A Single Reed

Early June 1888, the fishing village of Saintes-Maries on the Mediterranean. A Dutchman sets up his board on the beach, facing a few boats drawn up on the sand. The boats will put out to sea soon; he has no time.

He later described the making of that drawing to his brother: "done without measuring, just by letting my pen go." [500]

One hour, and a sheet of astonishing completeness. The curve of the hulls, the crossing of the masts, the grain of the sand — every stroke lands where it belongs. Consider what this meant: for six full years before that morning, he had drawn almost no landscape without an iron viewing frame — a rectangle strung with threads into a grid, built by a blacksmith to a manual's specifications. He had planted it on beaches, in meadows, on dikes, looking through it at the world like a surveyor [223].

Now, for the first time, he had left the frame behind. What made that possible was the thing in his hand: a sharpened reed.

And that reed had been foretold seven years earlier.

The prophecy

Summer 1881, Etten. Vincent, twenty-eight, newly resolved to be an artist, possessed almost nothing: no teacher, no academy, no money. What he had was a stack of drawing manuals, chief among them several by the Frenchman Armand Cassagne — the books from which he taught himself perspective, to whose specifications he built his viewing frame, whose paper recommendations he followed to the letter.

That June he bought Cassagne's treatise on watercolour, and in a letter mentioned his first trials with the reed pen, "which has a broader stroke" [146].

Cassagne's drawing manual devotes a whole chapter to pen and ink. It illustrates the reed pen, explains how to cut the nib with a penknife, and gives it the highest praise: the best pen there is for drawing. It "glides" over the paper, far superior to the "weak and puny" nibs of metal pens — the instrument of a "bold and firm" manner.

Then comes the decisive sentence. The best reeds, Cassagne writes — the "fine, elegant and firm" ones — are found in the Midi, in the area of Cannes and Nice.

The reeds of Holland disappointed him. The experiment was soon dropped. He could not have known that in the first year of his career, this manual had already written down the answer he would need seven years later: to find your pen, you must first go south.

"I see things like pen drawings"

Through the seven years of detour, the evidence kept showing itself.

In The Hague in 1882 he confessed to a painter friend: "I see things like pen drawings." The friend answered: "Then you must draw with the pen." [195] The same letter holds a complaint of almost touching innocence: "perhaps there would be more pen drawings in the world if somebody invented a good pen for use outdoors with an inkstand to go with it." [195]

But other priorities beckoned. The task he had set himself was the figure — he believed a painter must first learn to draw human beings. So came the models, the academic exercises, the experiments with every black material he could get: carpenter's pencil, lithographic crayon, the "gypsy crayon" that enchanted him [272]. He wanted to "draw, quick as lightning" [223], and kept running into what he himself named the "invisible iron wall" [237].

Looking back, nearly every moment of real fluency in those seven years involves a pen. This was a man who wrote more than nine hundred letters; the nib was always the most obedient tool in his hand. He simply did not know it yet — or had not yet met the right pen.

The man who cut reeds

In February 1888 he reached Arles. By the second half of March the cold had broken and he was drawing again, beside the Langlois drawbridge. There, in the reeds along the canal, he found the very thing Cassagne had described two decades before: the hollow-stemmed reed of the South.

You sharpen it "the way you would a goose quill" [478], he reported to his brother, adding: "it's a method I already tried in Holland some time ago, but I hadn't such good reeds there as here." [478]

The reed pen is a tool of blunt physical character. Its knife-cut tip makes emphatic, declarative lines — one stroke is one stroke. But it holds very little ink; every few marks send it back to the inkwell. That "defect" is the whole secret: it forces its user into brief, decisive strokes, forces the image to be built in clear stages, out of more or less uniform parts. For a man who worshipped the dashed finishing strokes of Hals and Rembrandt and wanted above all to draw quick as lightning, no instrument could have fitted better.

In La Fontaine's fable, the reed differs from the oak in knowing how to bend — and so it survives the storm. In Vincent's hand, the reed bent to an urgency: to pin an image to paper while the experience of it still hung in the air.

White paper and four strokes

The pen was southern; the grammar was eastern.

