Van Gogh Museum Journal 1996

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fig. 1
Letter to Theo van Gogh, c. 6-7 December 1883 [412/345], Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

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[Van Gogh Studies]

‘As it came into my pen’: a new edition of the correspondence of Vincent van Gogh
Hans Luijten⁺

At the end of 1994 work began on a new, scholarly edition of the letters of Vincent van Gogh. This is a joint project of the Van Gogh Museum and the Constantijn Huygens Institute for Text Editions and Intellectual History in The Hague. The edition will contain the original texts of the letters with parallel English translations, and there are plans for separate English commentaries with annotations of the letters. The work is in the hands of art historian Elly Cassee and Dutch language scholars Leo Jansen and myself.¹

The correspondence as it has come down to us comprises over 900 letters, about 80% of which are in the possession of the museum. The vast majority is addressed to Vincent's brother Theo. Only about 40 replies have been preserved. Other correspondents include Vincent's mother and father and his sister Willemien as well as artists such as Anthon van Rappard, Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin.²

This is far from the first time that the letters have been the object of attention. Immediately following Van Gogh's death in 1890 the original manuscripts already commanded interest, and they circulated among the friends of Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo's wife. After Theo's death - shortly after Vincent's - she devoted herself to gaining widespread recognition for Van Gogh's work. She was responsible for the publication in 1914 of Letters to his brother, the first edition, in three volumes. Increasingly comprehensive Dutch editions appeared in 1952-53, 1973 and 1990 (the latter containing modernised renderings of the letters and Dutch translations of all those written in French), each in turn spawning translations, enabling intensive use to be made of the letters over the years. Virtually every study of Van Gogh has drawn on and quoted from the correspondence.

In spite of this, we are still without a reliable edition. It is to fill this gap that the present project has been launched. The edition is being prepared with an international and scholarly readership in mind, which has had consequences for its structure.

+ This article was written in close consultation with my colleagues Leo Jansen and Elly Cassee.

1 An Editorial Board has been formed to provide the necessary support for the project, composed, aside from the executive editors, of Ronald de Leeuw, Louis van Tilborgh and Sjraar van Heugten - all of the Van Gogh Museum - and Dick van Vliet, Director of the Huygens Institute. To facilitate discussion of specific questions in various sub-areas, other than technical editorial problems, an advisory panel to the editors has been called into existence. This panel consists of Maarten van Buuren, Modern French Literature scholar (Utrecht University), the Van Gogh specialists Roland Dorn (Zürich) and Evert van Uitert (University of Amsterdam), the Dutch Language and Literature scholar Dick van Halsema (Free University, Amsterdam), and the art historian Rudi Ekkart (Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie [RKD], The Hague).

2 Sixteen of the letters to Willemien have been preserved, 58 to Van Rappard, 22 to Bernard and 16 from Gauguin.

Methodology

The early months of the project were largely taken up with compiling inventories of the letters owned by the Van Gogh Museum itself, ascertaining the status of the copies and drawing up guidelines for the transcriptions. A start was also made on the material description, including dimensions, watermarks and embossing, as well as the type of paper and writing medium used.³ We have also determined which letters are, or may be, missing, and we have made efforts to determine their current whereabouts.

3 The material description of all the letters will be gathered in a database. This will not only serve as documentation but may also prove helpful in the dating of sheets or in making decisions concerning which sheets belong together. Some scholars contest certain juxtapositions, and not without cause. Roland Dorn has made several new proposals on the basis of information external to the letters: see Roland Dorn, et al., exhib. cat. Van Gogh und die Haager Schule, Vienna (Kunstforum) 1996, p. 162, note 3; see also p. 191, note 1.

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The annotated, letter-for-letter transcriptions will include all variants: in this way, every slip of the pen, deletion and addition will be registered. Whether a separate list of these variants will also appear in the final edition has yet to be decided. One possibility would be to include only a selection of textual variants here, but a conceivable alternative option in the light of recent developments would be to add all the transcriptions to the edition in the form of a cd-rom.

As of now, a number of the letter-for-letter texts have been turned into what are known as reading texts and provided with linguistic annotations. It is these reading texts that will appear in the forthcoming edition, and the English translations will be based on them. Once the reading text has been definitively approved, so that reliable texts of the letters are available, the commentary can be expanded to embrace annotations such as biographical, literary and topographical notes as well as comments in the realm of art and cultural history.

The commentary volumes will be followed by an account of the transcription method employed and an overview of the emendations. Furthermore, every work of art referred to by Van Gogh, if at all possible, will be identified. If it proves feasible, these may be included in a separate illustrated volume, or perhaps in the cd-rom referred to above.

When preparing the reading texts we were struck by the liberties that previous editors had taken with Van Gogh's letters. We, too, shall sometimes be unable to avoid a measure of intervention in this new edition, given the casualness of Van Gogh's style of writing - he concerned himself little with punctuation, there are numerous slips of the pen, and personal (19th-century) expressions call for clarification or emendation. But in comparison to our predecessors we shall exercise a good deal more restraint, and leave as many of Van Gogh's idiosyncracies as possible intact in the reading texts.

