1. Loosduinen lies about 4 km south of The Hague.

2. This painted study of a seascape with a mole is not known. It evidently corresponded to letter sketch B, Breakwater (F - / JH 381).

3. For Jacob van Ruisdael’s The bush , see letter 34, n. 4.

4. The 5 km-long line of the Westland Steam Tram Company from The Hague to Loosduinen was opened on 24 June 1882.

5. The eastern part of Scheveningen increasingly took on the air of a luxury seaside resort and constrasted sharply with the original fishing village. Towards 1881 Scheveningen was already being visited by some 20,000 people a year, mainly between July and September. See exhib. cat. Amsterdam 1980, p. 40.

a. Means: ‘verschoond is van, onaangetast is door’ (spared, unspoilt).

6. In 1838, at the age of 21, Charles-François Daubigny became a pupil of Paul Delaroche. In that year a painting by him hung in the Salon for the first time. From 1844 he established his reputation as a painter; before that he was also active as an engraver.

7. From 1 April 1883 Poeldijk and Naaldwijk could be reached via a line slightly more than 9 km long. See J.C. van Hartingsveldt, De Westlandsche stoomtram. Trams en tramlijnen. Rotterdam 1981, p. 14.

8. This watercolour of the bush beside a path in the dunes is not known. The work evidently went back to letter sketch A, Path to the beach (F - / JH 382).

9. This painted study of the jetty at Loosduinen is not known.

10. This means that the extra amount Theo sent on or about 25 July was 50 francs. Cf. letter 368.

11. Van Gogh discussed this proposal about net prices in letter 366 (cf. n. 8 there).

12. The surveyor was Antoine Philippe Furnée; his father Hendrik Jan Furnée had a chemist’s shop at Korte Poten 8 in The Hague. He also sold artists’ materials and was a stockist for Paillard, a French brand of paint.

13. This is the first time that Van Gogh writes that he is going to work with the more professional canvas (from letter 260 it appears that he worked with paper). Yet some of the works from before this period are already painted on canvas.

14. In the correspondence only three watercolours of landscapes are mentioned: a corn field, part of a potato field (letter 361) and the bush beside a dune path referred to here. It is unlikely that the sketches on the last page of the letter go back to the ‘landscapes’ meant here. They are beach scenes after all: Boats and strollers on the beach (F - / JH -), and the very cursory Boat on the beach (F - / JH -).