Notes

Context:
JLB 190, 11/23/1881: "So I'm actually a headstrong person after all!"

Context:
BVG 242, 11/5/1882: "I feel a power in me which I must develop, a fire that I may not quench, but must keep ablaze, though I do not know to what end it will lead me, and shouldn't be surprised if it were a gloomy one."
JLB 292, 12/10/1882: "I feel a power in me that I must develop, a fire that I may not put out but must fan, although I don't know to what outcome it will lead me, and wouldn't be surprised if it was a sombre one."

Context:
BVG W04, 6/22/1888: "At times, driven by a certain mental voracity, I even read the newspapers with fury, but do not deduce from this fact that I feel a craving for reading."
JLB 626, 6/16/1888-6/20/1888: "Sometimes, out of ravenous hunger, I even read the newspaper here with fury, but don't take this to mean that I have a need to read."

Context:
BVG 156, 11/10/1881-11/11/1881: "I get very cross when people tell me that it is dangerous to put out to sea, observing that one might drown in it."
JLB 182, 11/10/1881 or 11/11/1881: "And get very angry if people tell me that it's dangerous to sail at sea and remark that one might drown … "

Context:
BVG 156, 11/10/1881-11/11/1881: "I don't get cross because I think they are wrong to say that, but because they seem to forget 'that there is safety in the very heart of danger.'"
JLB 182, 11/10/1881 or 11/11/1881: "… I don't get angry because I think they're wrong in saying so, but because they seem to forget 'that there is safety in the very heart of danger.'" 13. "C'est un fou" b2035 V/1982, "Gogh, Theo van" to "Bonger, Jo", 2/14/1889, quoted in Jansen and Robert, p. 160: "From his style of dress & his demeanour you can see at once that he is different & for years everyone who sees him has said C'est un fou." 14. "product of a sick mind" b0947 V/1962, "Gogh, Theo van" to "Gogh, Willemina van", 9/27/1890. (See Epilogue, n. 46.) (19) 15. "I have sometimes worked" BVG B09, 6/24/1888.

Context:
JLB 633, 6/27/1888: "I've sometimes worked excessively fast; is that a fault? I can't help it." 16. "pictures full of painting"BVG 524, 8/14/1888; emphasis added:  Vincent’s actual emphasis waseven more emphatic, combining underlining and capital letters.

Context:
BVG 524, 8/14/1888: "If I painted prettily like Bouguereau, people would not be ashamed to let themselves be painted, but I think that I have lost models because they thought that they were "badly done," because 'it was only pictures full of painting' that I did."
JLB 660, 8/13/1888: "If we painted smoothly like Bouguereau people wouldn't be ashamed to let themselves be painted, but I believe it's made me lose models, that people found that it was 'badly done', it was only pictures FULL OF PAINTING that I was doing" (emphasis in original).

For a good discussion of the distortive effect of commercial imperatives on art biography in the years before and immediately after Vincent’s death, see Nicholas Green, Dealing in Temperaments: Economic Transformation of the Artistic Field in France during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century. Here is Green's own summary of his thesis: "To sum up: it has been argued that a dealer system rooted in expanding capitalism was able to rework the economic relations of the artistic field in so far as it drew on and exploited constructions of individualism ultimately validated by the Third Republic ideology of citizenship. In that process art biographers played a central part. It was they who forged the language naturalizing the ongoing relation between entrepreneurial capitalism and the perceived progress of art. It was they who were instrumental in establishing dialogue between the commercial marketplace and state policy. But, as we have seen, they were neither the dupes nor the subaltern agents of capital. Biographical discourse had its own logic, its own institutional conditions and its own, often contradictory, rationale. The writers themselves, while frequently acceding to the demands of capital, inhabited a distinct economic and cultural milieu. In fact, what is perhaps as interesting about this semi-professionalized cadre of cultural agents as their obvious links with dealing is the carefully guarded compartmentalizations between the different sites in which they operated. In the role of historical specialists Burty and Blanc were careful to blank out the current state of art investments as largely irrelevant and unworthy of the integrity of their subject. We might speculate on the disjunctions and awkwardness which they experienced in terms of their personal identities as they shifted fluidly across from one context to another." (Green, p. 73.)

Vincent’s own champion, Albert Aurier, recognized and condemned these sorts of biographical critical excesses right before his early death in 1893: "All the other modern critics ... have perpetually forgotten to speak of the work of art and have confined themselves to speaking only of the artist. These books [like Théophile Silvestre's biography of Delacroix, a favorite of Vincent's] where the artists themselves are called upon to bear witness to their desires, their dreams, their theories, even their way of life, are far from being completely devoid of interest; but are they really, properly speaking, books of criticism? I do not believe that this idea can be sustained once one begins to think a little. They are interesting in the way that autograph and photograph albums are. That is all." (Aurier, p. 199.) Aurier caricatured this approach to art criticism by citing one of its practitioners, Émile Deschanel who had claimed that he could "show, through a certain number of examples and facts, how one can and must recognize in a work of style and art, not only the century when it was produced, but also the climate, the country and the race to which its creator belonged; then the creator himself, and his gender, and perhaps his age, but certainly his constitution, his character, his disposition and, who knows? whether he is in good or poor health, and more importantly his temperament, his education, his customary habits, his status and his profession." (ibid., p. 200.) To Deschanel's Zola-inspired manifesto of art as the expression of a uniquely personal temperament, Aurier responded with withering disdain: "According to this definition of the profession of art critic, one criticises everything but art itself" (ibid.).

Taine's programmatic (Vincent referred to it as "mathematical" [JLB 359, 7/3/1883; emphasis in original]) application of these templates of artistic achievement prompted Zola's impassioned response in Mes haines, which became the cornerstone of modernist interpretation, insisting on the individualistic essence of great art. "For me, a work is a man; I want to discover a temperament in the work, a particular, unique accent. The more personal it is, the more I am attracted and held. ... I only beg M[onsieur] Taine to accord more importance to personality. As an original artist himself, he must understand that works are tenderly loved offspring for which one sacrifices flesh and blood, and the more they resemble their fathers, feature for feature, the more they move us; they are the cry of a heart and a body, they offer the spectacle of a rare creature nakedly showing all that is human in it. I love these works because I love reality, life. ... Thus it may be well agreed that the artist places himself in front of nature, that he copies and interprets it, that he is more or less realistic according to his vision; in a word, that his mission is to show us objects as he sees them, emphasizing certain details, creating anew. I will express my total thought in saying that a work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament [un coin de la création vu à travers un tempérament].” (Zola, pp. 147-150.) Zola subsequently took the religion out of this famous formulation by substituting "natur" (nature) for création.”

This paradigm -- of which Van Gogh became the avatar -- shaped art history for the first half of the twentieth century. No less a successor than Picasso commented that, after Van Gogh, "we [artists] are all, in a measure, autodidacts -- you might almost say primitive painters. Painters no longer live within a tradition and so each one of us must recreate an entire language ... In a certain sense, that's a liberation but at the same time it's an enormous limitation, because when the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains in the way of liberty he loses in the way of order." (Picasso, quoted in Gilot and Lake, pp. 17-19.)

In the latter part of the twentieth century, a critical backlash formed against Zola's paradigm, claiming, inter alia, that the notion of individual artistic genius had enabled class and gender privileges. Art historians such as T. J. Clark, Griselda Pollock, and Carol Zemel, called for revoking the notion of "gifted individuals creating out of personal necessity" (Pollock, p. 3) and, in essence, reverting to a Taine-like analysis of "milieu" (that is: economic, social, and gender contexts) and "moment" (i.e., the art's place within those contexts). Their position, as summarized by Ann Dumas, was "rather than offering the paintings to be consumed as articulations of a personality, they were to be viewed as 'practices' within historically determined and therefore class-constituted positions" (Dumas, pp. 46-47). Thus, for example, Vincent’s paintings should be seen "within the phenomenon of tourism and the 19th-century vogue for artists' colonies" (Pollock, p. 3), or as expressions of contemporary notions of utopia (Zemel, p. 5). While rejecting the templates applied in the past to Vincent’s art (e.g., individual genius, heroism in adversity, redemption (see ibid.), these historians proposed new narrative templates, such as the bourgeois nostalgia triggered by disappointment with modernity and the resulting quest for a nature unsullied by civilization (Pollock, p. 3).

In these analyses, Taine's "moment" became the unique vision the artist brought to his or her respective milieu. Thus, Vincent’s conservative Dutch "take" on French-based (Daudet, Monticelli, Loti) notions of primitive utopias, as in Arles, or his application of traditional landscape principles to reparative quasi-religious imagery (e.g., Starry Night [F 612 JH 1731]), became the applicable narratives (Pollock, p. 3). It is interesting to note in this regard that Taine's earlier view allowed for a "governing talent" that transcended all the other factors by which he proposed that art should be judged. It was the subsequent rigidification of his positivist rules and the "programmatic application" of those rules that caused Zola to hoist him so eloquently in Mes haines and prompted Vincent to congratulate him for doing so: "But I’m glad, I just wanted to add, that he scores a hit on Taine, who deserves it because he’s sometimes irritating with mathematical analysis" (JLB 359, 7/3/1883; emphasis in original).

Zola, p. 148. This is based on Sund’s marvelous tracing of a notion that deeply influenced Vincent’s thinking to an 1866 article by Zola, “Le Moment artistique,” which Vincent perhaps first saw in the magazine L’Événement (May 4, 1866) or more likely in a 1879 edition of Mes haines (see JLB 358, 7/2/1883; n. 19). Vincent reported reading the latter in a letter from Etten in 1881. (JLB 358, 7/2/1883; see Sund, pp. 53-54, n. 41.) Zola’s original is “Ce que je cherche avant tout dans un tableau, c’est un homme et none pas un tableau” (quoted in Sund, p. 266, n. 41). This is Sund’s translation: “That which I look for before everything else in a picture, is a man and not a picture” (ibid.). Our translation in the text varies slightly from Sund’s. (See Prologue, n. 9.)

Context:
BVG 418, 7/1/1885: "Zola, who otherwise, in my opinion, makes some colossal blunders when he judges pictures, says something beautiful about art in general in Mes haines: 'Dans le tableau (l'oeuvre d'art), je cherche, j'aime l'homme -- l'artiste.' [In the picture (the work of art), I look for, I love the man -- the artist.]"
JLB 515, 7/14/1885: "Zola, who otherwise, to my mind, often makes colossal mistakes in his judgement of paintings -- says something beautiful about art in general in 'Mes haines'. 'In the painting (the work of art) I look for, I love the man -- the artist.'"

Context:
BVG 94, 4/30/1877: "Do you have De Plancy's Légendes des Artistes, with wood engravings after Rochussen?"
JLB 113, 4/30/1877: "Do you have De Plancy, Légendes des artistes, with woodcuts after Rochussen?"

Here is a typical example of the kind of biographical ephemera in which Gigoux traded: "One morning, Diaz arrived in my workshop at the Abbey. We were going to lunch with some friends, which always got him started. Feeling merry, Diaz let loose his tongue when someone mentioned the name of Ingres. Diaz shouted out with a threatening air, and struck the floor with his rammer (you know that he had a wooden leg): “Ingres? Here’s what I say! To hell, to hell with Ingres! ... He never knew how to paint a child. He could never paint a child. I defy him to paint child! Ingres is only a Chinese mislaid in the ruins of Athens." (Gigoux, pp. 89-90; authors' translation.)

Context:
JLB 146, 8/5/1878: “Now, old boy, I’m writing to you by the light of a lantern and the candle is becoming very short, adieu, I wish you well; if you can, write a few words with something about the painters, and if you hear something interesting about this or that, but better still would be your own impressions of whatever you like”

Context:
BVG 418, 7/1/1885: "There you have it; I think that's absolutely true. I ask you, what kind of man, what kind of visionary, or thinker, observer, what kind of human character is there behind certain canvases extolled for their technique -- often no kind at all, as you know. But a Raffaelli is somebody, a Lhermitte is somebody, and with many pictures by almost unknown people one has the feeling that they were made with a will, with feeling, with passion, with love."
JLB 515, 7/14/1885: "There you are, I think that's perfectly true -- I ask you, what sort of a man, what sort of a visionary/observer or thinker, what sort of a human character is there behind some of these canvases praised for their technique -- often, after all, nothing. But a Raffaëlli -- is someone, a Lhermitte is someone, and in many paintings by virtually unknown people one feels that they were made with a will, with emotion, with passion, with love." (Emphasis in original.)

Context:
BVG R06, 11/23/1881: "Now I told you on a former occasion that in general, and more especially with artists, I pay as much attention to the man who does the work as to the work itself."
JLB 190, 11/23/1881: "I told you on a previous occasion that I generally scrutinize, with artists in particular, the man who produces the work just as much as the work itself."

Context:
BVG 343, 12/1/1883: "The artist's life, and what an artist is, it is all very curious -- how deep it is -- how infinitely deep."
JLB 408, 12/1/1883: "The artist's life and WHAT an artist is, that's very curious -- how deep is it -- infinitely deep" (emphasis in original).

Context:
BVG 605, 9/7/1889-9/8/1889: "But when, after some time, one resumes the study and alters the brushstrokes in keeping with the objects--the result is without doubt more harmonious and pleasant to look at, and one can add whatever serenity and happiness one feels."
JLB 801, 9/10/1889: "Yet then one catches the true and the essential -- that's the most difficult thing. But when one returns to this study again after a time, and orders one's brushstrokes in the direction of the objects -- certainly it's more harmonious and agreeable to see, and one adds to it whatever one has of serenity and smiles."

Context:
JLB 634, 6/28/1888: "One more effort that's far from finished -- but one at least where I'm attempting something more heartbroken and therefore more heartbreaking."

Context:
JLB 528, 8/18/1885: "… I want to paint what I feel and feel what I paint …"

Context:
BVG 312, 8/17/1883: "As my work is, so am I."
JLB 375, 8/18/1883: "I am as my work is ..."