The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“Did I write to you about the storm I watched not long ago? The sea was yellowish, especially close to the shore. On the horizon a streak of light and above it immensely large dark grey clouds, from which one could see the rain coming down in slanting streaks. The wind blew the dust from the little white path among the rocks into the sea and shook the hawthorn bushes in bloom and the wallflowers that grow on the rocks. To the right, fields of young green corn, and in the distance the town, which, with its towers, mills, slate roofs, Gothic-style houses and the harbour below, between 2 jetties sticking out into the sea, looked like the towns Albert Dürer used to etch.”

This highly detailed description of the landscape in Ramsgate betrays Van Gogh’s painterly eye, even though it was written years before he decided to become a painter, reflecting Van Gogh’s Relationship with the Arts. In general, Van Gogh had a very verbose writing style, but his tendency to write full paragraphs about the landscape suggests his particular love of nature without having to state it explicitly.

“When I stood in the pulpit I felt like someone emerging from a dark vault underground into the friendly light of day, and it is a wonderful thought that wherever I shall go from this day forward I shall be preaching the Gospel.”

Van Gogh’s simile to describe his first experience preaching draws upon religious imagery of darkness giving way to light that is used in many places throughout The Bible. The profound hope that Van Gogh felt regarding the prospect of a clerical career is at its purest moment here. The certainty of the word “shall” indicates that, at this point, Van Gogh had no doubts that he would be preaching for the rest of his life.

“Ah—indeed we only pass through the earth, we only pass through life—we are strangers and pilgrims in the earth.”

The metaphor of life as a pilgrimage is one that Van Gogh would continue to ascribe to, even after he turned his back on organized Christianity. In his first sermon, however, it is emphasized over and over again in a strictly religious context. The resemblance between his determination to be a pilgrim for God, and then later, a pilgrim for art, is one of The Links Between Religious and Artistic Life throughout the text.

“It is my prayer and fervent desire that the spirit of my Father and Grandfather may rest upon me, and that it may be granted me to become a Christian and a Christian labourer, that my life may come to resemble, the more the better, those of the people I have mentioned above—for behold, the old wine is good and I do not desire new.”

Van Gogh’s devout religious convictions seem, at several points, to be tied to his desire to gain the approval of his father, reflecting the Tension Between Personal Ambition and Familial Duty in his life. As soon as his father made it absolutely clear that he would not give his approval, Van Gogh dropped his religious leanings altogether. The last part of this sentence refers to a parable from the Gospel of Luke.

“What preys on my mind is simply this one question: what am I good for, could I not be of service or use in some way, how can I become more knowledge-able and study some subject or other in depth?”

Throughout his letters, Van Gogh searches for a purpose tied to something larger than himself. Following his decision to quit religious work, a profound tone of insecurity colors his letters in this regard. His use of the verb “preys” conveys an existential terror at not having a purpose, as though it will consume and destroy him.

“I really do love Father and Mother, but it is quite a different feeling from the one I have for you or M. Father can’t feel for or sympathize with me, and I can’t settle into Father and Mother’s system, it is too stifling and would suffocate me.”

Van Gogh’s description of being “stifled” by his parents’ “system” emblemizes the theme of Tension Between Personal Ambition and Familial Duty. There is a real sense here that Van Gogh is actively struggling against the invisible barriers of what his father and mother expect from him. This struggle, as he so candidly states here, altered his love for his parents in permanent, painful ways.

“I have spared his feelings a hundred times & tolerated things that are little short of intolerable.”

While the first years of the letters tend to allude to Van Gogh’s fraught relationship with his father, by the time he moved back into the family home in Etten, he was ready to discuss the issue of the Tension Between Personal Ambition and Familial Duty bluntly with Theo. In his own estimation, Van Gogh was a victim of his father’s inflexibility and ignorance, although it should be noted that discussions of his family are some of the most subjective, and therefore reflective of Van Gogh’s personal experience of the situation.

