:43:08
Dear Theo, thank you for the money,
the paints, and canvas.
:43:13
With your help, I go forward.
:43:15
I feel the force to work
growing daily within me.
:43:19
Do your realize, Theo,
that what I'm doing is new?
:43:23
In the paintings of the old masters...
:43:26
did you ever see
a single man or woman at work?
:43:29
Did they ever try to paint a laborer,
or a man digging?
:43:32
They didn't.
:43:34
And for good reason. ;
because work is so hard to draw.
:43:46
Just look at the way he's dressed.
That old sheepskin.
:43:49
Oh, my. I tell you, I'm sorry for the family.
:43:54
To paint these people means to
be with them in the fields day after day...
:43:59
and by their firesides at night.
:44:04
Since the rains came,
I've become absorbed in the weavers.
:44:08
They make such good subjects.
:44:10
The old oak wood
darkened by sweating hands...
:44:14
and the shadows of the looms
on the gray mud walls.
:44:21
All these months
I've been trying to find a pattern...
:44:24
trying not so much to draw hands,
as gestures...
:44:28
not so much faces,
as the expressions of people.
:44:31
Men and women
who know the meaning of toil.
:44:37
I want to make clear that these people...
:44:39
sitting around a meal of potatoes
in the evening...
:44:42
have turned the soil
with the very hands they put in the dish.
:44:46
That they have honestly earned their food.
:44:49
I want to paint something
that smells of bacon smoke and steam.
:44:53
Something that's the good, dark color
of our Dutch earth.
:44:59
Willemien. Come in.