1. Alfred Philippe Roll, Le travail, chantier de Suresnes (Seine) (Labour, building site at Suresnes (Seine), 1885 (Cognac, Musée Municipal). The print after this painting, Le travail, chantier de Suresnes (Seine) was published in the Salon issue of L’Illustration 85 (25 April 1885), p. 292. Ill. 2139 [2139]. See letter 500, n. 4.
[2139]
2. The potato eaters (F 82 / JH 764 [2510]).
[2510]
3. Van Gogh took this from Sensier, La vie et l’oeuvre de J.F. Millet: see letter 495, n. 9.
4. The potato eaters (F 1661 / JH 737 [2135]).
[2135]
5. See for this large painting of a woman spinning, which is only known from a photograph on a ‘carte de visite’: letter 463, and cf. letters 449 and 450.
6. We do not know whether Van Gogh made a work of the scene in the letter sketch Three people sharing a meal (F - / JH 776). There is a sketchy drawing of virtually the same scene: Three people sharing a meal (F 1229v / JH 775).
The ‘cottage’ he refers to, at number 4 Gerwenseweg (in the continuation of De Berg, where the parsonage was), was home to members of the De Groot and Van Rooij family. It is not clear whether this family really was portrayed, but there is no doubt that one of the sitters was Gordina de Groot. See cat. Amsterdam 1999, pp. 136-145, cat. no. 26.
7. In March Van Gogh painted various heads silhouetted against a window, among them Head of a woman (F 70 / JH 715) and Head of a woman (F 70a / JH 716), which Theo had seen in Nuenen at the end of March; cf. letter 485.
[567]
8. Theo must have written to Vincent about painters who used a light palette. He discusses this again at length in his next letter.
9. Taken from Charles Blanc, Les artistes de mon temps (see Blanc 1876, pp. 23-24). This observation is also in the passage that Van Gogh quoted in letter 449. In Blanc’s Grammaire des arts du dessin there is a reference to a flesh tone based on ‘la boue des rues’ (the mud of the streets) (see Blanc 1870, p. 609).
10. Van Gogh would have been thinking here of Charles Degroux, whom he had talked about in letters 493 and 497 – Henri Leys, who is mentioned not long after this, did not paint peasants.
11. In 1885 Ernst Josephson’s Strömkarlen (Stockholm, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde) – a new version of The water sprite of 1884 (see letter 477, n. 4) – was rejected by the Salon judges. Ill. 1004 [1004].
[1004]
12. From the way this is put, we can infer that Van Gogh did not know about the Salon des Indépendants, staged for the first time in 1884. He must have been thinking of the Salon des Refusés (1863). Ironically, the painting was eventually shown at the exhibition of the so-called Opponents, ‘Vom Strand der Seine’, in Stockholm in the spring of 1885, and then in the autumn of the same year at the Opponents’ second exhibition, likewise in Stockholm. See exhib. cat. Hamburg 1984, p. 132, and exhib. cat. Portland 1964, pp. 21-23.
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