1. Visiting the Bonger family in Amsterdam, on Friday, 22 July 1887 Theo asked Jo Bonger to marry him. She was taken utterly by surprise by this proposal, and anyway she was in love with someone else, so she turned him down. On 25 July 1887 she wrote in her diary: ‘Friday a day full of emotion. At two in the afternoon the doorbell rang: Van Gogh from Paris. I was pleased he’d come, I imagined I’d be talking to him about art and literature. I received him pleasantly and then he suddenly began to make me a declaration. It would sound improbable in a novel, and yet it is the case that having known me for no more than 3 days [Theo had also seen her in 1885 and 1886] he wants to spend his whole life with me, he wants ... to put all his happiness in my hands. And I’m so terribly sorry that I’ve had to cause him pain. He’s been looking forward to coming here all year and pictured so much to himself, and now it ends like this. What a sad mood he will be in as he goes back to Paris’ (FR b4550).

2. It has not been possible to discover where Jean Richepin said this. In his introduction to La chanson des Gueux (1876) he does talk about ‘the freedom of Art’ (la liberté de l’Art’) and the fatal impact on art when justice controls literature: to him art and morality are two different worlds. See ed. Marcel Paquet. Giromagny 1990. Also cited in letter 632.

3. For Le Tambourin and the works Van Gogh exhibited there, see letter 571, nn. 2 and 3. One of the pieces that Van Gogh had recently painted for the restaurant was probably Basket of pansies(F 244 / JH 1093), in which the flowers stand on a small table shaped like a tambourine. See cat. Amsterdam 2011.

4. It has not been possible to establish exactly when or to whom Segatori transferred her business. See further letter 571, n. 3.

5. This was possibly the riverscape from Asnières which Van Gogh said that Tanguy had in his possession in a letter of July 1888; see letter 637, n. 2.

6. One of the four works was the painting in the window (n. 5 above). It is not possible to say for certain which other works he is talking about; they were probably landscapes from Asnières.