1. This ‘scratch’ is the enclosed drawing, Nude woman (‘The great lady’) (F - / JH 128). The drawing after which this is made, is not known.

2. Regarding Charles Bargue’s Exercices au fusain, see letter 156, n. 12.

3. The sentence ‘Choosing the lines... isn’t obvious, however’ was added later.

4. It is not known how Van Gogh acquired this information, which he mentions again in letters 280 and 332.

5. It is possible that Van Gogh wrote ‘kon’ instead of ‘kan’ (it’s).

6. This larger study of Nude woman, half-length (The great lady) is not known.

7. Here Van Gogh combines the themes of two well-known poems of social protest by Thomas Hood, ‘The lady’s dream’ and ‘The song of the shirt’. ‘The lady’s dream’ comes immediately after ‘The song of the shirt’ in some editions of the poems. See Poems. 7th ed. London 1854, p. 49. Van Gogh’s notion of this woman differs from Hood’s idea of her; see Zemel 1987, p. 367 (n. 29): ‘Hood’s own illustration for ‘The lady’s dream’, titled The modern Belinda, shows an elaborately gowned lady holding a lapdog and attended by a peacock while surrounded by flying skeletal sylphs’. See also Zemel 1997, p. 28 and letter 176.

a. Meaning: ‘zou zitten’ (would sit).

8. The postscript was written later in pencil at the bottom of the first page.

9. This could be an allusion to Sorrow (see letter 216); the same pose does in fact occur in Bargue. Cf. cat. Amsterdam 1996, pp. 34-35.