1. For Daubigny’s etching The bush after Jacob van Ruisdael, see letter 35, n. 5.

2. For the lithograph by Auguste-Paul-Charles Anastasi after Rousseau’s Oven in Les Landes , see letter 139, n. 9. Van Gogh’s copies after Rousseau have been lost.

3. For Bargue's Cours de dessin, see letter 136, n. 22. The books Tersteeg sent were most probably A. de Zahn, Esquisses anatomiques à l’usage des artistes pour servir aux études d’après nature et d’après l’antique (see letter 160, n. 2) and Guide de l’alphabet du dessin ou l’art d’apprendre et d’enseigner les principes rationnels du dessin d’après nature by Armand Théophile Cassagne. Paris 1880. This book, consisting of 43 lessons, contained much on perspective, and helped to dispel Van Gogh’s doubts when he started to draw (as he later wrote in April 1882). It was, in his view, a ‘comprehensible’ work; letter 214). See cat. Amsterdam 1996, pp. 18-21.

4. Van Gogh ‘believes’ he can recall watercolours by Lessore, by which he could mean either the work of Emile Aubert Lessore, whose known works include landscapes and figure studies from Algiers (mainly watercolours), or the work of his son, Jules Lessore, who worked as a watercolourist in Paris and London (TB). Matthijs Maris was a friend of Jules (see Heijbroek 1975, p. 284). Henri Emile Lessore, by whom Theo owned several prints, occurs in his address book. See exhib. cat. Paris 1988, p. 361. The portrait of Victor Hugo mentioned below has not been identified.

a. Read: ‘tout à fait’ (entirely, altogether).

5. Victor Hugo, Le dernier jour d’un condamné (1829). This novel, the story of the last day in the life of a criminal sentenced to death, addresses the horror of capital punishment.

6. Regarding Hugo’s William Shakespeare, see letter 155, n. 9.

7. The French village of Barbizon, on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau near Paris, was known in particular for the landscape painters who had worked there between c. 1830 and 1870 and whose work became widely known as the Barbizon School. They included Théodore Rousseau, Jules Dupré, Charles-François Daubigny, Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña, Constant Troyon, Antoine Chintreuil, Henri Harpignies and Jean-François Millet.

8. Courrières is c. 20 km south of Lille in the departement Pas de Calais. Van Gogh added ‘non pas la Manche’ to make sure that Theo knew he wasn’t referring to the English Channel. Later he writes that he made this long journey on foot at the beginning of March (see letter 391).

9. Breton had had a studio built near his house in the early 1860s. It stood on the site of the present-day house at rue Louis Breton 10, but was destroyed during the First World War. See L’écho du passé. Bulletin du Club d’histoire locale de Courrières (1996), no. 8, pp. 25-27. Cf. The garden of ‘The brewery’ at Courrières, 1861 (private collection) in exhib. cat. Cleveland 1980, pp. 187, 275-276, cat. no. 162; exhib. cat. Arras 2002, p. 109. For a photograph of Breton’s house and the interior of the studio, see Maurius Vachon, Jules Breton. Paris 1899, p. 19.

10. Dorn found a connection between the ‘Methodist regularity’ of Breton’s studio and the following remark made by Hugo in William Shakespeare concerning the house he lived in himself: ‘It’s constructed of Methodism’. See Hugo 1864, p. 10, and exhib. cat. Vienna 1996, p. 32.

11. Jovinda was the name of Uncle Cor’s villa at the corner of Prins Hendriklaan and Amalialaan G 72b in Baarn. This name was composed of the first couple of letters of the Christian names of each of his children Johanna, Vincent and Daniël. Uncle Cor officially registered as residing there on 18 April 1878. The house, also known as Villa Rozenburg, was built in an eclectic style and was demolished in the mid-1930s. Ill. 1893 (Photo collection of C. van de Steeg in Baarn). Cf. H. Bronkhorst, ‘Vincent van Gogh in Baarn: “Wat is het daar mooi”’, Baerne. Tijdschrift van de historische kring ‘Baerne’ 11-2 (1987), pp. 7-12.

12. In those days the only photographer in Courrières was Mr Gourlet. He was an amateur draughtsman and a friend of Jules Breton. (Communicated by Francine Lhost, chairperson of the ‘Club d’histoire locale de Courrières’). A portrait photograph of Breton appears in exhib. cat. Cleveland 1980, p. 275.

