a. Read: ‘Dankzij het bewuste bedrag’ (Thanks to the amount in question).

1. By ‘you know what’ Van Gogh means the 2.50 guilders that Van Rappard had lent him (see letter 231). He paid this back at the beginning of June (see letter 236).

2. Sien’s mother’s house (F 941/ JH 146 ) and, ‘the larger’: Sien’s mother’s house (F 942/ JH 147 ).

3. Nursery on Schenkweg (F 930 / JH 138 ).

4. Carpenter’s yard and laundry (F 939 / JH 150 ).

5. Fish-drying barn (F 938 / JH 152 ).

6. For this expression, see letter 176, n. 1.

7. For View of Haarlem with bleaching grounds by Jacob van Ruisdael, see letter 37, n. 3.

8. For this poor area of The Hague, see exhib. cat. The Hague 1990, pp. 46 (ill. 49), 50-51 (ill. 56-58). Whitechapel was a poor area in London.

9. Mary Ellen Edwards, also known as Mrs. Freer (in the years 1866-1869) and as Mrs. Staples (from 1872-?). Van Gogh confused her and the etcher Edwin Edwards now and then. In the estate there are eight prints from The Graphic (1871-1872) after works by Mary Ellen Edwards.

10. Henry Towneley Green,“Restoring the sign”, The Illustrated London News 63 (15 November 1873), p. 473. Ill. 906 .

11. Frederick Walker, The wayfarers, etched by Charles Albert Waltner (London, British Museum). Ill. 1416 .

b. Variant of ‘griendhout’.

12. For Dürer’s engraving Knight, Death and the Devil , see letter 148, n. 35.

13. For Chill October by John Everett Millais, see letter 122, n. 19. Mauve may have seen this work at the Paris International Exhibition of 1878.

14. Cf. for this quotation Dickens’s: ‘We have sketched this subject very slightly, not only because our limits compel us to do so, but because, if it were pursued farther, it would be painful and repulsive’. Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, ‘Scenes’, chapter 22: ‘Gin shops’. Oxford etc. 1981, p. 186 (The Oxford Illustrated Dickens). Cf. letter 325, n. 40.

15. Evidently an observation by Charles Dickens Jr – it is not quoted in Forster’s biography or in Dickens’s dictionary of London, which Dickens Jr had published in 1879. It is quite possible that Van Gogh read it in one of the English magazines.

16. This was Sien Hoornik.

17. For Sensier, La vie et l’oeuvre de J.-F. Millet, see letter 210.

18. We cannot say for certain which writings about Millet Van Gogh already knew. Ernest Chesneau had written an article about him in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts 1875; in 1876 Alexandre Piedagnel’s J.-F. Millet had been published; and in 1877 Philippe Burty included an essay on Millet in his Maîtres et petits maîtres. See exhib. cat. Paris 1998, p. 34.