What I want & have as my aim is infernally difficult to achieve, and yet I don’t think I am raising my sights too high. I want to do drawings that will touch some people… What I want to express, in both figure and landscape, isn’t anything sentimental or melancholy, but deep anguish. In short, I want to get to the point where people say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels keenly. In spite of my so-called coarseness - do you understand? - perhaps for that very reason. It seems pretentious to talk like that now, but that is the reason why I want to put all my energies into it.
What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.
All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.
That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me, I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum…
So you must picture me sitting at my attic window as early as 4 o’clock in the morning, studying the meadows & the carpenter’s yard with my perspective frame just as they’re lighting the fires to make coffee in the yard and the first worker comes strolling in. A flock of white pigeons comes soaring over the red tile roofs between the smoking black chimney stacks. Beyond it all lies an infinity of delicate, soft green, miles & miles of flat meadow, and a grey sky, as calm, as peaceful as Corot or Van Goyen.
That view over the ridges of the roofs & the gutters with grass growing in them, very early in the morning, & those first signs of life & awakening - the flying bird, the smoking chimney, the small figure strolling along far below - that is the subject of my watercolor. I hope you will like it.
I’m sure that it depends more on my work than on anything else whether or not I succeed one day. Provided I can just keep going, well then, I shall fight my fight quietly in this way & no other - by calmly looking through my little window at natural things & drawing them faithfully and with love. For the rest, I shall just adopt a defensive attitude against possible molestation, but beyond that I love drawing too much to want to be distracted by anything else. The peculiar effects of perspective intrigue me more than human intrigues…
-Van Gogh to his brother, July 1882
