Vincent van Gogh on Nature

"I was certainly going the right way for a stroke when I left Paris. I paid for it nicely afterwards! When I stopped drinking, when I stopped smoking so much, when I began again to think instead of trying not to think - good Lord, the depression and the prostration of it! Work in these magnificent natural surroundings has helped my morale."

"We walked along Buitenkant and there by the sand works at the Oosterspoor , I can' tell you how beautiful it was there in the twilight. Rembrandt, Michel, and others have painted it, the ground dark, the sky still lit by the glow of the sun, already gone down, the row of houses and towers standing out above, the lights in the windows everywhere, everything reflected in the water. And the people and carriages like small black figures everywhere. Like one sometimes sees in a Rembrandt. And it put us in such a mood that we began talking about all sorts of things."

"My dear Theo, Thanks for your letter of this morning. Yesterday I saw the Corot exhibition. It included a painting of the 'Mount of Olives'; I'm glad he painted that. On the right, a group of olive trees, dark against the darkening blue sky; in the background hills covered with shrubs and a couple of tall trees, above them the evening star.. .. I've also seen the Louvre and the Luxembourg, as you can imagine. The Ruisdaels in the Louvre are magnificent, especially 'The bush', 'The breakwater' and 'The ray of sunlight'. I wish you could see the small Rembrandts there, the 'Supper at Emmaus', and two pendants, 'The philosophers'."