Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1912 (Heft 40))

FROM VAN GOGH’S LETTERS*

WHAT always vexes me when I go to the Louvre is to be compelled to
look on and see how the jackasses of Directors permit their Rem-
brandts to be destroyed, and allow so many beautiful paintings to be
ruined. I could absolutely prove to you that the unpleasant yellow tone of
several of the Rembrandts is due to damp or other causes such as heat, dust,
etc. And that is why it is as difficult to say what was Rembrandt’s color as it
is to estimate exactly the grey of Velasquez. We might, for want of a better
expression, speak of the Rembrandt gold; that helps; but it is but a vague
hint.
When I came to France, I understood, perhaps better than many French-
men, two men for whom I have a sincere and boundless admiration—Dela-
croix and Zola. Having a fairly complete understanding of Rembrandt I
found that Delacroix obtains his effects through color, while Rembrandt
achieves his by values. Both men, however, are of the same rank. Zola and
Balzac, who are also delineators of an entire age, offer the rarest artistic enjoy-
ment to those who love them, in that they reproduce fully the age they picture.
Even if Delacroix paints mankind and life, instead of a period in general,
he none the less on that account belongs to the family of universal geniuses.
I dearly love the final sentences of an article written, if I am not mistaken, by
Theophile Silvestre, with which he concludes a hymn of praise: “Thus died,
laughing, Eugene Delacroix, a painter of great fame, who bore the sun in his
head and the tempest in his heart; who passed from warriors to saints, from
saints to lovers, from lovers to tigers and from tigers to flowers.”
Daumier also is a great genius. Millet is another painter of a whole
generation and its milieu. It is possible that these great geniuses are slightly
mad, and that we also must be made to believe in, and to have a boundless
admiration for them. If this be so, then do I prefer my madness to the cool
reasoning of others.
To study Rembrandt—that, perhaps is the most direct way. But first,
a word as to Frans Hals. He never painted the Christ, the Annunciation to
the Shepherds, a Crucifixion or a Resurrection; nor did he ever paint sensual
or gruesome nudes of women. Ever and always he painted portraits, nothing
but portraits—portraits of soldiers, of officers of clubs, of magistrates in session
for consultation—portraits of matrons with pink or yellow complexions, in
white bonnets, in black woolen or satin dresses, discussing the accounts of an
orphan asylum or hospital. He painted a tipsy drunkard, an old fishwife as a
jolly witch, a beautiful Bohemian woman, a newborn baby on its pillow, an
elegant cavalier in boots and spurs, the bon-vivant with swagger mustaches.
He painted himself and his wife as young lovers, on a terrace in the garden,
after their wedding night. He painted tramps, and laughing street musicians
and a fat cook.
He can do nothing else, but all this is of equal rank with the Paradise of
* Translated from the German by Agnes Ernst Meyer.
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