1. Theo had written to Vincent about the room he was renting from Tanguy; he eventually paid a total of 90 francs in rent (see letter 792, n. 12).

2. The painting The bedroom (F 482 / JH 1608 ) was damaged; see letter 776, n. 29. The repetition Van Gogh made of it is The bedroom (F 484 / JH 1771 ).

3. The painting was treated by J.C. Traas in 1932. In his report of the restoration, he observed that at some point the canvas had been very badly lined, ‘and a terrible mess had been made of the paint layer’. He attributed the widespread loss of paint (still evident) to that treatment. Traas provided the work with its present wax-resin lining, and restored the paint layer (Van Gogh Museum, Documentation, Invoice dated 31 January 1932).

4. Self-portrait (F 626 / JH 1770 ).

5. Self-portrait (F 627 / JH 1772 ).

6. Nostalgia (in this case homesickness) was sometimes referred to as the ‘Swiss illness’, because doctors first diagnosed such a pathological longing for one’s native country among Swiss soldiers in the seventeenth century.

7. This refers to the preface to Conscience’s Le conscrit, from which Van Gogh had already copied out the passage in question in letter 93.

8. Reaper (F 617 / JH 1753 ).

9. Van Gogh is probably referring to Sower with setting sun (F 450 / JH 1627 ), with which he previously compared the canvas of the reaper. See letter 784, n. 28.

10. Van Gogh was working on Reaper (F 618 / JH 1773 ), the repetition of the work mentioned in n. 8 above. See also n. 17 below.

11. For Delacroix’s ‘neither teeth nor breath’, taken from Silvestre, see letter 557, n. 6.

12. This portrait of the chief orderly, Charles-Elzéard Trabuc, is not known. Van Gogh gave it to Trabuc and made a repetition of it for Theo: Charles-Elzéard Trabuc (F 629 / JH 1774 ). See letter 801. The orderly’s wife was Jeanne Trabuc-Lafuye, whose portrait Van Gogh did in fact paint; see letter 805.

13. Alphonse Legros, Le Grand Espagnol (The tall Spaniard), etching made for Maîtres contemporains, by Edouard Lièvre, 2nd series, c. 1869 (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes). Ill. 1042 .

14. The last cholera epidemic in Marseille had been in 1884-1885.

15. Van Gogh must be referring to an item in the column ‘Lettre de Russie’ in the Le Figaro of 4 September 1889 about the death of the Russian journalist Andrey Alexandrovich Kraevsky: ‘Kraëwsky, the founder of the Russian political press, has passed away after a long cardiac illness, exacerbated by the emotional turmoil he had to endure in the last years of his life.’ (Kraëwsky, le fondateur de la presse politique en Russe, vient de s’éteindre après une longue maladie de coeur, qui a été aggravée par les émotions qu’il a eu à supporter pendant les dernières années de sa vie.) Van Gogh’s remark that the only thing to do was to ‘work passionately’ (l. 230) is presumably connected with the passage about Kraëwsky’s ‘long career as a relentless worker’ (longue carrière de travailleur acharné) (p. 4).

16. Van Gogh painted many self-portraits in Paris, but here he is most likely referring to Self-portrait as an artist (F 522 / JH 1356 ), made shortly before he left for Arles, which he compared with the face of death (see letter 626).

17. At the end of September, Van Gogh sent two consignments to Theo, containing altogether 17 no. 30 canvases. See letters 805 and 806.

18. In letter 806 Van Gogh wrote that he had painted the first version of the reaper (Reaper (F 617 / JH 1753 )) from nature and the second (Reaper (F 618 / JH 1773 )) in the studio. See also cat. Otterlo 2003, pp. 301-303. The second pair (in the order they were made) are Wheatfield and cypresses (F 717 / JH 1756 ) and Wheatfield and cypresses (F 615 / JH 1755 ).

19. Van Gogh is alluding to the passage in Goncourt’s Manette Salomon (1867), in which the painter Chassagnol, when asked ‘who will remain of the great painters?’, answers: ‘The landscapists ... the landscapists...’ See Goncourt 1996, chapter 35, p. 225. This novel, which takes place around 1840, describes the life of an artist as led by the four painters Bazoche, Coriolis, Chassagnol and Garnotelle, who work in Langibout’s studio and belong to the realistic Barbizon School. The model of the painter Coriolis, Manette Salomon, is a Jewish girl who eventually becomes the artist’s wife and the mother of his children.

20. For Corot’s utterance, see letter 611, n. 10.

21. Armand Guillaumin, Self-portrait with palette, 1878, and Portrait of a young woman (both Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum). Ill. 2292 and Ill. 146 .

22. For Russell’s Vincent van Gogh , see letter 650, n. 6.

23. For Laval’s Self-portrait , see letter 719, n. 2.

24. Van Gogh had spoken of this letter from Gauguin in letter 797.

25. A fitch brush is a thin, fine brush. Such brushes are also made from hair other than fitch hair.

26. The engraving L’homme est en mer (The husband is at sea) by Charles Baude after the painting by Virginie Demont-Breton, which was exhibited at the 1889 Salon (present whereabouts unknown; formerly Minneapolis, Walker Art Gallery), appeared in Le Monde Illustré 33 (6 July 1889), p. 9. Ill. 2293 .

27. This expression refers to the idea, developed in the seventeenth century by theologians and natural scientists, that God gave humankind not one but two books: the Bible and the Book of Nature. Nature was thus considered to be a system consisting of references to God rather than arising from the interplay of natural laws.

28. Silvestre wrote this about the death of Delacroix in Eugène Delacroix. Documents nouveaux; see letter 526, n. 2.

29. Mrs van Gogh celebrated her 70th birthday on 10 September. At the end of September, Van Gogh painted a smaller version of the reaper for her: Reaper (F 619 / JH 1792 ). See letter 806.

30. Théophile Peyron.

31. Regarding the paintings Van Gogh made for his mother and Willemien, see letter 803, n. 4. Lies must be the second sister referred to here (see letter 798); his mention of ‘another person’ probably refers to Margot Begemann. In one of his letters to Willemien, he said that he would like to give Margot a painting (see letter 812).

32. For Courbet’s Female bathers and The sleeping spinner , see letter 726, nn. 22 and 23.

33. For the Alfred Bruyas by Delacroix and Alfred Bruyas by Ricard, see letter 726, nn. 2 and 3.

34. For Delacroix’s Daniel in the lions’ den , see letter 726, n. 21.

35. For Delacroix’s Algerian women in their apartments , see letter 726, n. 20. For the version in the Louvre, see letter 765, n. 15.