13. The old church is the Eglise Saint-Piat, built in 1532, in which Breton painted in 1847 a Fourteenth Station of the Cross which was actually a copy of Titian’s Entombment of the mid-1520s (Paris, Musée du Louvre). Breton’s work was lost during the fire that swept through the church on 28 May 1940. See L’écho du passé. Bulletin du Club d’histoire locale de Courrières (1996), no. 8, p. 25 and (1997), no. 11, pp. 10-11 (ill.), 28. ‘An unpublished letter written by J. Breton to his uncle Boniface Breton on 3 July 1847 indicates that he is about to start painting the 14th Station of the Cross which he was supposed to carry out in the summer and autumn of 1847’ (Letter from Annette Bourrut Lacouture in Paris, 15 August 1999).

14. This ‘Café des Beaux-Arts’ was located at the corner of present-day rue Louis Breton and rue Massenet.

15. Nothing has been found about the café’s Don Quixote decoration.

16. With regard to flights of crows in the work of Daubigny, Van Gogh could have been thinking of Les corbeaux, coteaux en Champagne (The crows, hills in Champagne), 1860 (cf. Hellebranth 1976, p. 141, cat. no. 437); in the work of Millet, he could have had in mind Winter: The plain of Chailly, 1862 (Vienna, Österreichische Gallerie).

17. The pit is the so-called ‘shaft no. 1’, whose meagre yield and low-quality coal earned it the nickname ‘dust pit’. This mine was worked between 1851 and 1888. See L’écho du passé. Bulletin du Club d’histoire locale de Courrières (1996), no. 8, p. 27 and (1996), no. 9, p. 4 (with ill.).

18. This was followed by ‘en vendant’ (by selling), which Van Gogh crossed out.

19. Possibly an allusion to the opening of Ps. 130 in the Vulgate.

b. Read: ‘lorsque’ (when).

20. This saying did not come from Bernard Palissy; it is, rather, the device – borrowed from Andrea Alciato – of the publisher Barthélemy Berton, the first printer of Palissy’s Recepte veritable (1564), who also included it on the title page of this edition. Van Gogh was not the only one to attribute the saying to Palissy: at the end of the nineteenth century, Palissy’s biographer, Philippe Burty, remarked: ‘the bookseller’s hallmark was incorrectly attributed to Palissy’. See Bernard Palissy. Paris [1885], p. 12. The source of Van Gogh’s attribution is unclear; Palissy was a favourite of many nineteenth-century Protestant writers.

21. Here Van Gogh lists a number of regions and provinces in the north(west) of France; Brie is east of Paris.

22. Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was the author of several publications on architecture. His designs and ideas were known from magazines, and also appeared in the informative Entretiens (1858-1872), a collection of commentaries on neo-Gothic architecture. See Macmillan encyclopedia of architects. Ed. Adolf K. Placzek. New York and London 1982, vol. 4, pp. 324-332.

23. Van Gogh could be referring to the engravings Une vieille maison, à Blois (An old house at Blois) (Ill. 1895 ) and Beffroi (Belfry) (Ill. 1896 ), both made by Fortuné Louis Méaulle after drawings by Hugo. They were reproduced in Philippe Burty’s article, ‘Les Dessins de Victor Hugo’, L’Art 1 (12 September 1875), pp. 32-38 (ills. on pp. 33 and 35); letter 141 reveals that Van Gogh knew this magazine. On these drawings, see Victor Hugo pittore. J.J. Lebel. Exhib. cat. Venice (Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ca’ Pesaro). Milano 1993 and Drawings by Victor Hugo. P. Georgel and G. Reynolds. Exhib. cat. London (The Victoria and Albert Museum), 1974. London 1974, esp. cat. no. 58.

24. For similar buildings in the work of Meryon, see Richard S. Schneiderman (with the assistance of Frank W. Raysor, ii), The catalogue raisonné of the prints of Charles Meryon. London 1990.

25. Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia, 1514 (H75) (Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet). Ill. 86 .

26. It has not been ascertained which critic said this about Tissot.

27. Vincent later added the sentence ‘Meryon ... places’. Here he refers to a passage in ‘The fellow of no delicacy’ from A tale of two cities (part 2, chapter 13), in which Sydney Carton, overshadowed by a ‘cloud of caring for nothing’, spends many nights outside his beloved Lucie’s house, in the course of which he even starts to grow fond of the very pavement: ‘And yet he did care something for the streets that environed that house, and for the senseless stones that made their pavements.’ See Dickens 1859, p. 98.

28. Perhaps Van Gogh was thinking of Matt. 13:46.

29. Matt. 7:14.