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Vincent van Gogh

163 quotes

“Like me, for instance, who can count so many years in my life when I completely lost all inclination to laugh, leaving aside whether or not this was my own fault, I for one need above all just to have a good laugh. I found that in Guy de Maupassant and there are others here, Rabelais among the old writers, Henri Rochefort among today's, where one can find that — Voltaire in 'Candide'. On the contrary, if one wants truth, life as it is, De Goncourt, for example, in 'Germinie Lacerteux', 'La fille Elisa', Zola in 'La joie de vivre' and 'L'assommoir' and so many other masterpieces paint life as we feel it ourselves and thus satisfy that need which we have, that people tell us the truth. The work of the French naturalists Zola, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, De Goncourt, Richepin, Daudet, Huysmans is magnificent and one can scarcely be said to belong to one's time if one isn't familiar with them.”
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1887 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote of Vincent, in his letter to sister Willemien van Gogh, from Paris, late October 1887; from letter 574 - original text on vangoghletters online
“I brought home a no.15 canvas today, it's a drawbridge, with a little carriage going across it, outlined against a blue sky — the river blue as well, the banks orange with greenery, a group of washerwomen wearing blouses and multicoloured bonnets.. .But, my dear brother — you know, I feel I'm in Japan. I say no more than that, and again, I've seen nothing yet in its usual splendour. That's why (even while being worried that at the moment expenses are steep and the paintings of no value), that's why I don't despair of success in this enterprise of going on a long journey in the south. Here I'm seeing new things, I'm learning..”
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1888 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Theo, on or about Friday 16 March 1888; Letter 585, vanGoghLetters.org.
“I'd like you to spend some time here, you'd feel it — after some time your vision changes, you see with a more Japanese eye, you feel colour differently. I'm also convinced that it's precisely through a long stay here that I'll bring out my personality. The Japanese [like a. o. Hokusai, admired by Vincent] draws quickly, very quickly, like a flash of lightning, because his nerves are finer, his feeling simpler. I've been here [Arles] only a few months but — tell me, in Paris would I have drawn in an hour the drawing of the boats?.. .Now this [sketch] was done without measuring, letting the pen go. So I tell myself that gradually the expenses will be balanced by work.”
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1888 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Theo, c. 5 June 1888, in 'Van Gogh's Letters', letter 620, Van Gogh museum. Note: The Japanese artists with their colored woodblock-prints meant a great inspirations for several Paris' artists - they were extr…
“Often I think of that excellent painter Monticelli,. ..when I come back myself from the mental labor of balancing the six essential colors.. ..sheer work and calculation, with one's mind utterly on the stretch, like an actor on the stage in a difficult part, with a hundred things at once to think of in a single half-hour. Don't think that I would artificially keep up a feverish condition, but do understand that I am in the midst of a complicated calculation which results in quick succession in canvases quickly executed, but calculated long beforehand. So now, when anyone says that such and such is done too quickly, you can reply that they have looked at it too quickly.”
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1888 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Theo, Summer 1888; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935, (letter 507) p. 32
“..I am always between two currents of thought, first the material difficulties, turning round and round to make a living; and second, study of color. I am always in hope of making a discovery there, to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone against a sombre background. To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is nothing in that of stereoscopic realism, but is it not some thing that actually exists?”
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1888 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Theo, September 1888; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935, (letter 531) p. 22
“It is color, not locally true from the point of view of the stereoscopic realist, but color to suggest any emotion of an ardent temperament. When Paul Mantz saw at the exhibition the violent and inspired sketch of Delacroix.. ..the 'Barque of Christ' - he turned away from it exclaiming: 'I did not know that one could be so terrible with a little blue and green'. Hokusai wrings the same cry from you [Theo], but he does it by his line, his drawing, when you say in your letter - 'the waves are claws and the ship is caught in them'. Well, if you make the color exact or the drawing exact, it won't give you sensations like that.”
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1888 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Theo, 8 September 1888; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935, (letter 533) pp. 32-33
“At present I have a portrait of a woman [Madame Roulin].. .Which I've called 'la berceuse', . .It's a woman dressed in green (bust olive green and the skirt pale Veronese green). Her hair is entirely orange and in plaits. The complexion worked up in chrome yellow, with a few broken tones, of course, in order to model. The hands that hold the cradle cord ditto ditto. The background is vermilion at the bottom (simply representing a tiled floor or brick floor). The wall is covered with wallpaper, obviously calculated by me in connection with the rest of the colours. This wallpaper is blue-green with pink dahlias and dotted with orange and with ultramarine.. .Whether I've actually sung a lullaby with colour I leave to the critics..”
