1. Adam Bede (1859) by George Eliot is a novel about an ambitious young carpenter. He falls in love with the farm labourer Hetty Sorrel, who becomes pregnant by Arthur Donnithorn, the son of the local squire. She murders her newborn child and is sentenced to death. Shortly before she is due to be executed, she confesses and her sentence is commuted from death to banishment. Adam marries Dinah Morris, the Methodist preacher who persuaded Hetty to repent.

2. This landscape, which Van Gogh describes as Michel-like, occurs in a passage in which Hetty sets out on a desperate search for Arthur after he has broken off their relationship: ‘The next morning she ... set out to walk on the road towards Ashby, under a leaden-coloured sky, with a narrowing streak of yellow, like a departing hope on the edge of the horizon ... For the first few miles out of Stoniton she walked on bravely, always fixing on some tree or gate or projecting bush at the most distant visible point in the road as a goal, and feeling a faint joy when she had reached it.’ Later on, when Hetty looks for a pond in which to drown herself, Eliot writes: ‘At last she was among the fields she had been dreaming of, on a long narrow pathway leading towards a wood ... No, it was not a wood, only a wild brake, where there had once been gravel-pits, leaving mounds and hollows studded with brushwood and small trees ... The afternoon was far advanced, and the leaden sky was darkening, as if the sun were setting behind it.’ George Eliot, Adam Bede. 2 vols. Edinburgh and London 1859, vol. 2, chapter 36 (pp. 125-126), chapter 37 (p. 145).

3. The notebook in which Vincent copied out poems for Theo; see letter 29, n. 1.

4. In 1863 Ernest Renan published in Paris his controversial book Vie de Jésus, a monograph on Christ, as the first volume in Histoire des origines du christianisme. The book presented a completely new – positivist – approach to the historical figure of Jesus. In addition to the original version, Renan published a less expensive, abridged version: Jésus (Paris 1864). Both versions were reprinted many times; it is not clear which of the two Van Gogh was referring to.

5. In Jeanne d’Arc (1853), Jules Michelet described the eventful life of the fifteenth-century maid of Orléans.

6. Achille Isidore Gilbert, Corot, engraved by Burn Smeeton and Auguste Tilly, in The Illustrated London News 66 (27 February 1875), p. 197. In Van Gogh’s estate there is a copy with thumbtack holes. Ill. 1701 . (t*172).

7. John 21:18.