The Heron Maiden (Sagimusume)
Kitano Tsunetomi, 1880-1947
Above: Illustration of Edgar Allan Poe by Barry Moser poe
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Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
~Edgar Allan Poe
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You are far from the end of your journey.
The way is not in the sky.
The way is in the heart.
See how you love.
Buddha
Dhammapada
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You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don’t mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
~ Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
![Viincent van Gogh Self portrait, 1880-90, Van Gogh Museum
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What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.
All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.
That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love malgré tout [in spite of everything], based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest comers. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.
From a letter to Theo van Gogh, The Hague, 21 July 1882](http://25.media.tumblr.com/d7a147007437c313d711e3bcb0b599b0/tumblr_miyvswiyF81qc6wuio1_r2_500.jpg)
Viincent van Gogh Self portrait, 1880-90, Van Gogh Museum
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What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.
All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.
That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love malgré tout [in spite of everything], based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest comers. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.
From a letter to Theo van Gogh, The Hague, 21 July 1882
![Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin, 1888
Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, The Hague, 21 July 1882
Dear brother,
It is already late, but I felt like writing to you again anyway. You are not here - but I need you and sometimes feel that we are not far away from each other.
Today I promised myself something, that is, to treat my illness, or rather what remains of it, as if it didn’t exist.Enough time has been lost, work must go on. So, well or not well, I am going back to drawing regularly from morning until night. I don’t want anybody to be able to say to me again, “Oh! but those are only old drawings.”
I drew a study today of the baby’s little cradle with a few touches of colour in it. I am also at work on one like one of those meadows I sent you recently.
Girl kneeling by cradle
My hands have become a little too white for my liking, but that’s too bad. I’m going to go back outdoors again, a possible relapse matters less to me than staying away from work any longer.
Art is jealous, she does not like taking second place to an illness. Hence I shall humour her. So you will, I hope, be receiving a few more reasonably acceptable things shortly.
People like me really should not be ill. I would like to make it perfectly clear to you how I look at art. To get to the essence of things one must work long and hard.
What I want and have as my aim is infernally difficult to achieve, and yet I don’t think I am raising my sights too high. I want to make drawings that touch some people.
“Sorrow” is a small beginning - perhaps such little landscapes as the “Meerdervoort Avenue,” the “Rijswijk Meadows,” the “Fish-Drying Barn,” are also a small beginning. There is at least something straight from my own heart in them. What I want to express, in both figure and landscape, isn’t anything sentimental or melancholy, but deep anguish. In short, I want to get to the point where people say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels keenly. In spite of my so-called coarseness - do you understand? - perhaps even because of it. It seems pretentious to speak this way now, but that is the reason why I want to put all my energies into it.
What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.
All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.
That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love malgré tout [in spite of everything], based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest comers. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.
Other things increasingly lose their hold on me, and the more they do so the more quickly my eye lights on the picturesque. 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.
I am not without hope, brother, that within a few year’s time, or perhaps even now, little by little you will be seeing things I have done that will give you some satisfaction after all your sacrifices.
I have had very little contact with other painters lately. I haven’t been the worse for it. It isn’t the language of painters so much as the language of nature that one should heed. I can understand better now than I could six months ago why Mauve said: don’t talk to me about Dupré, I’d rather you talked about the bank of that ditch, or something of that sort. That may sound a bit strong, and yet it is absolutely right. The feeling for things themselves, for reality, is of greater importance than the feeling for painting; anyway it is more productive and more inspiring.
Because I now have such a broad, such an expansive feeling for art and for life itself, of which art is the essence, it sounds so shrill and false when people like Tersteeg do nothing but harry one.
For my own part, I find that many modern pictures have a peculiar charm which the old ones lack. To me, one of the highest and noblest expressions of art will always be that of the English, for instance Millais and Herkomer and Frank Holl. What I would say with respect to the difference between old and present-day art is - perhaps the modern artists are deeper thinkers.
