The paintings I like best

11 October
This time I’d like to write to you as I seldom do; I’d actually like to tell you in detail about my life here.
As you know I live in Montmartre. Also living here is a young Englishman…18 years old, the son of an art dealer in London, who will probably enter his father’s firm [...]

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A great revolution still awaits us in portraiture

9 October

I’m working on a portrait of our mother because the black photograph was making me too impatient.
Ah, what portraits we could make from life with photography and painting! I always have hopes that a great revolution still awaits us in portraiture.
I’m writing home to have our father’s portrait too. Myself, I don’t want black [...]

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There is peace here

7 October
I’m writing to you again now that I’ve walked around this village for a couple of days. What I find beautiful is everywhere here. That’s to say, there is peace here.

Here’s a little scratch from the peat fields.
There are often curious oppositions of Black and White here. For example, a canal with white sandy [...]

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I got a box of paints

Beginning of October
I want to tell you what I’ve done since I last wrote to you. First of all, two large drawings (chalk and some sepia) of Pollard willows, something like the sketch below.

Also the same, but vertical, of Leurseweg. Then I had a model a couple of times, digger and basket-maker. And then last [...]

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The heath was beautiful this evening…

3 October
The heath was extraordinarily beautiful this evening. There’s a Daubigny in one of the Albums Boetzel that expresses the effect precisely. The sky was an inexpressibly delicate lilac white – not fleecy clouds, because they were more joined together and covered the whole sky, but tufts in tints more of less of lilac – [...]

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The poor and money

1 October
These last few days I’ve done almost nothing but watercolours. A scratch of a large one is enclosed. You may remember Mooijman’s state lottery office at the beginning of Spuistraat. I passed it one rainy morning when a throng of people were standing there waiting to get lottery tickets. For the most part they [...]

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The way a spider in its web waits for flies

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 [...]

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Such intimacy!

18 September
Nature here is extraordinarily beautiful. Everything and everywhere. The dome of the sky is a wonderful blue, the sun has a pale sulphur radiance, and it’s soft and charming, like the combination of celestial blues and yellows in paintings by Vermeer of Delft. I can’t paint as beautifully as that, but it absorbs me [...]

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