TORONTO —
A letter written jointly by Vincent Van Gogh and fellow post-Impressionist painter Paul Gaugin — detailing brothel visits, their painting progress and frank assessments of each other — has sold at auction for around $321,000.
The Vincent Van Gogh Foundation acquired the letter at a Paris auction house on Tuesday. According to a press release, they consider it to be the “most significant document written by Van Gogh that was still in private hands.”
It is the only known letter that Van Gogh has penned with another writer.
“Gaugin interests me greatly as a man — greatly,” he reveals in the letter.
The letter was written on November 1 or 2 of 1888, shortly after Gaugin had arrived to stay at the Yellow House in Arles, in the south of France, where Van Gogh lived and produced some of his most vibrant art. Van Gogh dreamed of creating an artists’ paradise in Arles, and Gaugin’s arrival was a step towards that goal.
Their time living together would turn out to be brief, but intense, ending with Gaugin leaving in December around the same time that Van Gogh infamously cut off his own ear.
Although the letter is addressed to another artist, Emile Bernard, the text contains almost a dialogue between Van Gogh and Gaugin themselves, reflecting on their views on art and each other.
Van Gogh described Gaugin as “an unspoiled creature with the instincts of a wild beast.”
“With Gauguin,” he wrote, “blood and sex have the edge over ambition.”
After finishing his portion of the letter, he leaves space at the bottom for Gaugin to add his own short message to Bernard, and Gaugin takes the opportunity to share his opinion of the other artist.
“Don’t listen to Vincent; as you know, he’s prone to admire and ditto to be indulgent,” Gaugin wrote.
The letter also contains numerous references to paintings the two were working on — and where they went for inspiration.
“Now something that will interest you — we’ve made some excursions in the brothels, and it’s likely that we’ll eventually go there often to work,” Van Gogh wrote. A painting Van Gogh created in October of 1888 called “The Brothel” seems to depict one of the brothels that he visited.
After Van Gogh cut off his ear in December of that year, he reportedly gave it to a woman who worked as a maid at a brothel.
“At the moment Gauguin has a canvas in progress of the same night café that I also painted, but with figures seen in the brothels,” the letter continues.
The painting he refers to is likely “Night Cafe at Arles (Madame Ginoux),” where Gaugin painted Madam Ginoux, a woman Van Gogh had also painted earlier, sitting inside of a cafe that the two frequented. Three figures in the background of the painting are thought to be from the brothel that Van Gogh mentions in the letter.
Van Gogh’s earlier painting of this same cafe is called “The Night Cafe,” and also depicts the inside of the Cafe de la Gare, though it focuses on the colours of the room and does not have one central human figure.
The two artists both wrote of their feeling that they were at the forefront of a great art movement, and that the future of art was just around the corner.
Van Gogh wrote that he believed “in the possibility of a great renaissance of art.
“It seems to me that we ourselves are serving only as intermediaries. And that it will only be a subsequent generation that will succeed in living in peace.”
Van Gogh was plagued with depression and other mental health issues throughout his life. He died in 1890 from a gunshot wound. It is widely believed that he died of suicide, although some have speculated that he may have been shot by someone else.
Although Van Gogh and Gaugin never saw each other again in person after that fateful day in December when Gaugin left, the two continued to correspond through letters until Van Gogh’s death.
The letter will be displayed by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in an exhibit of the Dutch painter’s letters called “Your loving Vincent,” in October.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
