21 November

Have you seen the studies that Bernard brought back from Brittany? Gauguin has told me many things about them. He himself has one which is simply masterly. I think that buying one from him, from Bernard, would be doing him a service, and that he really deserves it.

The weather here is cold, but we see some really beautiful things all the same. Such as yesterday evening, a sickly lemon yellow sunset, mysterious, of extraordinary beauty — Prussian blue cypresses, trees with dead leaves in every broken tone against that, not half bad.

12 November

I’ve now just painted a reminiscence of the garden at Etten, to put in my bedroom, and here’s a croquis of it. It’s quite a big canvas.

Now here are the colours. The younger of the two women walking is wearing a Scottish shawl with green and orange checks and carrying a red parasol. The old one has a blue-violet shawl, almost black. But a bunch of dahlias, some lemon yellow, others variegated pink and white, explode against this sombre figure.
Behind them a few emerald-green cedar or cypress bushes. Behind these cypresses one catches a glimpse of a bed of pale green and red cabbages, surrounded by a border of little white flowers. The sandy path is a raw orange, the foliage of two beds of scarlet geraniums is very green. Finally, in the middle ground is a maidservant dressed in blue who’s arranging plants with a profusion of white, pink, yellow and vermilion-red flowers.
There you are, I know it isn’t perhaps much of a resemblance, but for me it conveys the poetic character and the style of the garden as I feel them.

I don’t know if you’ll understand that one can speak poetry just by arranging colours well, just as one can say comforting things in music. In the same way the bizarre lines, sought out and multiplied, and snaking all over the painting, aren’t intended to render the garden in its vulgar resemblance but draw it for us as if seen in a dream, in character and yet at the same time stranger than the reality.

I’ve now also painted a woman reading a novel. Abundant very black hair, a green bodice, sleeves the colour of wine lees, the skirt black, the background completely yellow, library shelves with books. She’s holding a yellow book in her hand.

That’s all for today.

10 November

The weather’s windy and rainy here, and I’m very happy not to be alone, I work from memory on bad days, and that wouldn’t work if I were alone.
Gauguin has also almost finished his night café. He makes a really interesting friend — I must tell you that he knows how to cook perfectly, I think that I’ll learn that from him, it’s really convenient.

We’re very satisfied with making frames with simple strips of wood nailed on the stretching frame and painted, which I’ve started doing. Do you know that Gauguin is partly the inventor of the white frame? But the frame made from four strips of wood nailed on the stretching frame costs 5 sous, and we’re certainly going to perfect it. It serves very well, since this frame doesn’t stick out at all and is one with the canvas.

3 November

De Haan’s drawings are very fine, I like them a lot. Now doing that with colour, arriving at the same degree of expression without resorting to black and white chiaroscuro, my goodness, that’s not easy. And he’ll even arrive at another type of drawing if he carries out his plan of passing through Impressionism like a school, regarding his new attempts at colour absolutely as studies. But as I see it he’s right several times over to do all that.

Only there are several people who call themselves Impressionists who don’t have his knowledge of the figure, and it’s precisely that, that knowledge of the figure, that will later come back up to the surface and that he’ll always benefit from. I very much want to get to know them one day, De Haan and Isaäcson. If ever they came here, Gauguin would certainly say to them: go to Java and do some Impressionism. Because Gauguin, while he works hard here, always has a nostalgic longing for hot countries. And there you are, it’s undeniable that if one came to Java, for example, with the preoccupation to work there with colour, one would see a heap, a whole heap, of new things. Then in those brighter countries under the stronger sun, the shaded parts as well as the shadow cast by objects and figures become completely different, and the coloration is so intense that one’s tempted quite simply to suppress it. That’s already happening here.

27 October

This week I did a new study of a sower; the landscape utterly flat, the figure small and blurred.
Then I did another study of ploughed field with the stump of an old yew. Like this.

My brain feels tired and dry again, but I’m better this week than the previous fortnight.
What Gauguin has to say about the tropics seems wonderful to me. There, certainly, is the future of a great renaissance of painting. … how interesting it would be if a few Dutch painters were to found a colourist school in Java. If they heard Gauguin describe the hot countries they’d certainly feel like doing that straightaway. Not everyone is free and in a position to be able to emigrate. But what things there would be to do!

I regret not being ten or twenty years younger; I’d certainly go.
Now not very likely that I’ll move from the coast, and the little yellow house here in Arles will remain what it is, a halfway house between Africa and the tropics and the people of the north.

21 October

I believe that we’re right to see in the Impressionist movement a tendency towards great things, and not only a school that would limit itself to making optical experiments. Similarly with those who do history painting, then, or at least have done it in the past; while there are some very bad history painters, like Delaroche and Delort, are there not also good ones, like E. Delacroix and Meissonier?

… You know that that interests me a good deal, the influence that Impressionism will have on Dutch painters and on Dutch art lovers.

Here’s very rough croquis of my last canvas. A row of green cypresses against a pink sky with a pale lemon crescent moon.
Foreground a piece of waste land, and some sand and a few thistles. Two lovers, the man pale blue with a yellow hat, the woman has a pink bodice and a black skirt. That makes the fourth canvas of the ‘poet’s garden’, which is the decoration for Gauguin’s bedroom.

16 October

I had a new idea in mind, and here’s the croquis of it. No. 30 canvas once again.

This time it’s simply my bedroom, but the colour has to do the job here, and through its being simplified by giving a grander style to things, to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In short, looking at the painting should rest the mind, or rather, the imagination.
The walls are of a pale violet. The floor — is of red tiles.
The bedstead and the chairs are fresh butter yellow.
The sheet and the pillows very bright lemon green.
The bedspread scarlet red.
The window green.
The dressing table orange, the basin blue.
The doors lilac.
And that’s all — nothing in this bedroom, with its shutters closed.
The solidity of the furniture should also now express unshakeable repose.
Portraits on the wall, and a mirror and a hand-towel and some clothes.

The frame — as there’s no white in the painting — will be white.
This to take my revenge for the enforced rest that I was obliged to take.
I’ll work on it again all day tomorrow, but you can see how simple the idea is. The shadows and cast shadows are removed; it’s coloured in flat, plain tints like Japanese prints.
It will contrast, for example, with the Tarascon diligence and the night café.

The autumn still continues to be so fine! What a funny part of the country, this homeland of Tartarin’s! Yes, I’m happy with my lot; it isn’t a superb and sublime country, it’s all something out of Daumier come to life. Have you re-read the Tartarins yet? Ah, don’t forget to! Do you remember in Tartarin the lament of the old Tarascon diligence — that wonderful page? Well, I’ve just painted that red and green carriage in the yard of the inn. You’ll see.

This hasty croquis gives you its composition.
Simple foreground of grey sand.
Background very simple too, pink and yellow walls with windows with green louvred shutters, corner of blue sky.
The two carriages very colourful: green, red, wheels yellow, black, blue, orange. A no. 30 canvas once again. The carriages are painted in the style of Monticelli, with impastos.

9 October

24 September

Colour plays an immense part in the beauty of the women here — I’m not saying that their forms aren’t beautiful, but that’s not where the local charm lies. It’s the broad lines of the colourful costume, worn well, and it’s the tone of the flesh more than the form.

And that’s why I understand that I’m losing absolutely nothing by staying where I am, and contenting myself with watching things go by, the way a spider in its web waits for flies.