1. Women picking olives (F 655 / JH 1869

) is a repetition of Women picking olives (F 654 / JH 1868

). Van Gogh had yet another version of it: Women picking olives (F 656 / JH 1870

2. At the end of the letter, Van Gogh copied the poem ‘Who is the maid? St. Jerome’s love’ by Thomas Moore. See Moore 1910, pp. 255-256. Van Gogh deviated from the source text several times, and omitted two lines. He knew the poem from Beecher Stowe’s We and our neighbours. See RM12.

In Saint-Rémy he recorded these lines of verse again, probably piecing them together from memory as he went along. The estate contains a sheet torn around the text, with part of a letter to Theo on the back; this sheet was probably never sent (see RM18).

3. James Abbot McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in grey and black no. 1; Portrait of the artist’s mother, 1871 (Paris, Musée d’Orsay). Ill. 1425

. Richard Josey made a mezzotint after it, and reproductions of it appeared in magazines and catalogues. The Illustrated London News of 21 May 1872 featured a wood engraving of it. See A. McLaren Young et al., The paintings of James McNeill Whistler. 2 vols. New Haven and London 1980, vol. 1, pp. 59-63, cat. no. 101.