1. Both offices were just a few minutes’ walk from Goupil’s: The Illustrated London News was at 198 Strand and the Graphic at 190 Strand.

2. For Herkomer’s Low lodging house St. Giles’s

3. For Fildes’s Applicants for admission to a casual ward, see letter 304, n 76.

4. A reference to the anonymous review in The Graphic 11 (12 June 1875), p. 571, of the third Black and White exhibition in 1875 at the Dudley Gallery in London, where nine drawings by Léon Augustin Lhermitte were shown. We quote the whole passage here because Van Gogh comes back to it in more detail in the following letters (the numbers between parentheses are those in the original catalogue): ‘And though we should be disposed to put Léon Lhermitte at the head of all those who exhibit here for the most potent secrets of strength and command of effect in black and white, there are English designers, both of the figure and landscape, such as Gregory and Small, who come but little behind him in these points, and English landscape painters like Powell and Hunter, to say nothing of departed masters like George Cattermole, whose mastery of broad and strong effect does not fall below his. To such qualities in his black and white, as delicacy of draughtsmanship, exquisiteness and sweetness of effect, and refinement of expression, Lhermitte’s work makes no pretension. It assails the imagination by a rude, massive, and primitive strength akin to that which impresses us in the monuments and buildings, the life and faith, of that Brittany from which he derives most of his subjects, and in which his genius seems most at home. How eminently favourable this stern simplicity is to effect, in such materials as chalk and charcoal, we may test by noting the distinctness with which the memory retains that simple street in Dauphiné (461) – with its broadly distributed masses of black and white; those grim grey-black fortress-like houses at Landerneau (311), in which we trace the kinship of Brittany and Wales, so irresistibly do they remind us of Caernarvon; or those grave, prayerful women (259), kneeling round the rude coast-shrine (the Ker-Saint, or “holy-house”), on the naked rock that goes plumb down to the angry sea of Finisterre; or – almost more remarkable for its strong, simple grasp on the picturesque elements of the subject – that corner of a Breton market-place (194), with the satisfying harmony got out of the white caps and dark dresses of its gossiping and bargaining commères, the deep hollows of the doorways, and the light and shadow playing on stalls and booths, and overhanging pent-house roofs; or the “Procession” (114), with the canopied host, marshalling cross, and waving banners, the white-veiled communicants at the head of the train, and the more darkly and humbly clad forefathers and foremothers of the hamlet bringing up the rear, on the winding way along the hollow road up the hill-side to the rustic church that crowns its brow; or those robed and tonsured priests in the cloistral half-shadow of their stalls at Notre-Dame (172); or that gaunt and grim Breton beggar-woman over her never-grudged écuille of soup, or that Breton house-wife at her sleepless wheel. It is impossible to forget Lhermitte’s work. He is at once the Millet and Jules Breton of Black and White; and it would be a curious and not useless artistic problem to work out upon his drawings what is the secret of the pathetic effect obtained without delineation – indeed, with hardly even indication – of feature, and only the rudest suggestions of form. A. Legros has something of this power, but his style is at once dryer and more distinct (see his “Beggar and Worshippers at a church-porch of Bruges”) (92).’

Van Gogh uses the plural ‘comptes rendus’, which may be a reference to other favourable reviews of Lhermitte’s work, such as those by Tom Taylor in The Graphic 15 (23 June 1877), p. 594 and The Graphic 18 (6 July 1878), p. 6, and the anonymous contribution to The Illustrated London News 72 (22 June 1878), p. 582. For the works exhibited, see Le Pelley Fonteny 1991, p. 508.

5. This remark, and the sentence in the next letter to Theo: ‘In the last letter I wrote to you I asked in passing about the work of LHERMITTE’ (letter 308), shows that a letter or part of a letter to Theo has been lost, because Lhermitte’s name is mentioned for the first time in the present letter to Van Rappard.

6. Workman sitting on a basket, cutting bread (F 1663 / JH 272

). This remark proves that Van Gogh (either earlier or with the present letter) sent several lithographs to Van Rappard.

a. Read: ‘fond’ (background).

7. For this anonymous biography ‘Hubert Herkomer’, see The Graphic 18 (26 October 1878), in which The last muster (Sunday at Chelsea hospital)

is also mentioned: letter 306, n. 9.

8. In the same contribution in The Graphic it is said that Herkomer became acquainted with Edward John Gregory, and together with him joined ‘The Institute of water-colours’ in 1871. The piece itself does not mention that both artists wanted to do figures from the people.

9. For Paris under the red flag

, which Van Gogh had mistakenly attributed to Boyd Houghton earlier, see letter 304, n. 53. ‘An emergency hospital in a theatre’ is Edward Gregory’s The theatre of war

; see letter 304, n. 49. The word ‘Comedie’ is seen twice. An example of ‘scenes on board ships’ is the wood engraving Our allies – Scene on board ship at Jellah koffee, in The Graphic 9 (14 February 1874), p. 161 (t*161).

10. Van Gogh talked earlier about the days of the ‘Bohème’; see letter 274, nn. 7 and 8.

b. Means: ‘hij er niet mee ingenomen was’ (he was not best pleased).

c. Means: ‘bijgelegd’ (settled our differences).

11. Marinus Boks, a pupil of Mauve, had been admitted to the Geneeskundig Gesticht voor Krankzinnigen (Insane Asylum) in the Hague on 27 October 1881. He was probably discharged in April 1882, before being briefly readmitted on 29 August of that year (GAH, B, no. 33, inv. no. 70).

12. Who this person was (someone in the art trade?) has not been established.

13. For Herkomer’s The last muster