1. Van Gogh regarded Israëls’s work as the counterpart of Millet’s. Nothing is known about any contacts between Van Gogh and Israëls, although they very probably met when Vincent was working in the Goupil gallery in The Hague (in July 1883 he quoted something Israëls said; see letter 361). Israëls sold much of his work through Goupil.

2. The letter sketch Sower with setting sun (F - / JH 1472) was done after the painting of the same name (F 422 / JH 1470 ). Van Gogh described and sketched it at an earlier stage; he worked on it again soon afterwards (see letter 634).

3. Louis Anquetin, The harvest (The mower at noon), 1887 (private collection). Ill. 508 . Bernard described it as one of Anquetin’s ‘Japanese abstractions’ (abstractions Japonaises), and regarded it as one of the first experiments with Cloisonnism. The painting hung in the exhibition staged by Van Gogh in Restaurant du Chalet, and in the offices of the Revue Indépendante in January 1888. See Bernard 1994, vol. 1, pp. 64, 241, and letter 575, n. 9. Van Gogh’s Arles seen from the wheatfields (F 545 / JH 1477 ) followed the lead set by Anquetin’s painting.

4. Van Gogh is referring here to his Nuenen period from late 1883 to late 1885, when he tried to express the symbolism of the countryside and peasant life.

5. Van Gogh had written to Bernard about this subject before (see letter 596).

6. In Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel En ménage (1881), the character Cyprien remarks: ‘– And what about the paintings? – The painter scratched his beard with his long fingers. The paintings, pah, he said, it’s sometimes good to muse about those you will never do, in bed, of an evening, when you’re not asleep!’ (– Alors les tableaux? – Le peintre se frotta la barbe de ses longs doigts. Les tableaux, peuh, dit-il, c’est quelquefois bon de songer à ceux qu’on ne fera jamais, au lit, le soir, quand on ne dort pas!) (see 3rd ed. Paris 1881, chapter 16, p. 346). The novel is set in an artistic milieu, and revolves around a broken marriage, the day-to-day worries of an old bachelor, the loneliness of the search for love, the need for a woman – in short the desolateness of life. Cf. Sund 1992, p. 253 (n. 27).

7. Bernard sent him a drawing of a brothel soon afterwards, which Vincent sent on to Theo, saying: ‘it’s probable that he has a more finished painted study of it’ (letter 630). Bernard’s drawing Brothel scene (see letter 630, n. 4) was thus probably based on that study of a brothel. However, no such painted version is known today.

8. The letter sketch Wheatfield with setting sun (F - / JH 1474) is after the painting of the same name F 465 / JH 1473 .

9. This is a subject that Van Gogh had raised in his previous letter to Bernard (622), who had presumably asked him to explain it in more detail.

10. This form of words is similar to that used by Charles Blanc in his Grammaire des arts du dessin when he wrote that, when using bold colours, white can serve ‘to rest the eye, to refresh it, by moderating the dazzling brilliance of the whole spectacle’ (à reposer l’oeil, à le rafraîchir, en modérant l’éblouissant éclat du spectacle entier). See Blanc 1870, p. 609. Van Gogh later made the trousers blue.

11. See letter 536, n. 28 for the concept of simultaneous contrast.

12. For Van Gogh’s knowledge and use of a perspective frame, see letter 235, n. 10.

13. Paul Eugène Milliet was due to leave for Guelma in Algeria on 1 November 1888. Cf. letters 714 and 716.

14. Van Gogh drew a box around ll. 85-93.

a. Read: ‘ici’.

15. Van Gogh was preoccupied with the relationship between social or artistic ambitions and creativity on the one hand, and sexual activity and procreation on the other. He admired men who were very active sexually or who had families, but believed that he himself had to forgo these benefits in the interests of his art.

16. The notion that a painter had to have the patience of an ox was based on a saying (unsourced) of Gustave Doré’s, as we learn from letter 400.

17. Van Gogh originally wrote ‘plus boeuf’ (more of an ox) after ‘seras’.

18. Van Gogh mentions the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire because he knew that he was an important figure for Bernard, with his aspiration to become a poet. Bernard’s veneration of Baudelaire, which Van Gogh did not share, is very apparent in his correspondence with his mother, who also wrote poetry. With thanks to Fred Leeman.

19. Taken from Alphonse Daudet, Le Nabab (chapter 22), where it is described as ‘a melancholy Lied’ (un lied mélancolique). Van Gogh writes ‘un instant’ where Daudet has ‘un moment’. Daudet took the lines from a poem by Armand Silvestre that Jules Massenet set to music in his cycle Poème d’avril (1866). See Daudet 1986-1994, vol. 2, pp. 804, 1395.

20. Pierre Loti’s novel Madame Chrysanthème (1888) is set in Nagasaki. A French officer marries the Japanese Kikou-san, or Madame Chrysanthème. In reality the marriage is a paid, temporary concubinage. The Frenchman has no real feelings of love for her; it is more a question of his amazement at how doll-like she is. Loti describes the setting and the customs. The underlying message is that it is difficult for Europeans to penetrate the mysterious closed nature and morals of the Japanese, or the artificial refinement of objects.

21. Theo had written to tell Vincent about his meeting with Guy de Maupassant. See letter 625, n. 7.

b. Read: ‘ayant un doute’.