There is a great difference in sentiment between, for instance, Chill October by Millais and Bleaching Ground at Overveen by Ruysdael. And equally between Irish Emigrants by Holl and the women reading from the Bible by Rembrandt. Rembrandt and Ruysdael are sublime, for us as well as for their contemporaries, but there is something in the moderns that seems to us more personal and intimate.
It is the same with Swain’s woodcuts and those of the old German masters.
And so it was a mistake when the modem painters thought it all the rage to imitate the old ones a few years ago. That’s why I think old Millet is right to say, `Il me semble absurde que les hommes veuillent paraître autre chose que ce qu’ils sont. [It seems absurd to me that people want to seem other than they are.] That may seem trite, and yet it is as unfathomably deep as the ocean, and personally I am all for taking it to heart.
I just wanted to tell you that I am going to get back to working regularly again, and must do so quand même [at that] - and I’d just like to add that I look forward so much for a letter - and for the rest, I bid you goodnight. Goodbye, with a handshake,
Ever yours,
Vincent
Please remember the thick Ingres if you can, enclosed is another sample. I still have a supply of the thin kind. I can do watercolour washes on the thick Ingres, but on the sans fin, for instance, it always goes blurry, by no fault of mine.
I hope that by keeping hard at it I shall draw the little cradle another hundred times, besides what I did today.
At this time, Vincent was 29 year old
Translated by Mrs. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, edited by Robert Harrison. via: webexhibits](http://24.media.tumblr.com/93d8669a401033dfa7d7a04361b8481e/tumblr_miwg5gtMNd1qc6wuio1_r2_500.jpg)
Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin, 1888
Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, The Hague, 21 July 1882
Dear brother,
It is already late, but I felt like writing to you again anyway. You are not here - but I need you and sometimes feel that we are not far away from each other.
Today I promised myself something, that is, to treat my illness, or rather what remains of it, as if it didn’t exist.Enough time has been lost, work must go on. So, well or not well, I am going back to drawing regularly from morning until night. I don’t want anybody to be able to say to me again, “Oh! but those are only old drawings.”
I drew a study today of the baby’s little cradle with a few touches of colour in it. I am also at work on one like one of those meadows I sent you recently.
Girl kneeling by cradle
My hands have become a little too white for my liking, but that’s too bad. I’m going to go back outdoors again, a possible relapse matters less to me than staying away from work any longer.
Art is jealous, she does not like taking second place to an illness. Hence I shall humour her. So you will, I hope, be receiving a few more reasonably acceptable things shortly.
People like me really should not be ill. I would like to make it perfectly clear to you how I look at art. To get to the essence of things one must work long and hard.
What I want and have as my aim is infernally difficult to achieve, and yet I don’t think I am raising my sights too high. I want to make drawings that touch some people.
“Sorrow” is a small beginning - perhaps such little landscapes as the “Meerdervoort Avenue,” the “Rijswijk Meadows,” the “Fish-Drying Barn,” are also a small beginning. There is at least something straight from my own heart in them. What I want to express, in both figure and landscape, isn’t anything sentimental or melancholy, but deep anguish. In short, I want to get to the point where people say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels keenly. In spite of my so-called coarseness - do you understand? - perhaps even because of it. It seems pretentious to speak this way now, but that is the reason why I want to put all my energies into it.
What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.
All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.
That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love malgré tout [in spite of everything], based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest comers. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.
Other things increasingly lose their hold on me, and the more they do so the more quickly my eye lights on the picturesque. 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.
I am not without hope, brother, that within a few year’s time, or perhaps even now, little by little you will be seeing things I have done that will give you some satisfaction after all your sacrifices.
I have had very little contact with other painters lately. I haven’t been the worse for it. It isn’t the language of painters so much as the language of nature that one should heed. I can understand better now than I could six months ago why Mauve said: don’t talk to me about Dupré, I’d rather you talked about the bank of that ditch, or something of that sort. That may sound a bit strong, and yet it is absolutely right. The feeling for things themselves, for reality, is of greater importance than the feeling for painting; anyway it is more productive and more inspiring.
