1. See for A.P. Eversteijn and R.H. Tripp, owners of Maison Arnold et Tripp: letter 343, n. 6.

2. Charles Obach was the manager of Goupil’s gallery in London when Van Gogh worked there. He started his own gallery at 20 Cockspur Street, Pall Mall, London, in about 1884. Nothing is known about problems at Goupil’s.

3. This is a reference to Octave Mouret, a character in Zola’s novel Pot-bouille (1882) who comes to Paris to try his luck in business. He is described, among other things, as follows: ‘Business fascinated him... And he described with peals of triumphant laughter how he had earned the five thousand francs without which, with a Jew’s caution under the exterior of an amiable scatterbrain, he would never have tried his luck in Paris.’ (Le commerce le passionnait... Et il raconta, avec des rires de victoire comment il avait gagné les cinq mille francs, sans lesquels, d’une prudence de juif sous les dehors d’un étourdi aimable, il ne se serait jamais risqué à Paris.) Mouret thinks of large businesses and modern shops: ‘It was the bold venture that he sought... he became heated, showed himself full of contempt for the old way of trading, in the depths of dark, damp shops with no window displays, described in gestures a new way of trading, piling up every kind of feminine luxury into palaces of crystal.’ (C’était l’affaire d’audace qu’il cherchait. ... Il s’échauffait, se montrait plein de mépris pour l’ancien commerce, au fond des boutiques humides noires, sans étalage, évoquait du geste un commerce nouveau, entassant tout le luxe de la femme dans des palais de christal.) See Zola 1960-1967, vol. 3, chapter 1, p. 13 and chapter 9, p. 171. Cf. for Pot-bouille also letter 283.

a. Means: ‘kalmte’, ‘onbekommerdheid’ (calm, unconcern).

4. Taken from Victor Hugo, Les misérables, part 4, book 1, chapter 4: ‘A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It happens because it has to happen’ (Une révolution est un retour du factice au réel. Elle est parce qu’il faut qu’elle soit). See Hugo 1951, p. 878. Van Gogh quotes the sentence again in letter 400. Cf. the earlier formulation in Dutch: ‘een revolutie in me ontstaat omdat het de tijd was dat die kwame’ (a revolution has now come about in me because it was time it came) (letter 353).

5. A group of protestants in England who broke away from the state church at the end of the sixteenth century in order to restore the church to its original ‘puritas’ and to rid it of all Roman Catholic influences. Cf. also letter 405, where Van Gogh talks about the Mayflower.

6. See for ‘collier’s faith’: letter 286, n. 17. The assertion that Millet ‘often used’ this expression is not confirmed by Sensier or Burty 1877. See for the only time that the expression occurs – and then only when Paul Mantz says it in his introduction about Sensier: Sensier 1881, p. vi.

7. This letter sketch, Ploughman and two women (F - / JH 412), is similar to the drawing Ploughman and three women (F 1096r / JH 411), in which women follow a plough and pick up potatoes. There are several figure studies on the verso of this sheet. Cf. letter 396 for a letter sketch after a similar composition.

8. These scratches in letter 395 are not known.

9. See for the expression ‘ça ira’: letter 176, n. 1.

10. See for this expression: letter 288, n. 15.

11. Having reached this point in the letter, Van Gogh drew the second letter sketch, Stooping woman in a landscape (F - / JH 414), and added the sentence ‘I find ... effort’.

12. Van Gogh added the word ‘speculative’ (‘wind’) in ‘speculative art business’ (‘windkunsthandel’) later.

13. The expression derives from Victor Hugo’s poem La légende des siècles (1859), (see letter 288, n. 8). It appears that Van Gogh is trying to say that Theo can hear the ‘still voice of nature’ if he lets the heath speak to him (letter 396, l. 320).