1. This may be Peat diggers in the dunes (F 1031 / JH 363 ), which is only known from the photograph Van Gogh had made of it (see letter 362). Later on in the letter he says that the drawing has been done ‘in fusain, natural chalk and autographic ink’.

2. Charles Stanley Reinhart, Washed ashore, in Harper’s Weekly 27 (20 January 1883), pp. 40-41. The engraving was also in The Graphic 27 (20 January 1883), Supplement, between pp. 58 and 59. Ill. 1258 .

3. Fernand Blayn, Une épave (Victim of a shipwreck), in L’Illustration 74 (15 November 1879), pp. 312-313. Ill. 591 .

4. In this context Félix Régamey is more likely to be meant than his brother Guillaume.

5. For Victor Hugo’s Les misérables, see letter 333, n. 12.

6. Charles Dickens’s A tale of two cities is set in London and Paris during the French Revolution.

7. For Howard Pyle, Christmas morning in Old New York , see letter 279, n. 8.

8. For Edwin Austin Abbey, Christmas in old Virginia , see letter 304, n. 37.

9. Van Gogh may have based this remark on the ‘Preface’ to A tale of two cities, which reveals Dickens’s powerful compulsion to write the novel: ‘A strong desire was upon me then, to embody it [= the story] in my own person ... Throughout its execution, it has had complete possession of me; I have so far verified what is done and suffered in these pages, as that I have certainly done and suffered it all myself’. Dickens hoped that his book would contribute towards a better understanding of ‘that terrible time’. See Dickens 1859, p. v.

10. In A tale of two cities there are frequent references to the dark streets and to extra lighting from candles, candlesticks and torches. See e.g. book 1, chapters 1 and 3. In Barnaby Rudge. A tale of the riots of ‘Eighty’, which is set in London in 1775-1780, Dickens writes: ‘the streets of London ... were, one and all, from the broadest and best to the narrowest and least frequented, very dark. The oil and cotton lamps, though regularly trimmed twice or trice in the long winter nights, burnt feebly at the best; and at a late hour, when they were unassisted by the lamps and candles in the shops, cast but a narrow track of doubtful light upon the footway, leaving the projecting doors and house-fronts in the deepest gloom.’ Ed. London [1874], p. 62.

11. Les misérables begins in 1815 and is set in the time of the Restoration, the July Revolution and the Workers Uprisings in Paris in 1832-1834.

12. For Victor Hugo’s novel Quatre-vingt-treize, which is set shortly after the French Revolution, see letter 286, n. 9; for the illustrations in this novel, see letter 304, n. 75.