Because I now have such a broad, such an expansive feeling for art and for life itself, of which art is the essence, it sounds so shrill and false when people like Tersteeg do nothing but harry one.
For my own part, I find that many modern pictures have a peculiar charm which the old ones lack. To me, one of the highest and noblest expressions of art will always be that of the English, for instance Millais and Herkomer and Frank Holl. What I would say with respect to the difference between old and present-day art is - perhaps the modern artists are deeper thinkers.
There is a great difference in sentiment between, for instance, Chill October by Millais and Bleaching Ground at Overveen by Ruysdael. And equally between Irish Emigrants by Holl and the women reading from the Bible by Rembrandt. Rembrandt and Ruysdael are sublime, for us as well as for their contemporaries, but there is something in the moderns that seems to us more personal and intimate.
It is the same with Swain’s woodcuts and those of the old German masters.
And so it was a mistake when the modem painters thought it all the rage to imitate the old ones a few years ago. That’s why I think old Millet is right to say, `Il me semble absurde que les hommes veuillent paraître autre chose que ce qu’ils sont. [It seems absurd to me that people want to seem other than they are.] That may seem trite, and yet it is as unfathomably deep as the ocean, and personally I am all for taking it to heart.
I just wanted to tell you that I am going to get back to working regularly again, and must do so quand même [at that] - and I’d just like to add that I look forward so much for a letter - and for the rest, I bid you goodnight. Goodbye, with a handshake,
Ever yours,
Vincent
Please remember the thick Ingres if you can, enclosed is another sample. I still have a supply of the thin kind. I can do watercolour washes on the thick Ingres, but on the sans fin, for instance, it always goes blurry, by no fault of mine.
I hope that by keeping hard at it I shall draw the little cradle another hundred times, besides what I did today.
At this time, Vincent was 29 year old
Translated by Mrs. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, edited by Robert Harrison. via: webexhibits
![Sorrow, drawing in chalk, The Garman Ryan Collection, The New Art Gallery Walsall
Vincent van Gogh
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From wiki: “The model posing […] was […] Clasina (Sien) Hoornik, whom he had met shortly after his arrival in The Hague and taken in with her daughter afterwards. […]
There are several versions of this drawing Sorrow. In early April 1882 Van Gogh sent one of them to Theo, referring to it as “the best figure I have drawn yet” (186).”
While doing the first study, Van Gogh had used two sheets of paper as underlayers. After finding out that the contour had been imprinted on the underneath, he finished two more versions and sent one of them to his brother. The drawing shown by this file was identified by Roland Dorn to be the original, which the artist very probably kept for himself:
At the lower margin, he quoted from Jules Michelet’s treatise “La Femme” (1860) by the words:
“Comment se fait-il qu’il y ait sur la terre une femme seule?”
(The worst fate for a woman is to live alone. Alone! Just to pronounce the word is sad.)“And how on earth does it happen that a woman is alone?” (end of quoted line)(Are there no longer any men? Have we arrived at the end of the world?)
Sien was pregnant witha a son at that time, and had been left by the child’s father. Van Gogh added “délaissée” (abandoned) to the words of Michelet [see lower right corner).
This drawing is based on Plate 24 of Charles Bargue’s Exercises au fusain (exercises in charcoal drawing] section from his renowned Cours de dessin (Drawing Course, 1871).
In letter 216, Van Gogh confided to his brother to have been inspired by English examples as well as by the woodcut La bergère (The Shepherdess) after Jean-François Millet.
In letter 224 to Theo, he says: “Last winter I met a pregnant woman, deserted by the man whose child she was carrying. A pregnant woman who walked the streets in the winter — she had her bread to earn, you’ll know how. I took that woman on as a model and have worked with her all winter. I couldn’t pay her a model’s full daily wages, but I paid her rent all the same, and thus far, thank God, I have been able to save her and her child from hunger and cold by sharing my own bread with her.”
From same sujet, Van Gogh drew also one larger version, as he noted in letter 222, where he claimed it “to express something of the struggle for life”. That one (and one of the first drawings) are thought to be lost. By November 1882, he made a lithograph from same sujet, of which three impressions are known.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/61aee92d81ce5e7e28a88de7eddf8b91/tumblr_miwimlvNHO1qc6wuio1_r1_500.jpg)
Sorrow, drawing in chalk, The Garman Ryan Collection, The New Art Gallery Walsall
Vincent van Gogh
.
From wiki: “The model posing […] was […] Clasina (Sien) Hoornik, whom he had met shortly after his arrival in The Hague and taken in with her daughter afterwards. […]
There are several versions of this drawing Sorrow. In early April 1882 Van Gogh sent one of them to Theo, referring to it as “the best figure I have drawn yet” (186).”
While doing the first study, Van Gogh had used two sheets of paper as underlayers. After finding out that the contour had been imprinted on the underneath, he finished two more versions and sent one of them to his brother. The drawing shown by this file was identified by Roland Dorn to be the original, which the artist very probably kept for himself:
At the lower margin, he quoted from Jules Michelet’s treatise “La Femme” (1860) by the words:
“Comment se fait-il qu’il y ait sur la terre une femme seule?”
(The worst fate for a woman is to live alone. Alone! Just to pronounce the word is sad.)
“And how on earth does it happen that a woman is alone?” (end of quoted line)
(Are there no longer any men? Have we arrived at the end of the world?)
Sien was pregnant witha a son at that time, and had been left by the child’s father. Van Gogh added “délaissée” (abandoned) to the words of Michelet [see lower right corner).
This drawing is based on Plate 24 of Charles Bargue’s Exercises au fusain (exercises in charcoal drawing] section from his renowned Cours de dessin (Drawing Course, 1871).
In letter 216, Van Gogh confided to his brother to have been inspired by English examples as well as by the woodcut La bergère (The Shepherdess) after Jean-François Millet.
In letter 224 to Theo, he says: “Last winter I met a pregnant woman, deserted by the man whose child she was carrying. A pregnant woman who walked the streets in the winter — she had her bread to earn, you’ll know how. I took that woman on as a model and have worked with her all winter. I couldn’t pay her a model’s full daily wages, but I paid her rent all the same, and thus far, thank God, I have been able to save her and her child from hunger and cold by sharing my own bread with her.”
From same sujet, Van Gogh drew also one larger version, as he noted in letter 222, where he claimed it “to express something of the struggle for life”. That one (and one of the first drawings) are thought to be lost. By November 1882, he made a lithograph from same sujet, of which three impressions are known.”
Bent figure of a woman,” Vincent van Gogh
Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, The Hague, 3-12 May 1882
Please feel free to tell Mauve anything you like about the contents of this letter, but there is no need for it to go any further.
My dear Theo,
I met Mauve today and had a most regrettable conversation with him, which made it clear to me that Mauve and I have parted for good. Mauve has gone too far to retract, and anyhow he certainly wouldn’t want to.
I invited him to come and see my work, and then to talk things over. Mauve flatly refused: `I will certainly not be coming to see you, that’s all over.’
In the end he said, `You have a vicious character.’ I turned away then - it was in the dunes - and walked home alone.
Mauve takes it amiss that I said, `I am an artist,’ which I won’t take back, because it’s self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It is the very opposite of saying, `I know all about it, I’ve already found it.’ As far as I am concerned, the word means, `I am looking, I am hunting for it, I am deeply involved.’
I have ears, Theo - if somebody says, `You have a vicious character,’ what am I supposed to do? I turned away and went home alone, but with a very heavy heart that Mauve should have been prepared to say that to me. I shall not ask him for an explanation, nor shall I apologize.
