2. It is very likely that the use of the word ‘chicane’ here is derived from Chérie by Edmond de Goncourt. The expression ‘chercher chicane’ (to pick a petty quarrel) occurs in a passage criticizing the conservative linguistic views of the Académie Française (Goncourt 1884, préface, p. vii). Van Gogh had read the book some time before this, see letter 534.

3. Probably something Van Gogh put into the mouth of his teacher Verlat or Siberdt by way of example.

4. This could be either the history painter and former director of the Koninklijke Akademie in Amsterdam, Jan Willem Pieneman, or his son, the history painter Nicolaas Pieneman.

5. By the ‘Germanicus’ Van Gogh means a classical statue of the Roman general Julius Caesar Germanicus (15 BC - 19 AD) that he drew at Vinck’s evening class. The Germanicus is on an inventory of the collection of plaster casts at the Antwerp Academy in the period 1866-1896 (no. 542), but it is not there now. The version of the statue in the Louvre is one of the better-known ones. See cat. Amsterdam 2001, pp. 69-70. The statue was obviously very popular in studios – when Millet went to Delaroche’s studio his first drawing was ‘a study after the Germaniucus’ (une étude d’après le Germanicus) according to Sensier 1881, p. 60. Van Gogh was already familiar with it through Charles Bargue’s Cours de dessin. Modèles d’après la bosse (‘Ensembles. Germanicus’), no. 69. Ill. 2173

. Van Gogh’s drawing of the Germanicus is not known.

6. Paul Mantz, ‘Paul Baudry’, Le Temps (26 January 1886): ‘As far as women are concerned, who are the ultimate difficulty in art and sometimes in life’ (Vis-à-vis des femmes, qui sont dans l’art et quelquefois dans la vie la difficulté supreme). This appreciation of Baudry’s life and work was written on the occasion of his death on 17 January 1886.

7. See for Zola’s L’oeuvre letter 552, n. 11. The extract from Zola’s L’oeuvre quoted by Van Gogh appeared in Gil Blas on 11 January 1886. This accords with letter 552, in which he wrote, ‘The other day I saw an excerpt from Zola’s new book for the first time’. In the passage in question, the painter Claude Lantier receives a visit from Christine, the girl to whom he had offered shelter in his studio two months previously. On that occasion, he sketched her portrait. They are pleased to see each other again and talk amicably together until she sees the painting he is working on and recognizes her own face in that of the nude female figure. She feels that her honour has been impugned, because it appears as though the painting shows not just her face but her naked body too, but she is shocked above all by the direct, rough painting. She goes immediately, leaving the painter baffled: ‘Anger seized him in its turn: an oath hurled into empty space, a dreadful shrugging of the shoulders, as if to rid himself of this idiotic preoccupation. Could you ever be sure, with women!’ (La colère le prenait à son tour, un juron jeté dans le vide, un terrible haussement d’épaules, comme pour se débarrasser de cette préoccupation imbécile. Est-ce qu’on savait jamais, avec les femmes!) See Zola 1960-1967, vol. 5, pp. 504-507 (citation on p. 507).

Van Gogh’s assumption that this is about Manet probably has to do with the description of the painting on which Lantier is working, which is very reminiscent of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. In fact, Lantier was based on Paul Cézanne. Several other characters in the novel are based on real people, among them the writer Sandoz, in whom we can recognize Zola himself.