1. Vincent sent Theo the drawing The night café (F 1463 / JH 1576 ) after the painting The night café (F 463 / JH 1575 ). Assuming that the remark about the Japanese prints also refers to the other drawing he sent, this could have been Fishing boats on the beach at Saintes-Maries (F 1429 / JH 1459). Like F 1463, this drawing, which dates from June 1888, was done in the Japanese style (‘coloured in flat tints’ as Van Gogh himself put it in letter 614).

2. At Vincent’s request Theo had sent him 300 francs to furnish the Yellow House; see letter 676.

3. Joseph and Augustine Roulin.

a. Read: ‘paillasses’ (palliasses).

4. The symbolic number 12 may refer to the apostles – Van Gogh’s ideal was that artists should live together like monks – or to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which Van Gogh erroneously thought had twelve members (see letter 625). See for this purchase in relation to Van Gogh’s ‘Gemeinschaftsideal’: Kōdera 1990, pp. 59-64, esp. p. 61.

b. Read: ‘habiter’.

5. Van Gogh tried to furnish the rooms to match his ideas about the temperaments of Gauguin and himself. See Juleke van Lindert and Evert van Uitert, Een eigentijdse expressie: Vincent van Gogh en zijn portretten. Amsterdam 1990, pp. 51, 108-109, 114.

6. See letter 602, n. 3, for the layout of the Yellow House.

7. Van Gogh painted The Yellow House (‘The street’) (F 464 / JH 1589 ) at the end of September.

8. Van Gogh had done four paintings of sunflowers in the last week of August: F 453 / JH 1559 , F 459 / JH 1560 , F 456 / JH 1561 and F 454 / JH 1562 . As we learn from the rest of the letter, he intended the last two no. 30 canvases for Gauguin’s room.

9. On the number of flowers, see Dorn 1999, pp. 49; Van Tilborgh and Hendriks 2001, p. 22.

10. The northern entrance to the town, the Porte de la Cavalerie, was on the far side of the public gardens on place Lamartine.

11. Possibly an allusion to Edmond de Goncourt’s La maison d’un artiste; cf. letter 674, n. 7.

12. See letter 638, n. 16, for this unidentified cleaning woman.

13. This sentence may contain two allusions to book titles: Tolstoy’s La puissance des ténèbres and Zola’s L’assommoir; there are also images in this passage that correspond with those in Zola’s book, such as the ‘hellish furnace’. In L’assommoir the home-brewed alcohol made by the landlord Colombe deals the final blow to the working people. Cf. Dorn 1990, pp. 137-139; for Tolstoy, see letter 604, n. 8.

14. See letter 583, n. 9, for Daudet’s Tartarin de Tarascon and Tartarin sur les Alpes.

15. Tersteeg’s comment probably related to one of the three landscapes Theo had bought from Sisley in 1887, which were still in Boussod, Valadon & Cie’s stock: The first days of autumn (D648), The abandoned house (D652) and Plateau at Roches-Courtaut. See Rewald 1986-1, pp. 16, 32, 97. Tersteeg had called in at the Paris branch in June 1888. The last of these works was also part of the batch of modern paintings that Theo had sent to the Hague branch of Goupil’s in March 1888. See letter 589, n. 4.

16. Félix Fénéon and Edouard Dujardin regularly staged small exhibitions in the offices of the monthly magazine La Revue Indépendante at 11 rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin. Anquetin, Seurat, Signac, Camille Pissarro and his son Lucien had exhibited there in 1887-1888; in 1888 there was work by Manet, Guillaumin, Luce, Dubois-Pillet and others. See exhib. cat. Paris 1986, p. 34 and Correspondance Gauguin 1984, p. 512. Although Vincent initially reacted positively to Theo’s suggestion that he should exhibit there, he changed his mind later (see letter 718).

17. The emphasis Van Gogh places here on presenting his work as ‘studies’, with an exhibition of ‘composed paintings’ a year later, may have been prompted by Kahn’s reaction to his still life Piles of French novels and a rose in a glass (‘Romans parisiens’) (F 359 / JH 1332 ), which had been shown at the Indépendants in the spring. Kahn’s comment was that it could hardly be called a fully-fledged painting; at most it was a study. See letter 594, n. 15, and cf. exhib. cat. Chicago 2001, p. 210.

18. Sower with setting sun (F 422 / JH 1470 ).

19. Van Gogh wrote in letter 657 that he had tried to get this old peasant as a model.

20. Van Gogh had ordered ‘coarse paint’ from Tasset before; see letter 676.