Narrative Excerpts
"Dear Theo...
I am eager to receive a letter from you, to hear how you are and what you are doing, and also to hear perhaps if you have seen any beautiful and remarkable things lately...I have not seen anything in the way of art since I left Brussels. Notwithstanding, the country is very picturesque and very unique here: everything speaks, as it were, and is full of character. Lately, ..."
... it was an intriguing sight to see the miners going home in the white snow in the evening at twilight.
Those people are quite black. When they come out of the darkmines into daylight, they look exactly like chimney sweeps ..."
... I have drawn five times over a man with a spade, a Digger [unBecheur], in different positions, a sower twice, a girl with a broom twice. Then ..."
...I can tell you one thing; during these last days there has been a change for the better. I have finished at least a dozen drawings, or rather sketches in pencil and in pen and ink, which seem to me to be somewhat better. They vaguely resemble certain drawings by ..."
"... I wish all people had what I am gradually beginning to acquire: the power to read a book in a short time without difficulty, and to keep a strong impression of it. In reading books, as in looking at pictures, one must admire what is beautiful with assurance--without doubt,without hesitation ..."
"... More and more I feel that drawing the figure is a good thing which indirectly has a good influence on drawing landscape. If one draws a willow as if it were a living being-and after all, it really is-then the surroundings follow in due course if one has concentrated all one's attention only on that same tree, not giving up until one has put some life into it ..."
"... Every week I now do something which I couldn't do before, and as I have already mentioned, it is like growing young again. And the consciousness that nothing, except illness, can take from me the force which is now beginning to develop-this consciousness is what gives me courage for the future and helps me bear the many difficulties of the present ..."
"... Well, Mauve at once sat me down before a still life with a pair of old wooden shoes and some other objects, so I could set to work. And I also go to him for drawing in the evening ..."
"... Do you know that drawing with words is also an art, which sometimes betrays a slumbering hidden force, like small blue or gray puffs of smoke indicate a fire on the hearth?
This Emile Zola is a glorious artist. I am now reading Le Ventre de Paris; it is confoundedly clever.
P. S. Read as much of Zola as you can; that is good for one, and makes things clear ..."
"Dear brother,
I want you to understand clearly my conception of art. One must work long and hard to grasp the essence. What I want and aim at is confoundedly difficult, and yet I do not think I aim too high. I want to do drawings which touch some people. "Sorrow" is a small beginning, ..."
"... [Now] Just imagine me sitting at my attic window as early as four o'clock in the morning, studying, with my perspective frame, the meadows and the yard when they are lighting the fires to make coffee...
...This view of the gabled roofs with their grass-covered gutters at early day, and those first signs of life and awakening, the flying birds, the smoking chimneys, ..."
"... I refrained from choosing "nice" colors which one ought to mix oneself. I believe this is a practical palette with healthy colors. Ultramarine, carmine, or the like are added when strictly necessary.
I will begin with little things, ..."
"There is something infinite in painting-I cannot explain it to you so well- but it is so delightful just for expressing one's feelings. There are hidden harmonies or contrasts in colors which involuntarily combine to work together and which could not possibly be used in another way ..."
"... The problem was-and I found it very difficult-to get the depth of color, the enormous force and solidity of that ground-and while painting it I perceived for the very first time how much light there still was in that dusk-to keep that light and at the us same time the glow and depth of that rich color...
... In a certain way I am glad I have not learned painting, because then I might have learned to pass by such effects as this. 
Now I say, No, this is just what I want-if it is impossible, it is impossible; I will try it, though I do not know how it ought to be done. I do not know myself how I paint it. I sit down with a white board before the spot that strikes me, I look at what is before my eyes, 1 say to myself, That white board must become something; I come back dissatisfied-I put it away, and when I have rested a little, I go and look at it with a kind of fear. Then I am still dissatisfied, because I still have that splendid scene too clearly in my mind to be satisfied with what I made of it. But I find in my work an echo of what struck me, after all. I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me, and that I have put it down in shorthand. In my shorthand there may be words that cannot be deciphered, there may be mistakes or gaps; but there is something of what wood or beach or figure has told me in it, and it is not the tame or conventional language derived
from a studied manner or a system rather than from nature itself. ..."
"... You remember perhaps Moorman's State Lottery office at the beginning of Spuistraat ? I passed there on a rainy morning when a crowd of people stood waiting to get their lottery tickets. For the most part they were old women and the kind of people of whom one cannot say what they are doing or how they live, but who evidently have a great deal of drudgery ...
... that little group of people-their expression of waiting-struck me, and while I sketched it, it took on a larger, deeper significance for me than at first.
