Letter 04/01/1884 - by Vincent van Gogh

Enclosed I send you a sketch of a painting that I have in hand along with some others. This shows the effect of flowering trees in the late afternoon. Among the drawings, which you will get as soon as Rappard comes here, there are three made of the same subject. What struck me in the scenery was the astonishingly real, half old-fashioned, half rustic character of that garden. And that I made a pen drawing of it as many as three times from the same angle - apart from several studies of it that I destroyed - was because I wanted to reproduce its character in some intimate detail, which could not be expressed easily or automatically or by accident.

If I have any self-confidence about my work, it is because too much effort is spent on it to believe that nothing could be gained by it, or that it would be in vain. And again, I just shrug off the generalities most art critics increasingly appear to lapse into.