Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh (16 October 1888) ... shaping up. For today I
am all right again. My eyes are still tired but then I had
a new idea in my head and here is the sketch of it. Another size 30
canvas. This time it's just simply my bedroom ,
only here colour is to do everything, and giving by its
simplification a grander style to things, is to be suggestive
here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, looking
at the picture ought to rest the brain, or rather the
imagination.
The walls are pale violet. The floor is of red tiles.
The wood of the bed and chairs is the yellow of fresh
butter, the sheets and pillows very light greenish-citron.
The coverlet scarlet. The window green.
The toilet table orange, the basin blue.
The doors lilac.
And that is all - there is nothing in this room with its
closed shutters.
The squareness of the furniture again must express
inviolable rest. Portraits on the walls, and a mirror and a
towel and some clothes.
The frame - as there is no white in...
Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh (17 October 1888) ... nothing, only flat colours in harmony.
I do not know what I shall undertake next, for my eyes are
still tired even yet.
And in just such moments after hard work - and all the more
the harder it is - I feel my own noodle empty too, you
know.
And if I let myself go, nothing would be easier than to
detest what I have just done, and kick my foot through it a few
times, like old Cézanne. After all, why kick my foot
through it - let's leave the studies in peace, even if one sees
no good in them; and if we see something that may be called
good, well, so much the better.
And after all, don't let's meditate on good and bad too
deeply - they're always relative.
That is exactly the fault of the Dutch, to call one thing
absolutely good and another absolutely bad. Nothing in the
world is as hard and fast as that.
By the way, I have read Richepin's Césarine too;
there are some very good things in it, that march on the
retreating soldiers, how one feels their...
Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Paul Gauguin (17 October 1888) ... was like Japan yet! Childish, wasn't it?
Listen, the other day I wrote you that my eyesight was
strangely tired. All right, I rested for two and a half days,
and then set to work again, but without daring to go out into
the open air yet. I have done, still for my decoration, a size
30 canvas of my bedroom with the white deal furniture that you
know . Well, I enormously enjoyed doing this
interior of nothing at all. Of a simplicity à la
Seurat.
With flat tints, but brushed on roughly, with a thick
impasto, the walls pale lilac, the ground a faded broken red,
the chairs and the bed chrome yellow, the pillows and the sheet
a very pale green-citron, the blanket blood red, the washstand
orange, the washbasin blue, the window green. By means of all
these very diverse tones I have wanted to express an
absoluterestfulness, you see, and there is no
white in it at all except a little note produced by the mirror
with its black frame (in order to get...
Letter from Theo van Gogh to Vincent van Gogh (19 October 1888) ... I may read it. I am quite eager to know it.
It is very annoying that you have been having trouble with your
eyes. What can be the cause of that?
Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh (17 January 1889) ... still there? Don't let them get discouraged.
After my illness my eyes have naturally been very sensitive. I
have been looking at that “Croque-mort”
[undertaker] of De Haans, which he was good enough to send me
the photograph of. Well, it seems to me that there is a real
touch of Rembrandt in that figure, which seems to be lit up by
the reflection of a light coming from the open tomb in front of
which the croque-mort is standing like a sleepwalker.
It is done with great subtlety. I myself do not try to get
effects by means of charcoal, and De Haan has taken for his
medium this very charcoal, again a colourless substance.
I should like De Haan to see a study of mine of a lighted
candle and two novels (one yellow, the other pink) lying on an
empty chair (really Gauguin's chair), a size 30 canvas, in red
and green . I have just been working again
today on its pendant, my own empty chair, a white deal chair
with a pipe and a tobacco pouch . In these two
studies, as...