Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Emile Bernard

Arles, c. 18 August 1888

…Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Emile Bernard, 1888

We are sailing back up The River Seine again today, back through a part of the country that van Gogh loved.  Passing through a foggy riverscape crowded with working boats and sometimes rows of smaller pleasure boats lining the shoreline, I remembered that van Gogh, when the demons in his head were raging, had written a letter to Emile Bernard in which he wrote, “In spite of everything, yes!”

It’s the “In spite of everything” quote that sent me searching the Internet. I found in the same letter a couple of other sentences that got my attention.  Van Gogh begins the letter to his artist friend with, “I want do do figures, figures and more figures.  I cannot resist that series of bipeds from the baby to Socrates, and from the woman with black hair and white skin and the woman with yellow hair and a sunburned brick-red face.”  

Wow!  Me, too.  Van Gogh also said he had found “two boats of a violet-kind of pink in veronese green water with grey sand, wheelbarrows, planks and a little blue-and-yellow fellow… All of it seen from the quay above it, looking down at a bird’s-eye view.  No sky.” Van Gogh was talking about seeing and painting.  I’m thinking about seeing and pointing my camera.

Then comes that statement I was looking for:  “Ah! my dear comrades, let us crazy ones take delight in our eyesight in spite of everything, yes, let’s!"

http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/18/B15.htm?qp=health.fatigue

I'm convinced Vincent Van Gogh would have liked seeing and painting all these people.

I liked seeing them... and pointing my camera at them.

YES!