I’m very happy not to be alone

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, [...]

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Go to Java and do some Impressionism

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 [...]

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I have the patience of an ox

28 October
There are two people whose intense struggle between ‘I’m a painter’ and ‘I’m not a painter’ I know. Rappard’s and my own — sometimes a frightening struggle, a struggle that’s precisely the distinction between us and some others who take it less seriously.
One must take it up with assurance, with a conviction that one [...]

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But what things there would be to do!

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 [...]

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New ideas are beginning to emerge

25 October
Rappard is still here and will be staying for another week since the work is going extraordinarily well. He’s making women spinning and various studies of heads, has already made 10 studies or so, all of which I consider fine.
We’ve talked together quite a lot about Impressionism — I think that you would classify [...]

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Rainy and chilly, but full of atmosphere

22 October
It’s still autumnal weather here – rainy and chilly, but full of atmosphere – especially good for figures, which show a range of tones on the wet streets and roads in which the sky is reflected. It’s what Mauve, above all, does so beautifully time and again.
As a result I’ve been able to do [...]

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A tendency towards great things

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, [...]

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The colour has to do the job here

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 [...]

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It’s all something out of Daumier come to life

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 [...]

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Figure drawing in particular is good

12 October
I feel more and more as time goes on that figure drawing in particular is good, that it also works indirectly to the good of landscape drawing. If one draws a pollard willow as though it were a living being, which it actually is, then the surroundings follow more or less naturally, if only [...]

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