“When I send you the 4 canvases of the garden I have on the go you’ll see that, considering that life happens above all in the garden, it isn’t so sad.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1889)
“Patience serves us against insults precisely as clothes do against the cold. For if you multiply your garments as the cold increases, that cold cannot hurt you; in the same way increase your patience under great offences, and they cannot hurt your feelings.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
“I think I’ll spend less here than elsewhere, since here I still have work on my plate, for nature is beautiful.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1889)
“Grief mustn’t build up in our souls like the water of a swamp.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1889)
“I always think that what we need is sunshine and fine weather and blue air as the most dependable remedy.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1888)
“[I]mperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent.”
— John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Volume 2 (1853)
“[I]’d almost believe that these canvases will tell you what I can’t say in words, what I consider healthy and fortifying about the countryside.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1890)
“Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney and then go on their way.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1880)
“[A]ccurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.”
— John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Volume 2 (1853)
“For although there are some who howl or usually rave, here there is much true friendship that they have for each other. They say, one must suffer others for the others to suffer us, and other very true reasonings that they thus put into practice.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1889)
“So instead of giving way to despair, I took the way of active melancholy as long as I had strength for activity, or in other words, I preferred the melancholy that hopes and aspires and searches to the one that despairs, mournful and stagnant.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1880)
“And in a painting I’d like to say something consoling, like a piece of music. I’d like to paint men or women with that je ne sais quoi of the eternal, of which the halo used to be the symbol, and which we try to achieve through the radiance itself, through the vibrancy of our colorations.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1888)
The Salon library
This is today’s sample of twelve. The whole collection is in the Salon.
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