The hundreds of Japanese ukiyo-e prints he had amassed in Paris now began to do their real work. The flattened space, the notation that compresses form into sign, the puzzle-cut simplicity of outline — all of it flowed into the reed pen. In June 1888 he wrote to Bernard in admiration of how the Japanese could "express the matte and pale complexion of a young girl... by means of white paper and four strokes of the pen." [B6]

Out of this came a graphic vocabulary entirely his own: hatches, dots, curling little whorls — a disciplined fireworks dispersed to the farthest edges of the sheet, hovering there, recoiling, never crossing the bounds. Dots are fields; short dashes, stubble; whorls, the crowns of olive trees; long parallel strokes, far hills. Black and white could now sound as loud as colour.

July and August

The beach at Saintes-Maries in June was the moment of release; July and August were the harvest. Scholars of his drawings agree on a remarkable point: nearly all of his greatest drawings were made in those two months of 1888.

Under the Provençal sun he returned to the plain of La Crau and the hill of Montmajour, drawing the wheat harvest, drawing panoramas. To Bernard, to the Australian painter John Russell, to Theo, he sent batches of drawings made after his finished paintings — reed-pen translations of oil into black and white. These sheets are at least as exquisite as the canvases they announce, and their style shifts subtly with each recipient, like his letters, where the handwriting changes from line to line in tempo with the thought.

And one more fact that the myth of genius tends to skip. A researcher once performed a modest experiment: copying one of his medium-sized Arles drawings took more than two hours of uninterrupted penwork. The great Montmajour panoramas must have taken far longer. The "spontaneity" that seems to pour out in one breath was labour by the hour, calculated in advance. He said as much himself: those works were "calculated long beforehand" — it was the viewers who looked too fast.

The chemistry of the kitchen

He never discussed his inks in the letters. Not until 2005, when the Metropolitan Museum examined a group of Arles drawings with X-ray fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy, was a corner of his kitchen opened.

The results surprised everyone. He was not using artists' ink, nor even the iron-gall ink long assumed — but the most ordinary commercial logwood writing inks of the day, in chrome, alum and iron formulations, very likely picked off a shop shelf at random. In some sheets the analysts found bright aniline ink — a coal-tar violet made for correspondence and copying documents.

In other words: he drew with the ink he wrote letters with.

Letters and drawings, the two things he produced most of, were already one and the same thing at the level of matter. The same bottle of ink, the same kind of nib; the only difference was whether what fell on the paper was words or a wheat field. The analyses found something further: now and then he stirred a carbon-bearing black — possibly autographic ink, the printmaker's medium — into his writing ink, solely to make certain strokes blacker. In the portrait of the Zouave, the face is drawn in ordinary fading writing ink, while the final reinforcement of the contours uses this carbon mixture. Even within a single sheet, he was mixing his own black.

The root

In 1891, months after his death, his drawings were shown in public for the first time. The Pointillist Paul Signac saw them and immediately wrote to the critic Félix Fénéon, praising those "fantastic drawings made with a bamboo reed" as having "rare power and vigorous style."

For Vincent himself, the deepest consequence of the reed played out on canvas. Once he possessed that vocabulary of hatches, dots and whorls, he began treating paint the same way: oil delivered stroke by stroke, each mark kept separate and legible, like penwork. The grammar of drawing seized power over painting. The brushwork we now see in The Starry Night and Wheatfield with Crows — that is the gait of the reed pen, in another material.

He had written the verdict down in 1883, five years before Arles:

"Drawing is the root of everything." [290]

A reed, a penknife, a bottle of writing ink, and the right latitude. Tools poor almost to the point of poverty — and with them, the most forceful revolution in the handwriting of the nineteenth century.

On sources Material for this essay is drawn from Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings (Metropolitan Museum of Art / Van Gogh Museum, 2005, by Colta Ives, Susan Alyson Stein, Sjraar van Heugten and Marije Vellekoop), including the ink analyses by Marjorie Shelley and Silvia A. Centeno (X-ray fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy). Cassagne's remarks on the reeds of the Midi appear in his 1873 drawing manual. Numbers in brackets are letter numbers; the full correspondence is at vangoghletters.org.