According to an Article in the New York Times, no one is certain when Vincent van Gogh and Émile Bernard first met. Van Gogh wrote some 800 letters in his lifetime, including 22 to Bernard from December 1887 to November 1889. (Most of their correspondence unfolded after van Gogh moved to the south of France.) Bernard’s description of van Gogh’s letters was simple: “There, pulsating with life, one would find the whole of him.”
In the letter below, dated March 18, 1888, van Gogh is writing a month after his move to Arles. In his final letter to Bernard, in November 1889, van Gogh criticizes his friend’s religious paintings — “The Christ Carrying His Cross is atrocious,” he writes — and tells Bernard that he “can do better than that.” Though neither artist considered that letter an end to their friendship, Bernard never wrote again before van Gogh died in July 1890.
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