I’ve just done a clump of apricot trees in a little fresh green orchard.
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This week I did a new study of a sower; the landscape utterly flat, the figure small and blurred.
Ah—my study of the vineyards—I sweated blood and tears over it—but I have it —another square no. 30 canvas—once again for the decoration of the house.
I have no canvas left at all.
I’m going to set myself to work often from memory, and the canvases done from memory are always less awkward and have a more artistic look than the studies from nature, especially when I’m working in mistral conditions.
I’ve done two canvases of a leaf-fall, which Gauguin liked I think, and am now working on a vineyard, all purple and yellow. Then I have an Arlésienne at last, a figure (no. 30 canvas) knocked off in one hour, background pale lemon — the face grey — the clothing dark dark dark, just unmixed Prussian blue. She’s leaning on a green table and is sitting in a wooden armchair — coloured orange.
The Green Vineyard
Arles, September 1888
oil on canvas
72 cm x 92 cm
I prefer to wait for the generation to come, which will do in portraits what Claude Monet is doing in landscape, the rich, bold landscape in the style of Guy de Maupassant. Now I know that I myself am not one of those people, but didn’t the Flauberts and Balzacs make the Zolas and Maupassants? So here’s to — not us — but the generation to come.
I’m hard at work here. For my part I find the summer here very beautiful, more beautiful than any I ever experienced in the north, but the people here are complaining a great deal that it’s not the same as usual. Rain now and then in a morning or afternoon, but infinitely less than at home. The harvest already long in. It’s very windy, though, and a very nasty, nagging wind, the mistral, usually troublesome enough when I have to paint in it, like when I lay my canvas flat on the ground and work on my knees. Because the easel doesn’t stand firm.
I’m well these days, apart from a certain vague background sadness that’s hard to define — but anyway — I’ve gained physical powers rather than lose them, and I’m working. Just now I have on the easel an orchard of peach trees beside a road with the Alpilles in the background.
I’d worked on a no. 20 canvas in the open air in an orchard — ploughed lilac field, a reed fence — two pink peach trees against a glorious blue and white sky. Probably the best landscape I’ve done.
Yesterday, at sunset, I was on a stony heath where very small, twisted oaks grow, in the background a ruin on the hill, and wheatfields in the valley. It was romantic, it couldn’t be more so, à la Monticelli, the sun was pouring its very yellow rays over the bushes and the ground, absolutely a shower of gold. And all the lines were beautiful, the whole scene had a charming nobility. You wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see knights and ladies suddenly appear, returning from hunting with hawks, or to hear the voice of an old Provençal troubadour. The fields seemed purple, the distances blue.