2. The poetry of John Keats had become increasingly popular in England from the 1840s on. English painters – especially the Pre-Raphaelites – regularly depicted themes from his work. In the Netherlands no great interest was taken in Keats’s work until the 1880s, at which time the country was gripped by a new literary movement of its own. In 1879 Keats’s ‘Hyperion’ was translated into Dutch by W.W. van Lennep. See G.H. Ford, Keats and the Victorians. A study of his influence and rise to fame 1821-1895. Hamden 1962; G. Dekker, Die invloed van Keats en Shelley in Nederland gedurende die negentiende eeu. Groningen 1926, p. 33, and John Keats. Gedichten. Ed. Léon Stapper. Baarn 1991, pp. 18-23.

3. See the poems appended to this letter.

4. ‘The eve of St Agnes’ was published in 1820 in Lamia, Isabella, The eve of St Agnes and other poems. The poem, which consists of 378 lines of verse, treats of the forbidden love of Porphyro and Madeline, ending with the lovers’ taking flight. See Keats 1978, pp. 299-318.

5. Here Van Gogh names popular tourist attractions: Crystal Palace, the principal structure of the 1851 Great Exhibition, re-erected on Sydenham Hill in South London; the medieval Tower of London; and Madame Tussaud’s waxworks museum in Baker Street.

6. Summer Bank Holiday.

7. Dulwich Picture Gallery, Britain’s oldest public gallery with a famous collection of seventeenth-century paintings. On Monday, 4 August, Van Gogh wrote his signature ‘VWvanGogh the Hague’ in the visitor’s book (Documentation Dulwich Picture Gallery). Ill. 3104.

8. Willem van Stockum’s birthday was 8 August.

9. Casparus Marinus van Stockum, Willem’s brother.

10. Van Gogh might be referring to Teunis van Iterson’s eldest brother, 24-year-old Franciscus van Iterson.

11. Lange Poten 10 in The Hague, Caroline’s parental home.

12. A publication containing the poems Van Gogh mentions, including the ‘Imagination’ quotation (ll. 195-197), is The poetical works of John Keats. Edited, with a critical memoir by William Michael Rossetti. Illustrated by Thomas Seccombe. London [1871], pp. 180-194; 237-240; 231 and preface, p. xxii.

Van Gogh’s copy largely corresponds to this edition. For example, ‘Unfinished’ has been added below the title in the same way, and the name ‘Moses’ – instead of ‘Aaron’, as in other editions – also occurs here (in l. 35). By contrast, Van Gogh’s transcription differs in details in several places from this edition, corresponding instead to other versions, so that Rossetti’s edition cannot be said with certainty to be the source. Cf. the editions in Keats 1978, and The poems of John Keats. Ed. Miriam Allott. 6th ed. London 1986.

Keats’s ‘The eve of Saint Mark’, which was never completed, was published posthumously in 1848. Van Gogh did not copy out the whole poem; he omitted more than twenty lines at the end. The date ‘1818’ does not agree with the Rossetti edition, which gives the date correctly as 1819.

13. The quotation originally came from a letter written by Keats to Benjamin Bailey. See The letters of John Keats 1814-1821. Ed. H.E. Rollins. Cambridge, Massachusetts 1958, vol. 1, pp. 184-185. Van Gogh could have taken it from the foreword to the Rossetti edition (see note 12).

14. Like ‘The eve of St Agnes’, ‘To autumn’ was published in Lamia, Isabella, The eve of St Agnes and other poems (1820). Van Gogh omitted the middle stanza of the original (11 lines of verse, a personification of Autumn).