Characteristics and idiosyncracies

‘I have written to you in this matter just as it came into my pen, I hope you will be able to make something of it’ wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo from London in January 1874.⁴ Hundreds more letters would follow, and in many of them Van Gogh gave vent to his feelings, often in the frankest of terms. Reading the original letters, one is frequently surprised by their directness, sincerity and fervour, not only in their tone but also in the manner in which they were written - with little concern for finishing touches, sometimes in haste, or under the visible influence of emotion. He committed his thoughts, ideas and opinions to paper without any reservation.⁵ The ensuing imperfections in the finished text are characteristic of Van Gogh's often impassioned style of writing, and up to a point this ‘loose’ style will therefore be preserved.

This is not the only reason for keeping the reading text as close as possible to the original. The nature of the edition and the intended readership make it possible to present a version which does justice to different aspects of the text of the letters in comparison to those which prevail in an edition targeting a wide public. Furthermore, all existing editions contain more or less ‘reworked’ and/or abridged - sometimes drastically so - versions of the texts.⁶

4 17/13. Cf. also: ‘Je 't écris un peu au hasard ce qui me vient dans ma plume’ [154/133] and ‘[...] omdat ik toch met U heb afgesproken Theo dat ik U de dingen maar zou vertellen zoo op mijn eigen manier/zooals 't uit mijn pen komt [...],’ [because I agreed with you Theo that I would simply tell things in my own way as they flow from my pen] [210/181]. In the passages quoted, an, indicates a comma we have inserted ourselves, and a _ likewise indicates a full stop added by us.

5 Cf. in this connection Van Gogh's own words to Theo from The Hague on 7 or 8 January 1882 [198/169]: ‘Wilt gij dat ik zal voortgaan te schrijven net zoo als ik in den laatsten tijd gedaan heb, over allerlei U de gedachten zeggende die in me opkomen zonder bang te zijn eens door te slaan, zonder mijne gedachten te kortwieken of terug te houden.
Dat laatste doe ik het liefst, namelijk vrijuit schrijven of zeggen wat ik bedoel.’
[Do you wish me to continue to do as I have been doing recently, to tell you the thoughts that come into my mind about all sorts of things without fearing lest I go too far, without curtailing my thoughts or keeping them back? For this is what I most prefer, to write freely or say what I mean.]
For the most important considerations in the publication of unprinted sources, see Marita Mathijsen, Naar de letter: handboek editiewetenschap, Assen 1995.

6 Jo van Gogh-Bonger omitted entire passages, reduced the names of persons who were still alive or whom she disliked to initials and adjusted words on her own initiative. The 1952-53 and 1973 editions, too, have left out substantial parts of letters and include mangled sections of text.

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The reading text obviously has to be intelligible, but this is not to say that it must be ‘flawless’; most ‘flaws’ do not lead to a misunderstanding, and Van Gogh makes so many that they are among the most conspicuous features of his style of writing.

For this reason, inconsistencies in spelling or the use of capital letters and missing punctuation have not necessarily been corrected. However, ‘flaws’ preserved in the reading text are generally untranslatable; these include Van Gogh's renderings of words as he himself pronounced them and those which can be regarded as belonging to the regional dialect of Noord-Brabant, where he grew up. Nuances of this kind are lost in translation. A concise linguistic annotation can alleviate this problem, as illustrated in the following examples:

Kersmis: variant form of Kerstmis [= Christmas]
de klus kwijt: variant form of de kluts kwijt [= in a state of nerves]
herrinneren: read as herinneren [= to recall]
defineeren: read as definiëren [= to define]
tout effet: read as tout à fait [= entirely]

Besides these examples, there is a category in which carelessness or slips of the pen result in obscurities or create scope for misunderstanding. To avoid uncertainty about the meaning, emendations are made at these places in the text - that is to say, the text is corrected - and each emendation will be justified.

In short, Van Gogh's style of writing deviates substantially from standard Dutch.⁷ This is partly due to the fact that there are words, expressions and spellings that could be designated personal or familiar idiom, and partly the result of Van Gogh's lack of concern for finishing touches in the text. For instance, he was very erratic in the matter of spacing: he would sometimes incorrectly write an expression as one word, sometimes the space between the letters of a word or between two arbitrary words is strikingly large, and final letters are often reduced to little squiggles or left out altogether. Reproducing the text of the letters as faithfully as possible must not mean that the reader of the edition is left to construe the intended meaning himself; there will thus be a need for explanations, whether lexicographical, grammatical, or in relation to emendations - particularly in the realm of punctuation and the use of capital letters.