For it is more significant when one sees in it the poor and money. It is often that way with almost all groups of figures: one must sometimes think it over before one understands what it all means. The curiosity and the illusion about the lottery seem more or less childish to us-but it becomes serious when one thinks of the contrast of misery and that kind of forlorn effort of the poor wretches to try to save themselves by buying a lottery ticket, paid for with their last pennies, which should have gone for food. ..."
"Dear Theo,
Today and yesterday I drew two figures of an old man sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Long ago Schuitemaker sat for me, and I kept the drawing' because I wanted to make a better one someday. Perhaps I will also make a lithograph of it. How beautiful such an old workman is, with his patched fustian clothes and his bald head ..."
"... It seems to me it's a painter's duty to try to put an idea into his work. In this print I have tried to express (but I cannot do it well or so strikingly as it is in reality; this is merely a weak reflection in a dark mirror) what seems to me one of the strongest proofs of the existence of "quelque chose la-haul" [something on high] in which Millet believed, namely the existence of God and eternity- certainly in the infinitely touching expression of such a little old man, which he himself is perhaps unconscious of, when he is sitting quietly in his corner by the fire. At the same time there is something noble, something great, which cannot be destined for the worms. Israels has painted it so beautifully. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, ..."
"... I have said to myself that my first duty is to try my very best on the drawings...
Now in these drawings I have tried to show my meaning even more clearly than in the old man with his head in his hands. These fellows are all in action, ..."
LT 256
When I made the lithographs, it struck me that the lithographic crayon was very pleasant material, and I thought, I'll make drawings with it. However, there is one drawback which you will understand-as it is greasy, it cannot be erased in the usual way; working with it on paper, one even loses the only thing with which one can erase on the stone itself, namely the scraper- which cannot be used strongly enough on the paper because it cuts through it.
LT 265
Theo, 8 February
Do you know what occurred to me ? That in the first period of a painter's life one unconsciously makes it very hard for oneself-by a feeling of not being able to master the work-by an uncertainty as to whether one will ever master it-by a great desire to make progress, by a lack of self- confidence-one cannot banish a certain feeling of agitation, and one hurries oneself though one doesn't like to be hurried.
LT 394
...I am very busy painting those heads.
I paint in the daytime and draw in the evening. In this way I have already painted at least some thirty and drawn as many. With the result that I see a chance of doing it even better before long, I hope.
I think that it will help me for the figure in general ...
LT 396
Some of the heads I promised you are finished, but they are not quite dry yet. As I wrote you already, they were painted in a dark cottage, and they are studies in the real sense of the word. I already began to send you studies of drawings long ago.
I work hard, and suppose that only one out of ten or twenty studies I make is worth seeing; though those few, either more or less in number, may he of no value now, they may be later on, perhaps.
...I am brooding over a couple of larger, more elaborate things, and if I should happen to get a clear idea of how to reproduce the effects I have in mind,...
LT 398
... Mother is unable to grasp the idea that painting is a faith, and that it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion-and that in painting one conquers by perseverance and not by making concessions-and that "I cannot give thee the faith" -this is exactly what is the matter between her and me-as it was with Father, and remained so. Oh dear ...
402
There is a school-I believe-of impressionists. But I know very little about it. But I do know who the original and most important masters are, around whom-as around an axis-the landscape and peasant painters will revolve. Delacroix, Corot, Millet and the rest. That is my own opinion, not properly formulated.
I mean there are (rather than persons) rules or principles or fundamental truths for draining as well as for color, which one proves to fall back on when one finds out an actual truth.
In drawing, for instance ...
LT 403
... I am working on the potato eaters, and I have painted new studies of the heads; the hands especially are greatly changed.
What I am trying to do most is to bring life into it.
I wonder what ...
LT 403 cont'
... I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labor, and how they have honestly earned their food ...
LT404
... Though the ultimate picture will have been painted in a relatively short time and for the greater part from memory, it has taken a whole winter of painting studies of heads and hands...
... A gray woven from red, blue, yellow, dirty white and black threads, a blue that is broken by a green, and orange-red, or yellow, thread, are quite different from plain colors, that is to say they are more iridescent, and primary colors become hard, cold and dead in comparison...
... If you could compare the first painted studies I made on my arrival here at Nuenen and the picture I'm now working on, I think you would see that things are getting a little more lively as to color. ...
LT404
... I believe that the question of the analysis of colors will preoccupy you too someday, for as a connoisseur and expert, I think one must also have a fixed opinion, and possess certain convictions ...
LT 405
... I think you will see what I mean in the picture of the potato eaters, I think Portier will understand. It is very dark, however, and in the white, for instance, hardly any white has been used, but simply the neutral color, which is made by mixing red, blue, yellow, for instance vermilion, Paris blue and Naples yellow.
Therefore that color is in itself a pretty dark gray, but in the picture it looks white.
I'll tell you why I do it that way. Here the subject is a gray interior, lit by a little lamp.
The dirty linen tablecloth, ...
LT 404
...As to the potato eaters, it is a picture that will show well in gold, I am sure of that, but it would show as well on a wall, papered in the deep color of ripe corn.
It simply cannot be seen without such a setting .
LT 408
... What shall I say?-the future and experience will someday repeat what I cannot find the right words for. I mean that enthusiasm sometimes calculates even better than those cool heads which reckon themselves "above such things." And instinct, inspiration, impulse, and conscience are better guides than many people think. And however that may be, I for one agree with the saying, "Mieux vaut crever de passion, que crever d'ennui" [It is better to die of passion than to die of boredom]. ...
LT 408 cont'
... At present I am busy putting into practice, on the drawing of a hand and an arm, what Delacroix said about drawing: "Ne pas prendre par la ligne mais par le milieu." That gives opportunity enough to start from ellipses ...
LT 413
The drawback to painting is that, even if one does not sell one's pictures, one still needs money for colors and models in order to make progress. And that drawback is a bad thing. But for the rest, painting and, in my opinion, especially painting rural life gives serenity, though one may have all kinds of superficial worries and miseries. I mean painting is a home, and one does not have that homesickness, that peculiar feeling Hennebeau had.
LT 416... I have here before me some figures: a woman with a spade, seen from behind; another bending to glean the ears of corn; another seen from the front, her head almost on the ground, digging carrots. I have been watching those peasant figures here for more than a year and a half, especially their action,...
... As far as I know there isn't a single academy where one learns to draw and paint a digger, a sower, a woman putting the kettle over the fire or a seamstress. But in every city of some importance there is an academy with a choice of models for historical, Arabic, Louis XV, in short, all really nonexistent.figures ...
LT 418
... Nowadays when critics stand before a picture, like the one by Benjamin Constant, like a reception at the Cardinal's by I don't know what Spaniard, it is the custom to speak with a philosophical air about "clever technique." But ...
... Perhaps you will ask: When will a figure not be superfluous, though there may be faults, great faults in it in my opinion?
When the digger digs, when the peasant is a peasant and the peasant woman. a peasant woman.
Is this something new?...
... Tell him that I adore the figures by Michelangelo though the legs are undoubtedly too long, the hips and the backsides too large. Tell him that, for me, Millet and Lhermitte are the real artists for the very reason that they do not paint things as they are, traced in a dry analytical way, but as they-Millet, Lhermitte, Michelangelo-feel them. Tell him ...
LT 425
... You will receive a big still life of potatoes, in which I tried to get corps, I mean, to express the material in such a way that they become heavy, solid lumps which would hurt you if they were thrown at you, for instance...
LT 426
... I do not know whether you remember the one to the left of the "Night Watch," as pendant of "The Syndics," there is a picture (unknown to me till now) by Frans Hals and P. Codde, about twenty officers full length.! Did you ever notice that??? that alone-that one picture-is worth the trip to Amsterdam-especially for a colorist ...
LT 428
... Tell me-have you noticed that those studies of mine that have black backgrounds have their highest light put in a low color scaler?? And when in this way I put my study in a lower color scale than nature, I yet keep the harmony of tones because I become darker, not only in my shadows, but also 
in the same degree in my lights.
I painted my studies just as a kind of gymnastics, to rise and fall in tone, so -don't forget that I painted my white and gray moss literally with a mud color, and yet it looks light in the study. ...
Ever yours, Vincent
These things concerning complementary colors, simultaneous contrast, and the neutralizing of complementals, this question is the first and principal one; the second is the mutual influence of two kindred colors, for instance, carmine on a vermilion, a pink-violet on a blue-violet. The third question is a light blue against the same dark blue, a pink against a brown-red, a citron yellow against a chamois yellow, etc. But the first question is the most important.
If you come across some good book on color theories, mind you send it to me, for I too am far from knowing everything about it, and am searching for more every day.
LT 429
... In answer to your description of the study by Manet, I send you a still life of an open-so a broken white-Bible bound in leather, against a black background, with yellow-brown foreground, with a touch of citron yellow.
I painted that in one rush, on one day.
This to show you that when I say that I have perhaps not plodded entirely in vain, ...
Please note: This narrative is still under construction.
It will be added to until it reaches the end of the narrative from the CDrom upon which it is based.