Letter 21, page 1

My dear friend Bernard,
The other day my brother wrote to me that you were going to come to see my canvases; so I know
that you're back, and I'm very pleased that you thought of going to see what I've done.

For my part, I'm extremely curious to know what you have brought back from Pont-Aven.

I hardly have a head for writing, but I feel a great emptiness in no longer being at all up to date
with what Gauguin, you and others are doing. But I really must have patience. I have another dozen
studies here, which will probably be more to your taste than the ones from this summer that my
brother will have shown you.

Among these studies there is an entrance to a quarry, pale lilac rocks in reddish earth, as in
certain Japanese drawings. In terms of design and the division of color into large planes, it's quite
closely related to what you're doing in Pont-Aven.

I had more control over myself in these latest studies, because my state of health had firmed
up. So there's also a no. 30 canvas with broken lilac plowed fields and a background of mountains
that go all the way up the canvas; so nothing but rough ground and rocks, with a thistle and dry
grass in a corner, and a little violet and yellow man. That will prove, I hope, that I haven't yet
gone soft.

Dear God, this is a pretty awful little part of the world, everything's hard to do here, to disentangle
its intimate character, and so that it's not something vaguely true, but the true soil of
Provence. So to achieve that, you have to toil hard. And so it naturally becomes a little abstract.
Because it will be a question of giving strength and brilliance to the sun and the blue sky, and to the
scorched and often so melancholy fields their delicate scent of thyme. The olive trees down here,
my good fellow, they'd suit your book; I haven't been fortunate this year in making a success of
them, but I'll go back to it, that's my intention. It's silver against orangish or purplish earth, under
the great blue sky. Well now, I've seen some by certain painters, and by myself, which didn't render
the thing at all. Those silver grays are like Corot first of all, and that, above all, hasn't been done
yet—while several artists have been successful with apple-trees, for example, and willows.

© 2007 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam