necessity of a new art of colour,

of design, and of the artistic life.

If we work in that faith,

it seems to me there is a chance that we do not hope in vain.

I've been working in the open air in an orchard.

Lilac ploughland, a reed fence,

two pink peach tress against a sky of glorious blue and white.

Probably the best landscape I've done.

I had just brought it home,

when I received from our sister, an obituary in memory of Mauve.

something, I don't know what, took hold of me and brought a lump to my throat.

Oh never think the dead are dead!

As long as there are men alive, the dead will live.

The dead will live.

That's how I feel it. Nothing sadder than that.

I am up to my ears in work.

For the trees are in blossom, and I want to paint a provincial orchard

of outstanding gaeity.

I fasten my easel with pegs driven into the ground, and work inspite of the wind.

It's too lovely!

It seems to me more and more that people are the roots of everything.

And though it will always be a melancholy thought,

that you yourself are not in real life.

I mean, that it's more worthwhile to work in flesh and blood itself,

than in paint or plaster;

more worthwhile to make children than pictures or carry out business.

I shall go on working.

And here and there, among my work, there will be things that will last.

But who will be the figure painter,

what Claude Monet is to landscape?

The painter of the future will be a colourist such as has never yet existed.

We must not judge God from this world.

It's just a study that didn't come off.

It's only a master who can make such a blunder.

And this life of ours, so much criticized and for such good reasons.

We must not take it for anything but for what it is.

And so, go on hoping that in some other life,

we'll see something better than this.

I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend.

A man who dreams great dreams.

I paint him as faithfully as I can to begin with,

but the picture is not finished yet.

To finish it, I exaggerate the fairness of the hair,

I get to orange tones, chromes and pale lemon yellow.

Beyond the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the main room,

I paint, infinity.

A plain background of the richest, intensest blue that I can contrive.

And by this simple combination,

the bright head, illuminated against a rich blue background,

acquires a mysterious effect.

Like a star in the depth of an azure sky.

And, the nice people will only see the exaggeration as caricature.

Here's a picture of the yellow house.

Alorn in the square, as you come into town, with a building at the back.

Today, I have taken the right wing which contains four rooms,

or rather, two rooms with two cabinets.

I hope I've landed on my feet this time.

You know, yellow outside, white inside, with all the sun

so that I shall see my canvases in a bright interior.

Meanwhile, if you approve, I shall furnish the bedroom,

either hiring or buying it for cash down.

I should like to share the little studio with someone.

Perhaps, Gauguin will come south.

My dear Gauguin,

I wanted to let you know, that I have just rented a four-room house

here in Arles.

And that it would seem to me

that if I could find another painter, inclined to work in the south;

and who, like myself, would be sufficiently absorbed in his work;

to be able to resign himself to living like a monk;

who goes to the brothel once a fortnight;

who, for the rest, is tied up in his work,

and not very willing to waste his time;

it might be a good job.

Being all alone, I am suffering a little under this isolation.

Theo,

if Ganguin were willing to join me,

I think it will be a step forward for us.

It would establish us squarely as the explorers of the south,

and nobody could complain of that.

I am writing to you from Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer

on the shores of the Mediterranean.

One night, I went for a walk by the sea, along the empty shore.

It was not gay. But, neither was it sad.

It was beautiful.

The deep blue sky was flecked with clouds

of a blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt.

The others of a clearer blue,

like the blue whiteness of the milky way.

In the blue depth, the stars were sparkling,

greenish, yellow, white, pink

more brilliant, more sparkling gem-like than at home.

Now that I have seen the sea here,

I am absolutely convinced of the importance of staying in the Midi,

and of positively piling it on, exaggerating the colour.

You see things more Japanese, you feel colour differently.

The Japanese draw quickly, very quickly, like a lightning flash,

because their nerves are finer, their feelings simpler.

I've had a week's hard work among the cornfields in the full sun.

The result is some studies of cornfields, landscapes, and a sketch of a sower.

A ploughed field, a big field with clouds of violet earth

climbing toward the horizon.

