1. This drawing of a row of diggers is not known. Van Gogh had described the first (different) plan for the drawing to Theo in letter 353.

2. In the spring of 1882 relations between Van Gogh and Tersteeg had deteriorated because he was living with Sien; see letters 208 ff.

3. This phrasing indicates that Van Gogh had had Bargue’s Exercices au fusain and Cours de dessin at his disposal since Tersteeg first lent them to him, around the beginning of September 1880 (cf. letter 157).

4. It is not known what the other favours were which Tersteeg had done for Van Gogh and for which he now wanted to ‘settle up’. It is unlikely to have been a question of financial support; it was probably a matter of lending books for drawing or painting instruction and suchlike, as mentioned in letter 158. Van Gogh may also have had in mind the paintbox and the sketchbook Tersteeg had sent him in the Borinage (see letter 153).

5. Van Gogh had enclosed the last letter from Van Rappard with letter 355 for Theo to read.

6. Hippolyte Taine wrote: ‘Le fond du caractère anglais, c’est le manque de bonheur’ in the fifth volume of Histoire de la littérature anglaise, entitled Les contemporains; see Taine 1874, pp. 35-36 (‘Dickens’, chapter 1, vol. 5). Also cited in letter 359. Early in 1884 Van Gogh again quotes from this chapter: see letter 419, n. 7

7. Van Gogh may be referring to two passages in Sartor resartus: see letter 312, n. 2.

8. Carlyle writes: ‘Knowest thou that “Worship of Sorrow”? The Temple thereof, opened some eighteen centuries ago, now lies in ruins, overgrown with jungle, the habitation of doleful creatures: nevertheless, venture forward; in a low crypt, arched out of falling fragments, thou findest the Altar still there, and its sacred Lamp perennially burning’ (book 2, 9: ‘The everlasting Yea’). See Carlyle 1987, p. 146. For Worship of Sorrow, cf. also letter 382.

9. Although Van Gogh had altered his plan for a drawing of potato lifting to make it a ‘row of diggers’ (see letter 355), he evidently still intended to draw the original subject as well.

10. After this Van Gogh originally wrote ‘something solemn’ (‘iets plegtigs’), but he crossed it out.

11. These four drawn studies of figures lifting potatoes are not known.

12. Herman Johannes van der Weele, A misty morning; see letter 327, n. 1.

13. Van Gogh had sent Uncle Cor a letter and two sketches; see letters 349 and 350.

14. Van Gogh had borrowed 25 guilders from Van Rappard; see letter 339.

15. For the stretching frames Van Gogh had had made for his drawings, see letter 346.

a. Van Gogh wrote ‘zou hebben kunnen doen’ and followed that with the English translation ‘might have done’ in parentheses.

b. Means: ‘goedmaken’ (make up).

16. Unlike Vincent, Theo knew the village where their parents lived, and had pointed out the attractiveness of the church and the churchyard at Nuenen as subjects; see letter 259, n. 6.

17. Nuenen was in a region where large amounts of woven textiles were produced.

18. In Gavarni, l’homme et l’oeuvre Edmond and Jules de Goncourt write at length about Gavarni’s time in London (Goncourt 1873, pp. 276-322). Gavarni mixed with the cream of the aristocracy, but after a while he concentrated on drawings of people from the underclass and the misery in which they lived. The drawings appeared in The Illustrated London News and other places. Gavarni gave an account of this in a letter to Louis Leroy (pp. 284-292). Becoming familiar with a setting, which Van Gogh talks about, is the theme of the following passage: ‘It’s a quite remarkable thing, the flexibility with which Garvarni, in so short a time, made distinctively his own the character and the type of the people among whom he found himself’ (C’est une chose tout à fait remarquable que le souplesse avec lequelle Gavarni, dans un temps si court, s’est approprié le caractère et le type de la population parmi laquelle il se trouvait) (p. 292).

19. For the family relation between Van Rappard and Willem Nicolaas Lantsheer, see letter 176, n. 9.