3. Van Gogh is referring here to Michelet. In L’amour he wrote of the married woman: ‘she is almost always brought up by her mother to have reactionary ideas’ (presque toujours elle est élevée par sa mère dans les pensées rétrogrades) (Michelet, L’amour, p. 167).

There is a similar passage in La femme on the danger that a woman can lapse into a ‘reactionary past’ (passé rétrograde). She hinders the progress of her husband, who is stifled by ‘the old family home’ (le vieux foyer de famille) (Michelet 1863, pp. 12-13). Van Gogh expresses this view in similar phrasing in letter 349.

4. Van Gogh is referring here to the following passage from the ‘Préface’ to Zola’s L’assommoir, dated 1 January 1877: ‘We must by no means conclude that the people in its entirety is bad, because my characters are not bad, they are merely ignorant, and ruined by the world of harsh toil and misery in which they live.’ (Il ne faut point conclure que le peuple tout entier est mauvais, car mes personnages ne sont pas mauvais, ils ne sont qu’ignorants et gâtés par le milieu de rude besogne et de misère où ils vivent). See Zola 1960-1967, vol. 2, p. 374. Also quoted in letter 379. For the novel, see letter 338, n. 12.

5. Possibly an allusion to ‘Homo homini lupus’ (Man is like a wolf to his fellow man); after Plautus, Asinaria, 495.

6. Van Gogh appears – in view also of ll. 62-63 – to mean that he had started a letter but did not send it.

7. Borrowed from Victor Hugo, Les misérables, vol. 1, book 1, chapter 4: ‘He whom man kills, God brings back to life; he whom the brothers drive away, find the Father’ (Celui que l’homme tue, Dieu le ressuscite; celui que les frères chassent retrouve le Père). See Hugo 1951, p. 41.

8. Pieter van der Velden worked in Wassenaar and The Hague between 1875 and 1888 (see Scheen 1981).

9. For the protagonist of George Eliot’s novel Felix Holt, the radical, see letter 66, n. 1.

10. Wilhelmina Elisabeth van Rappard.

a. Means: ‘onkosten’ (outgoings).

11. Only one drawing of a recumbent figure is known: Woman on her deathbed (F 841 / JH 359

), which will have been one of them.

12. Jozef Israëls had lived since 1873 in an elegant building with a studio on Koninginnegracht 2 in The Hague. See exhib. cat. Groningen 1999, p. 358.

13. For Herkomer’s The last muster (Sunday at Chelsea hospital / Chelsea pensioners), see letter 199, n. 12 and cf. letter 303, n. 6.

b. Van Gogh wrote ‘phot.’ possibly meaning photogravure and not photograph.

14. For Alfred Roll’s A miners’ strike , see letter 263, n. 5. Van Gogh discussed the print at length in letter 272.

c. Van Gogh wrote ‘phot.’ possibly meaning photogravure and not photograph.

15. Van Gogh evidently means a photograph after the painting by Hubert von Herkomer. We have been unable to confirm that it was on sale at the time. When Herkomer’s painting won a gold medal of honour in 1878 at the International Exhibition in Paris, however, Arthur Turrell did make a mezzotint after the work (for Pilgeram and Lefevre). See Edward Morris, Victorian and Edwardian paintings in the Lady Lever Art Gallery. London 1994, pp. 50-56, esp. 53. By ‘the large woodcut of the two main figures’ Van Gogh means The last muster ; for ‘the first rough sketch’ see n. 13. See also letter 199, n. 12.