7 At this stage of the research our knowledge of Van Gogh's French is too incomplete to make pronouncements about it.

Deletions

Two examples will suffice to indicate the kind of deletions that are encountered in the letters. On 31 May 1877, Van Gogh writes:

‘Geloof in God, door het geloof kan men worden “droevig maar altijd blijde” en ever green en hoeven wij niet te klagen “als onze jeugd verdwijnt bij 't rijpen onzer krachten”.’
[Faith in God, through faith may one become ‘sorrowful yet always rejoicing’ and ever green and need we not lament ‘when our youth vanishes with the maturing of our powers.’]⁸

Before the word ‘hoeven’ [need] in this passage, the phrase ‘il n'y a point de vieillarde’ is crossed out, a clue that while writing this Van Gogh was thinking of Michelet, whose work he so admired. Three years before, on 31 July 1874, he had written, echoing Michelet, ‘“Il n'y a pas de vieille femme”!’ and had added in explanation: ‘Dat wil niet zeggen dat er geen oude vrouwen zijn, maar dat een vrouw niet oud wordt zoolang zij bemint & bemind wordt. -’

[This is not to say that there are no old women, but that a woman does not become old as long as she still loves and is loved.]⁹

Here is a second example. It is widely known that Van Gogh was no paragon of refinement in daily life. He confessed to Theo:

‘Over dag in 't dagelijks leven zie ik er soms even ongevoelig uit als een wild varken misschien en kan ik mij best begrijpen dat de menschen mij grof vinden.
Toen ik jonger was dacht ik zelf ook veel meer als nu dat het hem zat in toevalligheden of kleine dingen of misverstanden die geen gronden hadden.’

8 118/99.

9 27/20 (emendation bemint for bemind). The quotation from Michelet is found again in letters 115/96 and 191/164.

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fig. 2
Letter 412/345: ‘Penselen’ and ‘grofheid’ (detail of the deletion), Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

[In day time in daily life I sometimes look as insensitive as a wild boar perhaps and I can well understand that people find me crude.
When I was younger I myself also thought much more than now that it had to do with coincidences or small things or misunderstandings that were without any foundation.]¹⁰

After ‘grof vinden’ [crude] Van Gogh had originally written ‘Het is met de menschen als met de penseelen: die er het fijnst uit zien werken niet het fijnst’ [People are much like brushes: those with the finest looks are not the finest in practice] (figs. 1 and 2). Although he later deleted this striking analogy, he did write it.

10 412/345.

Additions

Up to now, the underlinings in Van Gogh's letters, in editions and anthologies, have always been italicised or actually printed as underlinings. Yet in many cases, these sentences and phrases say much less than one might think. At any rate, studying the original versions reveals that these underlinings have often been added by a later and hence different hand.

The cases in question concern moments in Van Gogh's biography which have attracted a great deal of attention or which could point to his destiny as a painter: - the underlining of an entire sentence: ‘Die Rijswijkschen weg heeft voor mij herrinneringen die misschien de heerlijksten zijn die ik heb. Als wij elkaar eens spreken hebben wij het daar misschien nog wel eens over.’ [The Rijkswijk road possesses for me recollections that are perhaps the most wonderful that I have. When we meet again we will perhaps speak of it];

- the underlining of the comparison ‘evenzeer als voor het schilderen’ [just as much as for painting] is not Van Gogh's own in the sentence ‘Voor het werk van mannen als Pa en D^s Keller van Hoorn, oom Stricker en zoovele anderen is ook heel wat oefening noodig evenzeer als voor schilderen’ [For the work of men like Father and Rev. Keller van Hoorn, Uncle Stricker and so many others, a great deal of practice is required just as much as for painting];

- the underlining of the sentence: ‘Zijn gedoente was volkomen geschikt voor een Sch^ij van Thijs Maris bij voorbeeld.’ [His property would be just the thing for a painting by Thijs Maris for example.]¹¹

To someone interested in knowing what Van Gogh wished to emphasise or nuance, his own additions, on the other hand, are often of greater importance. After finishing a letter, he would frequently not only go over loops on letters with upright strokes or descenders, or case endings, but he would also add words, phrases or entire sentences.

In descriptions of landscapes or works of art he makes such additions in an attempt to evoke the picture more fully: where he adds descriptions of blue skies and towers jutting out above the horizon his aim is to reinforce the evocative power of the whole; adjectives are added to make details more precise: ‘heidegrond’ [heath] becomes

11 In letters 11/10; 114/95; and 147/126 respectively.

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‘bruine heidegrond’ [brown heath]; canals are described as ‘vol’ [full] and later ‘boordevol’ [brimful] of water, and comparisons are added for the sake of stylistic embellishment. The desire to polish up the text in this way was something Van Gogh acquired largely during his stay in Amsterdam.

Examples would also be added: ‘Het zijn zulke aardige menschen, ontmoette hen onlangs op eene lezing en zij staken bij het overige publiek af als een bemosten ouden appelboom of een rozenstruik van het kerkhof zou afsteken bij allerlei onnatuurlijke uitheemsche gewassen.’ [They are such pleasant people, met them recently at a lecture and they stuck out from the rest of the audience like a mossy old apple-tree or a rose-bush in a graveyard would stick out among all manner of unnatural outlandish undergrowth.] After the word ‘kerkhof’ [graveyard] he could not refrain from adding ‘of een iepenboom met kraaijennesten’ [or an elm with crows' nests]. Van Gogh, acute observer as he was, would constantly be delving into his visual memory, and often improved on his initial description. The pen would be dipped in ink again, and the result would usually enhance the expressiveness of his letter. In many cases he introduced nuances by adding either broader strokes or, in contrast, more refined touches.¹²

For an editor these additions are not without their problems, as Van Gogh did not always indicate where they were supposed to go; there are numerous cases in which it is unclear whether a sentence belongs in a letter or not (and if so, where) or if it is intended as a postscript. The following is a difficult example. It is included in a letter written in French, dated about July 1880 and sent from the Borinage. In this letter we see that Van Gogh added comparisons, at different stages, in the upper margin. Here he compares visual artists with writers (and paintings with books) and draws comparisons between artists from different periods, on the basis of correspondences of theme, of sentiment, or of manner of representation. Contemporary criticism, in the Netherlands and other countries, has remarked on this keenness on analogy.¹³ In this fragment Van Gogh compares, for instance, Eugène Delacroix to Victor Hugo, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Ary Scheffer, and John Bunyan to Matthijs Maris and Jean-François Millet. The addition of more and more comparisons has shades of amplificatio, a classical rhetorical device. The letter-for-letter transcript of the fragment concerned (cf. fig. 3) is printed below.

