© Copyright 2001 R. G. Harrison Letter 429 Nuenen, late October 1885
Dear Theo,
I read your letter about black with great pleasure, and it convinces me that you have no prejudice against black.
Your description of Manet’s study, “The Dead Toreador,�was well analyzed. And the whole letter proves the same as your sketch of Paris suggested to me at the time, that if you put yourself to it, you can paint a thing in words.
It is a fact that by studying the laws of the colours, one can move from instinctive belief in the great masters to the analysis of why one admires �what one admires �and that indeed is necessary nowadays, when one realizes how terribly arbitrary 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, and how to get life into it.
Jules Dupré is in landscape rather like Delacroix, for what enormous variety of mood did he express in symphonies of colour.
Now a marine, with the most delicate blue-greens and broken blue and all kinds of pearly tones, then again an autumn landscape, with a foliage from deep wine-red to vivid green, from bright orange to dark havana, with other colours again in the sky, in greys, lilacs, blues, whites, forming a further contrast with the yellow leaves.
Then again a sunset in black, in violet, in fiery red.
Then again, more fantastic, what I once saw, a corner of a garden by him, which I have never forgotten: black in the shadow, white in the sun, vivid green, a fiery red and then again a dark blue, a bituminous greenish brown,
and a light brown-yellow. Colours that indeed have something to say for themselves.
I have always been very fond of Jules Dupré, and he will become still more appreciated than he is. For he is a real colourist, always interesting, and so powerful and dramatic.
Yes, he is indeed a brother to Delacroix.
As I told you, I think your letter about black very good, and what you say about not painting local colour is also quite correct. But it doesn’t satisfy me. In my opinion there is much more behind that not painting local colour.
“Les vrais peintres sont ceux qui ne font pas la couleur locale�[The true painters are those who do not render local colour] �that was what Blanc and Delacroix discussed once.
May I not boldly take it to mean that a painter does better to start from the colours on his palette than from the colours in nature? I mean, when one wants to paint, for instance, a head, and sharply observes the reality one has before one, then one may think: that head is a harmony of red-brown, violet, yellow, all of them broken �I will put a violet and a yellow and a red-brown on my palette and these will break each other.
I retain from nature a certain sequence and a certain correctness in placing the tones, I study nature, so as not to do foolish things, to remain reasonable �however, I don’t mind so much whether my colour corresponds exactly, as long as it looks beautiful on my canvas, as beautiful as it looks in nature.
Far more true is a portrait by Courbet, manly, free, painted in all kinds of beautiful deep tones of red-brown, of gold, of colder violet in the shadow with black as repoussoir, with a little bit of tinted white linen as a repose to the eye �finer than a portrait by whomever you like, who has imitated the colour of the face with horribly close precision.
A man’s head or a woman’s head, well contemplated and at leisure, is divinely beautiful, isn’t it? Well, that general harmony of tones in nature, one loses it by painfully exact imitation, one keeps it by recreating in an equivalent colour range, that may be not exactly or far from exactly like the model.
Always and intelligently to make use of the beautiful tones which the colours form of their own accord, when one breaks them on the palette, I repeat �to start from one’s palette, from one’s knowledge of colour-harmony,
is quite different from following nature mechanically and obsequiously.
Here is another example: suppose I have to paint an autumn landscape, trees with yellow leaves. All right � when I conceive it as a symphony in yellow, what does it matter whether the fundamental colour of yellow is the same as that of the leaves or not? It matters very little.
Much, everything depends on my perception of the infinite variety of tones of one and the same family.
Do you call this a dangerous inclination towards romanticism, an infidelity to “realism,�a “peindre de chic,�p style="line-height:25px;text-indent:32px"> [painting without copying reality] a caring more for the palette of the colourist than for nature? Well, que soit.
© Copyright 2001 R. G. Harrison Delacroix, Millet, Corot, Dupré, Daubigny, Breton, thirty names more, are they not the heart and soul of the art of painting of this century, and are they not all rooted in romanticism, though they surpassed romanticism?
Romance and romanticism are of our time, and painters must have imagination and sentiment. Luckily realism and naturalism are not free from it. Zola creates, but does not hold up a mirror to things, he creates wonderfully,
but creates, poetises, that is why it is so beautiful. So much for naturalism and realism, which nonetheless stand in connection to romanticism.
And I repeat that I am touched when I see a picture of about the years �0-�8, a Paul Huet, an old Israëls, like the “Fisherman of Zandvoort,�a Cabat, an Isabey.
But I find so much truth in that saying: “ne pas peindre le ton local,�[do not paint local tone] that I far prefer a picture in a lower tonal scale than nature to one which is exactly like nature.
Rather a watercolour that is somewhat vague and unfinished than one which is worked up to simulate reality.
That saying: “ne pas peindre le ton local,�has a broad meaning, and it leaves the painter free to seek for colours which form a whole and harmonize, which stand out the more in contrast to another combination.
What do I care whether the portrait of an honourable citizen tells me exactly the milk-and-watery bluish, insipid colour of that pious man’s face �which I would never have noticed. But the citizens of the small town, where the above-mentioned individual has rendered himself so meritorious that he thought himself obliged to impress his physiognomy on posterity, are highly edified by the correct exactness.
Colour expresses something by itself one cannot do without this, one must use it; that which is beautiful, really beautiful �is also correct; when Veronese had painted the portraits of his beau-monde in the “Marriage at Cana,�he had spent on it all the richness of his palette in sombre violets, in splendid golden tones. Then �he thought still of a faint azure and a pearly-white �which does not appear in the foreground. He detonated it on in the background �and it was right, spontaneously it changes into the ambience of marble palaces and sky, which characteristically consummates the ordering of the figures.
So beautiful is that background that it arose spontaneously from a calculation of colours. Am I wrong in this?
Is it not painted differently than somebody would do it who had thought at the same time of the palace and of the figures as one whole?
All that architecture and sky is conventional and subordinate to the figures, it is calculated to make the figures stand out beautifully.
Surely that is real painting, and the result is more beautiful than the exact imitation of the things themselves. To think of one thing and to let the surroundings belong to it and proceed from it.
To study from nature, to wrestle with reality �I don’t want to do away with it, for years and years I myself have been so engaged, almost fruitlessly and with all kinds of sad results.
I should not like to have missed that error.
I mean that it would be foolish and stupid always to go on in that same way, but not that all the pains I took should be absolutely dismissed.
“On commence par tuer, on finit par guerir,�[One begins by killing, one ends by healing] is a doctor’s saying.
One starts with a hopeless struggle to follow nature, and everything goes wrong; one ends by calmly creating from one’s palette, and nature agrees with it, and follows. But these two contrasts are not separable from one another. The drudging, though it may seem in vain, gives an intimacy with nature, a sounder knowledge of things. And a beautiful saying by Doré (who sometimes is so clever) is: je me souviens. [I remember.] Though I believe that the best pictures are more or less freely painted by heart, still I cannot divorce the principle that one can never study and toil too much from nature. The greatest, most powerful imaginations have at the same time made things directly from nature which strike one dumb.
In answer to your description of the study by Manet, I send you a still-life of an open �so a broken white � Bible bound in leather, against a black background, with a yellow-brown foreground, with a touch of citron yellow. [F 117, JH 946]
I painted that in one rush, during a single day.
This to show you that when I say that I have perhaps not plodded completely in vain, I dare say this, because at present it comes quite easily to me to paint a given subject unhesitatingly, whatever its form or colour may be.
Recently I painted a few studies out of doors, of the autumn landscape. I shall write again soon, and send this letter in haste to tell you that I was quite pleased with what you say about black.
Goodbye,
Yours, Vincent