A sower in blue and white.

Over it all, a yellow sky with a yellow sun.

Colour plays a very important part.

My lord, I do want to attack it seriously and make a tremendous picture of it.

Everyone will say that I work too fast.

Don't you believe a word of it.

Is it not emotion, the sincerity of one's feeling for nature that draws us?

And if the emotions are sometimes so strong

that one works without knowing one works,

when sometimes the strokes come with a continuity and a coherence,

like words in a speech or a letter,

then one must remember, that it has not always been so.

and that in time to come, there will again be hard days,

empty of inspiration,

so one must strike while the iron is hot, and put the forge bars on one side.

I know nothing.

But, it is just this feeling of not knowing,

that makes the real life we are actually living now,

like a one-way journey on a train.

You go fast, but cannot distinguish any object very clearly.

And above all, you do not see the engine.

So, at the end of my career I shall prove to be wrong,

so be it.

Then I shall find that not only the arts, but everything else were only dreams,

and that one has nothing at all oneself.

If we are as flimsy as that, so much the better for us.

For then there is nothing to be said

against the unlimited possibility of future existence.

Looking at the stars always makes me dream,

as simply as I dream over the black dots

representing towns and villages on a map.

Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky

be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen,

we take death to reach a star.

We cannot get to a star while we are alive,

anymore than we can take the train when we are dead.

So, to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer

are the celestial means of locomotion.

Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.

To die quietly of old age, would be to go there on foot.

We do not feel we are dying.

But we feel the truth that we are of small account.

A canvas I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas.

That, believe me my pretensions go no further, that is my right to paint;

my reason for painting, and by the lord, I have one!

I can very well do without God, both in my life and in my painting.

But I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I am;

which is my life; the power to create.

And if frustrated by the physical power,

a man tries to create thought instead of children,

he is still part of humanity.

Upto now, the loneliness hasn't worried me much,

because I have found a brighter sun.

If the storm within gets too loud, I take a glass too much to stun myself.

Now, painting is becoming a distraction for me,

like rabbit hunting for the crack-brained.

They do it to distract themselves.

My concentration becomes more intense,

my hand more sure.

That is why I almost dare swear to you, that my painting will improve,

because I have nothing left but that.

Last week, I did two portraits of my postman.

The good fellow, as he would not accept money,

cost more eating and drinking with me.

But that is a trifle evil considering that he posed very well.

The more I think it over, the more I feel

that there is nothing more artistic than to love people.

I always think that poetry is more terrible than painting,

though painting is a dirtier and a much more worrying job.

And then the painter never says anything.

He holds his tongue, and I like that too.

Just now, we are having a glorious, strong heat with no wind.

Just what I want. There is a sun.

A light, that for the want of a better word, I can only call yellow.

Pale sulphur yellow, pale golden lemon.

How lovely yellow is!

I am now in the fourth picture of sunflowers.

Fortunately for me, I do not hanker after victory anymore.

And all that I seek in painting is a way to make life bearable.

Oh my dear brother,

Sometimes I know so well what I want.

I still have a kind of concentrated power

which only asks to spend itself in work.

I must be allowed to stress my own personality in a portrait;

not only myself, but in Impressionists in general;

a simple worshipper of the external Buddha.

I have made the eyes slightly slanting like the Japanese.

I have just bought a dressing-table with everything necessary,

and my little room is complete.

You cannot imagine what peace of mind it gives me.

I shall end up not feeling lonesome in this house.

Hope is breaking for me vaguely on the horizon.

That hope, in intermittent flashes, like a lighthouse

which has sometimes comforted me during my solitary life.

I was wild to see my pictures in frames,

and I had ordered too many for my budget.

But I ventured to think that if you saw the studies,

you would say I was right to work at white heat as long as it was fine.

I had a new idea in my head.

This time, it's simply my bedroom.

Only here, colour is doing everything,

and gives by its simplification, a grander style to things.

It's suggestive here of rest or of sleep,

looking at the picture, or to rest the brain, or rather the imagination.

