1. For ‘onkiesch’ (indelicate) and ‘ontijdig’ (untimely), see letter 181.

2. Regarding ‘banden verbreken’ (‘break old ties’), see letter 179.

3. As also emerges from later letters (e.g. 186, 227, 228, 234 and 235), in 1880 Mr van Gogh was thinking about having Vincent committed to a lunatic asylum in Geel. This Belgian village was a psychiatric colony, where most of the patients lived in a kind of supervised freedom. With regard to this place and what was known at that time about the patient care at the institution, see H.A. Banning, ‘Een uitstapje naar Gheel’, De Katholieke Illustratie 10 (1876-1877), NS, nos. 35, 41-43, 45, 50; pp. 275-278, 323-324, 335-336, 339-342, 355, 398-399. See also letter 155, n. 1. In Brieven 1914 this passage was censured.

4. According to Elisabeth van Gogh, her brother had his studio in an annexe by the parsonage, which had earlier served as an evangelization classroom. Many years later Elisabeth was prompted by the drawing Church and parsonage in Etten (from 1876), in which the annexe is depicted (F Juv. XXI / JH Juv. 6), to write the following to Anna de Jong-van Houten: ‘that annex was first a place where confirmation classes were held and later – when V. returned from Antwerp [she means Brussels] – his studio’ (FR b4538, 11 June 1933). See cat. Amsterdam 1996, pp. 57-59, cat. no. 7.

5. Van Gogh borrowed ‘her and no other’ from Michelet’s L’amour; see letter 180, n. 5.

6. These are the otherwise unspecified drawings Van Gogh refers to in letter 182, saying he has sent them.

7. This drawing of a ‘peasant lad’ is not known.

8. Man sitting by the fireplace (F 868 / JH 80 ).