Key: on the left is the line number; a ‘+’ sign means text added; ‘-’ means text deleted; ‘→’ means written over; ‘∅’ is an open space; ‘/’ is the end of a line; the pointed brackets ‘<’ and ‘>’ enclose variant forms:

158	[...] Seulement voyez vous il y a plusieurs/
159	choses qu'il s'agit de croire et d'aimer → il y a du Rembrandt dans
160	Shakespeare et du Corrège <+ou du Sarto> en Michelet et du Delacroix dans V. Hugo/

12 Some examples are found in the following letters (with additions enclosed thus: <+>):
27/20: ‘Dat een vrouw “een heel ander wezen” dan een man is, <+& een wezen dat wij nog niet kennen, tenminste maar heel oppervlakkig> zooals je zegt, Ja, dat geloof ik zeker. - En dat een vrouw & een man één kunnen worden, zegge één geheel <+& niet twee halven>, dat geloof ik ook. -’
[That a woman is ‘quite a different creature’ from a man, and a creature that we do not yet know, or at least only very superficially, as you say, Yes I am sure this is true. And that a woman and a man may become one, say one whole, and not two halves, this I believe too.]
55/43: ‘Gij zult wel dikwijls voelen dat noch ik noch Anna zijn wat we hopen te worden en wij nog ver van Pa en anderen af zijn. - <+dat ons soliditeit en eenvoudigheid en ongeveinsdheid ontbreekt, men is niet op eens eenvoudig en waar.>’
[You will often feel that neither I nor Anna are what we hope to become and we are still far from Father and the others, that we lack solidity and uprightness and ingenuousness, one cannot in a moment become sincere and true.]
83/70: ‘En onwillekeurig dacht ik <+levendig> aan de personen die daar te Hampton Court geleefd hebben [...].’
[And my thoughts turned involuntarily and vividly to the persons who lived there at Hampton Court.]
125/105: ‘Naar zoo ontzettend veel zaken heb ik groote begeerte en als ik geld had zou ik het misschien spoedig uitgeven aan boeken en andere zaken waar ik best buiten kan en die mij van de onmiddelijk noodige studie zouden aftrekken <+zelfs nu is het niet altijd gemakkelijk tegen de afleiding te vechten en als ik geld had zou dat nog erger worden> En men blijft hier op de wereld toch altijd arm en behoeftig, dat heb ik al wel reeds gezien [...].’
[There are so terribly many things I greatly desire and if I had any money I might spend it straight away on books and other things I can perfectly well do without and which would take me away from the immediate necessity of study. Even now it is not always easy to ward off distraction and if I had money that would become worse still. And one always remains poor and needy here in the world, I have already seen that.]
79/54: ‘Dezen morgen vroeg was het ook mooi, alles was toen helder waar nu <+min of meer> een nevel hangt. -’
[Early this morning it was also beautiful, everything was clear then where now there is a mist, more or less, hanging there.]

13 Examples may be found in the work of J. van Santen Kolft (1877): see Griselda Pollock, exhib. cat. Vincent van Gogh in zijn Hollandse jaren: kijk op stad en land door Van Gogh en zijn tijdgenoten 1870-1890, Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh) 1980, pp. 24-25. Thomas H. Goetz made the following comment on the parallel between Balzac's novels and the art of painting: ‘Balzac made frequent comparisons of his characters with Northern artists, especially Rembrandt [...]’; see Taine and the fine arts, Madrid 1973, pp. 126-29, this quotation from p. 128. Van Gogh could have read similar comparisons in the work of Victor Hugo: see Dorn, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 32-33.

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fig. 3
Letter 154/133 (detail of the additions), Amsterdam. Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

	[in upper margin]
160a	<+et dans Beecher Stowe il y a de <S→l'A>ry> Scheffer>]/
	[in upper margin, above line 160a]
160b	<+Et dans Bunyan il y a du M Maris ou du Millet une realité pour ainsi dire plus reelle que la réalité mais/
160c	il faut savoir le lire alors il y a la dedans l'inouï et il sait dire des choses inexprimables->]/
161	et puis il y a du Rembrandt dans l'<e→E>> vangile ou de l'Evangile/
162	dans Rembrandt comme on veut cela revient plus ou moins au même/
163	<-selon qu'on> pourvu qu'on entende la chose en bon entendeur, sans/
164	vouloir la détourner en mauvais sens <+et si on tient compte des equivauts des comparaisons/
164a	qui n ont pas la pretention de diminuer les/
164b	merites des personalités/
164c	originales>/.^14

