4. It is not known which drawings Van Gogh refers to here as ‘heads’, though Woman with a white bonnet (F 1009a / JH 106

) could have been one of them. See also letter 224, n. 10.

5. The Spanish painter José de Ribera is known for his painstaking studies of nudes, especially of old, remorseful people and folk types.

6. The Italian artist Salvator Rosa gained renown for his paintings and prints of soldiers, folk types and satyrs.

7. In this passage Van Gogh explains that even though he places Goya and Gavarni above the previously mentioned artists, the way in which they make an absolute truth of human vanity goes too far in his view.

Van Gogh refers here to a passage in De Goncourt’s Gavarni, l’homme et l’oeuvre, which describes how Gavarni (in La mascarade humaine) denounces hypocrisy (through the misanthrope Thomas Vireloque): ‘appearing, where he is seated on the heap of rubble, to be tracing on the ground with his stick the terrifying word Nada, written in Goya’s etching by the terrible spectre of the nothingness of the tomb’ (semblant, sur le tas de pierres de démolition où il est assis, tracer avec son bâton, par terre, l’effrayant Nada qu’écrit, dans l’eau-forte de Goya, le terrible revenant du néant de la tombe). See Goncourt 1873, p. 355. The biblical passage referred to is Eccl. 1:2.

8. Scheveningseweg (F 920 / JH 113

) and Sand diggers in the dunes (F 922 / JH 114

). The verso of the second drawing displays a pencil sketch of people digging and the inscription ‘workers in the dunes’ (according to an article in De Telegraaf, 28 April 1998).

9. Adrianus Johannes van der Drift.

10. This name was crossed out in black ink. It is not known who did this; earlier editions of the letters simply printed the name.

11. In 1882 De Bock was living at Kanaalweg 9 in Scheveningen. He did not have an adequate studio there, however, so he also rented a room on the first floor of the house at Van Stolkweg 20, now 22 (‘Villa Germania’), where A.G.H. Hazelhoff Roelfzema, Pieter Josselin de Jong and Willem de Zwart also worked. See De Bock 1991, p. 21.