2. The board of the game Ganzenbord.

a. Read: ‘kruit’ (ammunition).

4. For this decoration The muse of history, see letter 284, n. 6.

5. Hendrik van Gogh was co-owner of Tjiseureuh (Tjiandjoer) Tea Plantation in the Dutch East Indies.

6. Chapter title in Michelet, L’amour (book 1, chapter 2), as is the comment (book 4, chapter 9): ‘“What is woman? Sickness (Hippocrates.) – What is man? The physician”’ (Qu’est-ce que la femme? la maladie. (Hippocrate.) – Qu’est-ce que l’homme? le médecin) (Michelet, L’amour, pp. 52-58, 345).

b. Means: ‘while one also believes that in the essence of the changeable female nature, in its mysteriousness, there is a rationale’.

7. Earlier Van Gogh had talked of ‘Monday morning-like sobriety’; in that context it was probably an allusion to a passage in Shirley by Charlotte Brontë (see letter 274, n. 4).

8. No work by Tissot with this subject is known. Van Gogh may have been thinking of Tissot’s Walk in the snow : see letter 28, n. 8.

9. James Tissot, Voie des fleurs, voie des pleurs (The dance of Death) (Way of flowers, way of tears (The dance of Death)), 1860 (Providence, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design). Ill. 1384

.

10. What was ‘new’ about the reproduction technique was primarily the aquatint-like effects seen in some prints in this publication. The methods for photographing lithographs, engravings and etchings and transferring them to a printing plate became ever more advanced at the end of the century, and experiments were carried out with various techniques which cannot always be identified. For this first issue ‘Au Salon de 1883’, which F.-G. Dumas published via Paris Illustré and in which the ‘plusieurs tons’ in the printing process were emphasized, see letter 341, n. 12. Cf. also what Van Gogh writes in letter 309 about the special paper on which ‘snow effects’ could be achieved.

c. Variant of ‘bedisselen’.

11. The work of (Antoine Louis) Camille Lemonnier, including Un mâle (Brussels 1881), is marked by extremely realistic descriptions of repellent scenes. This book tells the story of a brutal poacher, with bestial traits, who develops a crude passion for a country girl. She lets herself be caressed by this ‘fearful male’ (mâle terrible) and gives in to his urges. When she is exhausted and tries to wrest free of him, he is enraged. After he has attacked one of her admirers, he is hit by a police bullet and dies like a wild animal in the bushes. Van Gogh’s verdict contrasts with the widespread criticism of the work of this representative of Belgian naturalism, which encountered deep repugnance. The book was mocked as ‘vulgar, obscene and immoral’. See Un mâle. Ed. Raymond Trousson. Paris 1996.

12. Eugène Fromentin, Bataille de fellahs (Battle of fellahs; present whereabouts unknown) was exhibited in Goupil’s middle window for a week under the title Gevecht (Battle), as shown by a report in Het Vaderland of 8 May 1883. On 13 April 1883 the painting was bought as Combat for 30,000 francs by the Hague branch of Goupil-Paris and sold back to Goupil-Paris on 23 May 1883 for the same amount (RKD, Goupil Ledgers). Not until 4 August 1885 would it be sold to Haseltine Galleries of Philadelphia, for 27,000 francs (GRI, Goupil Ledgers).

13. The catalogue Publications nouvelles de la Maison Goupil & Cie of April 1883 lists two new photogravures after Julien Dupré: La récolte des foins (Bringing in the hay) and Le goûter des faneurs (The haymakers’ meal). They measure 47 x 59 cm (p. 3, nos. 30-31).

The remark that Van Gogh saw ‘perhaps not all’ of the nouveautés implies that he went into the branch on De Plaats, now that H.G. Tersteeg was in Paris for the Salon (cf. letter 339). What he saw in the winter ‘in an illustrated magazine’ was the print In the meadow in Le Monde Illustré (see letter 292, n. 9).

14. For Van Rappard’s Tile painters , exhibited at the International Exhibition in Amsterdam, see letter 331, n. 14.