Letter 22, page 1

My dear friend Bernard,
Thank you for your letter, and thank you especially for your photos, which give me an idea of your
work.

Incidentally, my brother wrote to me about it the other day, saying that he very much liked the
harmoniousness of the color, a certain nobility in several figures.

Look, in the adoration of the shepherds, the landscape charms me too much for me to dare to
criticize, and nevertheless, it's too great an impossibility to imagine a birth like that, on the very
road, the mother who starts praying instead of giving suck, the fat ecclesiastical bigwigs, kneeling as
if in an epileptic fit, God knows how or why they're there, but I myself don't find it healthy.

Because I adore the true, the possible, were I ever capable of spiritual fervor; so I bow before
that study, so powerful that it makes you tremble, by père Millet—peasants carrying to the farmhouse
a calf born in the fields. Now, my friend—people have felt that from France to America. After
that, would you go back to renewing medieval tapestries for us? Truly, is this a sincere conviction?
No, you can do better than that, and you know that one has to look for the possible, the logical, the
true, even if to some extent you had to forget Parisian things à la Baudelaire. How I prefer Daumier
to that gentleman!

An annunciation of what—I see figures of angels, elegant, my word, a terrace with two
cypresses, which I like very much; there's an enormous amount of air, of clarity in it. . . . but in the
end, once this first impression is past, I wonder if it's a mystification, and these secondary characters no longer tell me anything.

But this is enough for you to understand that I was longing to get to know things from you like
the painting of yours that Gauguin has, those Breton women walking in a meadow, the arrangement
of which is so beautiful, the color so naively distinguished. Ah, you're exchanging that for
something—must one say the word—something artificial—something affected.

© 2007 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam