Vincent and Theo: Gallery Seven–Gallery Nine

He keeps working on perfecting the human figure using all these media and opaque white paint.

The books are by Dutch painters, who painted in a muted palette, so although he absorbs some of what Theo is trying to tell him, Vincent's color range remains more Dutch than French.

He tells Louis the family “acted extremely imprudently by speaking to her as they did.”

But then her stomach starts cramping, and she seems to be having convulsions.

Vincent takes her to Louis, and gets him to give her an emetic so she will vomit more.

Vincent is indignant. He tells Theo they have clashing ideologies.

Theo is part of the stodgy establishment, a company man, while Vincent is the passionate worker, the artist.

In spite of the reprieve from fighting with Theo, Vincent feels gloomy.

He is trying to perfect his use of chiaroscuro, the interplay of light and dark, without regard to color.

Theo likes some of Vincent’s paintings well enough to take them back to Paris: oil paintings of peasant women and a still life of flowers in a vase.

They have to think of the future: Ma, as the parson’s widow, is allowed to stay in the house only for a year.

The latest was just in November, a helpful distraction from Vincent's worries and woes about Margot.

They’d had an artists’ commune of two, and when Van Rappard left, Vincent knew he wanted that camaraderie again, with Van Rappard, and someday with others.

“You’ll agree with me that such work isn’t intended seriously. You can do better than this—fortunately; but why, then, observe and treat everything so superficially?”

“That coquettish little hand of that woman at the back, how untrue! And what connection is there between the coffeepot, the table and the hand lying on top of the handle?..."

How can he accuse Vincent of being cavalier in his painting?

He wants them to remain collegial friends.

He’s mesmerized by Andries’s favorite sister, Johanna. Her family calls her Net, but she’s known as Jo to everyone else.

He likes the look of her: hair pulled up and back, bangs low on her forehead accentuating her dark eyes; square jaw, broad nose, full lips—features that all together create a soft and yet also striking appearance.

Theo hasn’t confessed his infatuation with Jo to Dries—he’s still seeing S., after all.

He learns about color theory, and especially about complementary colors.

He spends three days there, and his visit is a revelation.

He loves the docks and wharves, which remind him of popular Japanese art prints that he’s begun collecting.

The doctor who performs the extractions tells him he’s smoking too much and eating too little.

He looks “awfully haggard. The poor fellow has a lot of worries. On top of that, his brother is still making life difficult for him, and accuses him of all sorts of things of which he's completely blameless.”

Their style will become known as pointillism.

Seurat thinks of his work as more rigorous and meticulous than Impressionism.

Seurat thinks of his work as more rigorous and meticulous than Impressionism.

Vincent has always been an autodidact, and within a few weeks, he finds a way to teach himself.

He also picks up a tip from his friend Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and adds paint thinner to pigment, then paints in a style called peinture a l'essence, with feathery, sketchy brushstrokes.

Vincent is more volatile and moody, Theo more melancholy.

He paints a portrait of a woman, in some ways similar to one from two years earlier, but unlike that older one, this one is full of color: red background, green dress, blues, greens, browns, tans.
Complementary colors, analogous colors, vivid colors.

At the end of April Theo reports to Wil that he and Vincent have “made peace because it served no good to carry on in that way.”
Paris in spring. A rapprochement.

They sit down together and talk, Jo thinking nothing much of it, “and then suddenly he started to declare his love for me. If it had happened in a novel it would sound implausible—but it actually happened.”

“I shall do all I can to present myself as I am, because I still nurture the hope that one day, when you no longer feel ‘I don't know you,’ we will have a rapport such as one does not encounter every day.”

He says that “everyone, without exception, people who are considered pious, those he himself loved dearly, even his father & mother, condemned him for his disregard of more temporal matters & his refusal to yield to society as it is, be it at the expense of what was best in him,” he tells Jo.

He says that “everyone, without exception, people who are considered pious, those he himself loved dearly, even his father & mother, condemned him for his disregard of more temporal matters & his refusal to yield to society as it is, be it at the expense of what was best in him,” he tells Jo.

He says that “everyone, without exception, people who are considered pious, those he himself loved dearly, even his father & mother, condemned him for his disregard of more temporal matters & his refusal to yield to society as it is, be it at the expense of what was best in him,” he tells Jo.

Her idea of being in complete harmony from the beginning, he writes, is “a very beautiful & very young idea, but it is not true. It is certainly a joy to imagine oneself totally compatible with another person, but it is only a dream, and one that is bound to be followed by a rude awakening.”

In deference to his bosses, Theo hangs the more traditional paintings on the ground floor, and the modern paintings on the entresol.