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VINCENT VAN GOGH:
Excerpts from the Letters
PORTRAITURE OF THE SOUL
To Theo, Arles, n.d. [August 1888]
Oh, my dear brother, sometimes I know so well what I want. I can very well do
without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do
without something which is greater than I, which is my life-the power to create.
And if, frustrated in the physical power, a man tries to create thoughts
instead of children, he is still part of humanity.
And in a picture I want to say something comforting, as music is com-
forting. I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal
which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to convey by the actual
radiance and vibration of our coloring.
Portraiture so understood does not become like an Ary Scheffer just
because there is a blue sky in the background, as in "St. Augustine." For Ary
Scheffer is so little of a colorist.
But it would be more in harmony with what Eug. Delacroix attempted
and brought off in his "Tasso in Prison" and many other pictures, representing
a real man. Ah! portraiture, portraiture with the thoughts, the soul of the model
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