1. The poor and the money (F 970 / JH 222 ).

2. The letter sketch Beach with people strolling with boats (F - / JH 248) was done after the watercolour with the same title F 982 / JH 247 .

3. Van Gogh is possibly referring to Daumier’s illustration ‘Ferragus, les deux mains sur sa canne’ (Ferragus leaning on his walking stick) for the story ‘Ferragus’ in Balzac’s Histoire des Treize. Ill. 54 . It appeared in Le Charivari (20 November 1846) and was included in several editions of Balzac’s Oeuvres complètes and Oeuvres illustrées. See Bouvy 1995, cat. no. 735 and Honoré de Balzac, La comédie humaine v. Etudes de moeurs. Scènes de la vie de province. Scènes de la vie parisienne. Histoire des treize. Ed. Rose Fortassier. Paris 1977. Cf. also letter 162, n. 2.

4. This plea for firmness and sobriety, and the words ‘Monday morning’ and ‘solid’, especially in this context, make it all the likelier that this is an allusion to the following passage at the beginning of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley: ‘If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.’ Ed. London 1857, p. 1. Van Gogh knew the book; see letters 170 and 187. Later he writes ‘prosaic as Monday morning’ (letters 341 and 342).

5. A month later Van Gogh was to read Les buveurs d’eau (1854) by Henri Murger; see letter 288.

6. Alphonse Daudet, Les rois en exil – Roman parisien (1879) is a novel about the royal family of Illyria, which is in exile in Paris after a revolution and waiting to return to the homeland. Their ‘race’ and ‘blood’ are exhausted, however, and the son and heir has to renounce the throne because of his poor health. Daudet describes aristocratic circles in Paris and how their show of strength is confronted by reality.

7. When giving the titles by Murger, Theo would have been bound to include Scènes de la vie de bohème (1851), a highly successful book with a mix of romanticism and realism. The main characters are a painter, a musician, a philosopher and a poet. The life of these bohémiens in the Quartier Latin in Paris takes shape in long dialogues and details about interiors, dress and music – it is extravagant and theatrical. At first money and romance are the central concerns, but eventually they have ‘arrived’ and they leave the free and easy ways of their younger years behind them.

8. Van Gogh was familiar with Gavarni’s combination of a free way of life and a successful career as an artist from the biography Gavarni, l’homme et l’oeuvre by Jules and Edmond de Goncourt. Meanwhile Theo had the book (see letter 277). A series of lithographs entitled ‘Bohèmes’ was included in La mascarade humaine, which Vincent had (see letter 302).

9. No figure studies of peat carriers from this period are known.

10. Nicolas François Octave Tassaert was obsessed by death; it ‘foreshadowed his own later self-destruction by asphyxiation’. ‘In April 1874, faced with starvation and with no hope of earning a living, Tassaert committed suicide, using the same type of coal stove he had depicted in his genre scenes of the garrets of the poor’. See exhib. cat. Cleveland 1980, pp. 44-45, 311.

11. Van Gogh mentions this idea several times: see letters 312, 398 and 400. He probably borrowed it from Sartor resartus by Thomas Carlyle, who writes ‘The end of Man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest’ (book 2, chapter 6). See also ‘existence was all a Feeling, not yet shaped into a Thought. Nevertheless, into a Thought, nay into an Action, it must be shaped’ (book 2, chapter 5). See Carlyle 1987, pp. 120, 112. Van Gogh must have had a copy of Sartor resartus as early as 1875. See Pabst 1988, p. 25. For this novel, see letter 325, n. 34.

12. Vincent had earlier suggested that Theo would be a good painter: see letter 211.

13. It was not unusual to dismantle stoves in the spring to give more space in a room. They were reassembled in the autumn (cf. letter 218).

14. Van Gogh had sent Orphans (F - / JH 203), the letter sketch of this unknown drawing: see letter 265.