VAN GOGH’S CHOICE OF PALETTES.

VAN GOGH’S CHOICE OF PALETTES. My impression is that popular legend portrays Van Gogh as an inspired madmen. The letters show a very different Van Gogh—one who thinks through what he does and studies intently what other artists have to say. In letter 537, for example, he discusses a passage from a book by an art critic: “True painters are the ones who don’t do it in the local colour [the sentence is italicized in the original]— that was what Blanc and Delacroix discussed once. May I not simply understand by it that a painter does well if he starts from the colours on his palette instead of starting from the colours in nature?” I am quoting this letter not only to show how Van Gogh studies and analyzes, but also because it shows how important the choice of the palette for a painting was for Van Gogh. I came across letter 537 because Richard Dorment, in the New York Review of Books (March 25), quoted from the following passage in the letter: ” Suppose I have to paint an autumn landscape, trees with yellow leaves. Very well — if I conceive it as — a symphony in yellow, what does it matter whether or not my basic yellow colour is the same as that of the leaves — it makes little difference. Much, everything comes down to my sense of the infinite variety of tones in the same family.
If you think this a dangerous tendency towards romanticism, a betrayal of ‘realism’ — painting from the imagination — having a greater love for the colourist’s palette than for nature, well then, so be it.”