Vincent van Gogh, letter to Paul Gauguin, Arles, 17 October 1888, page 1
Thaw Collection, given in honor of Charles E. Pierce, Jr., 2007
My dear Gauguin,
Thanks for your letter, and thanks most of all for your promise to come as early as the twentieth. Agreed, this reason that you give won't help to make a pleasure trip of the train journey, and it's only right that you should put off your journey until you can do it without it being a bloody nuisance. But that apart, I almost envy you this trip, which will show you, in passing, miles and miles of countryside of different kinds with autumn splendors.
I still have in my memory the feelings that the journey from Paris to Arles gave me this past winter. How I watched out to see "if it was like Japan yet"! Childish, isn't it?
Look here, I wrote to you the other day that my vision was strangely tired. Well, I rested for two and a half days, and then I got back to work. But not yet daring to go outside, I did, for my decoration once again, a no. 30 canvas of my bedroom with the whitewood furniture that you know.
© 2007 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam