Excerpts from Vincent van Gogh’s Letters

These letters have made a significant contribution in studying and analyzing the life of the great artist and individual whose downturns in life made him put all that he felt into his work. These letters show that Vincent was a gifted individual highly dependent on his brother for his emotional as well as financial support.

Van Gogh to his brother Theo, July 21, 1882

"Art is jealous, she doesn’t like taking second place and indisposition. Hence I shall humor her. ... What I want and have as my aim is infernally difficult to achieve, and yet I don’t think I am raising my sights too high. I want to do drawings that touch some people."

September 3, 1882

"I said to myself while I was doing it: don’t let me leave before there is something of the autumnal evening in it, something mysterious, something important. However -- because this effect doesn’t last -- I had to paint quickly, putting the figures in all at once, with a few forceful strokes of a firm brush. It had struck me how firmly the saplings were planted in the ground -- I started on them with the brush, but because the ground was already impasted, brush strokes simply vanished into it. Then I squeezed roots and trunks in from the tube and modeled them a little with the brush.

In a way I am glad that I never learned painting. In all probability I would then have learned to ignore such effects as this. Now I can say to myself, this is just what I want. If it is impossible, it is impossible, but I’m going to try it even though I don’t know how it ought to be done."

October 22, 1882

"What is drawing? How does one come to it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How is one to get through that wall -- since pounding at it is of no use? In my opinion one has to undermine that wall, filing through it steadily and patiently."

October 1884

"You don’t know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas, which says to the painter: you can’t do a thing ... Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of you can’t once and for all."

"A gray woven from red, blue, yellow, off-white & black threads -- a blue broken by a green and an orange, red or yellow thread -- are quite unlike plain colors, that is, they are more vibrant, and primary colors seem hard, cold and lifeless beside them."

July 1885

"... a Parisian who has learned his drawing at the academy, will always convey the limbs and the structure of the body in the same way -- sometimes charming, accurate in proportion and anatomical detail. But when Israëls, or say, Daumier or Lhermitte, draw a figure, one gets much more of a sense of the shape of the body, and yet -- and that’s the very reason I’m pleased to include Daumier - the proportions will sometimes be almost arbitrary, the anatomy and structure often anything but correct in the eyes of the academicians. But it will live. And Delacroix too, in particular."

About his mother Vincent wrote to Theo

"I am working on a portrait of Mother, because the black-and-white photograph annoys me so. Ah, what portraits could be made from nature with photography and painting! I always hope that we are still to have a great revolution in portraiture."

Vincent’s long time friend, the painter Emile Bernard wrote about the funeral:

"The coffin was already closed. I arrived too late to see the man again who had left me four years ago so full of expectations of all kinds…"

Gauguin wrote in a letter to Theo

"Vincent and I can absolutely not live together without turmoil, because of our incompatible characters, and both he and I need quietness for our work."

His sister Elisabeth wrote about Vincent

"Vincent’s brothers and sisters felt instinctively, with the delicate sensitiveness of children, that their brother preferred to be alone. If he had a vacation from boarding-school, he sought not their companionship, but, rather solitude."

Vincent, on being interrogated by the police after shooting himself

"What I have done is nobody’s business. I am free to do what I like with my own body."

Vincent, in one of his letters to his mother when his nephew was born

"I imaging that, like me, your thoughts are much with Jo and Theo: how glad I was when the News came that it had ended well: I should have greatly preferred him to call the boy after Father, of whom I have been thinking so much these days, instead of after me; but seeing it has now been done, I started right away making a picture for him, to hang in the bedroom, big branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky."

Encyclopedia Britannica says about the artist

" His work, all of it produced during a period of only 10 years, hauntingly conveys through its striking color, coarse brushwork, and contoured forms the anguish of a mental illness that eventually resulted in suicide."

In his memoirs Gauguin wrote regarding Vincent’s work

"With all his yellow on violet, all his painting with complementary colors, which he did in an unsystematic way, he got no further than incomplete, soft, monotonous harmonies; the clarion call was lacking. I undertook the task of showing him the way…"