And yet - and yet - and yet. I wish Mauve did feel some compunction. I am suspected of something…it is in the air…I am keeping something back, Vincent is concealing something that mustn’t see the light of day.
Well, gentlemen, I shall say to you, you people who prize manners and culture, and rightly so, provided it is the genuine article - which is more cultured, more sensitive, more manly: to desert a woman or to concern oneself with one who has been deserted?
Last winter I met a pregnant woman, deserted by the man whose child she was carrying. A pregnant woman who walked the streets in the winter - she had her bread to earn, you’ll know how. I took that woman on as a model and have worked with her all winter. I couldn’t pay her a model’s full daily wages, but I paid her rent all the same, and thus far, thank God, I have been able to save her and her child from hunger and cold by sharing my own bread with her.
When I first came across this woman, she caught my eye because she looked so ill. I made her take baths and as many restoratives as I could manage, and she has become much healthier. I have been with her to Leyden, where there is a maternity hospital in which she will be confined.*
It strikes me that any man worth his salt would have done the same in a case like this. I consider what I did so simple and natural that I thought I could keep it to myself. She found posing difficult, yet she has learned, and I have made progress with my drawing because I have had a good model. The woman is now attached to me like a tame dove. For my part, I can only get married once, and when better than now, and to her, because it is the only way to go on helping her and she would otherwise be sent back by want on to the same old path which leads to the abyss. She has no money, but she is helping me to earn money with my work.
I am filled with zest and ambition for my job and my work, and the reason why I have put aside paintings and watercolours for a time is that Mauve’s desertion gave me a great shock, and if he sincerely retracted I should start again with renewed courage.
At the moment I cannot look at a brush, it makes me nervous.
I wrote: Theo, can you enlighten me about Mauve’s attitude? - perhaps this letter will help to enlighten you in turn. You are my brother, it is only natural that I should speak to you about private matters, but the moment someone tells me, `You have a vicious character,’ I don’t feel like talking to him any more.
I could not do otherwise, I did what was ready to hand, I worked. I thought I would be understood without words. To be sure I thought of another woman for whom my heart was beating - but she was far away and did not want to see me, and this one - there she was, walking about sick, pregnant and hungry - in winter. I could not do otherwise. Mauve, Theo, Tersteeg, you people have my livelihood in your hands, are you going to reduce me to beggary, turn your backs on me? Now I have spoken and wait for whatever else will be said to me.
Vincent
I am sending you a few studies because you may perhaps see from them that she has helped me considerably with her posing. My drawings are `by my model and me,’ the one with the white bonnet is her mother. But since in a year’s time, when I shall probably be working quite differently, I shall have to base my work on these studies, which I am doing now as conscientiously as I can, I should like to have at least these three back.
Sien’s mother
You can see that they are done with care. If I need an interior or a waiting room or something of the kind later on, they will prove useful, because I shall be able to look to them for the details. But I thought it would perhaps be a good idea to keep you up to date on how I spend my time. These studies demand a rather dry technique. Had I tried for effect they would have been less useful to me later. But I’m sure you will see this for yourself.
The paper I should really like best is that on which the female figure bending forward is drawn, but if possible the colour of unbleached linen. I don’t have any of it left in that thickness. I believe they call it double Ingres. I can’t get any more of it here. When you see how that drawing is done, you’ll understand that the thin stuff is hardly able to take it. I wanted to send you a small figure in black merino as well, but I can’t roll it. The chair near the large figure isn’t finished, because I want an old oak chair there.
Bent figure of a woman (Sien)
Woman sewing
* Small wonder she wasn’t well, the child was in the wrong position and she needed an operation, that is, the child had to be turned round with forceps. But there is a good chance that she will pull through. She is due to give birth in June.
At this time, Vincent was 29 year old
Translated by Mrs. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, edited by Robert Harrison. via: webexhibits
