2. Le Tambourin was a restaurant and cabaret at 62 boulevard de Clichy in Montmartre, run by the Italian Agostina Segatori. It was very popular with artists. Van Gogh exhibited work there and for some time had an affair with Segatori, as can be deduced from letter 572. In 1903 Gauguin wrote that Van Gogh had been very much in love with Segatori, and in his ‘Souvenirs sur Van Gogh’ of 1924 Bernard said that he courted her by giving her a flower still life every day (cf. also n. 3 below). See Gauguin 1923, p. 177, and Bernard 1994, vol. 1, p. 242. We do not know how serious it was or how long it lasted. See also cat. Amsterdam 2011.

3. In 1908 Bernard wrote that Segatori gave Van Gogh free meals in exchange for paintings, mainly flower pieces, and the walls were covered in his studies. ‘That lasted for some months, then the business collapsed and was sold, and all these paintings, piled up in a heap, were auctioned for a derisory sum.’ (Cela dura quelques mois, puis l’établissement périclita, fut vendu, et toutes ces peintures, mises en tas, furent adjugées pour un somme dérisoire.) See Bernard 1994, vol. 1, p. 167. From letter 572 it appears that Segatori was no longer in charge at Le Tambourin and would probably lose the business; Van Gogh must have heard that his paintings had been seized.

Contrary to what Bernard suggested later, the works were not Van Gogh’s way of paying for his meals. He had evidently decorated the café with flower still lifes in the hope of selling them to customers, albeit without making specific arrangements with Segatori. Maurice Beaubourg stated in 1890 that Van Gogh had left everything behind ‘as security for the proprietor’ (comme gage au propriétaire), while Bernard wrote that the still lifes were auctioned off in batches of ten. At the beginning of his time in Arles Van Gogh remarked on how few flower still lifes from Paris he had been able to keep (letter 640). There is consequently every reason to assume that he did not collect the works that were decorating the café, and that they were then sold at auction, possibly as part of bankruptcy proceedings. For this see cat. Amsterdam 2011.

4. By ‘the rest’ Van Gogh must mean the Japanese prints that he had exhibited at Le Tambourin. Cf. letter 640.

5. We do not know which two paintings these are; cf. letter 572, nn. 5 and 6.

6. A louis was a coin worth 20 francs.

7. Asnières was a village on the Seine immediately to the north of Paris, just a few miles from rue Lepic. Signac and Bernard worked there too.

8. Julien Tanguy was married to Renée Julienne Tanguy-Briend. Unlike her husband, she was not well liked by artists, as Bernard’s description of her makes plain: ‘Silent and shaking her incredulous head, like a featherless bird’s, mère Tanguy, who reflected bitterly that there was nothing to put on the table, and that they owed three lots of rent, appeared from the height of her practical philosophy to despise that whole world of “light-minded fine talkers”.’ (Muette et branlant sa tête incrédule d’oiseau déplumé, la mère Tanguy, qui songeait amèrement qu’il n’y avait rien pour la table et que l’on devait trois termes, semblait mépriser du haut de sa philosophie pratique tout ce monde “d’écervelés et de beaux parleurs”.) See Bernard 1994, vol. 1, p. 166. Van Gogh took his own work to Tanguy.

9. We do not know which painting Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec sold through Alphonse Portier. At that time Julius Elias was in any event buying his work, as emerges from two letters that Toulouse-Lautrec wrote to Portier at the end of 1887. The painter had told Portier in July 1887 that he could receive him and his visitors every day. See Letters of Toulouse-Lautrec 1991, pp. 115, 121 (nos. 145, 154-155).