Vincent van Gogh to Emile Bernard on Aug 5 1888:
“…Why do you say that Degas has trouble getting a hard-on? Degas lives like a little lawyer, and he doesn’t like women, knowing that if he liked them and fucked them a lot he would become cerebrally ill and hopeless at painting. Degas’s painting is virile and impersonal precisely because he has resigned himself to being personally no more than a little lawyer, with a horror of riotous living. He watches human animals stronger than himself getting a hard-on and fucking, and he paints them well, precisely because he doesn’t make such great claims about getting a hard-on.
Rubens, ah, there you have it, he was a handsome man and a good fucker, Courbet too; their health allowed them to drink, eat, fuck.
In your case, my poor dear old Bernard, I already told you last spring. Eat well, do your military drill well, don’t fuck too hard; if you don’t fuck too hard, your painting will be all the spunkier for it.
Ah, Balzac, that great and powerful artist, already told us very well that for modern artists a certain chastity made them stronger…
These studies that I’m talking about first, you see it’s the first swallow of your summertime as an artist. If we want, ourselves, to get a hard-on for our work, we must sometimes resign ourselves to fucking only a little, and for the rest to be, according as our temperament demands, soldiers or monks. The Dutchmen, once again, had morals, and a quiet, calm, well-ordered life.
Delacroix, ah, him — ‘I,’ he said, ‘found painting when I
had no teeth nor breath left’. And those who saw this famous artist paint said:
when Delacroix paints it’s like the lion devouring his piece of flesh. He
fucked only a little, and had only casual love affairs so as not to filch from
the time devoted to his work.
p.s
Cézanne is as much a respectably married man as the old Dutchmen were. If he has a good hard-on in his work it’s because he’s not overly dissipated through riotous living.”
Vincent Van Gogh, The Siesta (after Millet), 1890, Musée d'Orsay