14 154/133. This letter-for-letter transcription could appear as follows in the reading text: ‘Seulement voyez vous il y a plusieurs choses qu'il s'agit de croire et d'aimer: il y a du Rembrandt dans Shakespeare et du Corrège ou du Sarto en Michelet et du Delacroix dans V. Hugo et dans Beecher Stowe il y a de l'Ary Scheffer_ Et dans Bunyan il y a du M_ Maris ou du Millet, une realité pour ainsi dire plus reelle que la réalité mais il faut savoir le lire, alors il y a la dedans l'inouï et il sait dire des choses inexprimables, et puis il y a du Rembrandt dans l'Evangile ou de l'Evangile dans Rembrandt comme on veut, cela revient plus ou moins au même pourvu qu'on entende la chose en bon entendeur sans vouloir la détourner en mauvais sens et si on tient compte des equivauts des comparaisons qui n'ont pas la pretention de diminuer les mentes des personalités originales_’ It has not yet been decided to what extent adjustments will be made to the accents in French.

Misreadings

One has to be constantly on one's guard for misreadings. An incorrect transcription is easier to make than it may appear. The editors who preceded us often had to work without consulting the original documents and frequently had far less time at their disposal. Yet every questionable word, every construction has to be assessed from different angles, with details being checked in dictionaries, libraries or archives. All this takes time. In addition, it is advisable in the case of manuscript sources to have the transcripts checked by at least two other readers, as has been done in the present case. Without any wish to detract from the important work done by our predecessors, some cases of incorrect transcriptions are given below.

In February 1885, Van Gogh was in good spirits because he had seen in a copy of L'Illustration reproductions of the exhibits in the 1884 Salon. He commented on some:

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‘Wat mij ook trof was een meisjes figuurtje van Emile Levy, Japonaise en 't Sch^ij van Beyle, Brûleuses de Varech en dat van Collin, L'Eté, 3 naakte vrouwenfiguren.’
[I was also struck by the figure of a girl by Emile Levy, Japonaise and the painting by Beyle, Brûleuses de Varech and that by Collin, L'Eté, three nude female figures.]¹⁵

While previous editions give the name Cottin here, the reference is in fact not to (Pierre) Cottin but to the French painter Louis-Joseph-Raphaël Collin (1850-?). A reproduction of Collin's L'Eté was printed in L'Illustration of Saturday 3 May 1884. The misreading may be explained by the similarities between Van Gogh's ‘l’s and his ‘t’s (making it difficult to distinguish, for instance, between the French ‘les’ and ‘tes,’ and between ‘ta’ and ‘la’).

The need for caution when dealing with names is also clear from a different passage. Here too, information extraneous to the text of the letter is needed to make a correct transcription:

‘Laatst ben ik nog eens terug geweest bij Hillen, had hem de vorige keer toen ik hem bezocht een paar van die Christus Consolator en pend^t, zooals ik er van U heb gekregen, gegeven en die hingen nu reeds op zijne kamer want hij had ze zelf onder glas gebragt, ik ben blij dat zij daar hangen.’
[I recently went back to see Hillen, when last I visited him had given him the Christus Consolator and its pendant [i.e. Christus Remunerator] like those I received from you, and they were already hanging in his room as he had put them under glass himself, I am glad that they are hanging there.]¹⁶

Van Gogh apparently returned to see his Hague catechist. In the most recent edition this sentence was included for the first time, but the man's name is given there as Helleu. The letters have been misread (which, given the handwriting, is again easy to understand) without the trouble having been taken to identify the figure. This same Hillen, it may be added, also occurs elsewhere in the correspondence.

The following fragment was written in Amsterdam on 18 September 1877, three days before the beginning of autumn:

‘Heb Gij het goed, schrijf eens spoedig en kom maar spoedig want het is goed elkander eens weder te zien en eens te praten, misschien kunnen wij dan zamen nog wel eens die tentoonstelling die dezer dagen wordt geopend gaan zien. - Groet ook Uwe huisgenooten. Jongen wat moet het toch heerlijk zijn om een leven achter zich te hebben als Pa [...].’
[Are you well, write soon and come soon for it is good to see each other again and to talk, perhaps we could then together go to that exhibition that is opening one of these days. Give my greetings to the rest of the household. My, old fellow, it must be wonderful to have a life behind one like Father.]¹⁷

The words we have italicized could be read as den zomer [in the summer], and this reading has indeed been given in the past. This is acceptable as far as the shape of the letters is concerned, but is illogical in terms of content. Firstly, summer may be said to be almost completely over by 18 September, and secondly, ‘the exhibition that is opening one of these days’ must have been that of the Levende Meesters, which took place that year in Amsterdam. From Thursday, 20 September 1877 the public could visit the exhibition, for the admission price of 25 cents, in the Hall of the former Koninklijke Akademie van Beeldende Kunsten.¹⁸

15 487/394.

16 138/117. For pend^t, read ‘pendant.’

17 130/110.