“The difference between your case & mine is that in the first place you and she were considerably younger than [Sien] and I, and secondly, your future and mine are different, that is, I for my part ply a humble trade and you hold a position which of necessity requires you to keep up a certain style.”

As Van Gogh fully embraced his new identity as an artist, he considered his position in society to have been irrevocably altered. His relationship with Sien was symbolic of that shift, although his family members (including Theo) did not understand his logic on this point at all, and he continued to suffer under the Tension Between Personal Ambition and Familial Duty.

“Art demands dogged work, work in spite of everything and continuous observation. By dogged, I mean in the first place incessant labour, but also not abandoning one’s views upon the say-so of this person or that.”

Van Gogh viewed the work of an artist as both physical and moral laborer, and in this way he straddled the gap between the peasants he painted and his own family’s religious occupation. His stubbornness in the face of outside opinions would have disastrous consequences in his own lifetime, leaving him financially dependent on his brother forever, but would ultimately be the key to his legacy as a creator of timeless canvases. Van Gogh’s suspicion of trends illuminates Van Gogh’s Relationship with the Arts.

“I would imagine my remedy would be yours as well: to be out in the open, painting.”

Van Gogh sought out constant reassurance for his brother’s approval, especially in the particularly financially dire times. One of the ways in which he repeatedly did this was by suggesting that his brother, too, should become a painter. On first glance, this seems like a highly illogical thing for Van Gogh to have pushed, because if Theo became a painter, he would have lost his financial benefactor. However, Van Gogh’s insistence that this was a good idea speaks to his tendency to think emotionally, rather than pragmatically.

“The world concerns me only in so far as I owe it a certain debt and duty, so to speak, because I have walked this earth for 30 years, and out of gratitude would like to leave some memento in the form of drawings and paintings—not made to please this school or that, but to express a genuine human feeling.”

Although duty to his family was a force that informed the course of much of Van Gogh’s life, here he expresses a larger social duty to create art. His concern for conveying feelings appears throughout the text, and was, apparently, one of the biggest puzzles he wanted to solve as his skills improved.

“They shrink from taking me into the house as they might from taking in a large shaggy dog who is sure to come into the room with wet paws—and is so very shaggy. He will get in everyone’s way. And his bark is so loud. In short, he is a filthy beast.”

In the letter dated from the 15th of December, 1883, Van Gogh used this metaphor of the shaggy sheepdog to air all his complaints about his relationship with his family. It is clear that by this point, he viewed himself as a pariah within the family, and his choice of the dog as an avatar for himself is double-edged, because although some might view dogs negatively, they also have a loveable quality in the eyes of others. One can therefore interpret this metaphor as an attempt to garner sympathy from Theo, and by extension, modern readers.

“As far as saleability or unsaleability is concerned, that’s a dead horse I don’t intend to go on flogging.”

Van Gogh’s use of the idiom, “flogging a dead horse,” which had only come into use about three decades earlier, gives readers a sense of his colloquial speech. Here, it conveys his utter frustration with continued suggestions that he needed to always consider what paintings would make sales, reflecting Van Gogh’s Relationship with the Arts.

“One must paint peasants as if one were one of them, as if one felt and thought as they do.”

Van Gogh romanticized his proximity to the impoverished world of peasants, viewing it as an artistic calling to become like them. He understood this mission to be an evocation of Jean-François Millet, whom he idolized.

“Those docks are one huge Japonaiserie, fantastic, peculiar, unheard of—or at any rate, that’s one way of looking at them. I would love to take a walk there in your company some day, just to find out if we see things in the same way.”

Van Gogh’s fascination with ukiyo-e prints from Japan began to color his perception of the world around him, and in turn, inform his artistic style. His description of his walk along the docks in Antwerp conveys this cycle, and also harkens back to the earliest letters, in which he often expressed a longing to go on walks with Theo.

