wortels (1)

My dear Theo,

It’s awfully good of you to have sent me the complete order of colours, I’ve just received them, but haven’t yet had the time to check them. I’m so pleased about it.

Today has been a good day too. This morning I worked on an orchard of plum trees in blossom — suddenly a tremendous wind began to blow, an effect I’d only ever seen here — and came back again at intervals. In the intervals, sunshine that made all the little white flowers sparkle. It was so beautiful!

My friend the Dane came to join me, and at risk and peril every moment of seeing the whole lot of it on the ground I carried on painting — in this white effect there’s a lot of yellow with blue and lilac, the sky is white and blue.

But as for the execution of what we do out of doors like this, what will they say? Well, let’s wait and see.

So, after supper I started on the same painting I intend for Tersteeg, ‘The Langlois bridge’, for you. And I’d really like to make a repetition of that one for Jet Mauve too, because since I’m spending so much, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that we’ve got to try to get some back, of this money that’s quickly slipping away.

Afterwards I was sorry, I hadn’t asked for the colours from père Tanguy anyway, although there isn’t the least advantage in that — on the contrary — but he’s such a funny fellow, and I still think of him often. Don’t forget to say hello to him for me if you see him, and tell him that if he’d like any paintings for his shop window, he can have some from here, and the best.

Ah, it seems to me more and more that people are the root of everything, and although it remains for ever a melancholy feeling not to find oneself in real life, in the sense that it would be better to work in flesh itself than colour or plaster, in the sense that it would be better to make children than to make paintings or to do business, at the same time you feel you’re living when you consider that you have friends among those who themselves aren’t in real life either.

But precisely because what is in people’s hearts is also the heart of business, we have to conquer friendships in Holland, or rather revive them. All the more so since, as far as the cause of Impressionism goes, we have little to fear at the moment of not winning through.

And it’s because of this victory, that’s almost guaranteed in advance, that for our part we have to have good manners and do everything calmly.


van Gogh-brief
(11 april 1888)