18 See exhib. cat. Tentoonstelling van schilder- en andere werken van Levende Meesters te Amsterdam in den jare 1877, Amsterdam (Koninklijke Akademie van Beeldende Kunsten) 1877. These exhibitions lasted some three to four weeks; see Gusta Reichwein, et al. (eds.), Levende meesters: de schilderijenverzameling van C.J. Fodor 1801-1860, Haarlem 1995, pp. 52-53.

Status of the sources

None of the previous editions have clarified the status of the sources: do we possess originals, photographs, photocopies or transcriptions, or has the text come down to us in other ways? Until now, the reader has been left to guess at this. For instance, all the letters to Van Rappard are available in photocopy only, which is prejudicial to the accuracy of the transcriptions. Two examples will serve to

[p. 96]

demonstrate the importance of exercising caution when the original document is missing.¹⁹

A short note addressed to M.A. de Zwart, who was then Van Gogh's landlord, has come down to us only in the form of a transcription made in Paris on 17 July 1963 by V.W. van Gogh, the son of Theo and Jo.²⁰ It includes the remark: ‘Verl. Maandag heb ik aan Giesenberg betaald niet alleen de die datum verschuldigde f 4,60 doch bovendien nog f 10,- Ingevolge van 't in mijn schrijven van Il maand behandelde met betrekking tot het zolderkamertje.’ [Last Monday I paid Giesenberg not only the 4 guilders 60 owed on that date but moreover another 10 guilders. In accordance with what was discussed in my letter of last month in respect of the attic.]

This transcription was then copied using a typewriter on which the letter ‘I’ was identical to the number ‘1’. While the original letter evidently read ‘Il maand’ (an abbreviation for ‘laatstleden maand’ meaning ‘last month’) the typed version read ‘11 maand,’ which was changed without comment in the 1990 edition, apparently because it seemed to make no sense, into ‘11 maart’ [11 March]. The inevitable result of this was to call into existence a ghost letter. The letter of ‘last month’ is known [321 /-], but no letter to De Zwart of 11 March will ever turn up.

Another case in which it is important to know the status of a copy concerns a letter to the painter Arnold Hendrik Koning (1860-1945). The source is the transcription in De Telegraaf daily newspaper of Wednesday, 29 November 1933. It was included in the Verzamelde brieven (1952-53 and 1973) and in De Brieven published in 1990. On the previous day, Tuesday, 28 November, De Telegraaf reproduced a facsimile of ten lines of the transcription. Once one studies this facsimile, it becomes clear that the copy is unreliable. It includes the remarks: ‘over te laten of ik al dan niet - gek, ingebeeld gek, of wel in eene slechts uit beeldhouwwerk bestaande inbeelding als gek beschouwd ben geweest of nog ben.’ [to decide whether I am or am not mad, have a delusion of madness, or have been considered, or still am, mad in a delusion that exists solely as a ‘sculptured’ creation.]²¹ The insertion ‘ingebeeld gek’ [have a delusion of madness] was missed out in the transcription shown in the newspaper, and is hence omitted in all the editions referred to. This provides an additional reason for referring explicitly to a source of this kind that has been taken from a newspaper, and to present it with the necessary caveat.

19 Possession of the original does not, however, always guarantee a flawless reading. Our reading of the text of letter 489/396, from March 1885, is severely impeded by ink damage caused by a heavily accentuated drawing on the other side of the paper.

20 331/-, The Hague, before or on 14 March 1883.

21 745/571a (c. 23 January 1889). Another case in which we have no first-hand knowledge is letter 74/60 (Ramsgate, 17 April 1876), addressed to Father and Mother Van Gogh. The word ‘copie’ [copy] has been added at the top by the scribe. Previous text editions made no mention of the fact that this letter is not in Vincent's handwriting. The writing-paper and hand-writing suggest that Theo copied out the letter.

Dating

The dating of many of the letters is one of the most difficult tasks. Van Gogh specialist Jan Hulsker, in particular, has done a good deal of excellent research in this area, proposing numerous useful re-datings.²² Scores of letters are undated, and in certain other cases the date has been tampered with by another hand. The combination of facts from different letters, the family correspondence as it has been passed down to us, and other external information may help us determine dates more precisely.

A detail that Van Gogh supplies in one of his letters from Dordrecht comes to mind: ‘Today an early sermon was given here for the first time, which I attended.’ If the date on which the first early sermon was given in Dordrecht could be ascertained, by consulting the church records for instance, the letter could be dated more accurately still.²³ One could also refer to the time when Van Gogh wrote of ‘warm’ and ‘cool’ colours in his own work. The note in which he does so [193/165a] to one of his uncles, is currently dated 1881-83, but is undoubtedly of a

22 Collected in Jan Huisker, Vincent van Gogh: a guide to his work and letters, zwolle 1993.

23 110/90. It was probably the Sunday before Easter, i.e. 25 March 1877.

[p. 97]

fig. 4
Letter to Theo van Gogh, probably between 16 and 22 September 1876 [86/68], Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

[p. 98]

later date. It is highly likely that he used these terms under the influence of his reading of Félix Bracquemond's Du dessin et de la couleur.²⁴

A third example is the day on which Teunus van Iterson, a colleague of Theo's, brought with him, from Isleworth, a pencilled note and two booklets for Theo (cf. fig. 4):

Waarde Theo
Daarjuist komt v_Iterson mij verrassen, ik vind het prettig dat hij komt maar 't is of hij een mensch uit de andere wereld is, zoo veel ligt er tusschen den tijd dat wij samen in de zaak waren en nu.
Hierbij de ‘wijde wijde wereld’ en een ander boekje, geef ook een daarvan aan Carolien.
Wat zou ik graag willen gij het ook eens zien kondt hier.
Zaturdag morgen 4 uur hoop ik naar Londen te wandelen om Gladwell en anderen op te zoeken. Ik wou gij mede kondt wandelen_ Een hartelijken handdruk in gedachten_
à Dieu, geloof mij,
Uw zoo liefh_ broer
Vincent
Dear Theo,
v. Iterson just came and surprised me, I am pleased that he comes but it is as if he is a man from the other world, so much lies between the time when we were together in the business and now.
I am sending you the ‘wide wide world’ and another little book, give one of them to Carolien.
How I wish that you too could see what it is like here some time.
On Saturday morning at 4 o'clock I hope to walk to London to visit Gladwell and others. I wish that you could walk with me. A hearty handshake in my thoughts.
à Dieu, believe me,
Your very loving brother
Vincent²⁵

In all probability this letter should be moved from mid-August 1876 to the latter half of September, on the basis of several remarks made in a letter of 3 October 1876:

‘Verleden Zaturdag voor 8 dagen maakte ik een langen tocht naar Londen [...]. Dien morgen ging ik vroeg hier van daan, 4 uur [...]. Te Londen ben ik bij den een en ander geweest en ook nog in de zaak van Mess^s Goupil & Cie en daar zag ik de teekeningen die van Iterson medebragt [...].’ [Saturday eight days past I went on an extended trip to London [...]. That morning I left here early, at four o'clock [...]. In London I paid a few calls and also visited the business of Mess^s Goupil & Cie and there I saw the drawings that Van Iterson had brought with him.]²⁶

That Saturday 8 days past was Saturday, 23 September 1876. This suggests that letter 86 was written between 16 and 22 September 1876.

24 193/165a. I should like to thank Roland Dorn for drawing our attention to this point. Du dessin et de la couleur is first mentioned in letter 532/423 (September 1885). The loose fragment 534/- (currently dated c. September 1885) ties in with the comment: ‘[...] Het boek van Bracquemond heb ik gehouden omdat bij eerste lezing ik hetgeen hij zegt van chaud et froid niet begrepen nog heb maar ik geloof het iets belangrijks is dat hij van het licht zegt.
Dat is waar ik 't mijne nog nader van hebben moet en dien te herlezen_ De andere hoofdstukken zijn ook belangrijk en zijn definities goed doordacht.’ (Italics mine.)
[I have kept Bracquemond's book because on first reading I did not understand what he says about chaud et froid but I think that it is something important that he says about the light.
That is what I have to fathom and should reread. The other chapters are also important and his definitions well considered.]
In the last letter to Van Rappard [533/R58], too, Van Gogh refers to reading the work of Bracquemond.

25 86/68

26 91/75.

Emotional handwriting

The new edition will also point out cases in which the handwriting is particularly expressive or emotional. Unusually large or sweeping script, multiple underlinings and highly uneven handwriting are all matters worthy of attention. In the example given below, single underlinings are italicised and words underlined two or three times appear in small capitals (in the forthcoming edition, examples of this kind will always be accompanied by a marginal note).

At the beginning of December 1883 Vincent informed Theo of his dissatisfaction with their father's attitude (fig. 5):

‘Gij moogt van mij denken wat gij goedvindt Theo maar ik zeg U dat het geen verbeelding van mij is, ik zeg U Pa wil niet_
Ik zie nu wat ik zag toen, ik sprak toen vierkant Tegen Pa, ik spreek nu in elk geval hoe het ook loope wederom TEGEN PA als willende NIET, als makende het ONMOGELIJK. Het is verdomd beroerd broer, de Rappards handelden intelligent maar hier!!!!!! En al wat gij er aan deed en doet, het wordt 3/4 vruchteloos door hen_ Het is lam broer [...].’

[p. 99]

fig. 5
Letter 412/345 (detail), Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

[You may think of me what you will Theo but I tell you that it is not my imagination, I tell you Father will not cooperate.
I see now what I saw then, I flatly Contradicted Father then, I shall now speak out in any case whatever might happen AGAINST FATHER once more because he does NOT want it, he makes it IMPOSSIBLE. It is damned awful brother, the Rappards acted intelligently but here!!!!!! And everything one has done and is doing about it, it is rendered 3/4 useless because of them. It is tiresome brother.]²⁷

In extreme examples of this kind, it will be a relief to have a facsimile.

27 412/345. Van Gogh underlined the words ‘tegen Pa,’ ‘niet’ and ‘onmogelijk’ (against Father; not; impossible) three times. Another example is letter 227/193 (14 May 1882) in which the words ‘in damned earnest’ were written with a brush, in extremely large letters.

