1. Theo suffered from headaches; see letter 269.

2. This painting of a piece of ground dug over is not known.

3. Van Gogh worked with a board (see letter 260, n. 9). He also talks about a ‘frame’ (letter 255, n. 3).

a. Means: ‘perspectief’ (perspective).

4. A girl in a wood (F 8 / JH 182 ). This painting is ‘fairly large’: it measures 39 x 59 cm.

5. Women mending nets in the dunes (F 7 / JH 178 ).

6. Cf. in this connection the watercolour People under umbrellas (F 990 / JH 172).

7. Brieven en dagboek van A.G. Bilders. Ed. J. Kneppelhout. 2 vols. Leiden 1876. It consists of selected letters and the journal of the painter Gerard Bilders (son of the landscape painter Johannes Warnardus Bilders), who died while still young. He gives a detailed account of his artistic life, which was in part made possible by the patronage of the man of letters Johannes Kneppelhout. Bilders was inclined towards melancholy and hypochondria, but was not without a sense of self-mockery.

8. Bilders was 26 when he died of TB.

9. Sensier, La vie et l’oeuvre de J.-F. Millet. See letter 210, n. 3.

10. In 1872 Sensier had published Souvenirs sur Théodore Rousseau. Philippe Burty’s Maîtres et petits maîtres contained an article on the life of Théodore Rousseau (Burty 1877, pp. 120-160). It is not known, however, whether Van Gogh knew these publications at this time.

11. Van Gogh could have acquired his knowledge of the life of Daubigny from the many articles about him in, for example, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and other art journals, or from monographs, such as Henriet 1875.

12. These exact words are not found in Sensier’s biography, but they should be regarded as Van Gogh’s version of Millet’s view.

13. Van Gogh’s rendition is based on remarks like: ‘I’m bored, I’m in a bad mood, I just can’t shake it off. It’s misty, it’s dark, it’s early; and the spleen makes me mad and gloomy, furious and silent’. See Bilders 1876, vol. 2, p. 77.

14. The subject of expensive cigars (manilas pointus) comes up when Bilders describes how he dreamed of selling a painting for a good price and then because of the imagined proceeds saw ‘several manila pointus’ before him (Bilders 1876, vol. 2, p. 40). In a letter to Bilders Kneppelhout had written: ‘If I understand your letter rightly, the tailor has been paid and you are broke, but without debts’. Bilders, who suffered from a chronic shortage of money, had to correct his patron on this point: ‘You do me too much honour by assuming that now the tailor is paid I have no more debts’ (Bilders 1876, vol. 1, p. 104).

15. The remark about the soup for the children is not in Sensier in literally this form, but Millet’s concern about feeding his children recurs several times. For example: ‘“Oh! How I am going to make ends meet? Because the children must eat, above all!’” (“Ah! ma fin de mois, où la trouver? car il faut bien que les enfants mangent avant tout!”). Moreover, he had been heard to say: ‘The main thing is that the children haven’t suffered in any way; so far, they’ve had enough to eat’. (L’important, c’est que les enfants n’aient point souffert; ils ont eu, jusqu’à présent, leur nourriture). See Sensier 1881, pp. 165, 107.

16. Art did not give Bilders the expected fulfilment: ‘She is not sufficiently my life, she does not sufficiently fulfil my most passionate wishes to care for her greatly.’ He believes he will not find ‘the philosopher’s stone’ until love crosses his path: ‘Then contentment, interest, enthusiasm, ambition, I believe, would return, and with them calm’ (Bilders 1876, vol. 2, pp. 82-83, 85).

17. The fact that Van Gogh’s attempts at painting six months earlier were not successful was due, he believed, to the estrangement between him and Anton Mauve, who had given him his first painting lessons; these lessons stopped because of this estrangement.