1. Le rêve (The dream) (1888), Emile Zola’s most recent novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, was published on 11 October 1888. It is the story of the orphan Angélique Marie, who spends her time embroidering the lives of saints and dreaming of a knight in shining armour. He appears in the person of Félicien. At the height of her happiness, however, after the nuptial mass, she dies in her husband’s arms. Losing touch with reality and coping with disillusion, including disappointments with catastrophic outcomes, are recurring themes in Zola’s work.

2. Aurier reworked this passage in his article ‘Les isolés: Vincent van Gogh’, which appeared in the Mercure de France of January 1890, to provide the following characterization of Van Gogh: ‘a dreamer, an exalted believer, a devourer of beautiful Utopias, who lives on ideas and illusions. For a long time he has taken delight in imagining a renovation of art made possible through a displacement of civilization: an art of tropical regions.’ (un rêveur, un croyant exalté, un dévoreur de belles utopies, vivant d’idées et de songes. Longtemps, il s’est complu à imaginer une rénovation d’art, possible par un déplacement de civilisation: un art des régions tropicales). See also Rewald 1978, p. 342 and n. 74.

3. Van Gogh used the plural, so apparently Bernard had told him that he had taken two works from Van Gogh’s consignment, in which case he must have chosen two of the following three works: ‘Red sunset’, Garden with flowers (F 578 / JH 1538 ), and an unidentified work (see letter 698, n. 1).

4. Paul Gauguin, Night café, Arles, 1888 (W318/W305) (Moscow, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts). Ill. 2240 . Van Gogh’s painting of the Café de la Gare is The night café (F 463 / JH 1575 ).

5. The two studies of falling leaves are The Alyscamps (‘Leaf-fall’) (F 486 / JH 1620 ) and The Alyscamps (‘Leaf-fall’) (F 487 / JH 1621 ). Van Gogh describes the location in letter 717.

6. The last figure pieces that Van Gogh had made – apart from his Self-portrait, which he traded with Gauguin – dated from September: the portraits of Eugène Boch and Lieutenant Milliet (F 462 / JH 1574 and F 473 / JH 1588 , respectively).

7. Gauguin had lived with Laval on Martinique from May to November 1887; in Arles he was making plans to return to the tropics. He finally left for Tahiti on 1 April 1891. See exhib. cat. Washington 1988, pp. 45, 50, 205.

8. Soon after arriving in Arles, Gauguin bought 20 metres of ‘very strong canvas’, as Vincent informed Theo in letter 717. It was coarse jute, which Van Gogh and Gauguin divided equally and worked on almost exclusively until they ran out of it in December. For the paintings made on this jute, see exhib. cat. Chicago 2001, pp. 354-369.