| | 48 letters relate to business - selling... | Excerpt length: shorter longer | |
| Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh
(early April 1884)
... of things toward the beginning of March.
Your reply was evasive, it certainly was not
straightforward, I mean it was not something like this:
“Vincent, I see the reasonableness of a number of your
grievances, and I approve of your proposal to make an agreement
that every month you will send me a number of drawings that you
consider equal in value to the 150 francs I am in the habit of
sending you, so that you will be able to look upon this money
as earned money.”
Most positively I noticed that you did not simply write
something like this!
Well, I thought, towards the beginning of March I shall send
him some things and wait for the result. Then I sent you nine
watercolours and five pen drawings, I wrote you I had yet a
sixth pen drawing and the painted study of the old tower ,
which at the time you said you were eager for.
But now that I see that your expressions remain as vague
as ever, I cannot but tell you without reserve that I do
not consider... | Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh
(c. 1 November 1884)
... I shall be
worth more than I am now.
Then later on, when I am somewhat better off, I shall be
glad to try to give you new hints about that problem of
reforming the art trade, about which I certainly have my own
ideas, arising from my own experience with what hinders a
painter's progress and with the kind of things that sometimes
make a painter's life unbearable.
I don't think this the right moment to write much about it.
I only say, If you or I need money to make
progress, and if for financial reasons we can only work at half
speed at the moment, we must try to get that money and plod on
till we have it. Not argue, “We are confronting a
half-year that will be financially bad, so make the best of
it.” What one must have, can be found.
I have written to Mauve and Tersteeg. If you back me, so
much the better.
Ever yours, Vincent
Don't misunderstand me, however, I have not written to Mauve
or Tersteeg in a complaining... | Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh
(2nd half June 1885)
... how to
get to the end of the month.
At times it makes me quite melancholy that the result is
always “unsaleable.”
But I go on, and harden myself against it.
Others have had to bear it too. Goodbye,
Ever yours, Vincent
Hasn't there been a Lhermitte number this May?
I repeat - work in spite of all indifference is not
easy to keep up, but what is easy isn't worth much.
Painting rural life is a thing that will keep its value, and
the fight won by others continues all the same. And one
can win it anew. Far from there being too many painters of
rural life - in my opinion it would be better to have some
hundreds more.
It is no bad idea that in France they are decorating the
town halls with scenes from rural life, like a number of
pictures at the Salon. I suppose they will carry it still
further.
But - it is even better that the pictures of peasants get
into houses in magazines and other reproductions,
directly... | Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh
(2nd half June 1885)
... but act according to your
discretion. If I could earn something with my work, if we had
some firm ground, be it ever so little, under our feet for our
daily existence, and if then the desire to become an artist
took for you the form of, let me say, Hennebeau in Germinal, [A
famous novel by Zola] discounting all difference in age, etc. -
what pictures you could still make then! The future is always
different from what one expects, so one never can be sure. The
drawback of painting is that, if one does not sell one's
pictures, one still needs money for paint and models in order
to make progress. And that drawback is a bad thing. But for the
rest, painting and, in my opinion. especially the painting of
rural life, gives serenity, though one may have all kinds of
worries and miseries on the surface of life. I mean painting is
a home and one does not experience that homesickness,
that peculiar feeling Hennebeau had. That passage I copied for
you lately had struck me particularly,... | Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh
(late October 1885)
... and superficially people criticize.
You must just let me maintain my pessimism about the art
trade as it is these days, for it does not at all include
discouragement. This is my way of reasoning. Supposing I am
right in considering that curious haggling about prices of
pictures to be more and more like the bulb trade. I repeat,
supposing that like the bulb trade at the end of the last
century, so the art trade, along with other branches of
speculation at the end of this century, will disappear as they
came, namely rather quickly. The bulb trade may disappear - the
flower-growing remains. And I for myself am contented, for
better or for worse, to be a small gardener, who loves his
plants.
Just now my palette is thawing and the frigidness of the
first beginning has disappeared.
It is true, I often blunder still when I undertake a thing,
but the colours follow of their own accord, and taking one
colour as a starting-point, I have clearly before my mind what
must follow,... |
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