Vincent and Theo: Gallery Five–Gallery Six

The ostensible reason for the letter is to thank Theo for the money he’d given Pa.

He has Theo’s help, but he hopes to become self-reliant. Not completely eschewing the values he was taught at 26 Markt.

So with passion and perseverance, he spends day after day filling pages of notebooks made of old Dutch paper like the one he bought from the bookseller in Brussels.

The Boulevard Montmartre teems with rich and fancy people day and night.

To them it seems as though Vincent is pursuing another path that will inevitably fail.

He had no romantic thoughts about her then, but now widowed and grief-stricken, Kee unwittingly presents a romantic figure to Vincent.

Vincent finds her a great confidant and kindred spirit.

She’s adamant and refuses over and over.

He feels their looks of contempt, and yet he cannot help himself.

Until he finally finds himself tedious and decides to put an end to it.

Buffering their father, Theo becomes the first line of defense.

He uses it to rent a place to live and work in, a room and an alcove, with bright light from a large southern-facing window.

“I think it very good that you’re permanently installed in The Hague,” Theo writes, “and hope to do as much as I can to help you until you can start earning yourself, but what I don’t like is the way you’ve contrived to leave Pa and Ma..

He finds watercolors difficult, but with Mauve's tutelage he perseveres.

And soon there will be more he won’t divulge.

Vincent predicts to Theo that in a year he’ll be making drawings and watercolors that are salable, and not just to a friend or relative.

He omits Mauve’s misgivings about Sien.

She sits, bent over, her knees pulled up, her crossed arms on her knees, her head in her arms, her face hidden, her long hair straggling down her back.

Her pendulous breasts hang over her rounded (pregnant) stomach. Vincent calls the drawing Sorrow.

The drawing is striking, well executed, poignant, melancholic, beautiful—but not in a traditional sense.

Besides, “she understands my own temper, and we have a tacit agreement, as it were, not to carp at each other.”

Besides, “she understands my own temper, and we have a tacit agreement, as it were, not to carp at each other.”

Vincent writes another letter, again stating his case, saying he’s not being frivolous, not trying to live off Theo in an irresponsible way.

And he’s not being impetuous, thinking of marriage.

“I feel that my work lies in the heart of the people, that I must keep close to the ground, that I must delve deeply into life and must get ahead by coping with great cares and difficulties.”

They camped in the dunes “for days on end from morning till evening like true bohemians. We took bread and a small bag of coffee, and fetched hot water from a water and coals woman in Scheveningen.”

She “takes on all the toil and worry of the painter’s life and is so willing to pose, I believe I’ll be a better artist with her than if I had won Kee Vos.”

The men are in workers’ clothes, not fancy establishment garb.

Vincent makes this painting in July, when the letters between the brothers are all about Sien, Tersteeg’s disapproval, Theo’s disapprobation.

The painting is a personal statement, an allegory, and it is also a glimpse into the future.

Vincent sends Theo a sketch of the palette, and a list of the colors he bought: “ochre (red, yellow, brown), cobalt and Prussian blue, Naples yellow, terra sienna, black and white, supplemented with some carmine, sepia, vermilion, ultra-marine, gamboge.”

They are part of each other, interstitial: lodged between each others cells.

At times he already feels like an artist and has even begun to sign some of his works—just his first name, “Vincent,” often in bright red letters. He underscores it with a flourish.

Theo is overwhelmed with money worries and by his ambivalence about Marie, but at least he has colleagues at the gallery, clients he speaks to regularly, painters he spends time with.

Vincent worries about his situation with Sien, plus he's got a fatigue he can’t shake, and bouts of melancholy. Even so, he works assiduously.

Vincent is gaunt, badly dressed, clearly not well.

Uncle Cor helps by taking more than twenty of Vincent’s drawings on consignment.

Vincent is grateful for Theo’s intervention and Uncle Cor’s help, but he tells Theo that this cannot be contingent on his leaving Sien.

It's true that it's like going along a road, one can see the steeple in the distance, but the land undulates, so that when one thinks one is there, there's another stretch that one didn't see at first and which is added on.

They turn the mangle room, where wet clothes are wrung out to dry, into a studio so he can paint and draw at home