Letter B14 Arles, c. 4 August 1888
My dear comrade Bernard,
I see I forgot to answer your question as to whether Gauguin is still in Pont-Aven. Yes, he is still there, and if you should like to write to him, I am inclined to think he will be pleased. He has been staying there till now, but he will probably join me here before long, as soon as he himself or both of us can get the money for the journey.
I don鈥檛 believe that this question of the Dutch painters, which we are discussing at the moment, is without interest.
As soon as virility, originality, naturalism of whatever kind come into question, it is very interesting to consult them.
But I must speak to you again first of all about yourself, the two still lifes you have done and the two portraits of your grandmother. Have you ever done anything better than that, and have you ever been more yourself and a personality? I think not. The profound study of the first thing which came to hand, of the first person who came along was enough to create really. Do you know why I like these three or four studies so much? Because of that unknown quality of deliberateness, of great wisdom, that inexpressible quality of being steady and firm and selfassured of which they give evidence. You have never been closer to Rembrandt, old fellow, than in these studies.
In Rembrandt鈥檚 studio that incomparable sphinx, Vermeer of Delft, found this extremely solid technique which has never been surpassed, which at present鈥?we are burning 鈥?to find. Oh, I know we are working and reasoning with colours, just as they were with chiaroscuro, tonal values.
But what do these differences matter, when the great thing after all is to express oneself strongly?
At present you are studying the methods of the Italian and German primitives, the symbolic significance which the abstract mystical drawing of the Italians may contain. Go ahead. I myself rather like that anecdote about Giotto.
There was a contest for painting some picture or other representing a Virgin. A lot of cartoons were submitted to the Administration of Fine Arts of the time. One of these cartoons, signed Giotto, was simply an oval, an egg shape. The Administration, perplexed 鈥?and confident 鈥?entrusted the Virgin in question to Giotto. I don鈥檛 know whether it is true or not, but I like that anecdote quite a lot.
However, let us return to Daumier and your grandmother.
When are you going to show us studies of such vigorous soundness again? I urgently invite you to do it, although I most certainly do not despise your researches relating to the property of lines in opposite motion - as I am not at all indifferent, I hope, to the simultaneous contrasts of lines, forms. The trouble is 鈥?you see, my dear comrade Bernard 鈥?that Giotto and Cimabue, as well as Holbein and Van Dyck, lived in an obeliscal 鈥?excuse the word 鈥?solidly framed society, architecturally constructed, in which each individual was a stone, and all the stones clung together,
forming a monumental society. When the socialists construct their logical social edifice 鈥?which they are still pretty far from doing 鈥?I am sure mankind will see a reincarnation of this society. But, you know, we are in the midst of downright laisser-aller and anarchy. We artists, who love order and symmetry, isolate ourselves and are working to define only one thing.
Puvis [de Chavannes] knows this all right, and when he, so just and so wise 鈥?forgetting his Elysian Fields 鈥?was so good as to descend amiably into the intimacy of our time, he painted a fine portrait indeed: the serene old man in the clear light of his blue interior, reading a novel with a yellow cover 鈥?beside him a glass of water with a watercolour brush and a rose in it. Also a fashionable lady, as de Goncourts have depicted them.
Now we see that the Dutch paint things just as they are, apparently without reasoning, just as Courbet painted his beautiful nude women. They painted portraits, landscapes, still lifes. Well, one can be stupider than that, and commit greater follies.
If we don鈥檛 know what to do, my dear comrade Bernard, then let鈥檚 do as they did if only not to let our rare intellectual power evaporate in sterile metaphysical meditations which cannot possibly put the chaos into a goblet, as chaos is chaotic for the very reason that it contains no glass of our caliber.
We can 鈥?and this was done by these Dutchmen who are so desperately naughty in the eyes of people with a system 鈥?we can paint an atom of the chaos, a horse, a portrait, your grandmother, apples, a landscape.
Why do you say Degas is impotently flabby? Degas lives like a small lawyer and does not like women, for he knows that if he loved them and fucked them often, he, intellectually diseased, would become insipid as a painter.
Degas鈥檚 painting is virile and impersonal for the very reason that he has resigned himself to be nothing personally but a small lawyer with a horror of going on a spree. He looks on while the human animals, stronger than himself get excited and fuck, and he paints them well, exactly because he doesn鈥檛 have the pretension to get excited himself.
Reubens! Ah, that one! he was a handsome man and a good fucker, Courbet too. Their health permitted them to drink, eat, fuck 鈥?As for you, my poor dear comrade Bernard, I already told you in the spring: eat a lot, do your military exercises well, don鈥檛 fuck too much; when you do this your painting will be all the more spermatic.
Ah! Balzac, that great and powerful artist, has rightly told us that relative chastity fortifies the modern artist. The Dutchmen were married men and begot children, a fine, very fine craftsmanship, and deeply rooted in nature.
One swallow does not make a summer. I don鈥檛 say that among your new Breton studies there are none which are virile and sound; I have not seen them yet, so I could not possibly discuss them. But what I have seen were those virile things: the portrait of your grandmother, those still lifes. But judging from your drawings, I have vague misgivings that your new studies will not have the same vigor, exactly in point of virility.
Those studies, which I am speaking about first, are the first swallow of your artistic spring.
If we want to be really potent males in our work, we must sometimes resign ourselves to not fuck much, and for the rest be monks or soldiers, according to the needs of our temperament. The Dutch, once more, had peaceful habits and a peaceful life, calm, well regulated.
Delacroix-ah! that man! 鈥撯