Because the people here, in order to make me pay pretty high rates for EVERYTHING, make too much of the fact that I take up a little more room with my paintings than their other customers who aren’t painters. For my part, I’ll make the point that I’m staying longer and spend more in the guest-house than laborers who just stay a short time. And they won’t get a sou out of me so easily any more.
Tag: difficulties
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ResetI have many expenses, and it sometimes distresses me greatly when I increasingly come to realize that painting is a craft that is probably practiced by extremely poor people, since it costs a lot of money.
And just as worries don’t come singly, nor do joys, either. Because actually, always bowed down under this money problem with lodging-house keepers, I put up with it cheerfully. I’d given a piece of my mind to the said lodging-house keeper, who isn’t a bad man after all, and I’d told him that to get my own back on him for having paid him so much money for nothing, I’d paint his whole filthy old place as a way of getting my money back. Well, to the great delight of the lodging-house keeper, the postman whom I’ve already painted, the prowling night-visitors and myself, for 3 nights I stayed up to paint, going to bed during the day. It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day. Now as for recovering the money paid to the landlord through my painting, I’m not making a point of it, because the painting is one of the ugliest I’ve done. It’s the equivalent, though different, of the potato eaters.
I have two models this week, an Arlésienne and the old peasant, whom I’m doing this time against a bright orange background, which, although it doesn’t pretend to represent a red sunset in trompe l’oeil, is perhaps a suggestion of it, all the same.1 Unfortunately, I fear that the little Arlésienne will stand me up for the rest of the painting. The last time she came she had innocently asked for the money in advance that I’d promised her for all the sittings, and as I made no difficulty about that she scarpered without my seeing her again. Anyway, one of these days she owes it to me to come back, and it would be a bit rich if she didn’t turn up at all.
I couldn’t pay my rent on the 1st, having a model for the whole week—I have two portraits of the same model on the go, which are more important to me than the rest. But it’s on this occasion, when I was putting my chap off till next Monday for the month’s rent, that he said something, that he could find another tenant for the house if I hadn’t decided to keep it. Which doesn’t surprise me much, since I’ve had it repaired myself, and so it’s improved.
Considering, if you will, the times in which we live as a true and great revival of art, the moth-eaten and official tradition, which is still on its feet, but which is at bottom powerless and bone-idle, the new painters, alone, poor, treated like madmen and as a result of this treatment becoming so in fact, at least as far as their social life is concerned.
What often makes me sad is that it’s more expensive than I’d calculated. And that I don’t manage to get by on the same expenses as those who have gone to Brittany, Bernard and Gauguin. Since I’m feeling better now I really don’t consider myself defeated, and besides, if I’d had my health, which I hope to get back here, that and many other things wouldn’t happen to me. The crate would have gone off already if I hadn’t had problems all day long.
It’s not in black that I see the future, but I see it bristling with many difficulties, and at times I wonder if these won’t be stronger than I am. This is especially so at times of physical weakness, and last week I suffered from a toothache that was so agonizing that it made me waste time quite in spite of myself
I myself think that Gauguin had become a little disheartened by the good town of Arles, by the little yellow house where we work, and above all by me. Indeed, there are bound to be grave difficulties still to overcome here, for him as well as for me. But these difficulties are rather within ourselves than elsewhere.