cooperative of impressionists was ever on van Gogh’s mind. It crops upin letters to Theo, to his fellow artists and to his sister Wil, whether he ismentioning that he had just read a book on the German composer RichardWagner and was interested that Wagner’s ideas about “community” wereso consonant with his own, or complaining of the low social and economicstatus of painters. To Wil he wrote:We live in an unspeakably awful and miserable world for artists. Theexhibitions, the shops selling pictures, everything, everything is in thehands of people who grab all the money. (de Leeuw, 1997, p. 367.)At the same time, these letters are also full of his work—descriptions ofhis paintings, the colors he is using for the various objects, his evaluationof them, his ideas about them and broader artistic issues. He describespainting in the midday heat, how to protect one’s easel from being blownover by the famousmistral(as the seasonal wind is called), how differenthe looked now compared to the man he depicted in a self-portrait he hadpainted in Paris. Everywhere, in these letters, his passion for art is ondisplayAt the end of June 1888, Theo wrote to Vincent that Gauguin had fi-nally agreed to come to Arles and share a house with Vincent. It was notuntil several months later—in October—that Gauguin actually arrived.On October 3rd, 1888 van Gogh wrote to Gauguin and told him how as heworked he had still been thinking of the two of them “setting up a studio”together (de Leeuw, 1997, p. 412). He also said that he was working fever-ishly. Indeed, he was worn out and forced to rest for a few days. Eventually,the intense pace of his activities in summer and autumn exhausted him somuch that “he felt he was ‘reduced once more close to the deranged stateof Hugo van der Goes in the painting by ́Emile Wauters’” (de Leeuw, 1997,p. 416). Considering what was to come, this remark was prescient.Gauguin eventually arrived on October 23. He stayed exactly nineweeks. In a letter to Theo, Vincent seemed weighed down by his debt tohis brother and by the fact that his paintings were not selling. He notedthat Gauguin’s arrival had turned his mind away from the feeling that hewas going to be ill.At first the two painters worked well together. They painted the samelocal people, spent evenings out together in a cafe, went to a local brotheltogether and, under Gauguin’s influence, van Gogh even painted someworks from memory. But there were fundamental differences between thetwo, and they argued endlessly and disagreed about basic issues in art andthe functioning and purposes of the artist. Each had very strong opinionsabout how the artist should work. Gauguin believed that a work shouldbe conceived as a whole before it was begun and he advised others to have