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1889 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote of Vincent in his letter from Arles, on or about Tuesday, 22 January 1889, to his Dutch friend Arnold Koning; from text of letter 740, van goghletters – Van Gogh museum
“Now I'm working on [a painting of the hospital ward. In the foreground a big black stove around which a few grey or black shapes of patients, then behind the very long ward, tiled with red with the two rows of white beds, the walls white, but a lilac or green white, and the windows with pink curtains, with green curtains, and in the background two figures of nuns in black and white. The ceiling is violet with large beams. I had read an article on Dostoevsky, who had written a book, 'Souvenirs de la maison des morts' and that spurred me on to begin work again on a large study that I'd begun in the fever ward in Arles. But it's annoying to paint figures without models. I've read another of Carmen Sylva's ideas, which is very true: when you suffer a lot – you see everybody at a great distance, and as if at the far end of an immense arena – the very voices seem to come from a long way off. I've experienced this in these crises to such a point that all the people I see then seem to me, even if I recognize them – which isn't always the case – to come from very far away and to be entirely different from what they are in reality..”
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1889 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In a letter to his sister Willemien, c. 21 October 1889, from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence,
“Paul Gauguin, that curious artist, that alien whose mien and the look in whose eyes vaguely remind one of Rembrandt's 'Portrait of a Man' in the Galerie Lacaze — this friend of mine likes to make one feel that 'a good picture is equivalent to a good deed'; not that he says so, but it is difficult to be on intimate terms with him without being aware of a certain moral responsibility. A few days before we parted, when illness forced me to enter an asylum, I tried to paint 'his empty place'. It is a study of his armchair of dark, red-brown wood, the seat of greenish straw, and in the absent person's place a lighted candlestick and some modern novels.”
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1890 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote in a letter to Theo, from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 9 or 10 February 1890 (1890), published in The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Vol. 3 (1958) New York Graphic Society, p. 256; see original letter:
“Dear mother and sister - This is the first time that I can bring myself to write after 2 months' indisposition. Until today I could bring myself neither to read your letters nor to write.. .For a few days now I've been busy painting a field in the full sunshine with yellow dandelions ['Flowering meadow with trees and dandelions']. And while my illness was at its worst, I still painted, among other things a reminiscence of Brabant, cottages with mossy roofs and beech hedges on an autumn evening with a stormy sky, the sun setting red in reddish clouds. And a turnip field with women lifting turnips in the snow.”
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1890 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote of Vincent, in his letter, from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 29 April, 1890, to his mother Anna van Gogh-Carbentus and his sister Willemien van Gogh; from letter 864, Van Goghletters, online - Van Goghmuseum
“I have seen Dr. Gachet, who made the impression on me of being rather eccentric, but his experience as a doctor must keep him balanced while fighting the nervous trouble from which he certainly seems to me to be suffering at least as seriously as I... .Nevertheless, he [dr. Gachet] is a strange fellow. The impression he made on me was not unfavorable. When he spoke of Belgium and the days of the old painters, his grief-hardened face became smiling again, and I really think that I shall go on being friends with him and that I shall do his portrait. Then he said that I must work boldly on, and not think at all of what went wrong with me.”
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1890 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quotes from Vincent's letter to Theo van Gogh, from Auvers-sur-Oise, 20 May 1890; as cited on Van gogh's Letters, online
“It was a great happiness to me to see Theo again, and to make the acquaintance of Jo and the little one. Theo's cough was worse than it was when I left him two years ago.. .I have a larger picture of the village church [in Auvers-sur-Oise ] - an effect in which the building appears to be violet-hued against a sky of simple deep blue colour, pure cobalt; the stained-glass windows appear as ultramarine blotches, the roof is violet and partly orange. In the foreground some green plants in bloom, and sand with the pink flow of sunshine in it. And once again it is nearly the same thing as the studies I did in Nuenen of the old tower and the cemetery, only it is probably that now the colour is more expressive, more sumptuous.”
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1890 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote in a letter from Vincent van Gogh to his sister Wilhelmina van Gogh, from Auvers-sur-Oise, 5 June 1890; as cited on Van Gogh's Letters, online
“Well, the truth is, we can only make our pictures speak. But yet, my dear brother, there is this that I have always told you, and I repeat it once more, with all earnestness.. ..that I shall always consider that you are something other than a simple [art-]dealer in Corot, that through my mediation you have a part in the actual production of some canvases, which even in the deluge will retain their place. Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half-foundered in it - that is all right - but you are not among the dealers in men so far as I know, and you can still choose your side, I think, acting with humanity, but what's the use?”
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) first seen 1890 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In a letter from Auvers, Summer of 1890, to Theo (found on him on 29 July, after Vincent had shot himself); as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935, (letter 652 ) p.…