Vincent van Gogh, letter to Émile Bernard, Saint-Rémy, 20 November 1889, Letter 22, page 2
Reclining girl; Three trees
Thaw Collection, given in honor of Charles E. Pierce, Jr., 2007
Last year, from what Gauguin was telling me, you were doing a painting more or less like this,
I imagine. Against a foreground of grass, a figure of a young girl in a blue or white dress,
lying full length. Behind that: edge of a beech wood, the ground covered in fallen red leaves, the
verdigrised trunks crossing it vertically—I imagine the hair a colorful note in the tone required as
complementary to the white dress: black if the clothing was white, orange if the clothing was blue.
But anyway, I said to myself, what a simple subject, and how he knows how to create elegance with
nothing.
Gauguin spoke to me of another subject, nothing but three trees, thus the effect of orange
foliage against blue sky, but still really clearly delineated, well divided, categorically, into planes of
contrasting and pure colors—that's the spirit! And when I compare that with that nightmare
of a Christ in the Garden of Olives, well, it makes me feel sad, and I herewith ask you again,
crying out loud and giving you a good rocket with all the power of my lungs, to please become a
little more yourself again.
The Christ Carrying His Cross is atrocious. Are the splashes of color in it harmonious? But I
will not let you off the hook for a COMMONPLACE—commonplace, you hear—in the composition.
When Gauguin was in Arles, I once or twice allowed myself to be led into abstraction, as you know, in a woman rocking a cradle, a dark woman reading novels in a yellow library, and at
that time abstraction seemed an attractive route to me. But that's enchanted ground,—my good
fellow—and one soon finds oneself up against a wall. I'm not saying that one may not take the
risk after a whole manly life of searching, of fighting hand-to-hand with reality, but as far as I'm
concerned I do not want to rack my brains over that sort of thing. And the whole year, have fiddled
around from life, hardly thinking of impressionism or of this or that.
However, once again I'm allowing myself to do stars too big, etc., new setback, and I've enough
of that.
So at present am working in the olive trees, seeking the different effects of a gray sky against
yellow earth, with dark green note of the foliage; another time the earth and foliage all purplish
against yellow sky, then red ocher earth and pink and green sky. See, that interests me more than
the so-called abstractions.
© 2007 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam