Vincent van Gogh on Art

"It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done."

"There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people."

"National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., United States — A virtual tour of the Van Gogh's Van Goghs exhibition."

"I am not working for myself alone, I believe in the absolute necessity for a new art of color, of design, and - of the artistic life.."

"The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people."

"Vincent van Gogh paintings and letters with dictionary"

"All my work is in a way founded on Japanese art.. .Japanese art, in decadence in its own country, takes root again among the French impressionist artists."

"Weathered faces lined in pain are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand."

"My intention is to make in Drenthe so much progress in painting that when I come back I may be qualified for the 'Society of Draughtsmen' . This stands again in connection with the second plan of going to England ."

"Art is to console those who are broken by life."

"Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands."

"Try to grasp the essence of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces, and you will again find God in them. One man has written or said it in a book, another in a painting."

"National Gallery of Art"

"Now I as a painter shall never stand for anything of importance. I feel it utterly.. .I sometimes regret I did not simply keep to the Dutch palette with its grey tones, and have brushed away at landscapes of Montmartre with no ado."

"If you hear a voice within you saying, "You are not a painter," then by all means paint, boy, and that voice will be silenced, but only by working. He who goes to trends and tells his troubles when he feels like that loses part of his manliness, part of the best that's in him; your friends can only be those who themselves struggle against it, who raise your activity by their own example of action."

"..I went to live in my studio on the first of May .. .I have not had a hot dinner more than perhaps six or seven times since. I have lived then and I do so here, not having money for dinner, because the work costs me too much and I have trusted too much on my being strong enough to hold out. Now I have made it worse by smoking a great deal, which I do the more because then one does not feel an empty stomach so much.. .My opinion is that one must not think that the people whose health is damaged, quite or partly, are no good for painting.. .It fell so unexpectedly on me, I had been feeling weak and feverish, but I went on notwithstanding, but I began to feel worried when more and more teeth broke off, and I began to look more and more ill."

"It is hard, terribly hard, to keep on working when one does not sell, and one literally has to pay for one's colors from what would not be too much for eating, drinking and lodgings, calculated ever so strictly. And then, besides, the models.. .All the same they are building State museums, and the like, for hundreds of thousands, but meanwhile, the artists can go to the dogs."

"About staying in the south, even if it's more expensive — Look, we love Japanese painting, we've experienced its influence — all the Impressionists have that in common — and we wouldn't go to Japan, in other words, to what is the equivalent of Japan, the south? So I believe that the future of the new art still lies in the south after all. But it's bad policy to live there alone when two or three could help each other to live on little."

"Vincent... had come to Paris in the Spring of 1886 to live with his brother Theo and to acquaint himself with all the new art movements. ...e felt a growing desire to see the paintings by the impressionists of which Theo spoke so often in letters. He also began to be preoccupied by the problems of simultaneous contrast and complementaries, which formed the basis of Seurat's theories. ...Theo took it upon himself to introduce his brother to the painters with whom he had dealings."

"The work in question, painting the peasants, is such laborious work that the extremely weak would never even embark on it. And I have at least embarked on it.. .And I've grasped some solid and useful things in drawing and in painting, more firmly than you think, my dear friend. But I keep on making what I can't do yet in order to learn to be able to do it.. .We have in common with each other that we seek our subjects in the heart of the people, and then we have in common a need — either as an objective or as a means — to take our studies from reality."

"He went to work in Asnières together with Signac or Emile Bernard; he paid frequent visits to Guillaumin... he studied the masterpieces of the Louvre and particularly the paintings of Delacroix; he saw more or less frequently Toulouse-Lautrec, who had also been for a while under the influence of the impressionists; he had frantic discussions with almost every one of his new acquaintances, trying to absorb as much as he could... e studied assiduously the paintings at the eighth impressionist exhibition ...he visited the Salon and later the Salon des Indépendants ...Theo and his painter friends also took him to Durand-Ruel's, to Portier's, to père Martin's and especially to the little place of père Tanguy. Van Gogh and père Tanquy quickly became fast friends, much to the distress of Mme Tanguy, who saw her husband supply the young man with canvas and paints in return for unsaleable paintings. Cézanne... is supposed to have seen in these paintings only the work of a madman. But old Tanguy... divided his admiration equally between Cézanne and van Gogh."

"Some time ago I saw a painting by Thijs Maris that reminded me of it. An old Dutch town with rows of brownish red houses with step-gables and tall flights of steps, grey roofs, and white or yellow doors, window-frames and cornices; canals with ships and a large white drawbridge, a barge with a man at the tiller going under it.. .Some distance away a stone bridge over the canal, with people and a cart with white horses crossing it. And everywhere movement, a porter with his wheelbarrow, a man leaning against the railing, gazing into the water, women in black with white caps.. .A greyish white sky over everything..."