“In Antwerp I did not even know what the impressionists were, now I have seen them and though not being one of the club yet I have much admired certain impressionists’ pictures—Degas nude figure—Claude Monet landscape.”

In Paris, Van Gogh encounters the impressionists for the first time, in one of the collection’s most direct portrayals of Van Gogh’s Relationship with the Arts. In this moment, Van Gogh’s artistic vocabulary and body of references expand rapidly, corresponding to radical shifts in his own art.

“As for me—I feel the desire for marriage and children dwindling and now and then I’m rather depressed that I should be like that as I approach 35, when I ought to be feeling quite the opposite. And sometimes I blame it all on this rotten painting.”

By the time Van Gogh moved back to Paris, his relationship with women had altered radically from what it had been in his early 20s, with his conflicted feelings about marriage and domesticity here adding a new dimension to the Tension Between Personal Ambition and Familial Duty. By this point, he framed painting and romance as mutually exclusive from one another, whereas he had seen them as mutually beneficial while living with Sien.

“The artists could not do better than combine forces, give their pictures to the association, and share the proceeds of any sales, the society thus guaranteeing that its members can go on living and working.”

Van Gogh’s dream of an artists’ collective in Arles is an abrupt addition to his ambitions; it seems to emerge out of nowhere in the letter collection. This abruptness might be attributed to the epistolary sparsity of the Paris period, and it is possible that Van Gogh had been concocting this plan for many months, just not writing about it.

“Do you realize that we have been very stupid, Gauguin, you and I, in not going to the same place?”

Van Gogh’s attempts to convince his colleagues to join him in Arles, as seen here in a letter to Émile Bernard, revealed his desire for a stronger sense of community with his fellow artists. This was a desire that persisted even after the disastrous results of Gauguin’s time in Arles. The tenuous nature of Van Gogh’s friendships with other artists is, in and of itself, a telling insight into the arts scene in late 19th-century Western Europe, revealing his peripheral relationship to the post-impressionist movement.

“I can well do without God in both my life and also in my painting, but, suffering as I am, I cannot do without something greater than myself, something which is my life—the power to create…And in my pictures I want to say something consoling, as music does. I want to paint men and women with a touch of the eternal, whose symbol was once the halo, which we try to convey by the very radiance and vibrancy of our colouring.”

Van Gogh is known for his distinctive use of color, and this quote reveals some of his thought process behind his color selection. The connection he draws between his art’s themes, and the themes of historical religious art, make it clear that although he often painted secular subject matter, he never fully let go of the religious influences of his youth, reflecting The Links Between Religious and Artistic Life.

“It won’t do for us to think that I am completely sane. The people from round here who are ill like me have told me the truth. You can be old or young, but there will always be times when you take leave of your senses. So I don’t ask you to tell people that there is nothing wrong with me, or that there never will be.”

Here, Van Gogh takes a notably pragmatic tone in regards to his own mental illness. He appears to have been concerned with Theo’s ability to handle others’ responses to the news of the illness, keeping his brother in mind even in his most difficult period of suffering.

“Life passes in this way, time does not return, but I am working furiously for the very reason that I know that opportunities for work do not recur. Especially in my case, where a more violent attack could destroy my ability to paint for good.”

In the last months of his life, Van Gogh’s letters took on a notably more anxious tone, as he anticipated that his illness would inevitably end his artistic career. This attitude is indicative of his larger philosophy that the illness should not make its way into the art itself, even though the art is frequently interpreted through that lens today.

“At the time, I considered abstraction an attractive method. But that was delusion, dear friend, and one soon comes up against a brick wall.”

Van Gogh’s resounding rejection of abstraction in the final stage of his life is another key insight into his place within the arts scene in late 19th-century Western Europe, illuminating Van Gogh’s Relationship with the Arts. As his affinity for Impressionism and Post-Impressionism oscillated, he found himself in a distanced phase in the isolated location of Saint-Rèmy.