1. Van Gogh had started working – presumably on Monday, 19 May or shortly thereafter – at Goupil’s London branch.

2. Tobias Victor Schmidt lived in the Goupil building in Brussels: 58 rue Montagne de la Cour (Hofbergstraat). In a draft of the biographical introduction to her edition of the letters (Brieven 1914), Jo van Gogh-Bonger wrote: ‘[Theo] lived in the house of a minister, which Pa found very safe ─ but it was dirty and dismal and he felt so alone and unhappy, he slept alone in the attic, where he was so afraid. He was still so young (15) but he never wrote home about it and bore it well, until finally, when he couldn’t stand it any longer, Schmidt asked him to come and live with him. Then everything was much more pleasant and enjoyable ─ in that young bachelor’s household, because Schmidt wasn’t married and Theo prepared their breakfast in the morning and fared very well’ (FR b3262). It is not impossible that there was some connection between Theo’s dissatisfaction with his lodgings and the circumstances of Reverend Van den Brink’s family, to which a daughter, Catharina Alberta, had been born shortly before this time who was long sickly and eventually died in August (FR b2660 and SAB).

3. Regarding Goupil’s London branch, see letter 5, n. 7.

4. The address of Van Gogh’s boarding-house is not known.

5. From September 1866 until March 1868, Van Gogh had attended the Hogere Burger School (High School) in Tilburg, a city in the province of North Brabant.

6. What is meant is the Salon, the annual exhibition of Living Masters, which had opened on 5 May 1873 in the Palais des Champs-Elysées.

7. The collections of the Musée du Louvre and of the Living Masters in the then Musée du Luxembourg, located to the east of the Palais du Luxembourg (in 1937 this museum was closed and the collection was removed to the Musée d’art moderne; a large part of this collection is now kept in the Musée d’Orsay).

8. Goupil & Co. had three galleries in Paris, one at rue Chaptal 9, one at boulevard Montmartre 19 and a branch at place de l’Opéra 2.

9. At first Van Gogh earned £ 90 a year (the average exchange rate was a little over 12 guilders to the pound, which amounted to an annual salary of 1,090 guilders), but, as Mr van Gogh wrote to Theo, ‘he still has to live frugally owing to the great hardship there; the boarding-house and his midday meal cost him 890 guilders a year’ (FR b2639, 2 July 1873).

10. The German Charles Obach, director of Goupil & Co. in London. Van Gogh went on this outing with Obach and his family on Sunday, 8 June (FR b2634).

11. Box Hill is near Dorking in Surrey, to the south-west of London, and could be reached by train. The ‘6 hours’ that Van Gogh talks about here is the time it took to walk that distance.

12. That year Whit Sunday and Monday fell on 1 and 2 June.

13. Uncle Hein and Aunt Mietje in Brussels.

14. Edouard Hamman.