Nuenen, on or about Tuesday, 14 July I wish that the 4 canvases I wrote to you about were gone. You remember that it says in the book by Gigoux how it came about that Delacroix had 17 paintings rejected at the same time. And 10 years on, a great deal is bound to have changed again. You must also go on showing when you meet people.
And likewise with that series of heads. After a few years most of it becomes stale and dull, and more and more boring. But still. But just go and sit outdoors, painting on the spot itself!
Image makers! For in Paris one can get Arab or Spanish or Moorish models simply by ordering and paying for them. When the digger digs, when the peasant is a peasant, and the peasant woman a peasant woman. Is this something new? I ask you โ do you know of a single digger, a single sower in the old Dutch school??? But even in this century, how relatively few there are among the legion of painters who want the figure โ yes โ above all โ for the sake of the figure i. So that the painting or the drawing is a figure drawing for the sake of the figure and the inexpressibly harmonic form of the human body โ yet at the same time โ is lifting carrots in the snow.
Am I expressing myself clearly? I hope so, and just say this to Serret โ I can say it in fewer words โ a nude figure by Cabanel , a lady by Jacquet and a peasant woman not by Bastien-Lepage himself , but a peasant woman by a Parisian who learnt to draw at the academy, will always show the limbs and the structure of the body in the same way โ sometimes charmingly โ correct โ in proportion and anatomy. But it will live. And above all Delacroix , too. Tell him that I mean that if one photographs a digger, then he would certainly not be digging.
Tell him that my great desire is to learn to make such inaccuracies, such variations, reworkings, alterations of the reality, that it might become, very well โ lies if you will โ but โ truer than the literal truth.