‘Complete’ correspondence

In time, the new edition will take its place as a source for further research on Van Gogh's life, work and use of language. But before this stage has been reached, scores of decisions remain to be made, concerning such things as the relationship between numerous marginalia to the body of the letter. Van Gogh's use in his letters of quotations from the Bible, from hymn books and from works by his favourite authors, decisions on what should be done with quotations from his letters in other sources,²⁸ and which enclosures belonged with which letters.

28 There are places in which we find quotations from letters, but where it is questionable how accurate those quotations are. A case in point is Vincent's ‘umbrella-comment’ in ‘English,’ quoted in a letter from his sister Anna. On 24 February 1874 she wrote to Theo from Leeuwarden: ‘But I am very glad for Vincent that he has found such a kind family to live, you know now yourself, how agreable it is. He seems to be always in good-spirits. In the last letter he writes me: “I fear that after all the sunshine I enjoy from there could be very soon rain - but I will only enjoy as long as possible the sunshine, and have my umbrella in the neighbourhood for the rain that could come”’ (Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, Vincent van Gogh Foundation, family correspondence, letter b2689 V/1982; italics mine.) Or is this Anna's own translation?

[p. 100]

fig. 6
Seaweed enclosed with letter 75/61, Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

One rather remarkable appendix was discovered to a letter that Vincent wrote to Theo from Ramsgate, on 17 April 1876 (fig. 6). In it, he relates: ‘Yesterday evening and this morning we all went for a walk on the sea front. I enclose a sprig of seaweed.’ Although Van Gogh often enclosed little items, such as rye bread, the fact that this 120-year-old little English sprig has been preserved may be deemed exceptional. It was found in the archives, a few letters further on, and has recently been reunited with the original letter.²⁹

It would not be entirely accurate to say that we can look forward to a complete edition of Van Gogh's correspondence appearing in the new century. For we are compiling a list of ‘presumed’ letters, letters that must have existed once (as may be inferred from comments such as ‘Thank you for your letter of yesterday’; ‘I am enclosing a few words for...’; ‘I have already written to Father and Mother...’). And this list is growing much faster than anticipated.

External information, too, makes it clear that a great many more letters must have existed in the past. One indication of this is provided by a remark made by J. Tersteeg, one of the children of the Hague art dealer Hermanus Tersteeg, who, from 1902 onwards, together

29 75/61: ‘Gisteren avond en dezen morgen deden wij allen eene wandeling aan den zeekant. Hierbij een takje zeewier.’ We have been unable to discover the feather of a rook found at Hampton Court, which was sent three months later.

[p. 101]

with his father, ‘began to run the business.’ On 25 June 1917 this J. Tersteeg confided to the art historian H.E. van Gelder that they had decided one day to raise the heating by a few degrees: ‘And we quite deliberately threw two or three hundred letters from Vincent van Gogh which were in our way into the fire; my father did not consider all that writing so important - rede nicht Künstler; bilde! [...].’ And this was not all. ‘Letters from masters of the Hague School also went into the fire from time to time - they were poor writers: what would have been the point of keeping all that? Their work spoke for them.’³⁰

Perhaps it would be best for us to say that we are working on an anthology of Van Gogh's correspondence, but a very special one.

30 ‘En in koelen bloede gooiden we twee- of driehonderd brieven van Vincent van Gogh in de centrale, als ze ons in de weg lagen; mijn vader vond al dat geschrijf zo belangrijk niet - rede nicht Künstler; bilde! [...]. Ook brieven van meesters van de Haagse School gingen op z'n tijd 't vuur in - povere penvoerders waren ze: waar toe dat alles te bewaren? Hun werk sprak voor hen.’ This letter is in the archives of H.E. van Gelder (1876-1960), and belongs to Van Gelder's heirs. It has been placed in the custody of The Hague's Gemeentearchief (no. 796, file 19). My thanks are due to Agnes van den Noort-Van Gelder, Scheveningen. We also have a remark made by Vincent's sister Lies, E.H. du Quesne-Van Gogh, in an interview printed in the evening edition of the Algemeen Handelsblad, on 5 May 1934: ‘His letters? Yes he wrote an incredible amount, sometimes about the same subject three times on one day, Mother would hide the others from Father. That all those letters to Theo, full of intimacies, have been published, was something we greatly deplored. Vincent and Theo would have detested it; an anthology from them would have been so much better! For a good understanding of his artistic expression, I believe that the publication of his letters to Tersteeg, who was his former head at the art dealer's, would have been far more valuable. When Tersteeg moved away from The Hague and settled in Baarn, he had a chest of drawers crammed full of letters from Vincent, but they were all destroyed then.’ [‘Zijn brieven? Ja hij schreef ontzettend veel, soms driemaal hetzelfde op één dag, moeder hield de andere dan achter voor vader. Dat al die brieven aan Theo, vol intimiteiten, zijn uitgegeven, hebben wij heel diep betreurd. Vincent en Theo zouden het verfoeid hebben; wat zou een bloemlezing daaruit niet veel beter geweest zijn! Voor het goede verstaan zijner kunstuitingen was, meen ik, van nog grooter waarde geweest een uitgave van de aan zijn vroegeren chef in den kunsthandel, Tersteeg, gerichte brieven. Toen deze zich uit Den Haag te Baarn kwam vestigen, had hij een chiffonière met laden vol brieven van Vincent, die toen echter alle vernietigd zijn.’]