2. The Pas de Calais is a department in north-west France where Van Gogh had been on a walking tour in the winter of 1879-1880: see letter 158.

3. Van Gogh is referring to Man stooping with a stick or spade (F 12 / JH 185

), in which the sunlight falls on the digger’s back.

4. These scratches are not known. Nor is it known after which painted studies these enclosed sketches were made, but one of them would have been Man stooping with a stick or spade (F 12 / JH 185

a. Means: ‘het stond mij bij’ (I vaguely recollect).

5. The estate contains Auguste André Lançon’s Een herberg van voddenrapers te Parijs (A rag-pickers’ tavern in Paris), engraved by Frederick William Moller, from De Hollandsche Illustratie 9 (9 September 1872), p. 4. Van Gogh himself wrote the French title Rendez-vous des chiffonniers under it in pencil. Ill. 1029

. (t*466). The print had been in L’Illustration 58 (26 August 1871), p. 132 under the title Les bas-fonds parisiens.– La casserole, cabaret des chiffonniers.

6. The estate contains De Parijsche armen. Uitdeeling van soep (The Paris poor. Soup distribution), engraved by Frederick William Moller, from De Hollandsche Illustratie 9 (6 December 1872), p. 4. Van Gogh himself wrote the French title Distribution de soupe under it in pencil. Ill. 1940

. (t*465). The print had appeared in L’Illustration 58 (2 September 1871), p. 149 under the title Les bas-fonds parisiens.– La soupe des capucins.

7. ‘Snow-clearing gang’ must refer to Une équipe de ramasseurs de neige (A gang of snow shovellers); it appeared in La Vie Moderne 3 (29 January 1881), no. 5, p. 66. Ill. 1941

. (t*141). Besides this print, Van Gogh also had Lançon’s Paris sous la neige – La charrue à glace du boulevard Montparnasse (Paris under snow – The snow plough of boulevard Montparnasse) (t*46), from Le Monde Illustré 24 (3 January 1880), p. 12. But in this the snow-clearers are not the main subject.

8. The series Les prisons de Paris (Mazas) (The prisons of Paris (Mazas)) had been in L’Illustration. In the estate there are 12 wood engravings, all from volume 48 of 1881 (February, July and August), including “169! Liberté!”, (“169!, you’re free!”), engraved by Eugène Froment, from L’Illustration 78 (6 August 1881), p. 96. Ill. 397

. (t*495). The others are t*43, t*45, t*187, t*203, t*223 and t*475.

9. The ‘Engraving Commission’ for the Household Edition of Dickens’s work was given to the Dalziel Brothers. James Mahoney illustrated Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit and Our mutual friend (all of 1871) for this edition. See Kitton 1899, p. 221 and Engen 1985, p. 173.

10. The letter sketch A girl in a wood (F - / JH 183) is after A girl in a wood (F 8 / JH 182

), which measures 39 x 59 cm.

11. This ‘scratch’ is not known; for the subject, cf. the watercolour Potato market (F 1091 / JH 252). Noordwal is near to Geest and Slijkeinde, where Sien’s mother lived; the potato market was between Gedempte Sloot and Breedstraat.

12. Ledig Erf (now Bakkersstraat) in The Hague is close to Geest, in the same poor neighbourhood in the centre of the city.