Van Gogh also realized the limitations of following the dictates of a sin-gle other artist and he explained to Theo that, while he was fond of Mauveand liked his work very much, he did not want to confine himself to theschool that Mauve represented, or any one school for that matter. Through-out his development, van Gogh copied, translated and used the works ofothers as the basis for formulating his own style. In 1880 he had written thathe believed copying good art was a good foundation for an artist’s work.Mauve was important to van Gogh in many ways. He helped himfinancially to set up a studio in The Hague. He taught him how to draw andshowed him the treatment of diverse media, including crayons and watercolor. He oriented van Gogh to the Barbizon school, a group of painterswho emphasized earth colors and an interest in working with peasants assubject matter.In the first years of his artistic work, devoted to drawing, van Goghoften included his drawings in his letters to Theo, commenting on them andcritiquing them. He was very well read and had already studied da Vinci’sNotebooks(Richter, 1952). Quite systematically, he followed the sequentialsteps that da Vinci had advised a young artist to follow. These were: toestablish a competence for drawing; to learn perspective; to understand theproportions of objects; to copy from a master (which van Gogh had beendoing for some years); to study drawing and painting nature; to observeand analyze the works of masters; and, finally, to practice and re-work aconcept again and again.It appears that van Gogh not only took da Vinci’s advice to heart butdiligently and continuously applied the latter’s precepts to his work. DaVinci’s advice provided a stable framework within which van Gogh coulddevelop multiple competencies, and experiment judiciously. “Drawing isthe backbone of painting” was a credo often voiced by him. As alreadymentioned, he devoted the first two years of the ten-year period entirely todrawing in order to be competent in that skill before taking on the arduoustask of mastering oil painting. His goal was to be good enough at drawingso that it would be as easy as writing. He had already read books presentingtraditional applications of perspective theory, including Albrecht D ̈urer’sdiscourse on that subject, first published in 1525. It was from D ̈urer that vanGogh got the idea of using a perspective frame—a device that allowed theartisttocomparetheproportionsofanearbyobjectwiththoseofamoredis-tant one. He had also often copied the works of other artists—for exampleBargue and Millet—but he now pursued this activity more purposefully.In fact he pursued all these activities more purposefully because they wereundertaken within the framework of a larger goal to which he had fullycommitted himself—that of becoming an artist. This pattern in the work ofcreative people has been identified by Gruber (1989) as the “organizationof purpose” represented in the person’s “network of enterprise.”