1. See letter 669, n. 16, for Boch’s departure from Arles.
2. Boch turned 33 on 1 September 1888. His sister Anna was seven years older. Boch had lived in Paris since 1879 and travelled widely: In 1881 he went to Italy, and between 1885 and 1910 he visited, among other places, Corsica, Spain, the south of France, the Balearics and Algeria. See exhib. cat. Saarbrücken 1971, pp. 44, 47-48.
a. ‘Être bien de son pays’ is a French expression that means ‘to know nothing of the world, to be simple, naive’, but Van Gogh uses it literally.
3. We do not know which two paintings Boch took to Paris. For his work from this period see letter 650, n. 17.
4. Nothing is known about a visit to the Netherlands by Anna Boch in this period. She stayed there on several occasions in the early part of the twentieth century. See exhib. cat. Saarbrücken 1971, pp. 14, 30.
5. Victor Boch, Eugène and Anna’s father, was managing director of the china factory Villeroy & Boch in La Louvière. In 1881 he had spent two months travelling through Italy with his children, going to museums. See exhib. cat. Saarbrücken 1971, p. 47.
6. Van Gogh had enclosed this paint order and letter for Tasset with letter 668, sent on 23 or 24 August, in other words rather more than ‘a week ago’. On 8 September (letter 676) he confirmed that Tasset’s consignment had arrived. In view of the short intervening period, this cannot possibly have been the new order sent with the present letter, so it must be the order that went with letter 668. See also Arrangement above.
7. Van Gogh is referring here to what Jules and Edmond de Goncourt noted in their Journal on 12 September 1868: ‘After buying this house for almost a hundred thousand francs, which bourgeois logic would view as totally unreasonable given our limited funds, we offer two thousand francs, which is more than the Emperor or de Rothschild would pay for a passing fancy, for a Japanese monstrosity, a fascinating bronze, which something told us we just had to have’. (Après l’achat de cette maison de près de cent mille francs, cette maison si déraisonnable au point de vue de la raison bourgeoise devant notre petite fortune, nous offrons deux mille francs, un prix dépassant le prix d’un caprice de l’Empereur ou de Rothschild, pour un monstre japonais, un bronze fascinatoire, que je ne sais quoi nous dit que nous devons posséder.) See Goncourt 1887-1906, vol. 3, p. 234. In the months of August and September 1868 they are full of their house, and write more than once about how expensive it is; cf. e.g. 4 August 1868 and 16 April 1869 (pp. 223, 289).
In La maison d’un artiste (1881) Edmond de Goncourt gave a detailed description of his house at 53 boulevard Montmorency. All the works of art in it are listed as if it were a museum guide. The descriptions serve in part to rehabilitate eighteenth-century art and the artistic treasures of French culture. See La maison d’un artiste. With a postscript by Pol Neveux. 2 vols. Paris n.d.
Various authors have regarded this passage as an allusion to La maison d’un artiste, see Van Uitert 1993, pp. 139-140 and Dorn 1990, pp. 40, 233 (n. 36), however nowhere is there an explicit indication that Van Gogh had read this book; in letter 677 he did, though, refer to ‘une maison d’un artiste’ (an artist’s house). Cf. also letter 681, n. 6.
b. Read: ‘vau’. Van Gogh mentioned the novel A vau-l’eau by J.K. Huysmans in letter 669.
8. Van Gogh had made four paintings of sunflowers: F 453 / JH 1559 [2701], F 459 / JH 1560 [2702], F 456 / JH 1561 [2703] and F 454 / JH 1562 [2704]. The new studies in any event also included the following works, mentioned in letters 659-673: Patience Escalier (‘The peasant’) (F 443 / JH 1548 [2694]), Thistles (F 447 / JH 1550 [2696]), Caravans with fairground travellers (F 445 / JH 1554 [2698]), Railway carriages (F 446 / JH 1553 [2697]), Quay with sand barges (F 449 / JH 1558 [2700]), the unknown study of thistles and butterflies (letter 666), Patience Escalier (‘The peasant’) (F 444 / JH 1563 [2705]), a flower still life (letter 671), Shoes (F 461 / JH 1569 [2707]) and Eugène Boch (‘The poet’) (F 462 / JH 1574 [2710]). This brings the number of studies to fourteen; two other flower still lifes (see letter 671, n. 3) and the two versions of Sand barges (F 437 / JH 1570 [2708] and F 438 / JH 1571 [2709]) may also have been done in the second half of August (see letter 666, n. 10).
[2701] [2702] [2703] [2704] [2694] [2696] [2698] [2697] [2700] [2705] [2707] [2710] [2708] [2709]
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