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Rare van Gogh letters offer insight into artist | Lifestyle | Living | Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh had a simple philosophy for producing good work -- "you have to eat well, be well housed, have a screw from time to time, smoke your pipe and drink your coffee in peace."

That advice to French artist and poet Emile Bernard in 1888 is from one of 20 letters the painter wrote to his younger counterpart between 1887 and 1889 and displayed at New York's Morgan Library and Museum starting on Friday.

"Art is long and life is short, and we must wait patiently while trying to sell our skin dearly," wrote van Gogh, whose paintings now sell for tens of millions of dollars.
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"Here's a description of a canvas that I have in front of me at the moment. A view of the garden of the asylum where I am, in the right a gray terrace, a section of house, some rosebushes that have lost their flowers; on the left, the earth of the garden -- red ocher -- earth burnt by the sun, covered in fallen pine twigs," he wrote.