Gerharda Hermina Marius

“ They are letters in which, between the cries of despair, gleam his indestructible ideals, hesitations, confessions, shrill contrasts, woven on the golden threads of his dreams, on the golden threads of his love for his brother Theo. Full of this admiring love, he writes that Theo is as great a painter, as great an artist through his selling of pictures, because, by each sale, he enables the artist to produce more pictures:
"Si un peintre se ruine le caractère en travaillant dur à la peinture, qui le rend stérile pour bien d'autres choses (vie de famille etc.) ”

“ In that branch of landscape-painting in which form and lines were sought after not so much for the sake of mood or emotion as for their own sake, in that search for purity which the increasing admiration for it had aroused, I must first mention Maurits Willem van der Valk, born in Amsterdam in 1857, the amiable theorist who, at an early date, cherished the desire to make of a water-colour a pure water-colour, of an etching an etching, light and transparent, and nothing more. ”

“ To us they are real flowers in their distinction, their form, their bloom, their colour, simple and broad, just as they blossom in a Whitsun meadow before a child's delighted eyes.
Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853 at Groot Zundert, in North Brabant. He was the son of a clergyman and was brought up to be a dealer in works of art, in which trade his uncle Vincent was of such great assistance to the younger Dutchmen, first at the Hague and afterwards in the firm of Goupil in Paris. ”

“ I do not greatly care to anticipate the verdict of posterity and prefer to say that Giotto, the shepherd, who evolved his first vision of life with charcoal on the walls of the sheepcote, transferred the art of painting from the hierarchical forms of the Byzantines to the living being, whereas Toorop, in depicting nature, makes his human beings the exponents of his ideas. ”

“ And, notwithstanding the many moments of happiness which he owed to his art, despite the fact that the inspired hours in his short life as a painter were almost uninterrupted and leaving his more rustic Dutch period out of the question, he does in a way suggest the painter in the Japanese cartoon, who lies felled to the ground by his own work. His imaginative drawings and landscapes were the nightmares of a man who was bound to perish in the greatness of his own longings ”

“ And I must also mention Edgard Willem Koning, born in 1869, who, with his Nurses and Children, was the first to show that a mural painting can be taken straight from life.
Simon Moulijn, born at Rotterdam in 1866, is one of those modern younger men who, like Thorn Prikker and, in certain respect, Hoytema, arriving early at a crisis, learn to think sooner than to paint, one of those who are influenced by many movements before they have acquired positive knowledge. The first conscious influence was imparted by the modern Frenchmen and especially by Toorop and Vincent van Gogh. ”

“ And they reveal all Vincent's theories and ideals, his goodness, his moods, variable as the mercury in a thermometer, his personality as a man and an artist, young, gay, unsuspecting, indefatigable: untiring, too, in spite of his lack of physical strength. At early as 1882, he wrote:
"My hands have become rather too white for my taste. People like myself have no right to be ill." ”

“ In 1891, the Hague Art Club was founded, in which Toorop and Vincent van Gogh were honoured as masters. Their followers included Thorn Prikker, born at the Hague in 1869, the painter who practised symbolism for a short time and who exhibited his dignified Heads of the Apostles at one of the club's shows, but who subsequently devoted himself exclusively to the applied arts. ”

“ Hart Nibbrig, who is especially to be praised for the honesty with which he sets down fields of grass and corn and buckwheat under a blazing sun, lacks something of the passion and enthusiasm necessary to make so systematic a proceeding express all his feelings. ”

“ These letters, continued in a Flemish monthly, Van Nu en Straks although we know only fragments in which he writes of his work and art (how long must we wait before the letters are published in full?) give us an insight into Theo's devotion for his brother, which made him hold the trade of a dealer in works of art as sacred as a religious belief and made him suffer perhaps even more than Vincent himself at the delay in the acknowledgment of the new artistic formula. ”

“ Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the attention of many of these younger men was diverted in the direction of the applied arts, which some of them have enriched with exceedingly important works. ”