The walls are pale violet.

The floor is of red tiles.

The sheets and pillow very light greenish lemon.

The coverlet scarlet. The window green.

The toilette table orange.

The basin blue.

The door lilac. And that is all.

The broad lines of the furniture again must express inviolable rest.

The frame, as there is no white in the picture, will be white.

This, by way of revenge, for the enforced rest I was obliged to take.

Dear Theo,

Gauguin has arrived in good health.

We have loads of work to do.

He and I intend to take a tour of the brothels pretty soon,

so as to study them.

You cannot imagine how much it pleases me

to have such good company as Gauguin's.

If we can stand the siege, victory will come to us one day.

Joy in public, sorrow at home.

Supposing that the fight is still before us,

we must just try to mature quietly.

Gauguin gives me the courage to imagine things.

and certainly things from the imagination take on a more mysterious character.

We talk a lot. Our arguments are terribly electric.

I think myself that Gauguin is a little out of sorts

with the good town of Arles;

the little yellow house where we work;

and, especially, with me.

There are grave difficulties to overcome,

for him, as well as for me.

But, these difficulties are more within ourselves, than outside.

Dear Theo,

I write to you in full possession of my faculties,

not as a madman, but as the brother you know.

This is the truth.

A certain number of people here, addressed a petition to the mayor

describing me as a man not fit to be at liberty!

What a staggering blow between the eye,

to find so many people here cowardly enough to join together against one man!

And that man ill!

I think about all the people I know, all day and all night long.

To suffer without complaining is one lesson that has to be learned in life.

When I get out, I shall be able to go my own little way again.

And soon, the fine weather will be coming again;

and I will start on the orchards in bloom.

No harm has come to me.

No evil exists in this best of worlds in which everything is for the best.

During my illness, I saw again every room in the house at home.

Every path, every plant in the garden, the views of the fields outside,

the neighbours, down to a magpie's nest in a tall acacia in the graveyard.

There's no one left to remember all this but Mother and me.

The best we can do is to make fun of our petty griefs,

and, in a way, of the great griefs of human life too.

I'd kept myself going on coffee and alcohol. I admit all that.

But all the same, it is true that to attain the high yellow note

I obtained last summer, I really had to be pretty well keyed up.

To produce the pictures in the furnace heat of the Midi!

Now, I feel a certain undercurrent of vague sadness difficult to define.

I am troubled by shapeless fears.

My God, those anxieties!

Who can live in the modern world without catching his share of them!

You can exhibit the pictures of the sunflowers.

You will see that this is a kind of painting that rather changes to the eye,

and takes on richness the longer you look at it.

Perhaps as an attempt to get all the music of the colour into La Berceuse.

It's badly painted but all the same.

Gauguin himself liked the sunflowers better later on,

when he'd been looking at them for a long while.

You must realise that if you arrange them this way,

say La Berceuse in the middle and the two canvases of sunflowers

to the right and left, it makes a sort of triptych

And then the yellow and orange tones of the head will gain in brilliance

by the proximity of the yellow wings and the paintings seen together.

I've no illusions about myself anymore.

There are moments when I'm twisted by enthusiasm or madness or prophecy

like a Greek oracle on a tripod.

Just as the waves pound against the sullen hopeless cliffs,

I feel a tempest desire to embrace something.

A woman of the domestic hen type.

One must take this for what it is, the effect of hysterical overexcitement,

rather than a vision of actual reality.

Let's work on very quietly.

You will do your duty and I will do mine.

We have both already paid in ways other than in words,

and at the end of the road, we may quietly come together again.

If you saw the olive groves just now!

The leaves - old silver and silver turning to green -

against the blue and the orange-coloured ploughed earth.

It's like the pollard willows of our Dutch meadows

or the oak bushes of our dunes.

That is to say the rustle of an olive grove has something very secret in it,

and immensely old.

It is too beautiful for us to dare to paint it,

or be able to imagine it.

Now, to get up heat enough to melt that gold again,

those flower tones. It isn't everybody who can do it.

It needs the whole and entire force and concentration of a single individual.

I am doing an arrieux of pink flowering chestnuts

and the little cherry tree in flower, with the wisteria plant

and a path in the park splashed with light and shade.

Now, society being what it is,

we naturally cannot wish that it should conform to our personal needs.

And so, though I am very glad to be going to Saint Remy,

nevertheless it would be fair that a man like myself

to shove them into the foreign legion.

All through my life, I have sought something other than a martyr's career,

for which I am not cut out.

Dear Theo,

I think I've done well to come here.

I am losing the vague dread, the fear of the thing.

And little by little, I can come to look upon madness as a disease like any other.

The fear and horror of madness that I used to have,

has already lessened a great deal.

And though you continually hear terrible howls and cries,

the people here get to know each other very well,

and help each other when their attacks come on.

When I am working in the garden, they all come to look.

I assure you, they have the discretion and manners to leave me alone,

more so than the good people of Arles for instance.

If I had not seen other lunatics close up,

I should not have been able to free myself from dwelling on it constantly.

There is someone here who's been shouting and talking like me all the time.

He thinks he hears voices and words in the echoes of the corridors.

Probably because, the nerves of the ear are diseased and too sensitive.

And in my case, it was my sight as well as my hearing.

Then the shock was such that it sickened me even to move,

and nothing would have pleased me more than never to have woken up again.

I find it queer that I saw it like this from between the iron bars of a cell.

When a man comes out of prison, after having been there a long time,

there would be moments when he will miss his prison,

because he finds himself at a loss now that he is at liberty;

so called I suppose because the grinding daily task of earning a living,

hardly leaves any liberty at all.

I am now trying to recover like a man who meant to commit suicide,

and finding the water too cold, tries to regain the bank.

I feel the desire to renew myself and to try to apologise for the fact,

that my pictures are, after all, almost a cry of anguish.

Although in the rustic sunflower, they may symbolise gratitude.

I have drawn that Pieta by Delacroix without taking a single measurement.

And yet, there are those four hands and arms in the foreground of it,

gestures and postures not exactly easy or simple.

I know well that healing comes if one is brave from within,

through profound resignation to suffering and death;

through the surrender of your own will and of your self love.

But it is of no use to me.

I love to paint, to see people and things everywhere

that makes our life artificial, if you like.

At present, this horror of life is less acute.

But, I have no will, hardly any desire or none at all;

and hardly any wish for anything belonging to ordinary life;

almost no desire to see my friends,

although I keep thinking about them.

I shall count myself very happy if I can manage to work enough to earn my living.

For it worries me a lot when I think I've done so many pictures and drawings

without ever selling one.

I'm always filled with remorse

terribly so, when I think of my work that is so little in harmony

with what I would have liked to do.

If in some month or other, it should be too difficult

to send me paint and canvas etc, then do not send them.

For believe me, it is better to live than to work at art in the abstract.

Yesterday, I began to work again on a thing that I see from my window.

A reaper. The study is all yellow, terribly thickly painted.

But the subject was fine and simple.

For I see in this reaper a vague figure fighting like a devil

in the midst of the heat to get to the end of his task.

I see in him the image of death,

in a sense, that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping.

But, there is nothing sad in this death.

It goes its way in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything

with a light of pure gold.

I think it will be one of those you keep at home.

It is an image of death as the great book of nature speaks of it.

But, what I have thought is the almost smiling.

It is all yellow, except a line of violet hills.

A pale, fair yellow.

I am sending you my own portrait.

You must look at it for some time.

You will see, I hope, that my face is much calmer.

Though, it seems to me that my look is vaguer than before.

I have tried to make it simple.

The olives with a white cloud and a background of mountains,

as well as the moonrise and the night effect,

are exaggerations from the point of view of arrangement.

Their lines are warped as in old wood.

The olives are more in character as in the other study.

And I've tried to express the time of day when you see the green rose beetles

and the cicadas flying about in the heat.

Unfortunately, there are no vineyards here.

But for that, I should have done nothing else this autumn.

On the other hand, the olive trees are very characteristic,

and I am struggling to catch them.

They are old silver; sometimes with more blue in them,

sometimes greenish, bronzed, fading white, above a soil

which is yellow, pink, violet-tinted or orange, to dull red ochre.

Very difficult though. Very difficult.

But that suits me,

and induces me to work wholly in gold or silver.

And, perhaps, one day I shall do a personal impression of them,

like what the sunflowers were for the yellow.

Altogether, it is difficult to leave a country before you have done something

to prove that you have felt and loved it.

For the moment, I am working on a picture of a path between the mountains

and a little brook forcing its way between the stones.

The rocks are of a plain violet-gray or pink,

with, here and there, palm bushes in a kind of broom.

It has all kinds of colours.

And the brook in the foreground, white and foaming like soap suds;

and farther on, reflecting the blue sky.

It is basically true, that a painter as a man,

is too absorbed in what his eyes see,

and is not sufficiently master of the rest of his life.

Please, ask Mr Aurier not to write anymore articles on my painting.

Insist upon this, that to begin with, he is mistaken about me.

Since I am too overwhelmed with grief to be able to face publicity,

sucess is about the worst thing that can happen.

I have led too hard a life to die for it,

or to lose the power to work.

My surroundings here, begin to weigh on me more than I can say.

My word, I have been patient for more than a year.

I need air.

I feel overwhelmed with boredom and grief.

This morning, I saw the country again.

What things I still could have done here!

It would be ungrateful to curse the Midi.

I leave it with great grief.

With a handshaking thought,

Your Brother, Vincent.

Dear Theo,

Auverre is very beautiful.

Among other things, a lot of old thatched roofs which are getting rare.

I've seen Doctor Gachet who gives me the impression of being rather eccentric.

But, his experience as a doctor must keep him balanced enough, to combat

the nervous trouble from which he certainly seems to me to be suffering,

at least as seriously as I.

But he is older and lost his wife several years ago.

But, he is very much the doctor,

and his profession and faith still sustain him.

I am working at his portrait.

It has the same sentiment as the self- portrait I did when I left for this place.

I am completely engrossed by these huge plains of standing corn backed by hills.

They are vast as the sea.

Very delicate yellow, very pale green and very soft mauve.

Part of the land is under cultivation, dotted with flowering potato plants.

The sky is blue, with white, pink and violet tints.

I believe I am capable of painting the scene.

I think we must not count on Doctor Gachet at all.

Firstly, he is sicker than I am, I think; or shall we say, just as much.

Now, when a blind man leads another blind man,

then they both fall into the ditch.

It is difficult to know oneself.

But, it isn't easy either to paint oneself.

I should like to have a soul less unquiet than mine, which is foundering.

I feel exhausted.

So much for me.

I feel this is the lot which I accept and which will not change.

And the prospects grow darker.

I see no happy future at all.

I generally try to be very cheerful.

But my life is also threatened at the very root.

And my steps are wavering.

Once back here, I set to work again,

though the brush almost slipped from my fingers.

But knowing exactly what I wanted, I've painted three more big canvases since.

They are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies.

And I didn't need to go out of my way to try to express sadness,

and extreme loneliness.

Though the truth is, we can only make our pictures speak.

But yet, my dear brother,

there is this that I have always told you,

and I repeat it once more with all the earnestness

that can be expressed by the effort of a mind

diligently fixed on trying to do as well as possible.

I tell you again, that I shall always consider you

to be something more than a simple dealer in paintings;

that, through my mediation, you have your part

in the actual production of some canvases;

which will retain their calm, even in the catastrophe.

For this is what we have got to.

This is all, or at least, the main thing that I have to tell you

at a moment of comparative crisis.

My own work - I am risking my life for it.

And, my reason is half-founded because of it.

That's all right.

But you are not among the dealers in man,

and you can still choose your side,

acting with humanity.

But, what is the use?

Wish I knew it!