Vincent van Gogh [1853-1890] in a letter to his brother:
Dear Theo,Thank you for the money, the paints and the canvas. With your help, I go forward. I feel the force to work growing daily within me. Do you realize, Theo, that what I'm doing is new? And the paintings of the Old Masters—do you ever see a man or woman at work? Do they ever try to paint a laborer? Or a man digging? They didn't. And for good reason, because work is so hard to draw. To paint these people means to be with them in the fields day after day and by their firesides at night. Since the rains came, I became absorbed in the weavers; they make such good subjects. The old oak wood darkened by sweating hands and the shadows of the looms and the grey mud walls. All these months I've been trying to find a pattern, trying not so much to draw hands as gestures. Not so much faces as the expressions of people. Men and women who know the meaning of toil. I want to make clear that these people sitting round a meal of potatoes in the evening, have turned the soil with the very hands they put in the dish. That they have honestly earned their food. I want to paint something that smells of bacon sloot and steam. Something that is the good dark color of our Dutch earth.
From the 1956 screenplay adaptation of Irving Stone's 1934 novel Lust for Life.
Vincent van Gogh's Psychiatric assessment here.
