1 Professional jealousy.
2 A novel by the de Goncourts.
3 With greater reason.
4 After all.
5 To understand everything is to forgive everything.
6 Vice and virtue are chemical products, like sugar and vitriol.
1 Armand Guillaumin (1841–1927), early Impressionist, some of whose work the brothers Van Gogh had acquired.
2 The drawing L’Eden Concert.
3 Christian Vilhelm Mourier-Petersen.
1 Louis Anquetin, Harvest, 1887.
2 ‘How short, then, the hour/One spends in loving, /It is less than an instant, /Little more than a dream. /Time strips us of/Our enchantment’
1 Brothel Scene.
1 Oleander.
2 Paul Gauguin.
3 Nègresses.
4 By the Shore, Martinique.
1 Doorman.
2 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Young Woman at a Table, ‘Poudre de Riz [Face powder]’.
1 The avant-garde group of Brussels artists, also called Les XX or Les Vingt.
2 A series of books by Alphonse Daudet.
1 This letter was sent by Gauguin to £mile Schuffenecker on 8 October 1888 with the observation, ‘I am sending you this letter from Vincent to let you know how things stand between us and with all our present plans.’
1 Theo had just sold Gauguin’s La Bretotmes for 5 00 francs.
2 The paint merchants Tasset & L’H6te.
3 émile Bernard, Breton Women and Children.
4 The painter Meijer de Haan had moved into Theo’s apartment
1 ‘Wherever I touched the earth, a poor wretch dressed in black came and sat down next to us and looked at us like a brother’(inaccurate and incomplete quotation from Alfred de Musset, ‘La nuit de Decembre’).
1 Gauguin’s fencing equipment, left behind in Aries.
2 Augustine Roulin, ‘La Berceuse [Woman Rocking a Cradle]’.
1 Louis Rivet, Theo’s doctor in Paris.
2 Philippe Ricord, French surgeon specializing in syphilis; Francois Raspail, French chemist and politician who asserted that disease is caused by parasites.
1 Theo’s birthday.
1 Dostoevsky.
1 Pissarro’s mother had recently died, and he had also had an eye operation.
1 Madeleine au Bois d’Amour.
1 Glad at heart.
2 Auguste M. Lauzet, lithographer who had reproduced work by Monticelli.
3 Mme Ginoux.
1 Adolphe Monticelli, Vase with Flowers.
1 Inter Artes et Naturam.
1 The Dutch sculptor Saar de Swart.
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh Page 57
