It would be a treat for me to spend a morning with you in the Dutch gallery. All that is barely
describable. But in front of the paintings I could show you marvels and miracles that are the reason
that, for me, the primitives really don't have my admiration first and foremost and most directly.

But there you are; I'm so far from eccentric. A Greek statue, a peasant by Millet, a Dutch portrait, a
nude woman by Courbet or Degas, these calm and modeled perfections are the reason that many other
things, the primitives as well as the Japanese, seem to me . . . like WRITING WITH A PEN; they interest me
infinitely . . . but something complete, a perfection, makes the infinite tangible to us.

And to enjoy such a thing is like coitus, the moment of the infinite.

For instance, do you know a painter called Vermeer, who, for example, painted a very beautiful
Dutch lady, pregnant? This strange painter's palette is blue, lemon yellow, pearl gray, black, white. Of
course, in his few paintings there are, if it comes to it, all the riches of a complete palette, but the
arrangement of lemon yellow, pale blue, pearl gray is as characteristic of him as the black, white, gray,
pink is of Velázquez.

Anyway, I know, Rembrandt and the Dutch are scattered around museums and collections, and
it's not very easy to form an idea of them if you only know the Louvre.

© 2007 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

However, it's Frenchmen, C. Blanc, Thoré, Fromentin, certain others who have written better
than the Dutch on that art.

Those Dutchmen had scarcely any imagination or fantasy but great taste and the art of arrangement;
they did not paint Jesus Christs, the Good Lord and others. Rembrandt though—indeed, but
he's the only one (and there are relatively few biblical subjects in his oeuvre), he's the only one who,
as an exception, did Christs, etc.

And in his case, they hardly resemble anything by other religious painters; it's a metaphysical magic.

So, Rembrandt painted angels—he makes a portrait of himself as an old man, toothless, wrinkled,
wearing a cotton cap—first, painting from life in a mirror—he dreams, dreams, and his brush
begins his own portrait again, but from memory, and its expression becomes sadder and more
saddening; he dreams, dreams on, and why or how I do not know, but just as Socrates and Mohammed
had a familiar genie, Rembrandt, behind this old man who bears a resemblance to himself, paints a
supernatural angel with a da Vinci smile.

© 2007 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

I'm showing you a painter who dreams and who paints from the imagination, and I started off by
claiming that the character of the Dutch is that they invent nothing, that they have neither imagination
nor fantasy.

Am I illogical? No. Rembrandt invented nothing, and that angel and that strange Christ; it's—
that he knew them, felt them there.

Delacroix paints a Christ using an unexpected light lemon note, this colorful and luminous note
in the painting being what the ineffable strangeness and charm of a star is in a corner of the firmament.

Rembrandt works with values in the same way as Delacroix with colors.

Now, there's a gulf between the method of Delacroix and Rembrandt and that of all the rest of
religious painting.

I 'll write to you again soon. This to thank you for your drawings, which give me enormous pleasure.
Have just finished portrait of young girl of twelve, brown eyes, black hair and eyebrows, flesh yellow
gray, the background white, strongly tinged with veronese, jacket blood-red with violet stripes, skirt
blue with large orange spots, an oleander flower in her sweet little hand.

I'm so worn out from it that I hardly have a head for writing. So long, and again, many thanks.

Ever yours,
Vincent

© 2007 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam