AMBITION

I want you to understand clearly my conception of art. What I want and aim at is confoundedly difficult, and yet I do not think I aim too high. I want to do drawings which touch some people...In either figure or landscape I should wish to express, not sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow....I want to progress so far that people will say of my work, he feels deeply, he feels tenderly - notwithstanding my so-called roughness, perhaps even because of it....What am I in most people's eyes? A nonentity, or an eccentric and disagreeable man - somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low. Very well...then I should want my work to show what is in the heart of such an eccentric, of such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is, in spite of everything, founded less on anger than on love.

- Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother, Theo