1. Elizabeth Parker, the daughter of Mr and Mrs John Parker, with whom Van Gogh boarded in Kennington, died on Sunday, 11 April of pneumonia. See Bailey 1990, p. 54.

2. In south London.

3. The poetry of Edmond Roche was published in Poésies posthumes. Paris 1863 (with a preface by M. Victorien Sardou, and etchings). The copy containing Van Gogh’s little drawing is not known.

4. The poem ‘La dune’ consists of two parts, both of which begin with the stanza quoted. Van Gogh says that the poem ‘begins and ends’ with this stanza, but he must have been misled by the page layout (see Roche 1863, pp. 48-50). Its first and last lines are conflated to form the last two lines of the poem’s final stanza.

5. Van Gogh quotes lines 1-2 and 9-11 from the poem ‘Calais (fragment)’. See Roche 1863, pp. 67-68.

6. The etching Ville-d’Avray: L’étang au batelier (Ville d’Avray: The pond with boatman), 1862, serves as an illustration to the poem ‘L’étang’ in Roche’s Poésies posthumes (Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, inv. no. p290 M/1977). Ill. 1704 . See Robaut 1965, vol. 2, pp. 102-103, cat. no. 3125.

7. Roche 1863, p. 99 (with several small variations). Ville-d’Avray is where Corot painted in his younger years.